The End?

I’m writing this on the last day of my trip as I speed towards Tokyo on the Shinkansen, which is perhaps my favorite train in the world. I’ve spent the better part of the last 300 days traveling from Sydney to Tokyo, a total of ten countries and dozens of cities, posting more than 100 blog entries and 3,000 photographs. That I'm going home hasn’t completely sunk in. I’ve been taking this trip one day, one week, one city at a time, and the end has crept up on me. So it is with mixed feelings that I return to Tokyo, where I’ll spend one more night before boarding a trans-Pacific flight (my least favorite form of travel) back to the U.S. of A.

I’m excited to return to familiar territory, where I speak the language and I am well versed in the customs. I’m looking forward to seeing family and friends, to eat my mother’s cooking and watch late-night cable television. But I’ll miss the freedom of the open road, the expected pleasures and unexpected impediments that make for open-ended travel. I’ve got an itch (no, not that kind of itch), formed early in life, that leaves me restless. It will lead to more travel in the future. For now, it's time to reflect on 2007 and look to 2008.

As a final installment of Packmonkey: Asia (leaving the door open to Packmonkey: North America and Packmonkey: Europe), I offer a short summary of the good, the bad and the in-between. This is hardly a recap of my entire ten months on the road, merely a short trip down memory lane. I plan to offer a little more reminiscing once I'm back in Los Angeles.


Everything Australian: I spent nine weeks in Australia in February and March, traveling overland along the southern and western coasts from Sydney to Broome, then into the Outback on a 4WD trek from Adelaide to Alice Springs. Australia is a beautiful country. The interior is desolate, stark and remote, the coasts rugged and wild. As a whole, it is a challenging, rewarding and breathtaking place to travel. I will never forget sleeping under the stars in the Painted Desert or swimming in sea lions in the Eyre Peninsula. I also made some lasting friendships in Oz: Bernie and Kate, Dean, Elizabeth – keep in touch! Australia raised the bar for all subsequent destinations. The time I spent in Australia amounted to the trip of a lifetime. Had I returned home after the Outback, I would have been satisfied.

Monkeys and Mountains in Malaysian Borneo: I arrived in Malaysia with low expectations. I left in love with the country. The Malaysian people were some of the friendliest I encountered - always a smile for the wandering Jew in their midst - and the food unexpectedly satisfying. The three weeks I spent in Malaysian Borneo sealed the deal: encounters with the orangutans, proboscis and langur monkeys, Uncle Tan’s jungle camp and the trek to the summit of Mt. Kinabalu, which left me exhausted but marked two of the best days of the whole year.

Backpackers’ Laos: Backpackers flock to Southeast Asia, so it’s no surprise that there’s a backpacking culture in this part of the world. My time in Laos, from my arrival at the border with Thailand to my departure from Vientiane, was the ultimate backpacker’s experience. The country itself is wonderful, remote and rural, yet unspoiled by the tourism you encounter in Thailand and Vietnam or the tragic history of Cambodia. Laos had been described to me as Thailand of 20 or 30 years ago. Ten short days in country showed me the Southeast Asia I dreamed of visiting.

What made my time in Laos really special was the friendships I made. Two days floating down the Mekong solidified a bond with my French amis, Guillaume and Emmanuelle. We spent the evenings in Luang Prebang at a sidewalk bar laughing over glasses of cloudy pastis, the days meeting the young monks at the city’s temples or swimming at the tranquil waterfalls outside of town. In Vang Vieng I met Mitzi and her daughter, Miksa, from Hawaii. We explored caves and rented bicycles for a trip to the local market. At night we relaxed over cheap food and beer at the backpacker cafes. Miksa and I even found time for a marathon afternoon watching "The Simpsons." Traveling friendships are short and intense, and one of the joys of travel.

Food, Food, Food: Who doesn’t love to eat? Everywhere I traveled there was something new to taste: kangaroo sausages in Outback Australia, blue rice in Malayasia, chicken rice in Singapore, khao soy in Northern Thailand, even deep-fried tarantulas in Cambodia. There were also some old favorites to devour: sushi and ramen in Toyko, curry and pad thai in Thailand. Somehow, I still haven't tried durian.

Indonesia Headaches: I arrived in Indonesia with high hopes. Two weeks later I couldn’t leave get out the country fast enough. From the touts and taxi drivers oozing desperation in Bali to the scam artists in Java who took me for a ride, I was overwhelmed by the amount of ill-will I felt in Indonesia. I’ve heard reports from other travelers about good times in Bali and Java, so I will not say the country is filled with bad people and bad times. At least I left with two good memories: sunrise at Mr. Bromo and an afternoon spent wandering the ancient Buddhist temple at Borobudur. These two places almost make up for all the aggravation I experienced everywhere else in Indonesia.

Tourism in Thailand and Vietnam: Thailand and Vietnam are two of the most popular destinations in Southeast Asia. They were also, for me, two of the most disappointing destinations on my trip. In the island of Southern Thailand, I encountered hoards of westerners traveling from one beach to another. It seemed that the locals in sight were either serving the foreigners beer and food or cleaning their rooms. There was also the terror of the night of the flying termites. The beaches are nice enough, but crowded and dirty. Were it not for the energy of Bangkok or the charm of Chiang Mai, I’d have to write off Thailand as a loss.

In Vietnam, the tourism treadmill also operates at full speed. Perhaps it was because I’d been on the road for six months, or perhaps it was because I was exhausted from a whirlwind tour of Cambodia. Whatever it was, I found Vietnam to be hectic in all the wrong ways. From the overcrowded and polluted streets of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, where even the act of crossing the street was hazardous, to the constant haggling over prices, Vietnam was a downer.

Life and Death in Cambodia: I only spent 10 days in Cambodia, but those days contained some of the best and worst times of my trip. On the positive side was an extraordinary tour that took me into the Cambodian countryside and introduced me to the real Cambodia of today. The tour also resulted in a few of those backpackers’ friendships that I mentioned earlier. I loved drinking late into the night at a small bar in Kampong Cham and on the beach at Sihanoukville with Sally and Renee, nurses from Adelaide, Australia. And Kathe, a university student from Holland, turned into a close and unexpected friend.

On the down side was a bus accident that left two Cambodians dead and exposed the utter corruption and poverty of Cambodian society. I refer you to the impassioned blog post I wrote on the afternoon of the accident.

Return to Tokyo: I knew that I wanted to end my trip in Japan, to return to a place I lived for 18 months in the early 1990s. I did just that and I am now reminded of that old adage about not being able to go home again. In the years since I lived in Tokyo, I’ve changed, Japan has changed and the world has changed. I love the country and the Japanese. I loved taking Japanese lessons and exploring the country again. But in the end I could have done with less. I’d been on the road for most of the year and was tired, wanted to do little more than curl up with a good book and a glass of whiskey. So I spent most of my time in Tokyo enjoying solitude and rest.

My time in Tokyo was good for the spirit, but perhaps something of a missed opportunity. Perhaps what it taught me is that the next time I take off and travel the world, I’ll impose a six-month limit. For me, that seems just right.

So on the eve of my return to the U.S., I look forward to reuniting with family and friends, to starting a new chapter in my life that builds on everything that’s come before.

Some people say travel changes you. I think that’s a big fat myth. I’m still the same person I was when I started this trip. What I have now that I didn’t have before is a greater understanding of the world and my place in it. I think I’m more humble. I’m definitely more aware of how fortunate I am. My place in this world is small, but my future is unlimited. The end? I don't think so. Just another beginning.

A HUGE thanks to everyone who checked in and supported me over the past ten months. I will see you all very soon!

The Best of Southeast Asia

I took a few thousand photographs between June 14 and July 23, between my arrival in Southern Thailand and the last few, frustrating days in Vietnam. Of those thousands of photos I uploads about 1,100 to Flickr. And now, I've whittled down those eleven hundred to 120 photographs in two manageable photosets. If you're looking for quick and easy vacation pics, you've come to the right place. I'll even call you and narrate each slideshow in a detail-laden monotone, only two or three hours for each one. If that's what you're looking for, of course. I've also included a link to my previous Southeast Asia set, the Best of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.

Go on, take a look. Do it for the cowboy, the Buddhist and the monkey god.

Best of Thailand and Laos

Best of Cambodia and Vietnam

Best of Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia

Crunch Time, Part II

On every bus ride there are rest stops. There is always food for sale, from cooked meals to prepackaged snacks. On the ride from Kampong Cham to Kampot, in a small town called Skuon in Eastern Cambodia, we were treated to a unique snack, a Cambodia delicacy if you will: the fried spider. I’d already eaten crickets, grasshoppers and termites, and I’d promised someone during a night of drinking that I’d eat a spider, so my time had come. There was no avoiding the inevitable; I was going to eat an arachnid.

Lonely Planet says locals hunt the spiders, a species of tarantula called an "a-ping" in Khmer, in the surrounding hills. According to legend, the villagers started eating the spiders during the Khmer Rouge regime, when food was scarce. The locals have developed a taste for hairy creatures, however, and I’m sure a steady stream of tourists injects a bit of revenue into the economy.

By the time I’d disembarked from the bus, our tour leader, Kevin, had already found a live specimen and was posing for photographs with the creature. He handed it to me and I let it crawl up my arm. It was ugly as sin, but harmless. I then bought one of the cooked spiders, for 500 riel or twelve and a half U.S. cents, and prepared to eat my mid-morning “snack.”

Live Tarantula

Dead Tarantula
The bugs I’d eaten in Phnom Penh were tasteless; any flavor came from the oil they were fried in. The spider, however, was a little meaty. The method for eating a deep-friend spider is to pluck the legs off one by one and pop them into your mouth. Each leg, when separated from the body, includes a tiny piece of white flesh, a morsel with the consistency of crab and the taste of chicken. Just kidding. There is a hint of sweetness to the flesh, but mostly it’s flavorless. The rest of the leg is crunchy and tastes of oil.

Doesn't Taste Like Chicken
When I’d polished off the eight legs (okay, I only ate six, giving two of the legs to some children), I broke the body in half, separating the torso from the abdomen. Kevin told me abdomen is nasty, and Lonely Planet concurred, describing a morsel “which seems to be filled with some pretty nasty-tasting brown sludge, which could be anything from eggs to excrement.” I passed on the abdomen, but ate the rest of the bug, including the head. It was no better than the legs, and took a long time to chew. I should have known that an exoskeleton would require extra effort to get down. Still, I persevered and ended up spitting out only the small bits that got stuck in my teeth.

Postcard Moment
Will I eat another deep-fried spider? I can’t say. All I know is that a week later, at another rest stop during another bus ride, I jumped at the chance to sample a dish of sautéed red ants. This time, unlike the crickets, grasshoppers and spiders, there was a distinct and pleasant flavor. I ate three heaping spoonfuls.

Crowded House

Okay, so here I am in Cambodia. And no trip to Cambodia is complete without a visit to the country’s main attraction: the Temples of Angkor. In fact, most tourists fly into Siem Reap, tour the temples and leave again without seeing any more of the country. On Intrepid Travel’s tour of Cambodia, my group spent two days exploring the temples and we only skimmed the surface.

I have a theory about the world’s most famous sites. They are spectacular and deserve their fame. However, their fame is also their downfall. Legions of tourists from every corner of the world are coming to Cambodia to see the temples. They line up at Angkor Wat to watch the sunrise, climb the hill at Phnom Bahkeng for sunset, form single-file lines to weave through the narrow paths at the jungle temple of Ta Prohm and past the intricately carved stupas at Banteay Srei. They are loud, sometimes yelling and laughing or talking on cell phones (“I already paid $28 for the buffet!”). And they take a lot of bad pictures (I can tell because they never get close enough to their subjects).

But Matt, you say, you are a tourist too! Yes, I am. I’m here like all the rest to gawk and take photos. But in my mind, I approach the temples and the artwork with a degree of respect and knowledge that I just don’t see from other tourists. Perhaps the company that manages the sites is to blame. Perhaps limiting the number of people who can enter sites at any given time would alleviate the crush. As it stands, the temples have survived for a thousand years against the forces of nature. I fear they might not last another 50 against the forces of tourism.

There’s little I can say that will add to the millions of words already written about Angkor Wat and the other temples in the region. The history, the architecture, the carvings, the bas-reliefs, the intrusion of the jungle on abandoned sites – it’s enough to keep your mind busy for anywhere from an hour to a lifetime. They are piles of old stones, yes, but I felt like Indiana Jones (or Lara Croft, choose your own fantasy) exploring these ancient sites.

So here’s my plan. I’m going to become so rich and famous that I can demand/afford a private tour of the temples. I’ll gather my entourage (if you are reading this, you are invited) and tour each temple in turn, marveling at unobstructed views and soaking up the silence.

Until that day, here, for your enjoyment, are some pictures snapped by your favorite tourist.

Eight-Armed Vishnu, Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat

Ta Prohm

Bayon

Banteay Srei Detail

Sunset Crowds at Phnom Bahkeng

Flickr Photoset: Temples of Angkor (102 photos)

Hello! Bye Bye!

Three hundred kilometers from Phnom Phen is Cambodia’s second-largest city, Battambang. With only about 150,000 inhabitants, Battambang will never be mistaken for a world capital. As it is, one might not even recognize Battambang as a city; it is more like a very large village surrounded by fertile countryside. But no one comes to Battambang for the urban experience; people come here to see rural Cambodia.

If you’ve been following my travels, you’ll know that there have been ups and downs, and that the downs often come from the intermittent periods of loneliness that a long-distance traveler is bound to experience. When the editors of Tripmastermonkey.com asked if I would write a story about a tour company called Intrepid Travel, I knew it would be a way to see Cambodia, a fairly difficult country to begin with, and a chance to travel in a group again. What I learned early on was that traveling with a group opens up unexpected opportunities.

One of these opportunities came in the form of a day-long motorbike tour of the Battambang countryside. Each member of the group, seven women, our Khmer guide and myself, hired a motorbike with a driver (for safety and, more importantly, to keep the group traveling at the same speed throughout the day). We held on tight as we rolled out of town and into the country.

Battambang by Motorbike
Our first two stops were, to my delight, related to food. At a roadside hut, we were introduced to sticky rice in bamboo. Sticky rice is mixed with coconut juice and packed into foot-long cylinders of bamboo. The bamboo containers are lined up next to hot coals until the mixture inside is thoroughly cooked. The resulting rice is thick, sticky and sweet, and filling enough for an entire meal.

Sticky Rice in Bamboo
At the next stop, a house a few kilometers down the road, a family was engaged in making rice paper, not the kind for writing, but the kind used to make spring rolls. An old woman crouched in a cloud of steam mechanically spreading a mixture of rice and water on a hot plate, then transferring the wet pancake to a horizontal post. A man then snapped up the wrapper and carefully laid it out on a drying rack. We were told that the family works all day long, in shifts, turning out a few thousand wrappers. For their hard work they might earn what you or I would earn in less than an hour in America.

Making Rice Paper
There are moments when I’m on the road when I look around and know I’m in Asia. The peaceful moments fill me with joy and validate my decision to risk my career for a year on the road. (The unpleasant moments are also enlightening, but harder to swallow.) The journey through the backroads of Battambang was filled with happy visions and moments: farmers leading white oxen across a flooded rice paddy; neon-bright fields of green grasses and crops glowing in the sun; the golden spires of a Buddhist temple glowing on the horizon. However, the moments that brought the most happiness on this day, and continued to provide joy throughout the tour, were the encounters with children.

I don’t know how often foreigners appear on in rural Battambang on motorbikes. I’m sure Intrepid takes groups through there on a regular basis. However often it is, the kids were ecstatic when we’d roll by. They’d sprint out of their houses, whether tumbledown wooden shacks or more solid concrete bungalows, grinning from ear to ear and waving, shouting “Hello! Hello! Hello!” Sometimes they’d yell “Hello! Bye Bye!,” or just “Bye Bye!,” and run after the motorbikes. The enthusiasm that radiated from those children was invigorating and made all of us forget that we were a lot of hot, sweaty travelers, choked by the dust and the grime of unpaved country roads.

Hello!
Unfortunately, Cambodia has the ability to change the mood in a heartbeat. The ultimate destination of the motorbike tour was a mountain (a pimple on the landscape, really) 18 kilometers from the city where the Khmer Rouge used a small temple, Wat Phnom Sampeau, as a prison and a neighboring cave, a killing cave, as a repository for the bodies of their victims. The location is serene today, with beautiful views from the hilltop of the surrounding countryside. In the late 1970’s, however, it was another vision of hell on earth.

Our local guide for the day, Pau, has spent his entire life in Battambang. When he was four years old, the Khmer Rouge regime began it’s reign of terror. Pau, his mother and father and two older siblings were taken from their home and moved to a camp near Phnom Sampeau where about 300 people toiled for the Khmer Rouge. Pau’s father, brother and sister worked in the fields; Pau stayed in the camp with his mother. The whole family suffered from hunger and deprivation, but survived on subterfuge and guile. Pau’s father discovered a store of rice and buried it, cooking in the dark in the middle of the night and feeding his kids handfuls at a time. But that secret stash only lasted for a year.

Eventually, Pau’s brother and sister were taken to another site to build a dam. His father was executed by the Khmer Rouge when someone revealed that he’d once been part of the army. But Pau, his mother and his siblings survived. Hearing his story was a chilling and awful reminder of Cambodia’s recent past. It brought that history to life in a way that our visit to the genocide museum and the killing fields could not.

Pau Tells His Story
Perhaps it was Pau’s story that made those shouts of “Hello! Bye Bye!“ from the rural children so poignant. We’d been told tales of death and misery, but we also witnessed new life and genuine joy. It was an unforgettable day on the road.

+++++

Note: If you clicked Battambang link to Wikipedia at the top of this post, you would have seen two photos. One looked very familiar to me and I clicked on it. I discovered that a Wikipedia contributor has used my photo for the page! I allow non-commercial use of my pictures, so it's cool. I am surprised and flattered!

Death on the Highway

[Warning: This post contains graphic descriptions of an accident.]

This morning my tour group boarded a bus in Kampot, on the South Coast of Cambodia, and set out on National Highway 3 for the beach resort of Sihanoukville, about 100 kilometers to the west. About 20 minutes into the trip I pulled out a novel and settled in for a good read. The bus jerked to the right. There was a loud thwack and crunch, that kind of sounds that scream collision. My seatmate, Kathe, turned to me with wide eyes and said we'd hit something. A sort of collective gasp and unease filled the cabin. But the bus continued to roll down the highway, the driver apparently unconcerned with the accident.

Two rows behind me and Kathe sat Sally and Renee, nurses from Adelaide, Australia. I heard Renee yell at the driver to stop, and only then did he pull over on the shoulder. Sally and Renee jumped off the bus and ran down the road while the rest of us tried to figure out what had happened.

Cambodians drive on the right, like in America. But that doesn't mean people follow rules, like staying on their side of the road. On the other side of the highway, a motorbike passed a car on the left. A third motorbike, with a driver and passenger, tried to speed ahead of the car and other motorbike by passing further on the left, which put them in the path of oncoming traffic. But for a space of about a foot, they would have been successful. They tried to swerve out of the way but ran into the left front bumper of the bus, causing minimal damage to coach and catastrophic damage to the motorbike and the men.

Bus Bumper
I left the bus and walked back along the highway towards a small but growing crowd. I could see Sally and Renee standing near a body on the pavement and a mangled motorbike. As I got closer I saw something on the pavement. My brain told me with was a bit of steak, then I realized it was a golf ball-sized chuck of flesh. I then noticed the second victim, the passenger, lying in a heap on a small slope next to the road. His arms were twisted behind his back and his shirt had been lifted over a motionless torso. I assumed he was dead, then saw that the right side of his head had been crushed, a pool of blood gathering in the grass. No one could survive those injuries.

I turned back to driver and was relieved to see that he was moving and conscious. But still no one was tending to him, no one even offering an ounce of comfort. Sally and Renee are trained professionals, yet the locals told them to not touch either man. If they intervened, and the men died, there was a chance that the victims' families would blame Sally and Renee for the deaths. In fact, no one would touch the men. It's not logical, yet it's the way things work here.

Nevertheless, Sally and Renee urged out tour guide, Kevin, a Khmer from Siem Reap, to step in, and he did, at risk to himself, to comfort the survivor. The man's left wrist was shattered, his hand hanging bloody and limp, yet he was responsive and answered Kevin's questions. He was in shock, but alive.

Tourists at the Scene
I wondered what would happen to the bus driver and heard that he had run into the rice fields. Even though he was not to blame, and tried to swerve out of the way of the motorbike, he would be blamed. Kevin said this blame would result in local villagers seeking vengeance and killing him on the spot. Could this be true? I then noticed a young woman lurking in the expanding crowd carrying a hatchet. Had she been working in the woodshed and come to see what happened or was she there with a more sinister purpose?

After fifteen minutes a trio of men lifted the ragged survivor into the bed of a truck and took off for the hospital in Kampot. I will never know what happened to the man, whether he survived or not. Sally and Renee said he will likely lose his left arm due to the extensive injuries and the lack of medical facilities in the region.

Meanwhile, the passenger, (his friend, brother, father, cousin?) lay motionless and uncovered by the side of the road. The crowd continued to grow, and included children and dogs. Gawkers roamed through the wreckage, kicking bits here and there. Young kids, four and five years old, stared at the corpse on the berm and the bits of gristle on the pavement. A pair of police officers showed up but did nothing more than spray-paint a circle around the wrecked motorbike.

My group returned to the bus. We knew there was nothing we could do but let Cambodia be Cambodia. This is not our home, things are not done the same way. Kevin told us that we should forget it, put it behind us, get back to our holiday. I felt queasy, and could see the concern in the faces of the other tourists. The Cambodians who had now gathered around the bus seemed to be unsure of whether they should check out the dead body or continue watching at the tourists. The whole scene was unreal, surreal, enlightening, frightening and disgusting.

Crowd at the Body
One man lost his life and another's life was ruined because of the space of a few inches. Perhaps a helmet would have saved the passenger's life. There are no answers; it was an accident, plain and simple. Yet, it showed me a side of Cambodian culture that no tour anywhere, anytime, would include in an itinerary. It was a reminder of the fragility of life. It was a reminder of the risks you take when traveling in developing countries. It was as eye-opening an experience as I've had these past six months. In fact, the journalist in me was thrilled to have the story. I'd go to Hell if I believed it existed.

A replacement bus arrived about thirty minutes after the collision. The somber group of foreigners filed back to their seats and the bus pulled away.

The dead man remained exposed and untouched by the side of the road.

Hell on Earth

Any visitor to Cambodia should reflect on this country’s recent history. Cambodia gained independence from France in November 1953. King Sihanouk abdicated the throne two years later, placing his father in power. But Sihanouk formed a political party, the People’s Socialist Communist Party, that gained power by taking every seat in parliament in the 1955 elections. For the next 15 years, Sihanouk was at the top of Cambodia politics.

Sihanouk was suspicious of the United States and in the 1960’s turned to the North Vietnamese and the Chinese for support. Socialist economic policies alienated the right; leftists were upset over internal policies that stifled any form of dissent. Sihanouk felt most threatened by the leftist rebels and instituted repressive policies. One of the rebel groups forced to flee into the jungle for safety was the Khmer Rouge.

Cut to the mid 1970’s. Sihanouk has been deposed by General Lon Nol. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces have invaded the country in an effort to root out the communists. The U.S. institutes a secret policy of bombing communist camps, killing hundreds of thousands. Rural Cambodia falls under the control of the rebels. Pol Pot, a Paris-educated leader of the Khmer Rouge, has formed an army and on April 17, 1975, captures Phnom Penh, taking over the city and setting the clocks back to “Year Zero.” His goal is to turn Cambodia into an agrarian cooperative society under a fusion of idealistic Marxist and Maoist theories.

The reality that ensues is one of the most repressive, bloody and terrifying chapters in modern history.

Pol Pot cleared Phnom Penh of people, relocating residents to the countryside. He then instituted a program to cleanse the country of its/his enemies. The problem was in identifying those enemies. They included leaders of the former regime, warring factions within the Khmer Rouge itself, intellectuals, monks, professionals, etc. No one knows how many people were killed during the three years, eight months and 21 days of Khmer Rouge rule. By the time the Vietnamese invaded, on Christmas Day 1978, hundreds of thousands had been tortured and killed and hundreds of thousands more had died of starvation and disease. Current estimates say more than two million people died as a result of the Khmer Rouge.

Leaders of the Khmer Rouge
This summary is simplistic and incomplete and doesn't do the subject justice. It is merely a preamble to my visit to one of the prisons where the Khmer Rouge held and tortured prisoners and a killing field where those prisoners were executed and then dumped into mass graves.

In the winter of 1975, Toul Svey Prey was a high school 15 kilometers south of the center of Phnom Penh. By the summer of 1975 it had been converted into Security Prison 21 (S-21), the most notorious detention center in the country. More than 17,000 people were held at the site before they were transferred to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, a former orchard and Chinese cemetery. An afternoon at both sites is a sobering experience. I realize this is a cliché, but what am I supposed to say when confronting insanity and genocide?

S-21 is now the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. The grounds remain as they were on the day Vietnamese forces rolled into the city in 1978. The Vietnamese found seven survivors in the camp (that’s seven survivors out of more than 17,000 prisoners who passed through the facility). They also found the corpses of 14 VIPs who had been shackled and tortured. The rooms where these VIPs died each contain an iron bed frame, the shackles and a large black and white photograph showing the condition the corpse was in when discovered. In one photograph, vultures are feeding on the corpse.

Toul Sleng Genocide Museum

Photograph of Tortured Prisoner
The Khmer Rouge, like the Nazi party, was meticulous about keeping records and they photographed and logged every prisoner that entered S-21. There are rooms filled with the photographs of these prisoners, from young children to the elderly. There are also photographs of a few of the foreigners who were caught in the madness (including a handful of journalists).

Today the grounds are peaceful. The grass is green and lush, there are flowers in the trees and people relax on benches in the shade. If you didn’t know the history, and ignored the lengths of barbed wire enclosing the prison, you might mistake it for just another decrepit Phnom Penh building complex. But paintings depicting torture, a room where large cases contain skulls and graves containing those 14 VIPs tell you it’s something else entirely.

May 14, 1978
The Toul Sleng Genocide Museum is educational, sobering, tragic, depressing and downright creepy, a reminder of the horrific extremes humans are capable of. At the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, the final dagger is plunged to the hilt.

The site lies 15 kilometers to the south. The 17,000 prisoners who had been detained and tortured at S-21 were transferred to the fields, where they were bludgeoned to death (why waste bullets?). Their remains were dumped into 129 mass graves. The remains of 9,000 victims have been unearthed from 86 of the graves. The remaining corpses are still in the ground. With year after year of rainfall, tourist traffic and natural erosion, bone fragments and bits of old cloth surface through the hard ground.

A memorial Buddhist stupa was erected in 1988 to commemorate the victims here. The tall, square building contains thousands of skulls and a pile of old clothes. Empty socket and fractured skulls are a painful yet simple reminder of the events that occurred on the site.

Skulls in the Stupa at Choeung Ek

Skulls
The Khmer Rouge is part of Cambodia’s past, even if its leaders have never been brought to trial). For me, visiting the detention center and the killing fields, I felt removed from the horrors of those years. I was able to visit the site and intellectually process what happened. But any attempt to comprehend the reality of the situation is beyond me. Genocide is not something I want to live through, but no one can truly comprehend that level of insanity without experiencing it firsthand. In the end, I visited, listened, learned and remained respectful. Is there anything else a tourist can do?

Crunch Time

It was late afternoon on my first day in Phnom Penh. I was wandering around outside the Royal Palace when I noticed a few carts piled with baskets of something edible. Never one to pass up a chance to inspect the local cuisine, I moved closer. It didn't take long to realize the baskets contained piles of fried insects. There were beetles, crickets and grasshoppers. There was a pile of green things that looked like large ants and another pile of something that I assumed was still in its larval stage. There were also small frogs and deep-fried baby birds. But who cares about frogs and birds when you are staring at a basket of fried bugs?

Bug Cart
The girl selling the snacks told me I could take as many pictures as I wanted for $1 (Cambodia uses U.S. currency). My instinct was to take the photos and move on. Wrong. I'm traveling to experience local culture, bugs and all. So I sampled the product.

I started with the smallest cricket, ignoring as much as I could the beady eyes and broken legs. I was expecting something mushy, perhaps with a bitter aftertaste of internal goo. What I tasted, however, resembled an oily tidbit of deep-friend charcoal. Ok, maybe the crickets don't retain their natural flavors, their essence lost when they are plunged into a vat of bubbling oil. I moved to the larger grasshoppers (locusts? large crickets? who knows). Crunchier, but still like eating the shavings from a piece of burnt toast. Perhaps the green ants and spring onions was what I was looking for? Better, with a hint of sweetness, but still unremarkable. Where does a guy have to go to get a plate of tasty bugs around here? Jeez!

Crickets

Beetles
I passed on beetles, pupae and frogs. But in a drunken state last night I promised two of the women on my tour that the next time we encounter bugs I will eat a beetle. I think I even promised to eat a hairy spider. When in Rome...

Holiday in Cambodia

Look what happens. You listen to punk rock as a kid and then you are living the title of a Dead Kennedys song. Yes, I've arrived in Cambodia, land of ancient temples and the killing fields.

I'm in Phnom Penh today and will be taking a walking tour this afternoon. Tomorrow I join an organized trip with Intrepid Travel. The two-week tour hits the country's highlights, but I'm most looking forward to a few days at Angkor Wat. I've been resting my camera the past few days knowing that it will get a workout at the ancient temples. The tour should be memorable. I'm looking forward to meeting the group and having familiar faces around me for a few weeks. I haven't been part of a group like this since my Australian Outback experience.

I'm going to try to update Packmonkey while on tour. The itinerary shows some blocks of free time, so I should be able to post along the way. If not, there will be plenty to write about in early August. I am also going to be writing an article about Intrepid for Tripmastermonkey.com.