Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide

From a distance this looks like an old school that is no longer in use, which it is. The buildings are crumbling and the paint is fading, but blooming rhododendron trees frame a quiet courtyard. From a distance it appears tranquil.

But it is a bleak, terrible place. The air is thick with despair. Closer inspection reveals barbed wire fencing enclosing the walkways.



And 14 graves in the courtyard.



In April 1975 the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh and emptied the city. The entire population was driven into the countryside where they were to become farmers. In less than four years about a quarter of the population was dead, mostly due to starvation. Hundreds of thousands died in combat. Tens of thousands were executed.

The KR also closed all the schools. Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was called during that dark era, was turned into a prison. Twenty thousand people came through. Only seven survived. The rest were killed here or taken to the Killing Fields.

Visting the Killing Fields was a sobering experience. But it was easy compared to Tuol Sleng. I was there for less than two hours but I was emotionally exhausted when I left. The Killing Fields and S-21 are similar in that they appear so ordinary.

But once inside the S-21 the horror smacks you in the face like the wall of cold air you feel walking into an icebox. The only thing I can compare it to is The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

The two places are completely different in that Tuol Sleng is the actual facility, in more or less the state it was found after the KR was kicked out of the country by the Vietnamese in 1979.

There were 14 prisoners at the facility when the KR evacuated it. But the KR wasn't about to pass up a chance to murder a few more innocent people. Those last prisoners were shot to death as they lay chained in their beds.

Photos of those poor souls are on the walls of the rooms in which they were discovered. They are gruesome and extremely hard to look at.



You have been warned...



All available evidence indicates that torture is useless as an interrogation tool. (People will say literally anything to escape physical pain.) But even if you believe torture has its uses, either as a means of gaining information or as a political tool to maintain control of a population, what is ultimately the most disturbing aspect, it seems to me, is how easy it is to find people to do it with such enthusiasm.

Before I visited the site I thought there was a joke somewhere about how going to high school felt a lot like torture. This rather sinister-looking sign is to remind visitors to respect the dead, but the atmosphere is so oppressive it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to smile or laugh here.



I couldn't help but flash to the debate -- and the insanity that the topic was even open to debate -- of whether the United States should torture detainees in Bush's war.

Anyone who thinks that torture is acceptable should be dragged kicking and screaming to S-21 and forced to look at the grimy, stained floors of the cells where the KR tortured thousands of innocent people.

The KR kept mind-numbingly meticulous records, in which they recorded the "confessions" of prisoners and obsessively cross-referenced them.

They also kept photographs of all prisoners. Surely there were those who opposed them and, by their rationale, deserved to be tortured. I doubt this guy was an active conspirator.



Photographs of all the S-21 prisoners are on display on dual-sided bulletin boards. This is one side of one of the bulletin boards. All of the prisoners are children!



In some of the photographs the subjects are smiling. I could only guess that these were the first prisoners, who had no idea what they were in for. In other photos, which I assume to have been taken later, the subjects are clearly aware of the horror they are about to endure.

I simply couldn't find a good angle to get a good shot of this man's photo, but even in this poor attempt the look on his face is haunting.



In an alternate universe this child would have been a beauty pageant contestant. Instead she was tortured, executed and dumped in a mass grave.



And yet some of the victims' faces burn with a fierce pride that I found oddly inspirational, considering the circumstances.



When I look back on this trip I will remember the joy of walking on the Great Wall, the awe I felt standing at the foot of Everest and the perfect, ghostly silence of the Sahara Desert at night. But, more importantly, I will always remember the sickening knot in my stomach when I left Tuol Sleng.

This has been the hardest post for me to write. The subject matter is disturbing, but I was also concerned about getting it right, out of respect for those who suffered at S-21.

War Remnants Museum

"Suppose we lost Indochina. If that happened, tin and tungsten, to which we attach such a high price, would cease coming ... In reality we have chosen the least costly means to prevent one of the most terrible things for the United States for its security."

President Eisenhower, 1953

There it is from the former Commander-in-Chief himself. The Vietnam war was about ... tin and tungsten.

This quote is on a plaque at the War Remnants Museum, a fascinating but gut-wrenching series of exhibits dealing with the American War, as it's called in Vietnam.

(Warning: Some disturbing images follow.)

There's an excellent exhibit on the 134 photographers who were killed during the war. It highlights their astonishing combination of bravery and artistry. Some of their photos deserve to be mentioned with the greatest ever taken. They are dramatic, shocking and often revolting, like this one of an American soldier carrying what's left of a dead soldier.



Here is the legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning picture of a naked, young girl fleeing a napalm explosion.



Her name is Phan Thị Kim Phúc. Her story is told in the book "The Girl in the Picture". She was so badly burned that she required 17 surgeries to repair the skin on her back. In the bottom right corner is a small photograph of her holding her own child, with her shoulder bared to show the scars there.

I had seen the photo but I had not seen the film footage. When she stops running she is given water to drink. The skin is literally peeling off her back as she drinks. The look on her face, incredibly, is relief.

I am a quite squeamish, so I couldn't even look at the photos in the exhibits dealing with damage done by defoliants, such as Agent Orange. It literally made me sick seeing photos of children born so deformed that they didn't even look human. Some looked like limbless pillows. Others had spindly limbs as big around as broomsticks, twisted into horrible shapes.

And it's not just people from the war years that were affected. In Laos I saw people maimed by unexploded ordnance. In Cambodia I saw people maimed by landmines. In Vietnam I saw people everywhere with deformed limbs.

I saw one women leave a restaurant in Nha Trang by scooting out on her butt. She can't walk because her knees bend backwards. I visited a factory outside of Saigon where local crafts are made by disabled Vietnamese. Most of the people I saw working there had problems with their limbs.

In another room of the museum was a series of paintings by Vietnamese children that nearly brought me to tears. They were hard to photograph because of the harsh fluorescent lighting. Some were about peace.



Some were about war.



Every one of them broke my heart. The children who painted these are two generations removed from the American War, but are still defined by it.

Another quote from another plaque:

"The situation in Viet Nam poses serious moral problems which are not merely diplomatic or tactical. Our nation is possessed of immense power. To permit its utilization for unreasonable and barbarous purposes endangers the very foundation of American influence."

Excerpt from a declaration signed by one thousand professors and lecturers of American universities and published in The New York Times on May 13, 1965

Thank God we'll never make that mistake again...

Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh

I wrote a post about how the name of Bangkok really isn't Bangkok and hasn't been for hundreds of years. Locals call it Krung Thep.

Thanh Pho Ho Chi Minh (Ho Chi Minh City) is the official name of the big city in southern Vietnam, but no one calls it that. Not tourists, not locals. I shall hereafter refer to it as Saigon, not because I'm taking a stand one way or the other, but mostly because it's easier to type and I'm lazy.

Among the things Saigon is famous for is its traffic. I've read that there are anywhere from three to six million motorbikes in the city. Believe it.

Everywhere in Southeast Asia you can hire a moto taxi, which is a fancy way of saying you pay a guy to drive you around on his motorbike. It's the fastest way to get around the city, and it can be quite ... thrilling.

Here we are on the wrong side of the road.



Here is a pretty typical intersection crossing.



Something I've seen in Saigon that I haven't seen in any other city are the crazy bundles and nests of electrical wires everywhere. This intersection is a block from my guest house.



I stayed in the Pham Ngu Lao section of town. It's my favorite backpacker ghetto so far. It's not as sleazy or crowded as Thamel in Kathmandu or Khao San Road in Bangkok. Oddly, though, most of the bars close at 1 a.m.

One of the main tourist attractions is the Reunification Palace. It was the capital of the south during the American War (as it's called here). It was left as it was when Soviet tanks crashed through the gate in 1975. Now it's used for ceremonial purposes.

In the US we refer to this event as the Fall of Saigon. In Vietnam it's known as the Liberation of Saigon.

I was expecting opulence like I'd seen at the palace in Beijing or even Phnom Penh. What I saw was more like Graceland. It's decorated like a 1970s-era club basement, or a set from The Sopranos.



The exterior of the building was designed to incorporate Chinese characters. Here's the front.



And here are the characters it's supposed to represent.



It was pretty cool, though, wandering through the military rooms in the underground bunkers.



I couldn't help laughing when I thought of the line from President Merkin Muffley in "Dr. Strangelove":

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!

I felt sorry, though, for the poor guy who worked at the one lonely desk in the Crypto Section.



He must have been really good at his job.

Sihanoukville

If I hadn't gone home for the holidays I would have spent Christmas in Sihanoukville. Which would have been fine.

It's the main beach town in Cambodia, on the southern coast. I had heard it would be disappointing after the beaches in Thailand but I liked it a lot. The beach was crowded but still had a mellow, laidback feel to it.



I spent most of my time there just sitting on the beach reading, relaxing and talking to the local working kids. They sell fruit, bracelets, and so on. Even if I didn't buy anything they'd sit and talk with me. Most of the kids were adolescents or young teens, but some were only four or five years old, often following around an older sister or cousin.

This is Som Peh (sp?), 13, a really sweet kid from whom I bought a dragon fruit every day.



I made a point to go to a beachfront restaurant every night to have a beer and watch the sun go down.



I did get my lazy butt off the beach one day to take a tour of some of the surrounding islands. This is Bamboo Island.



I did some snorkeling that day. There wasn't much to see and the visibility was nil. I had planned on scuba diving while I was there but after snorkeling I decided not to.

My decision to stay on land was cemented when I went to the beach the following day and saw one of the snorkeling boats had sunk overnight. You can see part of it sticking up in front of the boat in the center of the photo.



While I was in Phnom Penh the darker aspects of Cambodian life were always obvious: the poverty, the sex trade, the lawlessness. In Sihanoukville it was there, but in a more subtle, insidious way.

I was talking to a little girl who couldn't have weighed 70 lbs. She proudly showed me a few cheesy glamour shots like the kind you'd get at a mall in the US. I asked her why the color was so washed out. She said they did that on purpose to make their skin look whiter. I jokingly told her that people from the US and Europe came to Cambodia to get their skin brown like hers.

(It's funny to look at all the sunburnt, overweight tourists in their wildly inappropriate swimwear and then compare them to the locals. The beach vendors wear sunhats, scarves, long pants and long sleeves to protect themselves from the sun.)

She then showed me a photo of herself with three other girls in traditional Khmer costumes. They were standing behind a guy who was sitting in a faux military uniform. I guessed the guy to be in his mid-60s. He was bald, fat and white.

Suddenly the scene snapped into focus, as if I'd been staring at one of those 3-D posters. I literally shuddered as I realized, Holy @#$%, this little girl has already had sex for money. She's 14. She looks like she's 10.

I realized that selling bracelets or fruit or whatever was, for at least some of the girls, merely a means to bigger transactions. They practice their English, learn how to flirt with tourists, and, whether they're trying or not, eventually an opportunity will present itself.

Until that epiphany I saw them just as friendly kids trying to make a buck selling fruit. The only thing I was guilty of was naivete, but from that point on I was very careful about what I said and did.

One of the girls I bought fruit from actually was 18. Sam has been selling fruit on the beach for 10 years. She speaks excellent English even though she's never been to school. She walks up and down the beach all day, every day, selling fruit so her three brothers and sisters can go to school.

When she first started she would sell her entire tray of fruit and make pretty good money. Now there are too many kids selling fruit. Even though every year there are more tourists she makes less money. She could make more in one hour with a tourist than she could make in a week of selling fruit on the beach, but she won't.

The Killing Fields

Ever wonder what 8,895 human skulls look like?

Just outside Phnom Penh there's a memorial to those tortured and executed by the Khmer Rouge (KR). It's on the site of one of the Killing Fields. At Choeung Ek Genocidal Center there is a stupa (monument) containing the skulls of every body unearthed on the site.

Inside the glass you can see shelves stacked from floor to the top of the stupa. Each shelf is full of skulls.



Here's a really shaky video I took with my camera which gives a better idea of what a horrifying sight it is.



None of the buildings remain. There are signs on the grounds to indicate where the various buildings were. The KR couldn't kill the people fast enough so some were forced to stand in shacks overnight to await execution in the morning.



As this sign indicates, tearing down the buildings was a mistake. Visitors are left to imagine what the site might have looked like.

I was struck by how ordinary the area looks. Without the stupa a casual visitor might walk through the field with no notion of how much blood was spilled here.

But a cursory examination of the terrain reveals of pit rows and row of pits in which nearly 9,000 people were buried in mass graves.



The cries of the condemned were too much even for their executioners, as this sign states.



The KR played music to drown out the cries of their victims. I noticed with a shock that this is a Bodhi tree which is the type of tree under which the Buddha sat to attain enlightenment. Like everything else at this site, the irony is cruel.

Rough Morning Vietnam

I know, I know ... it's a pretty weak title for a blog post. Even worse than The Secret Treehouse, which sounds like a Hardy Boys mystery. Bear with me. I'm feeling a little rough around the edges after a couple nights checking out the nightlife in Saigon.

I generally don't go out drinking when I travel. It's expensive, for starters. From what I've seen bars everywhere look the same for the most part, and drunks all look and sound the same, no matter where they're from or which language they speak.

If I have people to hang out with I'll go out, but I don't like going to bars by myself.

But perhaps the best reason for not going clubbing while traveling is that I end up waking up feeling the way I did today and wasting an entire day. I thought I'd spend the day bringing the blog up to date but the creative juices just aren't flowing. It's hard to write when your muse is nursing a hangover. I've got a lot to write about from Cambodia and Vietnam, but not today.

I've been wrestling with a long post about Phnom Penh, but I'm still trying to get my head around the place. It's fascinating, exhilarating, wild, beautiful, horrifying and sometimes dangerous. I'm intrigued by Cambodia, probably more so than any other country I've visited. Of all the countries I've visited, this is the one I'd like to spend more time in and get to know more intimately.

Tonight I'm heading to Nha Trang, which is supposed to be the best beach and scuba spot in Vietnam. I'm taking a sleeper bus for the first time. It has actual beds, so I might actually get some rest. I'll hang out there for a few days and then fly back to Bangkok. A friend of mine from the US is joining me there and we're going to do some diving. I'm looking forward to having a travel buddy for a while.

How to eat a cockroach

As I was wandering around the riverfront of Phnom Penh I found a little market where there were vendors selling flowers, Coke, cockroaches -- you know, the usual stuff.

I had been to a night market in Beijing and tried all sorts of crispy critters and was generally disappointed that they didn't have much flavor. The seahorses and scorpions, for instance, were small, and after they were fried they were crunchy and tasted like popcorn. Silk worms tasted disgusting, as expected, but everything else was pretty easy to eat.

I ate grasshoppers in Cambodia. They were easy and even a bit tasty. But I didn't think I could bring myself to eat a four-inch cockroach or a tarantula.



Those are cockroaches on the left, then spiders, then whole partridges, with grasshoppers in the second row.

I was wandering around by myself when I saw this. If there had been traveling with someone who was willing to try it with me, or even to egg me on (I'm talking to you, Earl) I would have tried it.

A local woman came by to sample the goods, and I watched her eat one. You could see from the look on her face that she was sampling the cockroach as someone would sample a wine. Or durian!

As I watched her I was really glad I wasn't brave enough to try one. I would have popped the whole thing in my mouth like a grasshopper.

But that's not how it's done.

You break off the wings. Then you snap the head and abdomen off, much like cracking a lobster. Then you pop the meat out of the shell -- it's about as big as a Brazil nut -- and chew slowly ... I nearly gagged.

Tonle Sap

After spending one day at Angkor I took a boat from Siem Reap to the town of Battambang. To get there you cross the biggest lake in Cambodia, called Tonle Sap, then spend several hours traveling on the Strung Sanker (Sanker River)

I wanted to see Tonle Sap because it's one of the Things That May Interest Only Me. In the western world we think of the monsoon season in Southeast Asia as being roughly akin to hurricane season in the states. But it's not. We can go years without seeing a major hurricane. During the monsoon it rains every day.

To fully understand how much rain falls, look at Tonle Sap. The lake is connected to the Mekong by a short waterway called the Tonle Sap River. I'm sitting in an internet cafe on the riverfront in Phnom Penh and can actually see where the rivers join.

During the rainy season it rains so much that Tonle Sap becomes five times bigger. The reason for the massive increase in surface area is not what you might expect. The Mekong receives so much water that it forces the Tonle Sap River to change direction and flow back into the lake.

From the boat it just looks like a lake, of course. But what was interesting was navigating the narrow twists and turns of the Sanker, and seeing how the local people live in a way that you don't see in a tourist area like Siem Reap.

We went through a narrow channel with vegetatin so thick that at times we had to lean into the boat to keep from getting whacked by passing branches.



We passed through a series of floating villages. People build houses that float on the river. When the river rises, the houses don't flood. Buildings on the riverbank are built on stilts.

The river is low now, which slows down the boats. During the wet season the trip takes about five hours. It took us nine. At times we had to slow to almost a standstill to navigate the narrow channels.



But these were major metropolises compared to what we saw for the next several hours before we reached Battambang. We traveled for miles and miles through areas where people lived on the river bank in thatch huts, or sometimes just slept on the ground under tarps. These were probably the poorest communities I've ever seen with my own eyes.



And yet we were always greeted by throngs of children. During the day we saw them working on boats. This little girl got caught by surprise.



Late in the afternoon they were all in the river playing. They would wave and yell and splash. I am in perpetual amazement at the resiliency and strength of children. I've met so many kids who are literally dirt poor. No shoes, no toys, no electricity, etc. And yet kids everywhere love to laugh and play and wave at tourists. It's truly one of the joys of traveling.

The Secret Treehouse

When I was in Siem Reap in December the owner of my guest house told me a few secrets about Angkor. One was the bike path on the wall where I ran into all the monkeys. Another was a tree house near the east entrance.

I tried to find it once but got completely lost. The landmines problem in Cambodia is well known. Amputees are everywhere. Everywhere. If you were going to list the five worst places in the world to get lost in the jungle, Cambodia would probably make the list.

I got lost.

I stuck to the trails, but I was still a bit panicky. I found a little village off the main road and asked for directions. No one there spoke a word of English (and I don't speak Khmer) but I was asking directions to Angkor Wat -- you know, the biggest tourist attraction in Southeast Asia?

I pulled out a map and indicated where the temple was on the map and asked how to get there. There was a crowd of about 10 people around, laughing at me, and understandably so. One guy took charge and confidently pointed me down the road.

I was confused. I pointed in another direction. He shook his firmly and again pointed the other way. So off I went, not realizing until later that he couldn't read the map and was trying to save face in front of his friends and family...

So I crashed through the brush for about an hour. The sun was starting to set. The thought of being trapped in the Cambodia jungle at night focused my thinking. I could see the sun. I could hear cars. If I walked in the direction of the sun (towards the temple) and the sound of the cars I would come to a road.

I eventually did, but literally miles from where I thought I was. I was really, really lost. I hailed a tuk-tuk driver who charged me way too much to take me back to my bike and headed over to Angkor Wat to watch one last sunset. When I got back to the guest house the owner and I had a laugh over the story. He told me I was basically looking on the wrong corner.

When I went back to Siem Reap for one day last month I decided to find the treehouse. To get it you go to the east entrance of the park. I asked a little girl who selling guidebooks where to go and she motioned for me to walk parallel to the moat. After about 100 yards I saw a narrow path leading into the woods. You can see the treehouse from moat, but you have to look pretty high to see it.

I was expecting a platform 20 or 30 feet off the ground.

Oh no.

This thing has six levels connected by incredibly steep steps and it is high. I'd say at least 100 feet. There were three local kids coming down who got a big kick out of watching me navigate the steps. They were coming down as I was coming up. They were gone by the time I reached the top. I had the whole thing to myself.



The view of Angkor Wat wasn't the best, but it's a view few people see.



I've met many, many people who have been to Angkor Wat but not one who knew about the treehouse. So my thanks to Erich, the owner of the Prince Mekong Villa, for letting me in on the secret. Which is no longer a secret, of course, since I would need both hands to count all the people who read this blog.

When I got back to my bike I thanked the little girl who had helped me. I taught her the word 'treehouse' and gave her some money. I made a point to hold up the money and point to the treehouse. I saw the light go on in her head. She realized she might make a little money by telling tourists about it. Or so I hope

Monkeys!

When I visited Angkor in December the owner of my guest house told me about a trail on the ancient Angkor Thom city wall that very few tourists use. I pushed my bike up there and rode along, completely alone, until I saw a fat old monkey.



He would waddle for about 20 feet and then turn around and honk at me. I thought he was trying to scare me off, but he was actually warning the other monkeys. I rode about 100 yards further on and it was Monkey Rush Hour. Dozens of them in the trees and on the path. They didn't pay much attention to me so I just watched them for a while and then rode on after they started heading into the jungle.

When I returned I wanted to see them again. And this time I wanted to Make Contact. I rode up on the wall and there they were. I parked my bike and sat on a rock to watch.



There were a couple of mothers with tiny babies who didn't seem bothered by my presence.



The younger ones seemed braver. I could approach them easily. It seemed as if they were posing for the camera.





I stuck out my hand to see what would happen. A couple small ones tentatively approached and grabbed my finger.



The ice was broken.



It's not easy to take a picture of yourself with a monkey on your shoulder. But then I couldn't keep them off of me. It's really hard to take a picture with three on your head.



It was a little scary, because they wanted to play fight, which means play biting. Their heads are tiny, so their teeth are too, so I wasn't afraid of getting mauled, but I was afraid of them breaking the skin.

It's not easy to shake off a monkey. They live in trees. They're good at holding on. Shaking off six is pretty hard.

I had been monkeying around for over two hours and had used up my entire camera battery so I got on my bike to leave but apparently they didn't want me to go.