Security Prison 21, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

S-21, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

After the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek, DJ Camera drove me across the city to an extremely dense section of sprawl. Faded buildings stood looking at the remnants of a school. The school was fenced and largely walled off and topped with razor wire. Care had been taken to provide some division between the school and the houses behind. The compound consisted of five or so buildings that looked like a plain old school because it was once just that. At an opening in the wall, next to another ticket booth, milled the standard group of tuk-tuk drivers and amputees.

Again, I was not bothered. The sun was strong and the shade beneath the fruit trees, while not cool, was a little more bearable. At most, the beggars and drivers made half assed efforts to solicit, but it wasn’t anything more than shallow obligation.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, formerly called Security Prison 21 (S-21), formerly called Chao Ponhea Yat High School. It marks the decent into madness, panic, hysteria and cruelty. Even in the middle of the day, walking the grounds and the halls of this place makes you feel uneasy; claustrophobia and panic aren’t ever far away.

The history of this place is everywhere. It was once a school. Fruit trees dot the grounds and if it weren’t for the obvious modifications that can turn a school into a place of hell, it simply looks like a school. There weren’t many people there so it was often hard to believe it was even a museum.

Inside a cell.

After the Khmer Rouge took over, the school was turned into a center for imprisonment, interrogation, extreme torture and murder. For a handful of years in the mid to late 1970’s, somewhere around 17,000 people, most innocent, came here to answer for their crimes against Pol Pot’s regime.

The place has this unchanged feeling that makes you uneasy. Rows of connected classrooms now host miniscule holding cells made of decaying brown wood, inches thick. In the middle of the floor there are rusted shackles and stains of a hasty paint job. The paint is red and in whatever light that comes through barred windows makes it look like blood.

To step into one of these cells and close the door is to feel that sense of hopelessness and doom. There is not enough room to move and there is no breeze; humid, oppressive air becomes stagnant and suffocating.

What’s more are little relics of S-21’s past life that weren’t removed seem to serve as a taunt to those who were imprisoned there. At the end of the hall an ancient chalk board still clung to the wall, its faded green contrasting with stone and reinforced wood and metal latches.

A classroom turned cell-block.

The open-air hallway of the second floor of the prison is sealed by a net of barbed wire. This “net” I was told was not so much to keep somebody from escaping, but to keep a person from being able to commit suicide by jumping from the railing.

The whole place was terrible. On the grounds were a handful of graves, whose occupants were so badly decayed and mutilated that their identity is unknown. They were the last to die S-21 before the Vietnamese overtook the Khmer Rouge.

The methods of torture in this place were creative as they were cruel. In an effort to extort a confession or get more names, guards would electrocute, suffocate, drown, half-hang, stab, beat, rape. If names were given, guards would repeat the process on people who probably had no idea what they had done. There are stories of victims who were tortured so badly that they confessed to outlandish things like joining the CIA at the age of 12.

A line of Cells.

Infront of one of the buildings is a set of uneven bars that adorn every playground. Guards punished their victims by tossing a rope over, tying their captives arms behind their back and hoisting them into the air.

Throughout the classrooms that weren’t full of prison cells or methods of torture, there were photographs of mutilated people, some alive and some dead, who had spent time at the prison. Their stories were painful to read as their spirits were as broken as their lives when they left that place, if they lived.

For a time in the beginning, prisoners were executed at the prison and buried nearby, but soon the sheer numbers made that impossible. After a time they were carted over to that other cheery place, Choeung Ek, the Killing Fields, where they were killed with whatever could be found.

After I left, I thanked a still hungover DJ Camera for bringing me to these places, had a drink in my room, woke up and got the hell out of Phnom Penh.

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The Killing Fields of Cambodia

The next morning when I met DJ Camera in the restaurant downstairs he was not so chipper. He greeted me with a genuine hotel, but his eyes were vacant and he looked uneasy. I thought for a moment and wondered if our destinations for the day had him uneasy and morose.


No.

It was the booze. DJ Camera was royally hungover. I wondered if maybe he was still drunk.

I was greeted by the manager, smiling just as much as the night before.

“Hello, Thomas!” He said. “DJ has lived through the night, I think.”

I ate a quick turkey sandwich and was soon in the back of a silent DJ Camera’s tuk-tuk, flying through the dust of Phnom Penh.

The Memorial Stupa contains thousands
of skulls.

We drove through the cluster of hotels and guest houses that populated the area next to the Chan Chhaya pavilion. I bounced in the back as DJ Camera picked up speed, mumbled something I didn’t catch, and launched us across a couple of lanes and into the frenetic every-way traffic fiasco that is every country in Asia.

Tuk-tuk is a good way to see a country. I used to think buses were the best means of efficient transport to see a country but tuk-tuks have this way of putting you directly into the action. For example, my eyes were constantly watering from the dust that was kicked up by the traffic. Also, as DJ Camera cut-off, squared-off, and otherwise basically played an extended game of Chicken with every driver in Phnom Penh, I felt a very real fear of death; something like a bus might have denied me this great cultural experience.

After a time the traffic thinned and the buildings on either side of the road descended in structural integrity until they were nothing more than shacks made of salvaged aluminum. The presence of shoes became rare.

We passed vehicles full to the tipping point with wood, goods, junk or people. Every so often we would pass green fields marked with giant puddles and the burnt-sienna mud and a cluster of water-buffalo. Kids walked and laughed in groups and bikes whizzed by leaving trails of dust and exhaust.

We crossed a river that was edged on both sides with houses on stilts, made largely of blue tarps and mismatched bits of wood, metal, and cloth. They stood on stilts and resembled tree-houses if you could put extreme poverty out of mind for a while.

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Mass graves.

Choeung Ek. Outside the ticket booth a handful of amputees begged money or stood in the shade. It was extremely hot so mostly they just hung around in the shade.

At first glance, Choeung Ek doesn’t seem to earn its other names. It feels like you are buying entrance into an old orchard, or a second rate park. Off in the distance stands a Buddhist stupa that reaches to the sky. It looks as though it might be a kind of museum. Signs in Khmer and English dot the trails next to these pool-sized divots that cut into the earth. Grass has grown over these holes so their presence is muted, not shocking but unnatural.

The Killing Fields.

That so much of Cambodia’s tourism, particularly in or around Phnom Penh, is directly related to such a horrible time in the country’s history says something about their willingness to face such a nightmare without balking. The atmosphere at Choeung Ek, the best known of many Killing Fields is subdued, quiet, a bit creepy, and sad but it also has this feeling of “look at this, look at what has happened here, how?”

Victims of the Khmer Rouge.

I walked around Choeung Ek because that is really the only thing you can do there; it isn’t a place you really enjoy or are entertained. Groups of people were doing the same thing as I, some with guides who spoke in whispers.

The stupa was full of skulls. Thousands of skulls. They stare out of a central tower in the center of the structure and from the walls opposite. To walk in the narrow path around the stupa is to be flanked on either side by the faces of horrible deaths.

Estimates say that well over a million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. Many of those people died in places like this and were buried in mass graves in places like this. Many people died in this place.

The divots in the ground were mass graves. Gnarled trees reach from their sloping edges, their shapes perverted by the uneven ground. Next to the trees are displays of what happened here and what is still happening as a result of rain and earth’s tendency to regurgitate what is put into it.

Remains that came to the surface.

There used to be a chicken coup in my back yard. It was destroyed a long time ago, but still pieces of glass come up through the dirt when it rains. Here, in Choeung Ek, torn strips of faded clothing and bones are still coming to the surface and are laid to the side. The bones at this tree belonged to a child, says the sign.

I walked through the woods for a while. The entire park was silent. At the back side there was a pond and then a barbed wire fence marking the end of the property. Shoeless and shirtless boys begged with their hands reaching through the links. Later I listened as a guide told his charges that he lost his whole family to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in these fields.

“Sad place,” said DJ Camera when I returned to his tuk-tuk. “Now, we go to school.”

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Phnom Penh, Cambodia: DJ Camera

DJ Camera, my tuk-tuk driver in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, was beginning to creep me out; not majorly, but I was beginning to dread his jolly, round face, and off-centered dirty baseball cap.


He was everywhere.

I arrived, admittedly thanks to DJ Camera, at the Noura Motel unscathed and found that while the $20 rooms were occupied, the manager was willing to let me stay in a $35 room for $25. DJ Camera had something to do with this and I was grateful, but he lingered about the tiny reception desk for too long.

“OK, Thomas,” he said in his over-excited manner of speaking, “go to your room, relax, come down. I wait for you and we make plans for tour tomorrow. We do many things.”

I looked at him and my heart sank a little. His sweaty brown face was staring at me and smiling. He was selling me something. Cabbies, whether in a car, on a bike, or pulling a rickshaw, in this part of the world are always trying to sell you something.

I handed him the few dollars that I owed him and told him that maybe I would see him later, and if I was to take a tour I would go through him.

DJ Camera shook his head in the negative and steamrolled my hesitation and told me that he would take me anywhere. I told him “maybe” a few more times

The Noura Motel has a layout and atmosphere that reminds one of an Old West saloon / hotel. Stairs lead to hallways that branch in many directions, looking over a small bar lit by dim, flickering bulbs. Idle workers stood talking by empty tables that spilled out towards the street. The street was teeming with beggars, tuk-tuks, and the fire of the setting sun.

I was shown to my room on the second floor. I walked through a reading room and down a hallway that led to a wide open balcony. Just across the street stands the royal Chan Chhaya pavilion, a part of the Royal Palace; its green lawns dotted with barefoot kids, sleeping tuk-tuk drivers, and a few soccer balls.

If I didn’t want to sit in the wicker chair and watch the setting sun, then I could have seen it from the massive windows in my room.



Sure enough, when I found my way to the main lobby to leave for dinner, DJ Camera was waiting for me. He sat at a small table just outside of the hotel. As soon as I was close he sprung up and asked where I was headed, if I wanted a ride, and began listing the things we could do the next day.

I cut him off. I told him that I appreciated his effort, but I wasn’t sure if I would be taking a tour tomorrow and that I might just wander around and take photos.

He looked hurt for a moment.

“OK, tomorrow when you want leave,” DJ said, “I will wait you outside hotel.”

He then grabbed my hand, shook it whilst ignoring the growing annoyance on my face, and sat down again.

I understood why DJ Camera was so eager to seal the deal: “maybe,” and “I’ll call you,” generally mean “no” and “fuck off” in his line of work. That has certainly been the underlying meaning when used by myself. What I could not understand was why he didn’t give up and look for business else where. And why was he still outside the motel!?

I walked towards the Meekong and sat down to a traditional Khmer meal of Italian grinder, fries, and alcohol.

I thought of my smiling DJ Camera and of a taxi driver in Mexico.

It was a few years back and I was wandering up the wrong road on the wrong hill. Drug cartels were beginning to take hold of the edge of town and apparently I was walking straight that way. A cabbie came running up, grabbed me and asked me as polite as possible as to where the fuck I was going and if I wanted to die?

I replied no, that I needed a cheap place to sleep.

He drove me for a while until we came to a hotel on the edge of a bay full of dirty water and men in tin boats hawking fresh fish.

This man had the same anxious tone as DJ Camera and wanted me to take a tour with him the next day as well but there seemed to be something more sinister about him. The hotel was on the edge of town and I became paranoid that this cabbie knew where I was and that my door was only a sliding plastic curtain. Friends from Mexico and guidebooks warn of local cabbies aiming for extortion, kidnapping, or worse.

I slept with my bed against the door and when he didn’t come to kill me and I never let him take me for a tour I felt guilt. I was ashamed of my paranoia.

Still, DJ Camera just wanted my money.

DJ Camera asked me how my dinner was when I arrived at the hotel. I shot him a look but there was no reaction..

“Tomorrow…” he went on again.

“MAYBE!” I told him and walked away.

“I will wait you tomorrow.”



After a few power-outages I headed downstairs to use the wi-fi and have a bottle of Angkor beer, the local version of the cheap, flavorless, working class beer of the world.

The two person bar staff talked in a corner and the tables outside the hotel were swarmed. Laughter rose frequently and the slamming of beer glasses and the clink of utensils against glass plates. Khmer filled the air. I half expected DJ Camera to —

“Hello!” said DJ Camera, standing up from his chair outside.

I stared at him in disbelief. Behind him tuk-tuk drivers slept in their vehicles. People walked by on their way to the bars or restaurants of the Phnom Penh night; but here was DJ Camera, still sitting outside my hotel.

I returned the greeting, disregarded whatever else he said and continued to drink my unfinished beer and then a second when I felt somebody staring at me.

I looked out the door and DJ Camera was stooping in, looking uncharacteristically meek. I stared at him for a moment and he spoke quietly.

“Thomas,” his memory was impressive, “please, it is a happy night. You are in Cambodia. Do not sit alone. Sit with me outside and drink.”



Shit.

I had him wrong like I probably had the cabbie in Mexico wrong. I pride myself in adaptability and openness in travel but here, I had it all wrong.

What the fuck?

I smiled, closed my computer and joined a smiling DJ Camera outside.

The table was full of food and pitchers of beer. There were two men at the table with DJ Camera. They smiled at me. A group of extremely beautiful girls laughed at me as I mumbled awkward “hellos“.

The man next to me was another tuk-tuk driver and the man next to DJ Camera was the manager of the lovely Noura Motel, and a close friend of DJ Camera’s.

“We are like family,” said the manager, a squat smiling man with one of the friendliest faces I have ever seen. “We take care of eachother.”

I felt shame.

I looked at the man who I assumed wanted only to take my money.

“Tonight, Thomas,” DJ Camera said, “you are our new friend and we take care of you.”



They did take care of me. There were pitchers of local beer mixed with a beer from Singapore. They pushed a kind of edible rice cloth my way and it tasted like a neutral rice cake on it’s own but it was heaven in the sweet, fishy dipping sauce.

“Traditional Cambodian,” my new friends told me.

There were questions about me, questions about my time in Korea and Vietnam. There were questions about Cambodia, whose answers were to be expected:

“Cambodia is the best!”

The four of us spoke and drank for a time as we descended into the universal language of drunkeness.

“Thomas,” DJ Camera said, eyes glazed over after declaring that he had left school sometime before high school, “you are my friend!”

“Good friends,” I corrected.

“I saw you alone and I take care of you. I take you to my friend’s motel. Tonight you eat and drink with us. We take care of you. Tomorrow I want you to see Cambodia!”

Finally, I agreed.

Jol Moi! We all said as we clinked our glasses and drank.

“Thomas,” said DJ Camera, “Can you understand my English?”

“Nobody can understand your English!” Piped in the other tuk-tuk.

“Thomas, DJ is very drunk. Nobody can understand!” Said the manager of the motel.

DJ began to introduce me to the girls scattered around in the night. The tuk-tuk drivers parked across the street looked over occasionally if they weren’t otherwise occupied by being passed out.

The night wore on for a while until finally the alcohol was gone. I pulled out my wallet but was hissed at by all three of my companions.

“Thomas,” said DJ Camera, “tomorrow I will wait you. Sleep long. I will be here.”

“Maybe you will have no tour tomorrow,” said the manager, “DJ will probably crash into a tree tonight!”

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Phnom Penh

Sorry all, I've been in Florida or otherwise occupied away from the computer.  Let's push and finish this ol' blog.  This next one might be familliar if you have seen our little magazine.  Anyway, after a long bus ride from Saigon, I ended up in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Cambodia, with its history of violence and a recent tragic past, is a place of dichotomy.  Common guides often speak of warmth, hospitality, and beauty on the same page as warnings of armed robbery and drive-by brick attacks aimed at foreigners along the banks of the Mekong on the same page.  The scars of the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge regime attract huge numbers of socially-aware tourists while leftover landmines and assault rifles have taken their toll on the population and given the country something of a renegade reputation.
Cambodia is a contradiction; at once beautiful and violent which gives way to the frequent comparison to the Wild West.  When driving through outpost towns on the side of a poorly maintained and heavily holed “highway” from the Thai border to the capital, Phnom Penh, this comparison is valid.
A burnt-brown dust hangs in the air, kicked up by every manner of vehicle from tour bus, to car, to homemade “Road Warrior” contraptions that would lead to instant arrest in the U.S.A.  Buildings stretch in rows alongside the road, both shaded by the tall palms in front and covered in their dead leaves.  The storefronts are well worn or run-down, depending on how you look at it.  Sun-worn locals adorn the entrances, sitting around, talking, drinking or smoking if they aren’t selling fruit, meat or sweeping away clouds of dust with palm-leaf brooms.  Many people kick up dirt to add to the ever present haze with bare feet.  Here and there men sleep in a ragged and faded hammock tied to a couple of leaning palms.  Dogs lay in the shade batting flies and the occasional weathered old man with patchy brown skin and unkempt hair wanders naked into the Mekong.
The guidebooks lead you to believe that some of the people in this “frontier” are armed with more than a six-shooter.  They are probably right but it doesn’t seem to matter much.

A store in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I will confess a certain level of apprehension and paranoia before I crossed the border between Vietnam and Cambodia.  I have been in hairy situations before and Phnom Penh seemed to have potential for things to go bad pretty quick.
As the bus carrying a couple dozen travelers from Saigon to Phnom Penh -a mix of locals and western tourists- came into the city limits I began to wonder if I had bitten off more than I could chew.
There was no real plan, so to speak.  I had no place to stay and my wad of cash was becoming a little smaller each day.  Further, I had been hauling a year’s worth of possessions from South Korea along with my camera equipment; if there was a brick thrower in the area I probably wouldn’t even make it off of the bus.
When the bus pulled into a derelict station that consisted of a faded white stone building accented by decaying wood and a dirt “parking lot” I became overwhelmed.

I stepped into the oppressive heat and dirt-filled air to the barrage of tuk-tuk drivers shouting, beckoning, and stopping one step shy of kidnapping.  Luggage was pulled from the storage compartments of the bus and dumped onto the dirt.  It was hard to maneuver between the people and vehicles.  Tuk-Tuk drivers spoke in varying levels of English, and a blizzard of Khmer filled the air.  The crowd of my fellow bus travelers dissipated in a cloud of confused faces staring off, unable to efficiently process what was going on until one of the tuk-tuk drivers shouted loud enough to cut through the staccato and then they were riding off into a cloud of dust and a cluster-fuck traffic.
I picked up my dirt covered luggage and tried to leave the chaos, only to come face to face with one of the tuk-tuk drivers.
“Are you alone?”  He asked.
“Yeah, I am.”
“OK, then I will take you to a hotel.” He said.
“I need a cheap one.”
“Ok, $25,” off the top of his head.
I agreed.  I had been taken for a long and expensive ride when I was in Saigon to a hotel with an astronomical price.  Cheaper accommodation can be found in Phnom Penh, but I didn’t mind paying the $25 if I had a decent place to sleep and didn’t have to worry about being shot, stabbed, hit by a brick, or all three at once.
The driver, a squat dark skinned man in a baseball cap loaded my luggage onto the rack and I hopped into the back for my first tuk-tuk ride.
Tuk-tuks seem more exciting than they are because they remind you of a hay-ride or going down a hill in a red wagon when you were a kid.  Ideally, a tuk-tuk ride is less apt to send you flying into the certain death of Phnom Penh traffic but the possibility is there and that makes it exciting.  Also, like all of Southeast Asia, there is the chance of actually being a participant in a motorbike bag snatching which can result in such vacation-making events such as a stolen camera or death, if you are unlucky enough to be pulled onto the street.
I sat with my camera bag tangled in my arms.
My driver called himself DJ Camera.  He was a gregarious man somewhere near

middle age.  He spoke with the enthusiasm of someone trying to sell you something, anything.  He asked where I was coming from and what I was doing tomorrow.  The roof of the tuk-tuk was adorned with flyers of tourist attractions and DJ Camera arm-in-arm with blonde girls and backpackers.  DJ Camera was also a guide.
We passed the ever-present Southeast Asia gas stations: small wagons with cola and Fanta bottles full of gasoline and baking in the sun.  Motorbikes whined past us and people crossed the street, often barefoot, with no apparent regard for their lives.  An occasional “delivery” bike passed by, recently slaughtered poultry bouncing were strapped to the sides; they flopped with each bump as though reliving their death throes.
“Tomorrow,” DJ Camera said as he played a mad game of Frogger with his tuk-tuk and our lives, “I show you Cambodia.”

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