Kelly and Quang's Global Roam

Since it's looking like the Global Roam will be ending soon, we've decided (and here I'll steal a line straight from Def Leopard) that it's better to burn out than fade away. Therefore, we're going to pack in as much as we can until we just can't go any further. Starting today. Despite the sticky sticky heat, we hired a driver to take us on an all-day tour of Phomn Phen.

We decided to start by visiting the Killing Fields. The Killing Fields are just outside of busy Phomn Phen and are a gruesome reminder that Cambodia's recent civil war was vicious and awful and a complete waste of human life. Pol Pot, the leader of a guerilla army called the Khmer Rouge, planned to take over Cambodia, cleanse the nation of outside influences, and set the country on a path to agricultural reform. He didn't succeed, but that didn't stop him from trying.

After conquering Phomn Phen in 1975, Pol Pot ordered the city evacuated. The city was cleared out and actually stood practically empty for three years (Can you imagine a capital city being evacuated?).

In that time, the Khmer Rouge arrested thousands upon thousands. People were arrested for being of minority populations (other than Khmer), for speaking more than one language, for being students, teachers, doctors, or any other profession in which an education was required. People were even arrested for wearing glasses because people with glasses were assumed to be educated. Having an education was a big no-no as far as Pol Pot was concerned because it meant you had met with outside influence (never mind that Pol Pot himself was educated in Paris).

Getting arrested by the Khmer Rouge was not a good thing because it meant you were pretty much done for. Pol Pot's army was notorious for destroying just about anything in its path - people, schools, temples, precious ancient ruins. The Killing Fields outside of Phomn Phen were an extermination camp. Unlike Hitler's concentration camps in Europe's WWII, the Killing Fields didn't house people. People were sent to Cambodia's Killing Fields for the sole purpose of being killed.

The Khmer Rouge was snuffed out eventually, and at the end of 1980 workers began to exhume graves at the site. After uncovering 86 of the area's 129 mass graves, 8,985 bodies were found. There were entire mass graves that held only women, others that held only headless bodies, and others that held only children.

There were many chilling things about visiting the Killing Fields. One: little piles of bleached human bones sit around in small groups.

Two: pieces of cloth are embedded in the dirt paths. These rages are not garbage. They are the clothes of the dead.

Three: the mass graves are shallow and close together. Even though this place is called the Killing "Fields", there is nothing fields-like about it. What is so disturbing about this place is how efficiently the Khmer Rouge used the space. Could they have buried anymore people in this small area?

Four: Phomn Phen's Killing Fields are just one of many such extermination camps across Cambodia.

After visiting the Killing Fields, we headed for another stomach-churning site - the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum. Toul Sleng used to be a high school before the Khmer Rouge turned it into an interrogation prison for all its captives. Before getting sent to the Killing Fields, prisoners were kept and tortured here.

This museum was chilling because the building very much felt like a school. We walked the hallways now lined with bars and barbed wire. We wandered classroom after classroom filled with posters of prisoners. The photos were haunting - especially picture after picture after picture of arrested babies! While many classrooms held the rows of pictures, others had been entirely converted into closet-sized cells. The Khmer Rouge had simply put up wall after wall after wall of brick in a classroom until it had 28 cells in each with a thin walkway down the middle. And finally, there were the classrooms that had been converted into torture chambers.

After roaming through these halls of torture, we were hot and bothered. Just what sort of agricultural reforms was Pol Pot trying to bring about? How was it that the rest of the world stood by and allowed this torture and genocide to happen in the late 1970s? In our own lifetime? And aren't we still standing by and letting it happen? What about Sudan, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Bosnia, Israel, Palestine, Iraq?

Plus, what, if anything, did the U.S. have to do with any of this? We bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam War. We laid landmines throughout its jungles. And what did Vietnam have to do with any of this? The Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979 and put an end to Pol Pot's regime.

Plus, limbless beggars were everywhere. They greeted us by holding out stubs of legs or arms or hands and looking sad and forlorn. They were hard to escape. Was one dollar really going to help? But how could it hurt? These people needed health care, social programs and vocational training - none of which seemed to exist.

We declared a lunch break. We needed out of the sun and out of the depressing reminders of Cambodia's past. We headed to Phomn Phen's riverside walkway and rows of cafes with oversized rattan tables and chairs. We needed a more serene way to fill our afternoon, so we told our driver to take us to Wat Phomn, a hill top temple in the middle of the city. The wat was a hot climb up a hot staircase. It was a nice enough wat, but was really caught our attention were the monkeys running free all about the place.


We were reaching the boiling point - the point where we were so dang hot that we didn't really care what we did next. The driver took us to the National Museum, and then the Royal Palace (Cambodia has a king and queen - who knew?). The Royal Palace was a flashback to Bangkok. We wandered about it for as long as we could stand (it was getting hotter) and finally told our driver to take us back to the hotel.


There were a few more sites on the map - like a couple of markets and another wat, but we were fully cooked. We were well done. We were burnt.