Welcome to the Wild Wild East

So.. I've been in Cambodia for 4 days now... it's a completely different experience to what I thought it would be like. Phnom Penh was a real kind of frontier town, placed on top of an ancient but damaged culture/society, and with some amazing architecture thrown in to boot.

There are so many expats living there - teaching english, working for NGO's, just kind of hanging around. It's very easy to get a business visa, and they just let you extend it year after year, so there are all these people who have just been in Cambodia for so long they wouldn't know what to do if they had to leave. I met an ex bar owner last night who has been here 15 years, and is still dancing with young bar girls every night...

I decided to go to PP first, that way I could do all the depressing disturbing things first and then end my holiday by going to Angkor. The Killing Fields, and especially S21, the Tuol Sleng school where the Khmer Rouge systematically tortured thousands of people after meticulously recording all their details and taking photographs are some of the most disturbing things I've ever seen. In S21, one of the most chilling aspects is that it's just in a suburban street, surrounded by houses and other everday buildings. It's only inside that you see the photographs of the horror - actual shots of the remains of the last tortured people the Vietnamese found when they liberated S21, as well as wall after wall of the photos taken when people arrived. Some people knew what was about to happen - you could see it in their eyes. Others had no idea... there was a whole wall of children under 5, another of boys all around 10-12 wearing the fashionable cap of the day.. and it just went on and on. The rooms where people slept, were tortured.. the equipment.. it's all been left pretty much how it was found, except for the installation of photographs.

And the fact it's an old school somehow makes it even worse. Seeing school rooms transformed into cells about a metre wide and a metre and a half long with almost no light... You can feel the spirits of the dead who's remains never got a proper burial, and who were thrown into mass graves in the Killing Fields.

The Killing Fields themselves seem rather banal - until you read the signs describing how many bodies were unearthed there, and when you see the monument to the dead - made of found skulls, most killed by blows, or hacking chops of a machete to the head to save on bullets... it's all very harrowing.

The other side of this is the abject poverty in which many families now find themselves. I went to an orphanage, which was in a really poor slum area, where kids slept 5 to a room on lino if they were lucky, and tarp if they weren't. The kids are great - I took some rice (well 25 kgs) I'd bought at the market, but was completely unprepared for how much more was needed. They also try and get you to pay for some of the kid's schooling, which is heartbreaking, becuase it isn't that much, but there are so many kids, and the centre isn't well enough set up yet to guarantee that the kids would get the money. I'm thinking of sending a big parcel of items wehn I get home, like pens, paper, clothes, toys etc etc. Think I'll try and get a bunch of people involved. They are teaching the kids singing and dancing skills as well as regular school and also english.

So I left PP feeling drained, and overwhelmed and a bit unsure of how I was going to deal with the rest of Cambodia. But Siem Reap has been really good. It's still as underdeveloped - perhaps even more so than PP, but the atmosphere is better, people are friendlier, there's less weird shit going down, and it's just a nice town. The place I'm staying is great - the people are really nice, and I spent my first day at the temples today which was amazing! Saw Ta Prohm - the one the jungle has taken over that was apparently in "Tomb Raider" (I never saw it), and saw the Bayon with the big faces, and a whole lot of others... I have 2 more days checking out the temples, and then I leave on Monday lunchtime for Singapore, via Saigon.

I'm going to attempt to load a few pictures with this entry, but I'll see how the computer goes...