Of horrible histories and happy herbs

Incense burning at a shrine atop Wat Phnom.

A big hello to my readers at Cope Allman, who are never, ever reading this blog at work, I'm sure, because they are all far too busy working.......!!! Thanks for reading and keeping up with my travels!

Phnom Penh summed up in one picture, where history collides with the modern world, with some delightful consequences

We're off to Kampot tomorrow (also confusingly known locally as Kompot here - but you can search for both online) and I might not be online for a few days, so I thought I'd update you on our busy, emotional week.

Taken at the Royal Palace. This is a bit behind the scenes. I'd set myself the challenge of filling my pictures with colour on this day as the sky was so overcast. This is where some of the ceremonial kit is stored, and the gardeners have used the space in front to stack some of their plants. Those pink flowers are everywhere in Cambodia and are really beautiful.

After Siem Reap, Cambodia's capital city was a bit of an urban awakening. Everything about Siem Reap is chilled, the temples are peaceful and still, everyone seems to know everyone else. Phnom Penh is to Siem Reap as London is to Chipping Tinyville back home. It's a busy city that never sleeps and like Medan, our fave city in Sumatra, you need balls of steel and eyes in the back of your head just to cross the road. You get over your fear of stepping out in front of cars here fast, and you become accustomed to sharing roads, pavements and gutters with rapidly speeding motos and rickshaws.

This building in the heart of Phnom Penh opposite the National Museum has intrigued us for the entirety of our visit. It is entirely abandoned and just falling down, but looks like a throwback to the colonial French days. Why doesn't anyone want it? It doesn't even look as though anyone squats there!

Less exciting and more heartbreaking in Phnom Penh is Cambodia's still huge problem with poverty and the ever global problem of the gap between the rich and poor. Street children line the pavements and as with Siem Reap and Medan, we have been told not to give money to children as they rarely, if ever, get to keep it. The problems with landmines are also visible here and you see amputees outside every tourist attraction selling pirate books (yes, I'm still buying them, I'm carrying the equivalent of a local bloody library, but I'm still buying them - I'm a book whore). Cambodia is a Buddhist country, so with people begging or selling, if you can give a couple of thousand riel, do. The only time we don't is if we have run out. For this reason, and for my love of books, I have been befriended by two booksellers on the waterfront in particular, who now stop to say hi and shoot the breeze. There is still a social stigma attached to amputees in some parts of Cambodia, and many booksellers carry signs telling you that they are not begging, they are working.

The National Museum, where this very brave young man was atop a beam fixing something or other. If you can zoom in you'll see one of the best smiles in Cambodia - this guy and I chattered away in different languages for a while before he thanked me for taking his picture and got back to work!

I had read a lot about Cambodia's troubled past back in Siem Reap, but if you want to find out about it in detail, then Phnom Penh is the place to visit, but be warned, this is no casual history lesson, and be prepared to shed a few tears. On our second day, we visited S21 or Tuol Sleng, a primary school before the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975, then a torture camp for those who the KR deemed 'enemies of the Revolution'. The KR (or DK as they are sometimes known) wanted to herald in a new era that returned the former glory of Cambodia to its Angkor empire days (the period in which the famous Wat was built), and thought the best way to do this was to create a nation of peasant agriculture workers, living only from the land and rejecting the material inequalities of capitalism.

Sarun, our driver for our first two days in Phnom Penh. Sarun explained to us that like many tuk tuk drivers, he rents his bike for $5 a day and has to make at least this to make ends meet. His home is in the rural villages several dozen kilometres outside Phnom Penh, so the tuk tuk he rents is also his main home.

Whether this began as a good idea amongst the small group of intellectuals who first came up with it - including the most famous leader Saloth Sar or Pol Pot as he called himself, who was an intellectual educated in France - is a moot point. Somewhere along the way, perhaps as a result of the Khmer Rouge being forced into exile when Cambodia became a US pawn in the Vietnam War, the KR became an extreme, heavily factionalised and paranoid despotic regime, responsible for the deaths and suffering of a vast number of people.

A long gallery next to the Palace buildings, I fell in love with this gallery and wrote a hundred story scenes in my mind just standing looking at it.

Tuol Sleng was where people were sent prior to being driven out to their deaths a few kilometres away at a place called Cheong Ek, or The Killing Fields, as they were christened by Dith Pran (the subject of the now famous film on Cambodia during this time). It is now run by the government as a museum and its chief exhibit is row after row of photographs taken in the camp. Each prisoner was photographed on arrival and extensive documents were kept on each one, including their biography and details of their 'confessions'. These documents are now used by both historians and as a part of the ongoing trial of the man who ran S21, Duch.

Visnu at the National Museum. In his original pose, he is lying on the primal cosmic ocean that brought forth all life. As in the Angkor temples, Cambodia's religious history reflects both its Buddhist and Hindu influences.

The victims brought here were primarily officials of the previous government and their families and associates, intellectuals and later, even many members of the KR themselves, as the leaders became increasingly paranoid of an uprising from within their ranks. The methods of torture were outrageously cruel and of the 20,000 people brought here, only a small number are known to have survived. Walking through row after row of the images of people killed gives you only a small sense of the sheer scale of the genocide in Cambodia and the terrible cruelty that was inflicted on the country as a result. Almost no one in the country was unaffected, as the KR routinely separated families and made chief amongst its methods the routine brainwashing of children, which meant that children were often responsible for sending their own parents to their deaths.

The intersection between Sisowath and Sothea Ros Boulevards on the waterfront, this is one of the Wats or pagodas here where monks live, teach, study and worship. We pass this almost every day, at least once, on foot or in a tuk tuk!

The following day we visited Cheong Ek itself, The Killing Fields where the inmates of S21 were, almost without exception, killed and their bodies piled in huge mass graves. Today Cheong Ek - one of over 340 sites like it in the country - has not been completely excavated, and the 8000 skulls that lie within the huge, 17 level stupa on the site is only a small reflection of the vast number of dead who rest there. Today the site seems peaceful and at first glance, a beautiful open landscape where people walk in silent reflection, apart from the low voices of the guides who steer groups around the site. We hired a guide for our visit, who was very kind in helping us to understand the sheer scale and complexity of the devastation brought down on Cambodia during the four years in which the KR were in power.

" I think that the genocide in Cambodia is worse than the Nazis in some ways," our guide told us, "Because it was Cambodian killing Cambodian, not about race, not about anything. Sometimes children brainwashed to kill their own families, brother against brother. There was no reason, no understanding why. Just what I think, but I think is worse. Many of those who killed people here were children, you understand, children who killed people. Now they are maybe forty, fifty. Most of the old Khmer Rouge, they live in the north west of Cambodia now, still apart from others, but all still alive. Most never brought to trial."

The regal beauty of the Royal Palace. Although it was overcast on the day we visited, the splendour of these buildings shines through - in stark contrast to the children begging outside and the amputees who are selling you books on the street.

This is the real complexity of the KR and of Cambodian history, that those who joined the KR often had no choice themselves, a situation our guide describes as 'kill or be killed.' It is not easy to find someone to blame, an ambiguity that sits at the heart of Cambodian culture now. It is impossible to know how a nation recovers from this kind of tragedy in its recent past.

The Dance Pavilion at the Royal Palace on a very grey day.

We have spent our remaining days in Phnom Penh in much lighter pursuits, as primarily Cambodia is a country of hope and of great hopefulness. We have found its people to be friendly and most of all, incredibly good humoured and this is the first country in which I have bought a phrase book, because everyone is so eager to help you when you try to speak Cambodian, although many of its sounds simply do not exist in our language. I am hopeful yet that I may pick it up one day!

Even more of the Royal Palace buildings. The public are only allowed into one quadrant of the whole site, still officially the residence of the King, so this is just a small percentage of the whole.
The grey building in front is the Napoleon III pavilion, a gift from Napoleon III to King Norodom in 1876 and made entirely of iron!

The National Museum offered a full afternoon's pleasure as we wandered amongst Buddhist and Hindu statues. It is customary here to make an offering to the chief Buddha's on display, which also act as shrines for those visiting, so we stopped every so often to collect from an attendant some garlands of jasmine and to offer them to the Buddha along with the standard few thousand riel or a dollar. The smell of jasmine in the museum was beautiful, and one attendant insisted I take a garland for myself after I also offered one to the Buddha, which I'm hoping was a compliment and not a sign that I smell.

The inner courtyard and gardens at the National Museum. As well as being a really peaceful and interesting place to burn some hours, the gardens are really beautiful in their own right and at the centre sits a red stone Buddha statue. For 500 riel, you can get two bags of fish food to feed the fish in the four lily ponds, too!

We visited the Royal Palace a couple of days ago, which was beautiful and breath-taking in equal measure, with its gold roofed buildings, murals, shrines, landscaped gardens and statues. Unfortunately, the day was cloudy when we went, but there was still a vast array of colour to be seen everywhere, including in the murals on the courtyard walls of the Reamker, Cambodian's epic poem which is based on the Ramayana, or tales of Rama and which we also saw at Angkor Wat.

Wat Phnom and Cambodia's largest clock. Yes, I said clock.

Yesterday we stopped off at Wat Phnom, the hill after which the city takes its name, and on which a huge stupa stands and several shrines to the Buddha. It is also home to the largest clock in Cambodia. Yes, I said clock. Despite these fantastic tourist draws, I went because I had read that for a dollar you could set free a sparrow that the sellers catch in large numbers and keep in cages at the top, and when the seller handed me the tiny trembling bird and showed me how to throw him into the sky, I did so with a great sense of relief for this tiny life. I wrote to my friend Lynda today that I wish I could throw my emotional baggage into the sky with the same gusto. The seller, sensing my now Cambodia-famous soft touch, told me that for $10 I could free the entire cage. I was tempted until I looked around and saw how many cages there were and realised that I could blow my entire budget on Wat Phnom.

And from the top.....Looking down Norodom Boulevard. The road names in Phnom Penh are subject to change, most back streets are numbered rather than names and there is often no order to the number. In addition, the same number is often given to more than one house on a street. Being a postman here must suck.

In addition to our touristy delights we have also frequented almost every market in Phnom Penh, including the Russian, Central and Night markets. Sometimes, when I look back on the days, I'm not sure how we find the time to eat, especially as for the first time we are also managing to lie in each day (our room doesn't have a window). But eat we have and do, and well. Our favourite place so far has been the discovery of Happy Herb Pizza, where, if you ask, the cook will throw some extra 'happy herb' on your pizza as topping, if you catch my drift...........

Happy Herb Pizza in the middle, and our other favourite haunt, The Pink Elephant, which has a great selection of veggie Khmer food (often a rarity - Cambodia's main diet is rice and fish. So much fish.....). This is Sisowith Boulevard, the waterfront overlooking the Tonle Sap river. Just down the road is a shop that sells pirate movies for a dollar. We watched Wolverine, it was great, though how one body can sustain the muscles Hugh Jackman is wearing in that movie is far beyond me. Not that I'm complaining......

I'll write soon with more news, but until then, my love to all. Peace and Happy Pizza out.

And it's goodbye from them. Monkeys on Wat Phnom.