After finishing off an amazing time in Chiang Rai, Thailand with a visit to a cat cafe, Rich and I jumped on a plane and landed pretty late in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.
A unique, and totally endearing, Southeast Asia custom we have picked up on at almost every airport we have visited here is the friend and family welcome committee . For every passenger returning home, it seems there are at least three smiling faces eager to welcome the weary traveller.
Although come to think of it, maybe that is a southeastern U.S. tradition too. The husband of one of my dearest friends proposed to her when she landed in the Atlanta airport, and I know my sweet mother has met me in Nashville with a “Welcome home, Amanda” banner on at least one occasion (when I was 20+ years old).
But I digress. We were happy to land in Phnom Penh and even happier to see our names written on the sign held by our hotel’s driver!
Day 74: Exploring Phnom Penh…But First, Football
If you know us, you know Rich and I are pretty committed to football in general and the Georgia Bulldogs and Philadelphia Eagles in particular. We, of course, miss our family and friends back in the states. AND we also miss turning on the TV on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, plopping onto our huge grey couch, and watching football rabidly for hours.
I’m not going to give too much of our tradecraft away on how we have managed to do this, but so far, we have been able to watch two of the three Georgia games and one of the two Eagles games on our laptops. Because the Eagles played the Falcons in the NFL opener at 8:00 PM on a Thursday night, we saw the game live in Cambodia at 7:00 AM Friday morning.
Weird, huh?
The Eagles, who happened to win the Super Bowl last year (#importantdetail), also won against the Falcons! While we were in high spirits, we got a particularly late start to our day in Phnom Penh.
We decided we would take it slow and walk to the Wat Phnom Temple. While only about a mile and a half in distance, this stroll took us a good hour because, much like Hanoi, sidewalks are not primarily used for walking. While no other city could be as frenetic as Hanoi, Phnom Penh was active. It had its share of motorbikes and tuk tuks, as well as street food being prepared on sidewalks. Interestingly, almost every car and SUV was either a Toyota or a Lexus– apparently there is a large grey market for luxury vehicles in Phnom Penh.
The Wat Phnom complex was a beautiful park with a temple sitting at the top of a hill, a larger-than-life working clock, children riding bikes, and pretty gardens. We even saw a monkey!
From Wat Phnom, we went to dinner at Eleven One Kitchen. I enjoyed a delicious vegetable amok, a traditional curry dish cooked in banana leaves. Yum!
Our first full day: Birds win, and we settle into life in Cambodia. Not bad.
Day 75: Downtown Phnom Penh, Health Food, and Tragic History
Fortunately/unfortunately, there was no more morning football so we were able to head out to explore more sites in Phnom Penh much earlier than the day before.
The Royal Palace, Wat Langka, and Wat Botum Park
We knew we had a longer tour scheduled in the afternoon so we did a quick “walk by” tour of the Royal Palace, Wat Langka, and Wat Botum Park. It is clear that Phnom Penh is a city on the rise. There were many beautiful structures and monuments scattered about.
Additionally, while our walk the day before had been across cluttered, broken, and missing sidewalks, on our walk by more of the monuments, we found wider, cleaner sidewalks more like what we are accustomed to in the West. This part of town felt much more Ho Chi Minh City than Hanoi. It was pretty interesting to get a feel for both traditional and modern in the same city.
Health Food at Backyard Cafe
For lunch, we stopped at Backyard Cafe, a vegan and plant-based cafe that supports a foundation providing healthy food and nutrition for school children in Cambodia.
Umm, this cafe was straight out of an Anthropologie + Goop collaborative Instagram spread. The decor was amazing and unbelievably on trend. Our vegan sandwiches (pumpkin, humus red peppers, etc.) were not bad either.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
Visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum was incredibly powerful and also really heavy too. I will do my best to share what I learned in the spirit of bearing witness.
Some Background on the Khmer Rouge
I am not a historian, but my (very) basic understanding is that Cambodia had been a part of French Indochina from 1867 until 1953. Cambodia became a constitutional monarchy. However, quickly the country became conflicted over what their involvement in the Vietnam War should be. While Cambodia wanted to claim neutrality, the leadership allowed Vietnam to transport supplies through Cambodia. Then they also allowed Americans to bomb Vietnamese troops in Cambodia as long as no Cambodians were killed.
This strategy did not exactly win over the Cambodian people, and following the war, there was a coup, and then confusion and a vacuum of power. Enter: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Pol Pot believed there was a fundamental difference between “old” people (farmers, laborers, etc.) and “new” people who were educated, lived in cities, and had new ideas. He wanted to return Cambodia to an agrarian society, and as soon as the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, they entered and evacuated Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge told people that the Americans were going to bomb the city and that everyone could return in three days. Instead, the city dwellers were forced into farm labor, the military, or killed.
The Tuol Sleng Prison
The Tuol Sleng prison had originally been a secondary school located in the center of town. When the Khmer Rouge invaded, they installed high fences of barbed wire around the walls of the school and turned classrooms into cells and interrogation rooms. It became a secret facility known as S-21.
Over the next four years, more than 20,000 Cambodians, as well as some foreigners, were imprisoned there. The Khmer Rouge tortured inmates to extract confessions, and they executed more than 12,000 of these prisoners. Many of those imprisoned were teachers; some were there for wearing glasses, seen as a sign of “intellectualism.”
The tour of the prison is grisly. You see the cells where the last prisoners were discovered. The Khmer Rouge took pictures of all of the inmates upon entry, and thousands of these black and white pictures line the walls. It started pouring down rain while we were there. It was just so grim.
There are two former prisoners who survived who return every day to tell their story, and the chief of the prison has received a life sentence for crimes against humanity.
Reflection
So I like to keep the blog light and fun, but we visited a genocide museum. It is terribly sad. We visited Dachau several years ago. Like Dachau, at Tuol Sleng, evil feels close and palpable. As it should be, it in unsettling, but I think that immediacy is intentional. May every person who visits learn enough not to be a bystander should he or she ever come into contact with such evil.
A takeaway for me was how quickly divisions within a country can become terribly dangerous as well as how problematic it is to despise education and ideas.
The Khmer Rouge killed roughly 25% of Cambodia’s population, and most who were killed were the educated. Once the genocide ends, how do you educate your population when all of the teachers were killed and all of the students missed four years of school? How do you build buildings without architects or heal bodies without doctors? How long will it take Cambodia to truly recover?
We walked home from the museum in the rain, took long naps, and stayed in for dinner because we were so beat.
Our thoughts and prayers are with the people of Cambodia as they continue to rebuild, restore, and heal their beautiful country.