Cam in Cambodia

The more we were told about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, the more I found it extraordinary that Cambodia was not, on the face of it, a country afflicted by mass Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. 

It is an astonishing place, and, while I liked many things about Vietnam, there were things about Cambodia which will remain seared in my mind until…well…nothing is seared in my mind and I’m the noisy guy in the corner of the care home.

We liked Siem Reap, the gateway town for Angkor; what you do in Siem Reap is drink on Pub Street (not quite as bad as it sounds); eat delicious Cambodian food (Lok Lak! Amok! Lap Khmer! Kampot Pepper! Insects….) which, relative to say Thai food, is less spicy but very flavoursome. And you go to the market. Mr F and I, I’m afraid, grew rather addicted to the market, where the bartering (essential) made me feel rather ashamed and where the scarves and tablecloths and table runners, cotton and silk, were bargains and beautiful. We returned to one particular stall three days on the trot, our arrival greeted with squeals of excitement by the lady stall-holder: ‘You like this one? I show you more colours…good price for five. Ten?’ If I had had any sense I would just have bought all my Christmas presents in a oner. Instead, I pretended that was what I was doing; in the cold (and I mean cold) light of the Scottish dawn I did put one or two away for other people, honest.

Angkor itself is quite astonishing. There are places one goes which are, in truth, a disappointment – Niagara Falls, for example, did nothing for me – cold and wet and surrounded by tacky shops, and well…really just a lot of water. Las Vegas!!!??? Really??? Some other much-lauded sights/sites, however, are intensely moving, whether natural or manmade. My own lists would include the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and Petra, and to that now must be added Angkor, the largest religious site in the world, over 400 square kilometres, but also a city which 800 years ago housed over a million people (London, our guide told us smilingly, back then had 50,000 inhabitants). 

We saw only three parts – the Angkor Wat, the most famous of the temples to which we were brought just after sun-up having risen at 5.00 am. That sleepiness, and that light, with the building reflecting on the lake, made it a beautiful dream; later as the sun rose fiercely in the sky, drenched with sweat, and we proceeded to Angkor Thom, the “Great City” which was the capital of the Khmer Empire, it became more like a fever dream with a billion cicadas as the theme music. Was all this actually possible? The tiny details etched into the stonework, each square inch a time-consuming miracle, and then you realise that the frieze goes on for 100 yards; all these people, living and dying in the creation of this holy beauty. At the Ta Prohm site, the jungle hasn’t been completely cleared away and the temple is entwined by the roots of ancient, huge trees. People still live and raise crops and families in the complex’s villages. It is completely unlike anywhere else I have ever been; it made us all very quiet.

As did our bus ride with Virak. Virak was our guide in Phnom Penh. Because we moved about a great deal on this visit to Vietnam and Cambodia, we had five local guides, all very different people. Virak had the least good English and was the oldest of the five, and looked much older than he actually was – he was always smiling, but life had aged him. Today, Phnom Penh has a population of over two million; it’s a city of real contrasts – we ate in a pretty fancy restaurant which was immediately surrounded by a market full of butchers selling every part of every animal, some clearly specialising in innards. Everywhere there are monks. Virak explained to us the system by which you greet people in Cambodia, which involves holding your hands to your face in prayer style (but with your fingers open) while you bow. The more you cover your face, the more respect you are showing – the order of precedence pleased me: ordinary people the lowest, just touching the chin, then old people, then teachers and your parents, then monks and royalty. I pretended that they were greeting me with greater respect because I was a teacher…

Virak also told us about Pol Pot, who led one-party Communist Democratic Kampuchea between 1976 and 1979, during which time two million people were killed, having been forced out of the cities into labour camps in the countryside. Phnom Penh became a ghost city for three years, except for the prisons (some former schools) where suspected spies, many of them children, were tortured and murdered by Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of them children. Virak’s father, who had worked for the previous regime, was arrested, refused to confess and was murdered at the notorious ‘killing fields’, which we visited, paying our respects to the thousands of dead, in their mass graves, by laying a single beautiful lotus flower at the memorial. His grandparents were murdered. Virak’s mother went to live among the hill people, and through astonishing resilience, hard work and inventiveness, saved his life. She now lives in the USA. This was one story; all the time we were in Phnom Penh, drinking egg coffee in fancy new coffeeshops, I was thinking, I was teaching by the time this was over. How much did I know about it? Why did the world let this happen? And then, of course, one’s thoughts stray.