Ooh, what an ominous title.
Don't worry though, its not all doom and gloom. Backpacking can often be described as a pretty light hearted and joyful exercise in experiencing the world. You can come and go as you please, live your days at your leisure, flit from excercise to excursion as the mood strikes. Certain places however have sites you have to see. Some out of wonder, some out of curiosity but also some out of education and to an extent duty. Phnom Penh holds such a place.
When first strting my travels in Bangkok, i naturally enquired amongst the more seasoned travellers as to what my upcoming destinations would be like. Phnom Penh was the first stop described to me in anything less than effusive terms. I was told it was dirty and seedy. Further enquiry however uncovered a more apt term for it. A description from the tourist information advisor.
Phnom Penh is a sad city.
As the capital of Cambodia is the most developed location I have witnessed throughout the country and by some margin. It has high rise buildings. Bustling main highways and intersections. Branded shopping malls. Uptowns and downtowns. You can see the freshness to some of it and feel the strengthening beat of the urban pulse which is slowly building towards the fully fledged modern heartbeat developed by cities such as the Bangkoks and the Hanois it is ultimately destined to emulate.
Cambodia is a poor country though which has not had it easy. Phnom Penh has been front and centre for the struggle. It is growing to diversity through adversity. To even get close to understanding this, you need to visit the killing fields.
Getting there it self is like a trip between worlds. You catch a tuk-tuk (of course) and it drives you through smoggy sprawl of transport and commerce that are spread across the streets and the roads, neither exclusively set on one or the other. You are as likely to find a fruit seller strolling down the middle of the main road as you are to find a motorbike weaving through pedestrians in search of short cut.
Ultimately you get to the infamous killing fields. They are symbolic of attrocity. Moreover they are the site of attrocity. To think that one such place exists is heartbraking. To think that it is one of many throughout the country is unbearable.
I am not qualified or informed enough to give an adequate description of its history or context. Suffice to say that a bad man by the name of Pol Pot got some crazy ideas and some influence, he used this to convince a large proportion of undeducated peasants to join a cause they didn't truly understand and form an army called the Khmer Rouge. At this point in time Cambodia was still suffering from the battering it had had taken on behalf of the Vietnam war, meaning that when the action came, it was not ready or able to defend itself. The Khmer Rouge took the city, took control and just like any crazy tyrant, Pol Pot started wiping out his enemies.
The killing fields are an execution ground. An execuition ground of mass graves that span vast fields. Just as power breeds paranoia, especially the ill-gotten variety, more and more people became classed as enemies and now across the country fields like these exist. Appartly out of a population of 9 million people, 3 million were massacred. Please don't judge me on any faults in those details, I am just trying to recall it from memory. It seems strange to be part of a generation that grew up just after these events happened. Too late to have born witness to the news and yet too fresh to have the perspective to have studied it as history. I don't know if I speak for all my age but I know a lot of people who are aware that something bad happened there but dont know the story.
Now I think I will never forget it. I mean these are real, authentic mass graves you are walking amongst. They are still uncovering fragments of bone and clothing even to this day. I visited the morning after a heavy storm and had a hard time being able to atually compute that the cordoned off mud pits with bone shards sticking out of the dirt were not props. Pirates of the Caribbean, this aint.
You can only imagine that a day spent in such surrounds requires an evening to reflect but a night to forget. Some sights may never leave you but you cant fault a distraction from them. Duly socialising abounded, hair was let down and the night began. Then came time for the night to move on. The last bar was closing, it was time for a club.
Enthusiasm was rife, a location was set and a ebullient group of us set off in tuk-tuks, the rest following behind, the destination: Code Red. Great club, great drink offers. We had been dealt a winning hand.
One catch though, the ace in our pack turned out to be a joker.
Here is a piece of trivia for you. A lot of the tuk-tuk drivers in Phnom Penh, don't actually come from Phnom Penh. They come from far and wide, they are drawn to the bright lights and the commerial buzz. The catch being, they don't know the city and they don't know where the hell they are going.
It took us some time to realise this. I would say roughly an hour. Give or take. The giving and taking referring to giving directions and taking lies. Giving advice and taking false nods of understanding. Giving grief and taking confused looks. Giving up and taking another option for a club that was nearby and seemed acceptable.
And it was. It was called Heart of Darkness but that was somewhat misleading. A literary title for a gaudy electro pop nighclub. It may seem like a strange name that teeters along the titghtrope of inappropriatess given the books connection to the Vietnam War. Then again there was a club in Saigon called Apocalypse Now so really, who is to say.
Either way it seemed like a good enough time, and wouldn't you know love was in the air. Amongst all the dancing, frolicing folks a local Cambodian lad, couldn't have been older than twenty, he found affection. Clearly someone who understood him, someone he could share his spirit, certainly someone who got him. So what if this partner in question was a western man, who was clearly past the age of retirement. You could seem the connection in their dancing. And grinding. Why, the old, roughly unshaven, creepy old white guy had such a close relationship with this young Cambodian chap, he even trusted him enough to count his money.
And the say romance is dead.
I sat down in the other end of the club, trying to reflect on everything that I had seen that day. The sorrow, the confusion, the vibrancy, the frivolity, the vice and the festivity. It was a rich synaptic cocktail to digest and I wasn't sure how it was going to go down.
The answer, naturally, was to dance.
In this less populated end of the establishment, a group of waitresses finished their shift, put on a traditional local song and started dancing in a circle around a bar stool. They tapped my friend and I on the shoulder and invited us to join in. It was something I had never done before, I didn't know the moves but they just seemed happy. It could have meant all kinds of things, it could have meant nothing but amonst all I had seen, sharing in these people having a good time meant everything. I knew nothing of what was going on but at that moment, it made all the sense in the world snd that counted for a lot.
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