Off to Cambodia after a brief Thailand tour: The moon was still bright and full when we left for the airport at 5am and it was breath-taking as we broke down through the cloud cover into Cambodia three hours later.Gone were the skyscrapers, highways, lights and mass transit of surprisingly clean and navigable Bangkok. The land below was green, green, green with paddy and palm dotting the expanse. As we stepped off the plane we were immediately wet with humidity that was an order of magnitude greater than Thailand.
Even with the ubiquitous, preposterous, pairings of shlumpy looking Western dudes and stunningly attractive Thai women, Bangkok lulled me into believing I was still someplace familiar. Phnom Penh reminded me that I am a long way from home and that I came here for a reason. Planning for the Angkor International Bike Race has consumed the majority of the two days I have been here. However, this morning I did find time to visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the center of Phnom Penh. The word "Tuol" in Khmer means a hill or higher place, while "Sleng" is both the name for two local poisonous trees or a descriptive word meaning "bearer of poison" or "supplier of guilt".
Toul Seng was once a school before the Khmer Rouge converted it into the S-21 prison, where thousands of Cambodians were incarcerated, tortured and killed. The mugshot pictures of the inmates occupy an entire floor of one of the buildings, which was once subdivided into tiny, 4'x7' cells. A room housed the various implements of inhumanity employed in practices such as water boarding, which our current
administration is reintroducing in it's rendition of "enemy combatants."
The walk through this literal house of horrors has helped show me the reality of the vicious legacy, the bad dream that present day Cambodia is struggling to awake from. The daily paper here tells tale of Hummer smuggling (how one does this, I do not know) and updates on the latest obstruction to the prosecution of Khmer Rouge leadership.
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