To Cambodia and the Killing Fields (Ryan)

Seriously fellows and fellowettes, that title makes this blog sound like it'll be exciting - it won't. It's actually that long since we did whatever it was we did in the rest of Vietnam, getting to Cambodia, that I can't remember what we did when. As a result, you're all spared the monotony of my normal day-by-day style and I'll instead give you a paraphrased version of events.

So, Vietnam for starters, Madam? After knackering ourselves on that bike ride, which was really rather good fun, especially the 12km downhill stretch, we just stayed in bed late the next day in Mui Ne and did very little. We nearly went to the sand dunes at one point, but were too lethargic to even do that. What are sand dunes likely to be but lots of sand? We really couldn't make ourselves care enough to part with cash to see them. Mui Ne was quiet and basically consisted of one long road running parallel to the reasonably nice beach. Apparently the water was a tad polluted, but we never actually found out, being far too busy sleeping or indulging in other similar activities. On the night before we left, the night of an England game - I'm pretty sure versus Ecuador, but as ever I stopped watching not far through because our play was that sodding boring - we met a really nice Irish couple and a fairly good crowd in a cheap, local bar. Sadly we didn''t see most of them again because we were leaving the following day. That's Mui Ne in a nutshell: sitting/lying around a lot, plys a bit of drinking, pool playing and footie-watching to fill the later hours of the day.

Next stop on our hopefully whirlwind tour: Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City as it has been called for decades now, but nonetheless a name I don't thinkI ever used. Saigon just comes off the tongue so much easier. Rolling in in the early evening was practically like arriving at a strange, warped Picadilly Circus, with great big neon signs and video billboards looming above the street. We found a cheap guesthouse in the backpacker district and that was where we spent every day and night until we left (the district, not the gueshouse, you understand). Our sole venture outside the wee whitey-populated area was a day-trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, apparently left over from the Vietnam War. The fact of the matter is that these tunnels were fabricated and incredibly geared towards tourists and most people in the know we spoke to told us that there were far more authentic ones up north in the DMZ (de-militarised zone). There was also a shooting range built into these tunnels, so I fired an M16 and Tim and Shaun had a crack with an AK. Bullets were expensive though, so we figured we'd wait til Cambodia and do it properly there.

That was the only trip we went on from Saigon, pretty sick of trips as we were. The rest of the time we were staying up late in the Eden Bar, getting up pretty late, going to pretty nice restauraunts up and down the backpacker street, and generally milling around and relaxing. Tim and me both bought CDs, myself taking 25 albums on CD for about 33p each. Putting those only my MP3 player took some time, but kept me out of trouble for a time. Then came the inevitable question of leaving Vietnam and getting to ol' Cambodge. We decided to take a three day, two night trip in the Mekong Delta, including one night's homestay, as a part of which we'd get to go and help buy food for dinner, help cook it, partake in everyday tasks of sorts, ride some bikes around the rice-paddies and generally experience Mekong family life. Sadly, the house we were supposed to stay at was still being renovated on the night we were due to stay there, so we had to rebook with another company. Sadly the itinerary with this new company was the same as it was everywhere else, rather than being the somewhat unique experience we felt we would have had with the first company, but then you can't have everything.

With the second bunch we went to a coconut candy factory and bought an insane amount of candy, basically because it was buy five get one free and we had a sweet tooth. We also visited, during the trip, a place where we could have eaten some fish if we were prepared to pay extra, a place where they served us fresh fruit and played traditional music for us, a rice paper factory, a honey factory and a floating market. All in all a pretty good taste of river life on the Mekong. Sadly the homestay was basically a case of arrive in the pouring rain and sit and eat and drink and then go to bed, before waking up the following morning and getting back on a boat to leave again. Not quite the authentic family experience we might have had with the first company, sadly. It really was more like a small guesthouse, fairly impersonal on the whole. Never mind, though.

So, cut to the Cambodian border, where we ended up for the second night and England's excruciating penalty loss to Portugal, that Rooney sending-off, Cristiano Ronaldo looking agonised and angsty the whole game, before he perked up after knocking that last frigging penalty in. Smug git. Anyway, the Cambodian border, which we arrived at on a boat from Chau Doc in Vietnam. There we were, sitting at a table getting some grub, when a kid came up to the table - he couldn't have been more than eight - and banged a two pound coin down on the table. Evidently, he was looking to sell it to us. 'For how much?' I hear you ask. The answer: two dollars, or one pound. Although it felt slightly like exploitation, I did actually buy the said coin, storing it in a safe place until my return to England. It was a good deal for both of us really, because there's nothing he could do with a two pound coin, so the two dollars benefited him more than the useless disc of metal he had previously and I doubled my money. Wish all business transactions worked that way. After I'd bought that I figure they then pegged me as an easy target, so the same kid then went behind me and started giving me a back massage. Despite my repeated attempts to stop him, he continued unabated for a good long time and, though at times he literally pounded with his fists on the back of my neck, which quite hurt, I sort of felt obliged to pay him in the end. The final money-making scheme of this gang of little border urchins was to grab our rucksacks - or more specifically just mine, for they met little resistance - and haul them to our departing boat for us. I was convinced that the kid who took mine, who would have been outweighed by my rather heavy bag, would just fall over backwards trying to put it on, no matter how many times he flexed his muscles at me and told me he was, 'Strong'. To my great surprise, he grabbed the thing, strapped himself into it and took it all the way to my seat on the boat. Again, cash was parted with, but the service had been most useful and at least this one didn't assault my neck with his little fists.

The rest of the journey to Phnom Penh was fairly uneventful. After our transfer to a minibus, the guide started telling us all about his hotel in Phnom Penh and how it was 'safe' and 'cheap' and all those adjectives that should be used when trying to sell a hotel. When we arrived we didn't look at the rooms and rejected all of the moustached man's overtures, instead finding a tuk-tuk to take us to the Lakeside Guesthouse. I suppose now would be a good time to explain that since Saigon we had been travelling with a couple of volunteers - one of them starting PPE at Oxford this October, which will be handy - and they wanted to meet up with their volunteer friends, who were staying at the very chilled out Lakeside.

The road down the hotel was insanely rocky for such a popular route. Apparently up until about two weeks prior to our arrival it had been in even worse condition and the current state of affairs was only the result of a fortnight's work. It had only just had a drainage system installed, until which point in time, if it rained, faecal matter would literally sail down the street alongside the pedestrian traffic. Glad we arrived when we did, even if there were lethal, completely uncovered manholes every thirty feet. At the guesthouse, I ended up in a room with a broken toilet, a bathroom door that didn't lock and a shower whose feeble trickle struggled to get you wet. Oh yes, and it was on the fourth floor, so my calves got a bit of exercise every day. I just supposed that this was what back-packing in Cambodia was all about. Walking down the street to whatever restauraunt or bar you wished to visit, you were lucky to be asked less than ten times if you wanted a tuk-tuk or motorbike to somewhere, or to be solicited any less times by vendors of substances weird and wondrous. It seemed as though, in Cambodia, anything was on offer.

I don't remember doing an awful lot in Phnom Penh the first time, but one thing we did do was go on a tuk-tuk tour, on our first day, that took in the shooting range, the Killing Fields and S-21 Prison Museum. Before we left, a clearly opiated tuk-tuk driver came up to us, saying, 'You like sheep? Like killing?' We were some what confused, in part by his pretty dodgy English, until he unified the two questions for us. 'Want to shoot sheep? Shoot sheep with rocket launcher? Thirty dollars, shoot sheep with machine gun?' As I say, in Cambodia, it was all on the table. At the shooting range, which was our first stop of the day and where we thankfully were not offered a sheep, we fired a great range of guns between us. I had a whirl on an anti-aircraft gun, which Shaun also fired, and a Colt 45, again which I shared with Shaun. Shaun also fired a Tommy Gun, which wouldn't actually work properly so he also got to have a go with a K50 machine gun as well. Tim fired the Colt and chucked a hand grenade into a pond. All in all, we've fired a fair few firearms since coming away on our travels. I think the biggest thrill any of us had was Tim with his hand grenade, because once the pin's been pulled you know you've got to throw it right and not screw up or you could actually die and probably take everyone else in the vicinity with you. Certainly one for the grandkids.

So, as you can imagine, when we left we were in a strange state of euphoria that inevitably follows the firing of heavy weapons, at least for first-timers like us. We just sat in the back of the tuk-tuk weighed down with this leaden delight, smiling triumphantly at each other. But that mood would soon change. Visiting the Killing Fields was probably one of the most sobering and depressing things Í have ever done. As you tread the path from mass grave to mass grave, you are still walking on the teeth, bones and tattered clothing of the many thousands of victims of the Pol Pot regime. Our guide's parents and uncle were all killed by the Khmer Rouge. As you walk in, there is a massive monument which at first glance could be any pagoda anywhere, but upon closer inspection you realise is filled with skulls, almost nine thousand of them on shelves right the way up to the top. Some of them are smashed to pieces, others cloven with axes or gardening instruments, bludgeoned or shot. Our guide took us round the base informing us how several of these people had met their grisly end, with only one or two having had the privilege of being shot. Bullets were clearly felt to be too good for the majority, who instead got the axes, spades, hoes, hammers and bamboo sticks. We were sombrely informed how babies were thrown in the air for target practice or smashed off trees before being thrown in the pits, women were stripped naked, assaulted and then killed. There was even a tree whose leaves were sharp-edged and which was used to slowly, agonisingly decapitate the so-called 'enemies' of the Pol Pot regime. All in all he killed two million of a population of only six, at Cheoung Ek, the place we visited, and numerous other facilities across the country.

As if it could not get worse, we then visited S-21, the main Khmer Rouge prison. Of 20,000 former inmates, only 7 came out alive. Everyone else who entered was butchered. There were photos on the walls in the cells of what we can only assume were former inhabitants, electrocuted or lashed, beaten and battered. The gallery of pictures of the people who were killed were endless and the victim's were not only able-bodied adult males, but women, old and very young, schoolgirls and grandmothers, young boys and frail old men. The lower floor of one whole wing was taken up by the last photos of all of the victims and you had to wonder if the ones who made it to this display were only the ones lucky enough to be photographed. One of the wings had barbed wire covering it's entire front to prevent suicide. As if it would have mattered had the people leapt to their doom rather than let themselves be tortured. Apparently the Khmer Rouge preferred to personally kill everyone, rather than put their lives back in their hands. There was also a wing given to telling the stories of some of the victims, who basically just disappeared never to be heard of again, aside from when their confessions from S-21 were discovered after their death. These were people who had done absolutely nothing wrong. The regime killed those who it thought might become too powerful, those with glasses, intelligent people; basically anyone it felt threatened by. The final toll came to, as I mentioned above, two million, one third of the population of the country, all killed by their own countrymen at the behest of one madman dictator.

And despite all of the above, it was actually only after coming out that I, and no doubt everyone else, felt the most miserable. As you leave the prison, beggars surround you and remove their caps, for you to put money in. One man had no arm, one no leg, but there was one man in particular who shouldn't even have had to ask for money. His entire face looked like a melted waxwork, all the body and volume gone from beneath his cheeks, his skin instead just sagging, like a popped balloon draped over bone. One whole eye was covered by a drooping flap of skin and the other stared out of his head at an unnatural angle. His hair wouldn't grow out of one particular spot towards the front of his head and even the hand that held his cap was inhumanly disfigured. Not giving money to those people left me feeling more downright miserable than I have perhaps ever felt in my entire life. I could almost have burst into tears in the back of the tuk-tuk, going back to the lake. Instead I just dwelt on that man's face and how fast the mood had changed from one of strange, mechanistic ecstasy to one of grey sobriety and plain, old-fashioned depression.

That night no one felt much like going out, much like doing anything, in fact, but we ventured as far as Heart of Darkness, an apprently notorious Cambodian club where the young Khmer elite, childred of the rich, come and hang out, bringing with them firearms and bodyguards. It was a disappointment, generally befitting the malaise that had engulfed our day. Rather than some great, strobe-lit, slightly dingy and dangerous-looking den of something or other underworldly, we found ourselves in a reasonably trendy, rather small bar/club populated mostly by girls we assume to have been of the working kind. They certainly played pool pretty well, and that's a sure sign that, by the end of the night, you're gonna end up paying for what you've just gratefully received. We drank a bit, we danced, we left. As I said, no one felt much like partying.

The rest of Phnom Penh passed fairly uneventfully. We found an Indian restauraunt offering all you could eat for two dollars, so we ate there a bit. We had breakfast at the same, reasonably priced and reasonably tasty place every day. We also ate some quite delicious but fairly expensive pizza. The volunteer girls left, so we planned our next move, to a town near the coast called Kampot, from where we hoped to visit the nearby abandoned hill station of Bokor, perched on Elephant Mountain, high above the jungle. It sounded like an adventure in the making, so we booked our bus tickets and headed Kampot-way. On the morning we took the bus, the vision of that man's melted face was just about forgotten.