After our active day yesterday, it is on to some more leisurely adventures for the next couple of days.

Our friend Richard that we know from Thailand is engaged to a girl from Cambodia, and Vanna lives in Phnom Penh, so we are lucky to be able to re-connect with a friendly face and get some additional help figuring out what is worth seeing and what we should skip.

It seems like Vanna knows everyone here, but I suspect that is mostly because she is from a large family, and we are lucky enough to meet most of here sisters and her father 😉 We manage to get out for dinner with them one night, have a nice time talking with them – Vanna doing a lot of the translating because her father and cousins do not speak any English.

Our next day trip is to go out to the temple at Udong. Most of Cambodia is flat – so flat that you can see for miles and miles in most directions, and it is this flat, fertile land that allows them to produce 2 and sometimes 3 harvests per year. The countryside seems like mile after mile of rice fields, and when the rice shoots have grown it would be like a sea of bright green everywhere. Someone we were talking with from here described it as ‘a green so unique that even Crayola can’t duplicate it’ – true to form the scenery is magnificent and we are not disappointed.

But I am getting ahead of myself a bit…

Outside of Phnom Penh about 50 kilometers is one of a small number of ‘mountains’ that rises up out of the otherwise flat plains. It is not much of a mountain in our terms, but more of a hill that rises a couple of hundred meters above the plain. At the top of the mountain there is a fairly modern Buddhist temple along with some old stupas that were apparently built a couple of hundred years ago.

Like so many other temples we have been to this one also has some stairs involved 🙂 There are over 500 stairs to the top, and like so many other times we look all the way up, and then start making our way to the top.

Accompanying us to the top are a couple of teenagers from the local village, offering helpful tidbits of information as we make our way up the stairs. We had read a bit about this on the internet and how the kids would come along and then expect some money when you were done, so it does not come as a complete surprise. At one point they even mention that they will carry us up if we get tired – I should have said yes just to see the expression on their faces, as I probably could have eaten both of the little guys for breakfast!

By the time we reach the top we are a little short of breath, and I think the young guys are worried that I might expire as they grab a fan from a little girl and start to generate a breeze around my head. Little do they know that this is not my first rodeo, and while I may be sweating enough for 3 people, we have conquered far more rugged ascents than this.

All our efforts are well rewarded though as the views from the temple are awesome. We are at the highest point for miles around and it feels like we can see all the way back to Thailand.

After looking around at the temple and the Buddha statues kept there, we climb back down the stairs to jump back in our tuk-tuk. We tip the teenagers a dollar each which was less than their asking price, but I figure we did not really hire them anyway, and I certainly did not make them carry me so we are all good.

The tuk-tuk ride to and from the city was almost as entertaining as the time in Udong. The distance was only about 50 kilometers each way, but the trip takes almost 2 hours each direction. Along the way we see all sorts of interesting things including houses built on stilts, many of the weird motorcycle combinations in my previous post, and a variety of things that just made us go ‘hmmm’. All in all a great day, and quite an uplifting change after our previous day.

On our return to Phnom Penh we reconnect with Vanna to setup our arrangements for the next day. We are moving on to Kampot in the southern part of Cambodia, and Vanna knows all the right people to get us bus tickets, tips on where to stay, and what to see while we are there. Thanks Vanna for all your help, I think we owe you one!

This is our second trip to Cambodia – we went to Angkor Wat back in 2011, and while we have not logged as much time here as we have in Thailand, we are starting to get a good feel for the country and it’s people.

Like many countries Cambodia has a troubled past, but of particular interest to me is that one of the most tragic periods in Cambodia’s history happened in my lifetime, and it is something that we do not hear much about in the west.

Cambodia suffered a lot of ‘collateral damage’ during the US war in Vietnam and once South Vietnam fell to the NVA forces, the NVA started to support a local uprising in neighboring Cambodia by some insurgents known as the Khmer Rouge. By 1975 the local forces could no longer hold back the insurgents and April 1975, the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot assumed power in Cambodia.

Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge believed that the root of all trouble in Cambodia was from foreign influence and industrialization, and that the country could rise again to greatness by removing all these foreign influences and becoming a completely agrarian society. Upon seizing power the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and other cities and forcibly removed ALL the people, sending them to the countryside to work in the fields. Millions of people had all of their land and personal property stripped from them and were forced to work on the farms for no pay and given only meager allotments of food on which they could barely survive.

To prevent any sort of uprising or return to the industrial ways, educated people and people with any attachment to the former government were rounded up and sent to detention centers where they were imprisoned and tortured until they confessed to crimes against the Khmer Rouge – once they had confessed they were sent to what became known as killing fields and executed in mass graves for their alleged crimes.

Over 5 years until the country was liberated, the genocide claimed the lives of over 2 million Cambodians at the hands of their own countrymen and amounted to about 30-40% of the entire population at the time.

Some of the sites where these atrocities occurred are in or near Phnom Penh, and have been preserved as a reminder of the past, and even though the subject matter is quite heartbreaking, it was important to me to visit some of these places to see first-hand what the country had been through not all that long ago. Mrs. Columbus is not thrilled about the plan for the day, but I mumble something about learning from the past and off we go.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

We have arranged for a tuk-tuk driver to take us out for the day for the princely sum of $15 US. The first leg of our trip is a short journey about 15km outside of Phnom Penh to a place called Choeung Ek, more commonly referred to as the killing fields. This is only one of what is estimated to be about 300 locations like this scattered across the country. To date, they have recovered the remains of over 8800 men, women and children that were executed at this location, but they believe that thousands remain uncovered.

There is a guided listening tour that is provided, and it is more than just a little humbling to stand in some of the places and listen to the description of events that occurred here. The center of the site contains a large stupa that was erected here to house the remains of the people that have been uncovered at the site.

We spent a couple of hours at the site going through the guided tour, and looking through the museum at the artifacts of a dark period in Cambodian history, and neither of us really has much to say during the ride back to Phnom Penh.

The next stop on the tour is at the Tuol Sleng Interrogation Center. Known as S-21 for the region that it was located in, it was originally a school in the middle of Phnom Penh, but was converted to a detention center for the Khmer Rouge to hold prisoners in while they were interrogated and then most often sent off to meet their fate at Choeung Ek.

There are 4 buildings at the school, and the original classrooms were carved up into small cells about 2.5 x 6 feet where the prisoners were held. There were no beds or mats on the floor and detainees slept directly on the hard tile floors. Some classrooms were partitioned into larger places where the interrogations and torture occurred under horrible conditions.

To add to the heartbreak, even as news of the atrocities started to make their way outside of Cambodia, few nations came to their aid. After the Khmer Rouge government fell in 1979 most western nations continued to decline assistance, and in fact Pol Pot’s deposed regime was still recognized by the west as the ‘legitimate’ government of Cambodia well into the 1980s – all because the ouster of the Khmer Rouge was assisted by the Vietnamese and the Soviet Union (can’t be having that communism spread even if millions of people are suffering).

Pol Pot died in 1998 having never been arrested or tried for any of his crimes against his people – he and many of the other leaders of the Khmer Rough had been living in seclusion in the north western part of Cambodia near the Thailand border. A small handful of the leaders were arrested and have been attending trials put on by a world court for their actions during this period.

Which brings us around to the wonderful people – even after all that they have been through you might think that they would have some resentment to the foreigners that started things, or never came to help, or who left behind millions of land mines, or to other Cambodians who seem to have more then the average person here, but it is not like that at all. All of the people that we have interacted with are very friendly, helpful and hard working, just trying to get ahead, or keep their families fed. It is an incredible testament to the spirit of the Cambodian people, and once again we are humbled.

Our day trip ends with a stop at a large local market, but after all we have seen our hearts are just not in it, so we head back to our hotel to unwind and take in the day. It has been quite an education, and not the typical type of adventure that is fun to blog about, but I think even Mrs. Columbus would agree that it was valuable for us to go, and helps us to understand better Cambodia and it’s people as we travel through different parts of the country.

A few short paragraphs and some photos barely scratch the surface of the story, but for anyone who wants to learn more on the subject I can highly recommend the film The Killing Fields and the book First They Killed My Father

Back to lighter topics next, I promise….