Edmond Chan

“And my experience was this – and I try to describe it as accurately as I can. I had a curious sense of being literally in love with the world. There is no other way in which I can express what I then felt. I felt as if I could hardly contain myself for the love which was bursting within me. It seemed to me as if the world itself were nothing but love. We have all felt on some occasion an ardent glow of patriotism. This was patriotism extended to the whole Universe. The country for which I was feeling this overwhelming intensity of love was the entire Universe. At the back and foundation of things I was certain was love – and not merely placid benevolence, but active, fervent, devoted love and nothing less. The whole world seemed in a blaze of love, and men’s hearts were burning to be in touch with one another.”

Lt-Col. Sir Francis Younghusband, The Heart of Nature

Saigon

AFTER PHNOM PENH, it was time to say goodbye to Cambodia. I took a bus with Jon eastwards to Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as I prefer to call it; less prosaic I think) in the south of Vietnam.

Vietnam is bordered by China to the north and by Laos and Cambodia to the west. It has around 86m people making it the 13th most populous nation in the world. Vietnam has a mindboggling 54 officially recognized ethnic groups and is dominated by the Viet (Kinh) people who make up more than 86% of the population. Vietnamese people are immediately distinctive from their Cambodian neighbours. They are closer in looks to the Han Chinese than to the Cambodians. Here, when asked as to where I was from, I went with the Philippines; just as it was with the Cambodians, the Vietnamese have no beef with the Philippines and it meant I was regarded as close enough to the locals to be very warmly treated.

The name “Saigon‟ conjures up images of almost the quintessential Indo-Chine experience, born of countless Vietnam War films and early Cold War intrigue as depicted in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Despite only being 8 hours away on the bus, Saigon is a world away from Phnom Penh. It’s a seething commercial metropolis, with mid-rise buildings and wide boulevards teeming with the most motorcycles I have ever seen in one place – columns of traffic perhaps 20 bikes wide! Somehow though, it‟s possible to discern order amid the chaos.

We stayed in central Saigon in a great little guesthouse run by the wonderful Miss Loi, a perpetually young and graceful Hanoi woman, and by her army of daughters. As with most buildings in Saigon, the guesthouse was incredibly narrow and tall (about 12 stories). We immediately set about exploring the markets and food stalls around the backpackers’ areas around Pham Ngo Lau, where I found some delicious cold white noodles with a sweet and savoury dressing. The markets were full of clothes, shoes, suits, fabrics etc. and the sales staff were savvy, persistent and wily; it didn‟t help that I found the mental currency exchange rate calculations difficult: 1GBP would buy around 26,500 Vietnamese Dong (VND); try working that one out!

The spectre of the Vietnam War is never far away whilst in Saigon; easily understandable given that the War only officially concluded in 1975. One must-see sight here is the War Remnants Museum; a giant edifice dedicated to the memory of the conflict. The building is monolithic and adorned outside with US jet fighters and tanks. Inside is an eye-opening and, at many points, harrowing exhibition which definitely challenged and broadened my knowledge and understanding of the Vietnam War; a small body of knowledge hitherto only acquired through history lessons and US-produced and directed war films. The exhibition sheds light on lesser known incidences of US atrocities, such as numerous massacres of civilian villages, the less than glorious motivations and pretexts used for US involvement in the conflict and, something I didn‟t know anything about, the US deployment of a chemical weapon called Agent Orange. This chemical was contemporaneously known as one of the most toxic chemicals ever „discovered‟ by man and produced in military quantities to be utilised against the Vietcong, but in practice was deployed indiscriminately in mass blanketing of civilian areas. The results of Agent Orange are most horrifically manifested in the next generation, with thousands and thousands of children born with severe deformities such as missing limbs, mental illnesses and heavily disfigured facial and cranial injuries. Many of these victims can be seen today on the streets of Saigon; a terrible reminder of a conflict that still has reverberations even today. Of course, I‟m aware that history is generally written by the victors, and that accordingly, the exhibition should be viewed with an allowance for a degree of bias, but the accuracy and completeness of this account is hard to refute because it is all documented with declassified US documents, admissions by soldiers (including a US Senator who in 2001 admitted his leading a massacre of civilians) and by the presence and evidence of an international contingent of journalists and photographers.

Of course, the Vietnam War isn‟t the only war that Vietnam has faced, even in the last century. The country fought against its colonial power, the French, straight after the Second World War, during which it was a puppet of Vichy France and occupied by the Japanese. Vietnam, however, never surrendered to its aggressors and, despite massive disparities in resources, became the leading exponents of asymmetric warfare anywhere in the world. As mentioned previously, just three years after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, Vietnam still had the military capability to wrest control of Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge. I think the message is „Definitely don‟t mess around with Vietnam‟; these are some seriously, seriously tough people. Vietnam is just a further example of how people in the south-east Asian region have been subjected to successions of brutality in the recent past, both from external forces and, possibly more tragically, from elements of their own people (witness Myanmar today). The Vietnamese, just like the Malaysian, Thai and Cambodian people that I‟ve encountered on this leg of my trip, have been truly lovely and friendly people, always happy to greet a traveller, and without doubt they are one of the best reasons to visit this region.

During my stay in Saigon, I also took a trip to the Mekong Delta at My Tho, about two hours by bus from Saigon. Our guide was a man who had fought on the South Vietnamese side during the war and worked as a translator for the Americans. He was deeply proud of this allegiance and I wondered what it was like to end up on the losing side of war. He said that when the war ended he put down his weapon and returned to his farm. I got the sense that he still wished that the Americans had won. The mighty Mekong River is one of the world‟s biggest and starts in the mountains of China and ends in the vast Delta in southern Vietnam. At the Delta, the Mekong is massively vast, intimidatingly fast-flowing and a deep, muddy brown. It‟s the source of life for countless river communities along its vast length and we met some interesting locals along the banks at My Tho (including a snake man inviting us to pose with an enormous python wrapped around our necks – sorry dear reader, but I had to decline!), enjoyed some fresh Mekong fish and generally soaked up the laidback vibes of this amazing part of the world.

After the Temples of Angkor, I took an eight hour bus ride south-east to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, on which I met Jon Regan, a top bloke from Essex. He‟d been travelling for 18 months and planned a further 18 months, finishing off with a ski-season in Canada during the Winter Olympics. He‟d unfortunately been burgled in Siem Reap. Apparently, his dormitory had been completely cleaned out by a thief in the middle of the night. People apparently noticed a quiet guy who came into the room after the lights had gone off; he‟d just sat down in a corner. At around 3am, someone screamed, the lights came on and everyone had lost some valuables, with the guy nowhere to be seen. Unfortunately for Jon, he‟d lost a laptop.

Phnom Penh is definitely more off the beaten track than, say, Bangkok. I had been really looking forward to getting there; it carries a mystique and a romance for me, ravaged by war and genocide, a far-flung and exotic place, a pioneering and Wild West city for foreign correspondents, spies and arms dealers. There are fewer tourists and definitely much less widely spoken English. There are potholes in the road and fewer travel agencies geared towards backpackers. Where else do you see bona fide signs in hostels and guesthouses asking patrons to refrain from keeping firearms and explosives in your room and, instead, to check them in at reception!

Probably in Phnom Penh more than any other part of Cambodia, the shadow of the despotic Pol Pot and his abhorrent Khmer Rouge regime still hangs portentously over the people some three decades later; a visit to the Cheong Ek killing fields some 17km outside the city and to the Tuol Sleng torture prison goes some way to explaining why. As with so many countries in this region, Cambodia was heavily influenced by Marxism and its myriad variants. The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975 and aimed to turn Cambodia into an agrarian society and immediately began to purge the people of supposed traitors and undesirables such as those who didn‟t come from farming backgrounds. The system eventually began to breakdown with the threat of starvation looming despite rice production being prioritised. However, before the regime had the opportunity to implode, the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and took Phnom Penh. In the three years of Pol Pot‟s rule, a staggering 1.7m people had been killed or simply disappeared out of a total population of around 8m.

107

Eat, Drink And Be Merry, For Tomorrow We Die

Cheong Ek is dominated by a massive tower, which on closer inspection, is filled with skulls. It‟s grisly and macabre and incredibly difficult to fully comprehend. These skulls were dug up from the shallow graves of this small field and placed on display so that they are not forgotten. People were killed here with medieval methods (such as with a blunt instrument like a shovel swung at the head) so as not to cause too much noise when the murders were taking place. Decades later and bones are still visible on the paths around this killing field. It seems trite to comment on this place but there‟s the nagging feeling as you walk around that it‟s impossible to fully take in what happened here even when confronted by the physical reality of piles and piles of skulls stacked up in a glass tower not more than three feet from your face. You‟re aware that you should feel absolutely horrified, but the overall feeling is more of quietude.

The Cheong Ek killing field is just one example of many killing fields all over Cambodia. It may seem strange to think that such a place is heavily promoted in the guidebooks and by the local tourism groups; distasteful even. However, it‟s undeniable that these sites are tourist attractions (if that‟s the appropriate description) and the undesirable alternative would be a slow forgetting. We remember the dead in the cemeteries in Normandy; we remember the Holocaust; and we remember the victims of countless conflicts around the world. Perhaps the constant reminders of the unspeakable Khmer Rouge regime will go some way to preventing a repeat within Cambodia for future generations.

After Cheong Ek, we went to the Tuol Sleng torture prison (S-21), in central Phnom Penh, which had been a primary school before reinventing itself as the primary purging instrument of the Phnom Penh-based Khmer Rouge. Now a museum, you can walk around the interrogation rooms, which have been preserved and which generally contain just a rusty bed with no mattress and accompanying implements of torture; electric clamps, shovels, hammers, drowning tanks, pliers etc. The black and white pictures of people after being murdered are arresting and horrifying; people emaciated and mutilated. Anyone brought here for questioning generally didn‟t survive and either died here or at Cheong Ek. People eventually confessed to anything and informed on family members, friends, anyone. In 1977, S-21 claimed 100 victims a day. These events only happened around as little as 33 years ago, meaning that anyone in Cambodia of 37 years old and older has memories of this time. Everyone was terrified of the knock on the door requiring someone for questioning; everyone knew what the outcome was likely to be. Part of the story told here was of those who did the questioning and performed the torture. Many were young recruits from the countryside, some of whom were idealistic pro-Khmer Rouge, others who supposedly did it simply as a job and others who were fearful of recrimination. Exactly the same questions that were asked of the guards at the Nazi extermination camps apply here: what could cause normal people to torture and kill other human beings?

Phnom Penh itself is a really cool place to hang out in. People are friendly and there‟s a Wild West, untamed element to it. It‟s so invigoratingly different in Phnom Penh; it‟s totally different to the UK; you‟ve got to keep your wits about you here: for example, crossing the road in Phnom Penh is an art form. There are motorbikes going off everywhere and they don‟t stop; you have to just walk slowly and purposefully across, not make any sudden or unexpected movements and pray that they continue to swerve around you. Another really interesting aspect to city living here is that people‟s front doors are the size of a shop front and these doors are left open for most of the day and night. You can see the whole of a family‟s living room as they just watch TV, or sprawled out onto the street watching the world go by. The street is just an extension of their house where next to the motorbikes are tiny tables and accompanying stools for all the family to take their meals and be part of the life of the local community.

The markets here are fantastic, as are the side streets and back alleys – a fascinating slice of Cambodian living. The main market in central Phnom Penh, Psar Thmei, is everything I wanted it to be: slightly dishevelled, incredibly busy, each stall heaped full of foods I‟d never seen before, slightly smelly (but not in a bad way!) and always a spectacle. The produce here is so fresh, with the fattest prawns still alive in cold flowing waters. However, it‟s the sort of place that would be immediately closed down in the UK, which is unfortunate because it means that we miss the visceral nature of somewhat less squeamish markets (such as this one) with events like live fowl being killed to order in front of your eyes. The cooking classes in the UK are always exhorting us to get to know the provenance of our food and to know the process of slaughter that puts meat on our tables; perhaps we should be looking more at cultures like these, although it‟ll be a long time before that happens.

I knew there’d be some foodie treats in store in Phnom Penh; things I wouldn‟t find elsewhere: I loved the little snacks I found on the stalls on side streets and in narrow alleyways teeming with life (with people doing their washing, children playing and old women cooking) such as un-ripened green mangoes, sliced into thin segments and dipped into a salty, sugary dip. I tried deep-fried crickets (about two inches long – crispy, chewy in parts, salty and not too tasty!) At a small family-run place, with vague concerns over my stomach’s health, we ploughed into garlicky clams from the huge, muddy river (Tonle Sap which splits Phnom Penh), mountains of fried, sticky chicken wing tips, and baked embryo eggs: literally eggs with a semi-formed chick inside it. You crack it open and peel back most of the shell and you’re met by proper black feathers, a semi-formed exoskeleton (you can even see the bones under the wings attached to the bird’s ribcage and you’re able to extend the wing), the chick’s head; face and beak all surrounded by hard yolk – really nasty stuff! I kind of ate around it and pushed it to the edges of my plate, whilst feeling a bit sheepish for my prissiness as Cambodians all around me wolfed them down with a bit of sugar, chilli oil, garlic and gusto, devouring two or three each. I drew the line though at deep-fried spiders – I just couldn’t face them!

Another popular tourist activity in Phnom Penh is firing machine guns at a range; we went to a range run by the Cambodian Special Forces Airborne Unit (I think it was the 911 Para-Commando Battalion, a Cambodian Special Forces unit based a few miles west of Phnom Penh. Apparently, many are trained by the Kopassus, an Indonesian Special Forces unit), but I didn’t fire anything as it was way too expensive: about USD40 for 30 rounds – USD40 for just two seconds of firing; you’ve got to be kidding me! I’d heard that it was possible to fire a rocket launcher at a cow; I didn’t disbelieve it; it’s possible, I’m sure, to do almost anything here.

We explored the Phnom Penh nightlife with two of Jon‟s friends, whom he knew from his time in Siem Reap, Becs Riddell and Mel Hardman, two young Australians from Sydney who‟d been volunteering in orphanages. We went to a hostess bar where, as soon as you enter, you‟re surrounded by scantily-clad young Cambodian women who welcome you in and who then pour your beers for you (so that you drink slightly faster), dance suggestively on the bar and generally just flirt outrageously, with the boys, and on the rare occasions that they come in, with the girls. The conversation generally goes a bit like this:

“Do you like Cambodia?” “Yes, of course!”
“Are these your girlfriends?” “No”

“What you want to drink? Let me top that up for you! Another beer? Same again?” “Do you like Cambodia?”
“Er, yes of course!”

After, we went to another bar where we tried a little experiment; Jon and I would go in alone and Mel and Becs would wait outside and come in ten minutes later. We weren‟t prepared; as soon as we walked in, the only customers were a few European-looking guys and about 40 hostesses. I‟m pretty sure they weren‟t hostesses; more like encouragers of boozing with some prostitution on the side! We were surrounded and definitely more than slightly embarrassed by this much attention; several women just watching you drink and giggling to each other. It was a bit of a relief when Mel and Becs came in; the hostesses retreated until it became clear that they weren‟t our girlfriends; the hostesses came back over, but this time the shameless flirting stopped and the conversation became more natural. We then went to a surprisingly decent nightclub called Heart of Darkness with much better music than I‟ve heard in many clubs on this trip. Afterwards, on the way home, we saw a sign for karaoke. We pushed through this makeshift, plastic door to be greeted by two, pretty drunk, pretty Cambodian girls who poured the drinks, drank our beer and dominated the microphone; we had to fight for the mike. I popped to the gents when I accidently interrupted one of our hostesses doing her business on the squat toilet with no walls around it in the corridor next to the stairs and in front of an open balcony! She ran off squealing!

Cambodia is a wonderful country to visit. Despite being firmly on the backpacker trail, Cambodia still offers a huge sense of adventure. It‟s the classic Indochinese experience: a rice-growing culture, largely agrarian, pre-industrial, with a charmingly inefficient infrastructure, unbelievably friendly people, and fantastic food which is cheap and full of flavour. From the hairiness of my introduction at Poipet to the eternal splendours of Angkor Wat to the frontier feel and unpredictability of Phnom Penh, this is a country to which I’ll definitely return.

My day in Angkor Wat was as near a perfect day as I could have imagined. I was up before dawn and went into Siem Reap town centre for breakfast. I‟m a coffee addict and this one was special. It came in a small, steel container filled with grind and water and the coffee dripped into a cup beneath. The result was a thick, nutty and super-strong coffee that was sensational; why isn‟t all coffee made this way? Two cups later and I was jumping. Add this to hot „pho‟, a noodle beef broth with liberal amounts of chilli, Thai basil and bean sprouts, with the temperature already at 28 degrees at just 7.30am, and you have one of the world‟s perfect breakfasts.

Angkor Wat is usually explored by hiring a motorcycle driver and shooting around the complex. Tourism is clearly the biggest income of Siem Reap and everyone wants to be your driver. I found a keen young guy called „Mr Go-Go‟; (that‟s how he introduced himself! “Hi! What‟s your name?” “Just call me Mr Go-Go!” “Er, is that your real name?” “Sure! I‟m Mr Go-Go!”) and off we rode to the temples about 10km out of town. Angkor Wat is the name that people use as an umbrella term for the temples in this area of Cambodia; however, the temples here are in fact a huge complex of temples, only one of which is actually the temple “Angkor Wat”; the name sticks as the collective label perhaps because it is the most famous of the many temples in the region. I decided to leave Angkor Wat until last and let Mr Go Go direct the order of events. We hit the smaller, less well known temples first.

The temples are incredible! They were generally built in the 11th or 12th century and are magnificent. They are generally constructed out of huge ancient blocks of stone (each block around two cubic metres) and built to several stories high without mortar. The blocks are then ornately carved with images of Buddha, Hindu Gods such as Vishnu and scenes from history. There‟re at least 50 of these temples in the area, about one kilometre apart from each other, surrounded by thick forests. There are lots of tourists visiting the temples but it‟s always possible to find some quiet spaces to enjoy. The access to these world heritage structures is unbelievable; you can just clamber off on your own standing on huge blocks of stone; you can touch the temples and step over the fat, giant roots of the unique trees that flourish here. The mystery, like with Stonehenge and the Pyramids, is working out how the Cambodians achieved such a feat of construction and engineering; the sheer will and ambition it must have taken to conceive and construct this incredible, monumental complex that long ago just shows what human beings are really capable of achieving.

That day, I saw Prasat Kravan, Banteay Kdei, the immense water temple Sras Srang (where I met my first of many sellers; a preternaturally persistent and gifted young salesgirl “You want buy book? Very good book? You want t-shirts? I have no money? I should be in school? You want cold drink? Cold water? Very hot today, yes? Ed, you said you would buy book?” “Okay! I‟ll buy it!”), the tree-root infested Ta Prohm, climbed the steeply terraced and mighty Ta Keo, Chau Say Tevoda, the wonderful, small but perfectly formed Thommanon, the phenomenally huge Angkor Thom with its four walls and huge gates (inside these walls stands the mighty Bayon (used in the movie Lara Croft – Tomb Raider) and the Terrace of Elephants battleground (a huge lushly green park studded with trees and ornate tiny (relatively) temples with a terrace on one side for royalty. Here, elephants used to fight each other for the pleasure of the King!)), the eerie maze-like Preah Khan, and finally, the mighty and awesome Angkor Wat itself, an unfeasibly enormous walled complex surrounded by the biggest moat (200m wide) I have ever seen, with perfectly still, mirror-like waters, and accessible only by a bridge. Angkor Wat is the biggest religious building in the world, bigger than the Pyramids, and way, way, way bigger than any Cathedral or Mosque. The four outer walls are a kilometre long each! And once inside it‟s a long walk to the temple itself which is styled on the Hindu Mount Meru, the Home of the Gods. The temple is set on a terrace and there are three rectangular galleries rising to the pinnacle, a central tower. “Stunning”, “magnificent”, “jaw-dropping” don‟t even come close to adequate descriptions! I finished my tour with a walk up a hill behind elephants to the highest temple ruin in the complex where, with about a hundred other travellers, I watched the sun set over the surrounding forest which extended all the way to the horizon. The Temples of Angkor are truly phenomenal – one of the greatest things I have ever seen; up there with Machu Picchu and the Bolivian Salt Flats. It‟s the apex of Cambodian and Khmer culture and justifiably immortalised on the country‟s banknotes.

“We are the pilgrims, Master; we shall go

Always a little further: it may be
Beyond that last blue mountain barred with snow, Across that angry or that glimmering sea,

White on a throne or guarded in a cave
There lives a prophet who can understand Why men were born: but surely we are brave, Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

Sweet to ride forth at evening from the wells When shadows pass gigantic on the sand, And softly through the silence beat the bells Along the Golden Road to Samarkand.

We travel not for trafficking alone;
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
For lust of knowing what should not be known
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.”
James Elroy Flecker, from Golden Journey to Samarkand

Poipet

FROM BANGKOK, I took a local bus eastwards to the border at Aranya Prathet. It was at the Mo Chit bus station in Bangkok, where I saw the straight-faced devotion of the Thais to their King. I‟d heard that, whenever the national anthem was played, you had to stand to attention. So on the hour, every hour, at the bus station, the anthem plays at full volume and everyone stands ramrod straight. A video was playing on the large monitors recounting the whole of the King‟s life. I‟d heard about the recent case of an Australian novelist who‟d committed the offence of lèse-majesté (an offence against the dignity of a monarch) in a little circulated, self-published novel. He’d been arrested at the airport on the way out of Thailand, and thrown into jail for three years for his crime (he was subsequently pardoned by King Bhumibol Adulyadej). I stood to attention with my arms by my side for the full five minutes, just like everyone else around me.

It was six hours to the border. At Aranya Prathet, I saw huge signs telling Thais, that once over the border, their lives may be at risk and that nothing could be done by the Thai authorities to help them. You were on your own. This border crossing is well known to travellers as slightly hairy and I was well versed in the potential pitfalls. I crossed under the famous Khmer-style arches: Welcome to Cambodia!

Cambodia is bordered by Laos to the north-east, by Vietnam to the east and south-east, and by Thailand to the north and west. The Khmer people make up more than 90% of its population; the remainder includes Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham (Cham people are an ethnic group concentrated between the Kampong Cham Province in Eastern Cambodia and central Vietnam. The Cham form the core of the Muslim communities in both Cambodia and Vietnam) and Khmer Loeu people (they are Mon-Khmer or Highland Khmer or “Montagnards‟ as designated by the French colonialists.) The official Cambodian language is Khmer, a member of the Mon-Khmer subfamily of the Austro-Asiatic language group, a large language family of South-East Asia, also scattered throughout India and Bangladesh.

As soon as you cross into Cambodia at the casino town at Poipet, you‟re besieged by touts wanting to sell you a ride to Siem Reap, two hours away. Scams abound such as taking your money upfront for “gas‟ and then kicking you out of the car ten minutes up the road; or insisting that you exchange money in Poipet because there‟s no money exchange anywhere else; or driving all over the place for hours to leave you feeling tired and less able to refuse the guesthouse that they drop you off at, where they receive a tidy commission for leaving you there – the list goes on. Poipet is a Wild-West hellhole! I saw, I kid you not, in broad daylight, a bus driver take a picture of a man‟s penis and then give him money for it. The guy just pulled his pants up and got on with his day! Kids run ferally around naked. The roads are mudtracks. Nobody smiles. It’s like the guide book says – get the fuck out of Poipet as soon as possible. So I did, in the front seat of a battered Toyota Camry with several huge cracks in the windscreen, with an impassive driver saying “Yes, Siem Reap” and then getting on his phone. I didn’t leave Poipet for more than an hour; the car just kept circling the town, with random Cambodians getting in the back every ten minutes, then getting out, then getting back in, then dropping off huge amounts of hitherto concealed blood-splattered fish from the trunk. Toilet breaks were just on the main road as nobody wanted to step onto the potentially mined surrounding land. That ride into Siem Reap, about two hours away eastwards, was easily one of the most interesting journeys I have yet taken! I’d arrived at Siem Reap; the gateway to Angkor Wat.