Cycling through Indochina – Cambodia
I’ve always found it fascinating how a single man-made line can determine one country’s economic, social and moral welfare from another’s. The border crossing from Thailand into Cambodia – or ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, as they call themselves – is a good example.
Where Thailand has pavement, Cambodia has dirt roads. Its border is lined with billboards and posters pleading with nationals and foreigners alike to adhere to moral and legal virtue. “Please don’t harm our children,” read the signs: “Sex Trafficking Is Illegal”. Border areas, like the Aranyaprathet (Thailand)/Poipet (Cambodia) crossing, are real no-man’s-lands where gambling, casinos and prostitution are rife. (Casinos are legal only in Cambodia, allowing for an interesting gambling-heavy tourism from bordering countries Vietnam and Thailand). Border police are notoriously corrupt; sex tourism is rampant and can often be bought from the police themselves, who are said to be in direct cohort with local brothels. Nicholas Kristof of the NYT took an in-depth and interesting look at this trade (http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/01/03/opinion/1194837193498/the-face-of-slavery.html), noting that rural families (most of whom live a subsistence life farming rice) are often so poor that they will sell their children as ‘factory labourers’ or prostitutes (both girls and boys) to money-hungry middlemen.
Crossing the border: a tuk-tuk advert to end sex trafficking in Cambodia
Considering how rampant the sex trade is and how obvious the scam may seem, these families tend to be illiterate, uneducated and destitute, so when a middleman promises wealth, prestige and opportunity for the child in the city, they readily believe the lie.
This lack of social awareness is an effect of the civil war that ravaged Cambodia from 1975 until 1998, when the Khmer Rouge effectively eliminated the educated literati from Cambodian society. The result has been a moral and economic vacuum that has most disturbingly attracted Western sex tourists to this lawless state, who prowl the streets and bars at night with a particularly sinister look in their eyes. Some of them are young – teen backpackers travelling the world in their gap year looking for a ‘dare’ to take part in on one careless drunken night; others are divorcees, looking for love, sex, meaning, in all the wrong places. The weirdest of them are the wiry, sun-baked expats who have been living in Kampuchea for decades, speak only a handful of words in Khmer, and hang out at the hooker bars all night drinking whiskey and grumbling to one another about who should have the ‘prime spot’ at the bar to attract the prettiest prostitutes. The most interesting scene I saw, however, was a married 30-something-year-old who sat at the bar with his head in his hands, a beer just out of reach, painfully mulling over the moral dilemma running through his thoughts. Once his call girl arrived, however, his hands left his temples and caressed her voluminous hips instead, a tortured smile upon his lips.
Sex tourism may be illegal, but tourism is tourism, and that means money brought into the state, one still run by a Vietnamese-backed government (which ‘liberated’ Cambodia from the despotism of the Khmer Rouge in 1979) and which still contains members of Pol Pot’s psychotic former regime. Their government-driven, foreign-bought SUV’s roam the shanty-lined roads and growl at traffic lights in stark contrast to the beat-up Honda motorbikes and Daiwoo sedans that the ‘nationals’ drive, if they can afford a vehicle at all. There is no middle class in Cambodia: families either live in bamboo-stilt shacks amidst rice paddies and corrugated-iron and recycled-sheet-metal in the city slums, or in large mansions with guards and barbed-wire fences.
A typical rural bamboo-stilted house in NW Cambodia
A family on the way to school, Phnom Penh
Because whole families were wiped out under the Khmer Rouge – 2 million people were killed out of a population of 8 million in just 3 years – there has been a need to repopulate the country. But there does not seem to be a stable framework under which these families can now grow old and prosper. Scarred and deformed war veterans and landmine victims line the streets and beg for money alongside snotty-nosed children selling bracelets and books, lending a surreal, dawn-of-the-dead aspect to an already-somewhat-horrifically-heavy landscape. In a country where people were systematically killed just for wearing glasses, vibes are intense. Mass graves are still being uncovered after heavy monsoons, when the rain washes up bits of people’s skulls and teeth, and as you walk down the streets anywhere, you realise that nearly every single person you pass is either a survivor of the Khmer genocide, a former child soldier or an orphan who lost her whole family to the war. A fascinatingly good read about this is Loung Ung’s ‘First They Killed My Father’, a first-person account of what it was like growing up under the Khmer Rouge.
All this said, Cambodia is still a place of great history and beauty. Home to one of the greatest civilisations in SE Asia – the Angkor temple complex – Angkor Wat, the largest temple, is its main tourist destination and a ‘claim to fame’ on its national flag. Angkor was built as a state capital in the 12th century and was comprised in its heyday of almost 400 square miles, a crossover religious state between Hinduism (the first kings) and Buddhism (the later kings), before being abandoned in 1431 (due to roaming marauders, the capital moved to Phnom Penh) and left covered by the jungle until the French ‘discovered’ it in the late 19th century. The city is said to have accommodated up to 1 million people; when you see the area from a hot air balloon, you can believe it.
A hazy view of Angkor Wat from the sky - note the moat around it
The temples are incredible, made from laterite, sandstone and volcanic rock, overflowing with sculptures of elephants, nagas (seven-headed snakes), Apsara dancers (a traditional art form that still exists today, although the Khmer sculptures look very African), and four-faced Buddhas. The crowds are immense, the temples weathered and beaten by centuries of use and then partially destroyed by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. Take an early-morning motorbike ride to the temples for sunrise, however, and you see them in a spellbindingly captivating glory. As the warm jungle light dances across the temple walls, songbirds call loudly to each other amidst the banyan trees and landmine victims line the temple pathways playing traditional Khmer music in tones unheard of in Western music.
Angkor Wat at sunrise
One of the most interesting side trips we took from Siem Reap, the modern base to Angkor complex, was to Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in SE Asia. The lake’s depth and width are determined by the inflows from both the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers; during monsoon season, the Mekong reverses its flow and floods into the lake, with water levels rising up to 9 meters. The people in the region are poor subsistence farmers who depend on fishing and (some) tourism to survive. They live in floating homes and bathe in the lake; some, instead of begging for money, dress their children up in cobras to get money from photo-snapping tourists.
Take your picture with the cobra girl for $1, Tonle Sap
We cycled an average of 30k a day until we got to Phnom Penh; our last day at the Angkor complex was a tour of Banteay Srei, some 70km away. Having gone out the night before with two young Canadian dudes (who graduated from high school in 2007, holy shit) to Zone One, an awesome Siem Reap nightclub, I was unable in my hangover to cycle in the 95 F heat in 90% humidity. The others, in their typical Tour de Psychosis fashion, decided as ‘Team Zombie’ to race tuk-tuks on the way back from Banteay Srei and one of them nearly passed out from heat exhaustion. I snoozed instead on the a/c bus with the untalking Dane woman, whose name I finally learned began with a G and was not Maxine, as some of us had thought.
I had a very strange massage later that night in my hotel room from a plump woman named ‘Gentle’ who I think was actually a prostitute. She looked as surprised to see a woman open the door as I did to see a woman all dolled up in heavy blue eye shadow, shimmery lipstick and bejeweled clothes. She was 45 minutes late, no explanation, but things got REALLY weird after asking her if she was pregnant – her belly was huge – and learning that she did have two kids and no husband – both were physically abusive, I learned through a mix of hand signals and baby Khmer – but what she really wanted to communicate was how jealous she was of my slender(er) waist. Unthinkingly, I offered her a brownie when I paid her. She took it greedily and ran.
The next day we visited Phnom Penh’s Genocide Museum, or S-21 (Tuol Sleng), a former high school-turned-torture prison where the Khmer Rouge housed some 21,000 prisoners and killed all but 7 in its four years of terror. (The seven were spared when the Vietnamese finally liberated the city in 1979). Pictures of its prisoners line the walls – children as young as four or five, old men in their 80s, women in their 30s still with hope in their eyes. The KR recruited child soldiers to do the killing and the torturing, many of whom are photographed too; they were often killed every few months so that they wouldn’t live to speak of their atrocities. In the yard were two of the seven surviving soldiers – Chum Mey and Bou Meng – who described to us the systematic torture they went through while there. Chum Mey suffered water torture, had his toenails pulled out and watched prisoners hurl babies at walls, all to get him to ‘confess’ to having been in the CIA. He still crosses paths in Phnom Penh with some of the boys who tortured him, he said, his one consolation being that, in the next life, those people will have to pay for their sins.
Chum Mey, one of the only 7 survivors of Phnom Penhs torture prison S-21
Burn and landmine victims lined the street outside S-21, begging for money, who we pushed past to drive to the Killing Fields, just 15km outside of Phnom Penh. The Fields were the mass graves used to kill the prisoners at S-21 as well as random stragglers; 86 graves have been found so far, with an estimated 9,000 bodies in this one area alone. (In total, the graves number at 20,000 across Cambodia, with around 2m dead). The most disturbing aspect of the visit, however, is that the pathways are lined with bones: people’s skulls, rib cages and teeth can be seen poking up from the earth below, their black prison garb unburied bit by bit as rains wash away the topsoil. Incredulous, I bent down to pick up a molar tooth, its root long like a saber tooth tiger’s. “Maybe they just plant these bones here for effect,” I thought to myself, my hoarding instinct telling me to put the tooth in my pocket and take it home with me, until I realised that someone had been tortured, beaten and most likely buried alive, and here I was, holding their tooth in my hand, wanting to take it home. Nearby was a tree where babies were thrown against the trunk and left for dead, their mothers beheaded with sharp palm branches, their fathers bludgeoned with hammers. Bullets were too precious a commodity to waste on killing a prisoner.
Our hearts were so heavy after that that the bus was silent on the way back into Phnom Penh. We ate lunch and pondered the total insanity of Pol Pot’s killing off a quarter of his population through starvation, torture and murder. Later that day, I went to see a fortune teller in the night market, my tour guide Thy acting as my translator. Her family had been wiped out by the Khmer Rouge and she had been forced to work as a girl in the rice fields on the Cambodia-Vietnam border. After falling very ill in 1979, she was visited by a spirit who promised to save her life if she became a fortune teller.
My fortune teller, whose family was decimated by the Khmer Rouge. She was ill for a week in 1979 when a spirit appeared to her and promised to save her life if she became a fortune teller.
In all her years of card reading – over 35, she said – I’d pulled some of the best: lucky in both love and life, and destined to become a ‘rich tycoon’. She failed to tell me that I’d be robbed later that night by a 15-year-old bookseller, however, but that’s ok. I never would have known otherwise who the after-hours ‘tourist policeman’ was: a half-naked guy in a loin cloth sleeping on the street under a mosquito net, sandwiched in between a tuk-tuk and a food cart. “Ba, ba, ba”, he cried out when we approached him in the darkness, “you report it tomorrow.” It took us two hours and four police stations to finally do so, which pissed off the Tour de Sadists, but was a very interesting look into Cambodian life. The main police station is miles out of town and a giant building where overweight cops watch Chinese soap operas and fill out paperwork in pink folders. When we finally got on the road to cycle to Vietnam, everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief.
