Cambodia and Back
We went overland from Bangkok, taking a bus to a border marked by tacky casinos. We paid our visa, were photographed by customs and walked from the second to the third world. Our taxi, a fifteen year old Toyota sedan, would take us to Battanbang, Cambodia’s second largest city.
The journey took seven hours and it gave us an opportunity to ease into the country in a way that jet travel can not. The main road south, connecting the two countries, was potholed dirt, almost as bad as our driveway in Santa Fe, NM. It was dry season, yet even so, the land appeared fertile with rice fields spotted with fish ponds. We passed several colorfully illustrated signs showing people giving up rifles for shovels that read: “We don’t need weapons anymore.”
Battanbang is slightly off the tourist map. It has a happening market and a lively local street scene along the Sang Sanker river. Helen, my wife, had grown up in Southeast Asia. Her first impression, which held for everywhere but Angkor Watt, was that Cambodia was like Thailand in the seventies. Tourists are not seen as walking ATM machines yet. You can still have a real conversation with people.
After settling at our hotel, a young man who introduced himself as Chris offered to show us the local sites. The next day, we were off on his motorbikes, traveling on dirt roads through small family farms. I wasn’t too concerned about where we were going. I just wanted him to show us what he thought was important.
The countryside was beautiful with kampongs surrounded by bananas, mangos, palms and avocado trees. Chickens, pigs, rats, dogs and cattle meandered about. After about forty-five minutes, occasionally eating “Cambodian snow” (road dust), we arrived at what looked like a mesa rising up from the plains of rice fields. This was one of the centers of operation for the Khmer Rouge.
After about a twenty minute climb up steps, we reached the top of a rounded hill with some flat areas. While we rested on the steps of a Buddhist stupa, Chris told in detail how uncles were killed while mother and father narrowly escaped, though they were separated for five years. The account was heart wrenching. Pol Pot was no longer just one of many distant, twentieth century figures who perpetrated genocide.
We were shown a big open hole leading down into a deep cave. People were tortured and then pushed into the blackness to die. But many didn’t die. So those who lived fed on those who died until they died.
Now, the bones were stacked in a wire cage. Next to it, a reclining Buddha, candles, the smell of incense.
“What about all the army who supported Pol Pot?” I asked. “Where are they?”
“They were young. No one could recognize who they are now.”
Even though there are plans for war criminal trails soon, and there have been elections, Chris was not very hopeful about the future. How could anyone be? Every Cambodian lost family members to Pol Pot and the perpetrators could be your neighbor. Some of the top people who helped to orchestrate the genocide still have political power in the current government
At the bottom of the site, we rested for lunch. A coconut with a straw. Noodles and mysterious flesh in broth. And we discuss the culinary merit of various meats.
Getting down to basics, I asked him, “But which do you like better? Dog, pig or rat?”
“Dog,” he replied with the assured confidence. “It’s rich, like beef.”
(PS: for those of you with an entrepreneurial bent, the US has an excess of dog meat, wastefully incinerated at our shelters.)
Having a second helping of noodles, Chris explained that even eating insects without permission during revolutionary work on collectives was a capital offence. All food had to be given over. Rice was exported to China. Chris had starved when he was a young child.
No wonder the market has baskets of beetles, frogs and grass hoppers saut
Tags: Cambodia, Kmer, Laos, River, Rouge, Ruins, Terrorism, travel