by John Higham
For a moment I considered leaving, but hey, we had already ordered, and the restaurant had a big serving of Wee Fee. “Yeah,” I said, “I like it, too.”
I was careful to sit next to September throughout dinner and to put my arm around her. As the walls were plastered with paintings of men in high heels and corsets, there was no sense in giving anyone the wrong idea. Through dinner I contemplated the bigger picture of Cambodia’s recent history and what it meant to be able to display a painting of Chairman Mao in drag in a public place. I think Cambodia will not only survive, it will thrive.
• • •
We had considered taking a boat down the Mekong River to Phnom Penh until we learned that one full of Western tourists recently capsized, Vasa-style. It seems that tickets for seats on the boats are for Western tourists, and the locals are put up on the roof. My best guess is that the captain keeps taking passengers and loads them onto the roof until water is near to lapping over the sides of the boat.
As we had already covered inverted pendulums and Archimedes’ Principle after the Vasa museum, I resisted the urge to have another science moment on the subject and we simply decided to take the bus to Phnom Penh. We met a nice Australian family that was spending a few months traveling around Southeast Asia. They had come to Siem Reap the day before we had via the same route from Bangkok.
“So,” I asked, “how about those bridges? They must not have been too bad or you wouldn’t be here now.”
The father spoke up. “When we came through, one bridge was totally out and had apparently collapsed only minutes before we arrived. We were stuck for hours until it could be repaired, and then all the crew did was lay wood planks across the river. The planks were no wider than the width of a tire.”
“Ah, yes. I think our driver hit that bridge at 40 miles per hour. I nearly wet myself. And yet, here we are doing it again.”
“Well, a fair measure of crazy is doing the same thing twice and expecting a different outcome,” my new friend snorted, “but I suppose you need to be a bit crazy to be on a walkabout for an entire year with your kids.”
I had either been insulted or praised. Perhaps both.
Once in Phnom Penh, all the horrid traffic we had previously witnessed worldwide suddenly seemed sedate and orderly in comparison. In China we observed that the fanciest cars seemed to have the right-of-way at intersections. In Phnom Penh this was no longer subtle, putting the average person at a huge disadvantage, because the average person was on a moped. Rather, the average family was on a moped. At the same time. I never knew that a 50cc moped could carry a family of four and their shopping all at once, but I have the pictures to prove that not only can it be done, it’s common.
I don’t think anyone could ever really be prepared for Phnom Penh. From the insane traffic to the child beggars sans clothes and sans the occasional limb, it is not for the faint of heart. It is also a city full of beautiful people.
On one particular Sunday we meet Prak. He had very good English skills and became our guide around Phnom Penh. We learned a lot about Cambodia and its people from Prak. “My wife is very lucky,” he said. “She has a good job making clothes in a factory owned by the Chinese.”
So the Chinese were outsourcing their manufacturing to Cambodia, and the jobs were considered high-paying work. That put a lot of things into perspective.
In Siem Reap I had purchased a biography, Stay Alive My Son, from a seven-year-old amputee who was going from restaurant to restaurant selling books. Over the next several days I read Pin Yathay’s captivating-in-a-horrific-sort-of-way experience of the brutal Khmer Rouge genocide in the latter half of the 1970s. Now I had the opportunity to ask Prak about this period. He matter-of-factly itemized the number of family members he had lost in those years.
“No one was safe from the horrors of that time,” Prak explained. “Everyone over 30 years old has many family members who died.” The juxtaposition of being in a nonthreatening environment, say a bustling marketplace, and gazing into someone’s eyes and having them calmly discuss their harrowing experiences with openness and frankness was very unsettling.
I can recall Walter Cronkite reporting the Vietnam War’s daily body count on the evening news. After the war ended, strife in the region continued for a number of years. Half a world away, I fretted about getting my driver’s license as Phnom Penh fell to a Communist-inspired faction called the Khmer Rouge. In later years, stories about Pol Pot and atrocities at a place called the Killing Fields gradually began to be told on the world stage. But I understood little about how the fabric of an entire culture was torn apart until I visited Phnom Penh, spoke with Prak, and read Pin Yathay’s story of how he lost first his parents, then his siblings, then his children, and finally his wife.
In the years Pol Pot was in power, the Khmer Rouge tried to establish a purely agrarian form of communism where the entire population worked on collective farms. To accomplish this they tried to eradicate all traces of modern life. In a matter of days after the fall of Phnom Penh, all cities nationwide were permanently evacuated at gunpoint and the people herded into the countryside. With no planning or infrastructure in place for such a dramatic change, the resulting chaos and famine were inevitable.
To control the population, the Khmer Rouge marked anyone with an education as an enemy, as educated citizens were the most capable of overthrowing the new government. The Khmer Rouge cannibalized its own citizens by systematically exterminating doctors, engineers, teachers, skilled technicians, and the like. Some escaped into neighboring countries, but most were ruthlessly killed, often by starvation, as it was the most economical method. In the most extreme examples, simply carrying a pencil was proof enough that one possessed an education, and hence the carrier was sentenced to “re-education,” which could mean being quietly taken out into the jungle and bludgeoned to death, another economical method of execution.
The net result was that during their reign, the Khmer Rouge took a functioning and prosperous society and thrust it back to the Stone Age, destroying an entire culture in the process. By some estimates, during the Khmer Rouge years of 1975 through 1979, approximately one-third of the population of Cambodia was exterminated or died of starvation or disease.
For me, the experience of visiting the sites of the Khmer Rouge killing machine around Phnom Penh was a world apart from other places we visited where misery and death had been inflicted on a mass scale, such as Poland’s Auschwitz or Japan’s Hiroshima. I think that in part this is because time has erased the visible wounds in Europe and Japan. Time has not yet been able to work its magic in Cambodia.
For example, we visited Phnom Penh’s Genocide Museum, which is housed at the site of the former High School 21; this school was converted into a prison and torture facility during the Khmer Rouge years and was referred to as simply “S21.” As we approached the gate of the S21 compound where the Khmer Rouge coerced “confessions” from its enemies, we were greeted by a beggar. This was not an ordinary beggar, but a survivor of the compound we were visiting. He had been tortured by having acid thrown in his face, and his crooked arms and legs looked as if they had been broken but had never properly healed. His horribly disfigured face was little more than dislocated clumps of flesh and his eyes were vacant windows of milky white scar tissue; you simply could not look into his face and not gasp out loud.
At the S21 Genocide Museum we spent time in classrooms that had been converted to places of torture. Graphic photographs that hung on the walls were yellow and fading, but enough detail remained to communicate the intent. A sign on the wall, a relic from the prison, read ENDURE YOUR PUNISHMENT WELL.
“I can’t help but compare this to the Peace Memorial Museum at Hiroshima,” I said, looking at the faded yellow photos and documents.
“What do you mean?” Katrina asked.
“The museum in Hiroshima is an impressive building with multimedia displays to tell a story that needs to be told. The Japanese have invested a lot of money to ensure the s
tory is preserved and told well. Here, with no glass in the windows, there is nothing to protect the photographs on display from the humid tropical environment. Without investment of some kind, in another decade there may not be anything to preserve.”
“Preserving history,” September summarized, “is a luxury of the well fed.”
It was the same situation at the Killing Fields. To see the Killing Fields, you must hire a tuk-tuk and drive for a half-hour down a rutted, muddy dirt road through a neighborhood of squatters’ hovels, and when you arrive you pay a couple of dollars to a man sitting in a small wooden shack built with all the structural integrity of a child’s lemonade stand. In the center of the site is a pagoda housing a few skeletal remains, but mostly the Killing Fields is simply an open space. Supposedly the human remains in the mass graves have been exhumed and the site is simply the location where bodies once lay. However, human bones and bits of clothing were protruding from hard-packed dirt trails through the fields that were the graves of thousands of victims. The many feet that have walked through have worn off the topmost layer of soil, exposing the remnants of those who perished.
Seeing the realities of Cambodia was a hard lesson for two young kids from suburban America. But finding this kind of experience is the reason we had left the comforts of California. As I reflected on our time in Cambodia, I was ashamed that September had had to coerce me away from the beaches of Thailand.
Katrina’s Journal, January 7
… after that, our tuk-tuk driver took us down a very dusty and bouncy road to the Killing Fields. First, we went inside a small room with a very high ceiling, where there were skulls lined upon shelves that went up, up, up. I was sad to see that so many people were killed. Once outside, we walked on a path that went by lots of empty graves. Dad soon realized that on the path there were human bones showing in the packed-down earth. They were all over. Not just one here, one there, but the bones were as common as rocks.
I overheard Jordan saying to Katrina a few days after we left Cambodia, “You know that man we saw at the museum who had acid thrown in his face? Some things you remember even though you wish you didn’t have to.”
www.360degreeslongitude.com/concept3d/360degreeslongitude.kmz
Cambodia suffers about two land mine accidents every day. De-mining efforts are underway, but at the current rate, it will take over a hundred years to rid the country of this scourge.
18.
The Cute One and the Danish Postal Pin-Up Girls
January 9–January 18
Thailand, Again
I once rode an elephant at a zoo, paying an enormous sum to take Katrina, then age one, in a large circle for a five-minute ride. The elephant was well behaved and even tempered. I was egregiously misled by that experience into thinking that I should take my family on an “elephant trek” in northern Thailand.
The night before our trek we had a pep talk by our guide, Toto. I’m not sure of the spelling, but I could easily remember his name because I just imagined his wife was Dorothy. We met seven others who would be on our trek with us; Jordan and I, along with a Dutch man who was there with his girlfriend, were outnumbered three to one by young, single European women. There’s a message to the single guys out there. There are a lot of unattached single women backpacking the world.
Some of the girls—and yes, at nineteen they can still be referred to as girls—clearly looked disappointed that there were no guys to flirt with over the next few days. A couple of them took an immediate liking to Jordan, but he wouldn’t give them the time of day; I noted the clueless gene does not skip generations.
“Each day will have some difficult hiking sections,” Toto explained, “but there will be a hot meal and shower at the end of each day.” The promise of a shower after a long day of hiking in the sun was welcome news—it was one of the things we had sorely missed on our safari in the Serengeti. For three days we would hike and raft our way through the mountainous region of northern Thailand. The touchstone was the promise of an elephant trek on the morning of the second day.
Jordan’s Journal, January 11
Today we went on our trek. There were lots of other people on the trek, too. First we drove to a waterfall from a hot spring that we could climb. It was really warm! I took my shoes off with the goal to not get my socks wet. I actually managed to get my whole body wet. For lunch we had fried rice. I used to really like rice but in Asia there’s too much of it.
At the end of our first day hiking we were the guests of a hill tribe near the Burmese border. There had been a lot of elevation gain and I was proud that Jordan kept up and didn’t complain. Little did I know to what extent Jordan would go so he could keep up with the adults—I wouldn’t find that out until we hiked the Inca trail in Peru.
The twelve of us were given the use of a large one-room hut for the night and each clique claimed a corner of the spartan room. It was clear that we would all get to know one another quite well—perhaps better than some would want.
“Where’s that shower?” I asked Toto. It had been a long day of hiking in the hot Thai sun.
“There is a bucket near the river.”
“Oh.” You would think that by now I would have realized hot running water in the developing world is pretty much unavailable outside of a Marriott. Unfortunately, this river was not fed by a hot spring. Since it is unlikely any melting glaciers were in the region, I concluded the village was having the water cryogenically cooled for our enjoyment.
The bucket-cum-shower was out in the open with no provision for privacy of any kind. September threw on her swimming suit and, making the best of the situation, took a “shower” and I did the same. Katrina and Jordan resolutely refused. They would jump in any old body of muddy water, but as soon as it was labeled a “shower” they treated it as though it were lethal.
All of the European sorority babes took showers as well, in swim-suits, or failing that, their underwear. I wouldn’t really know for sure. I am merely reporting what I assume to be the case.
Two of the girls worked for the Danish postal service as letter carriers. “We are each a mailman,” Annika said. Due to their buxom appearance, September and I began to refer to them as the Danish Postal Pin-Up Girls. I’d failed to appreciate what a fine country Denmark was when we were there.
• • •
Night comes early and quickly near the equator. With no electricity, after darkness fell there really wasn’t much to do, so we headed to our hut for the night.
During our travels we all occasionally expressed some of the things we missed about home. This particular night, Jordan started it off by stating emphatically that if he never saw a bowl of rice again it would be too soon. “What I want are garlic fries at AT&T Park while watching the Giants thump the Dodgers.”
“I would be happy with a bowl of cereal with real milk from a real refrigerator, not that boxed UHT stuff that’s always warm,” Katrina said. September was pining for the banana chocolate chip muffins that her friend Heidi makes. For me, only Fiery Hot Flautas from Chevy’s with extra jalapeño jelly could make life complete.
Before we had left for our trip, all of us, but especially the kids, counted down to the moment we would leave on the World-the-Round Trip. This started many months before we left. As I lay in a spartan hut near the Burmese border pining for Fiery Hot Flautas, I realized for the first time that we weren’t counting down our return to California. Except for the occasional food cravings, there was little thought of home being any place except where our stuff was at the moment.
• • •
It was elephant time. Katrina was so excited I was worried that when the elephants started to show up she would rush up to one and give it a giant hug on the ankle. In my mind I was rereading a Tanzanian newspaper article about a little boy whose last act in this life was agitating an elephant by throwing a rock at it. Voices in my head started arguing.
“Yes, yes, yes, but that was a wild animal. These elephants are trained.”
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bsp; Another voice said, “Soooo. I am quite certain that the elephants have not had personality screening prior to applying for the job of hauling tourists around.” While the voices in my head were busy arguing, I told Katrina to stay away from the elephants.
She didn’t. I was to learn a lot about elephants that day, but even more about Katrina.
When the elephants started to arrive at the village, Katrina decided that she was going to make friends with “The Cute One.” When I wasn’t looking she picked an armful of grasses and flowers as an offering to The Cute One, and then climbed up the tower that was used for getting on the beasts’ backs so that she was at its eye level. There she sat, holding out her offering. The Cute One then took Katrina’s bouquet in her trunk, consummating a friendship. Katrina continued by having a long conversation with her new friend.
I am not sure how all this occurred right under my nose after she was told to stay away from the elephants, but Katrina was now friends with The Cute One and had to ride her and only her.
Elephants are massive beasts. I never fully appreciated this until perched atop one. Katrina, Jordan, and Granny climbed aboard a bench-seat that was strapped to The Cute One’s back and lumbered off into the jungle. September and I rode another elephant we nicknamed The Big Guy. Soon after we got underway, The Big Guy’s handler offered me the “privilege” of trading places—I could sit on the neck and the handler could sit on the bench, next to September.
“COOL!” I enthusiastically traded places. No sooner had I maneuvered into place than I realized that an elephant’s head is not equipped with a handle to grab onto. I also failed to appreciate that an elephant doesn’t really have much of a neck to sit on, so I was sitting on top of his shoulders, which swayed back and forth a tremendous amount as he walked. I seemed to be sitting on top of a three-story house that was rocking back and forth in a 10.0 earthquake. “This elephant is not OSHA-approved!” I yelled.
