Embracing the chaos of Cambodia
(Or, Margaret Thatcher’s ‘reasonable’ people)
Rarely will you these days hear of a ‘bring and buy’ sale. As charity fundraising methods go, they have long been superseded by fun runs and crowdfunding or simply by aggressive touts accosting people in the streets. But in the late 1970s and early 1980s—when your correspondent was just a young lad—bring and buy sales were all the rage, made famous by Blue Peter, that stalwart of British children’s television.
The premise was simple—bring something to sell and buy something brought by somebody else. All proceeds went to charity. The first bring and buy sale I ever attended was in the spring of 1979 at Morden Primary School, and the beneficiary was Blue Peter’s ‘Kampuchea’ (as the country was still being called) campaign.
Earlier in 1979, not long after Vietnam had chased the Khmer Rouge out of Phnom Penh and the world had been made aware of the sheer horror of what had happened in Cambodia over the previous four years, Oxfam had launched an appeal for £100,000 ‘to feed Kampuchea’. More than £3 million was raised in three months, much of it by Blue Peter viewers (and their parents) attending bring and buy sales.
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That Cambodia needed feeding in 1979 owed itself to two key factors.
Firstly, the country was still reeling from four years of Khmer Rouge insanity that had utterly destroyed the economy and had already led to the deaths (either directly or indirectly) of around two million people—around a third of the population. That anything (or anyone) was left at all was a miracle.
Secondly, despite the world knowing full well that the country was starving, very little aid was arriving. Western governments from the US and UK to France and West Germany were reluctant to provide any assistance to what it considered a Vietnamese government of occupation—remember, 1979 was only four years on from Vietnam’s victory over the US. Few Western governments had yet restored diplomatic relations with Hanoi.
In his landmark film Year Zero (which more than any other piece of reportage brought the horror of Cambodia’s plight to the world), John Pilger—a reporter who would unfortunately become an apologist for some very nasty regimes in later life—explains how the United States and its allies had declared a blockade on stricken Cambodia, ‘as a means of punishing the Vietnamese’.
Fortunately, Blue Peter viewers didn’t much care for Cold War geopolitics, but we did care about the starving children we saw in Pilger’s film.
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Forty years later, while wandering around the Choeung Ek Genocide Centre on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, one of Cambodia’s many killing fields, I recalled Pilger’s film when—thanks to the excellent audio guide handed to visitors—I learnt that almost all Western countries, including the US, UK and France, had, despite everything we knew the Khmer Rouge had done, continued to recognise the Cambodian communists as the country’s legitimate government until 1991.
That couldn’t possibly be right? Once back in Phnom Penh I opened my laptop and conducted a hasty Google search in order to check. Amongst other evidence confirming what I had just learnt was an extraordinary and utterly bonkers interview given by none other than Margaret Thatcher to Blue Peter (which never lost its interest in Cambodia) in 1988, in which she speaks of ‘the more reasonable people in the Khmer Rouge’.
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Had she ever visited Choeung Ek—or any other memorial site in Cambodia—it is unlikely that even Thatcher would have been capable of the mental gymnastics required to turn the Khmer Rouge into the good guys.
Accessible by bike or tuk-tuk from central Phnom Penh (there’s very little organised public transport in the Cambodian capital), Choeung Ek has largely been swallowed up by the city’s suburbs. It remains an intensely moving place nevertheless, home to a small museum and a Buddhist stupa filled with more than 5,000 human skulls—all found on the Choeung Ek site.
Most of Choeung Ek however is open field, littered with the pits that were once the mass graves of the more than 9,000 people killed here. Even today, human remains still cover much of the site, and as you slowly walk around you will shed bucketloads of tears. One tree in particular—used by the Khmer Rouge to smash the heads of babies—will break the hardest of souls.
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Without exception, the victims killed at Choeung Ek had first passed through Tuol Sleng, a former secondary school which was used as a prison by the Khmer Rouge. Here, men, women and children would be brutally tortured into making often absurd confessions (such as being CIA or KGB agents). Open today as a museum, the building has changed little since 1979 when the Khmer Rouge abandoned it, killing most of the remaining prisoners as the Vietnamese advanced though Phnom Penh. Only a handful of prisoners survived—a couple are usually on hand to talk about their experience.
Many of the former classrooms-turned-cells contain haunting black and white photos of the prison’s victims (the Khmer Rouge photographed every prisoner on arrival). One of the photos features the face of John Dewhirst, a young English yachtsman whose boat ended up in Cambodian waters while sailing in the Gulf of Thailand in 1978. The boat was seized by the Khmer Rouge navy and Dewhirst was arrested along with his New Zealand crewmate Kerry Hamill. They were brought to Tuol Sleng, tortured, and killed—probably at Choeung Ek. The pair are just two of nine westerners known to have been killed by the Khmer Rouge. (Ironically, the other Briton killed was the Scot Malcolm Caldwell, an apologist for the Khmer Rouge regime. His death is well chronicled in Elizabeth Becker’s When the War was Over).
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Phnom Penh is without question the most chaotic city I have ever visited. The old French colonial quarter of mainly low-rise buildings, with shops and restaurants on the ground floor and apartments above, offers a semblance of order, and begs to be wandered on Phnom Penh’s invariably sultry mornings.
The rest of the city—which has developed haphazardly and with little regard for the rules and regulations of urban planning—is all but impossible to tackle per pedes. Tuk-tuks, hailed through the Grab app, or a rented bike are the only ways to get around. If choosing the latter option be careful—the roads are lawless and there’s nothing resembling a cycle lane.
Even visiting Wat Phnom, the most sacred of the city’s Buddhist temples, built on the site of a 14th century pagoda, requires nerves of steel given its location in the middle of Phnom Penh’s busiest roundabout. (Watch out too for the Wat’s colony of monkeys who will grab anything they can get their hands on).
Knowledge of the city’s past, however, makes Phnom Penh’s contemporary chaos poignant, necessary, and life-affirming. This, after all, is a city that was entirely emptied in 1975—literally every inhabitant marched to the countryside as part of the insane Khmer Rouge experiment in social engineering. Only a handful of administrators and officials remained in the city. To see it today—all colour, intensity, anarchy, perplexing, confusing—is quite wonderful.
Little public transport there may be in Phnom Penh, but inter-city services in Cambodia have seen massive improvement in recent years. There are even some train services, from the capital down to Sihanoukville on the coast and a recently-added service to Poipet on the Thai border.
Our second destination in the country, Siem Reap, was reached by travelling on a comfortable, air-conditioned bus in seven hours. Flying would have been much quicker, but we would have missed out on quite the finest meal eaten during the entire trip—and, quite frankly, one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten (a fish curry at an otherwise nondescript truck stop outside the small town of Phnom Santouk).
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Siem Reap exists to service Cambodia’s most popular attraction, Angkor Wat. The city centre is therefore predictably tacky, all massage parlours (some of which, it should be said, are perfectly legitimate), loud bars and Hard Rock cafes, but there’s a wealth of secluded places to stay on the city’s outskirts, private little palaces hidden behind tall clay walls far from the madding crowd. One of these is Khmer House, our all-too-brief home in Siem Reap, run by a lovely Japanese chap and besides much else home to some superb cooking.
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Angkor is enormous. The Khmer Empire’s capital from the 9th to 15th centuries, its rulers presided over an empire that stretched from Myanmar to Vietnam. The full site extends over approximately 400 square kilometres and consists of scores of monuments, roads, bridges, canals, resevoirs and of course temples of which the best-known, Angkor Wat, is just one. Others, such as the Bayon, Preah Khan and Ta Prohm (made famous by Tomb Raider) temples, are equally magnificent if not quite so immediately recognisable as Angkor Wat, whose outline adorns the Cambodian flag and which is an integral part of Brand Cambodia.
The latest estimates suggest that at the height of the Khmer Empire’s powers in the 13th century, as many as one million people lived at Angkor, making it by far the largest city in the world at the time and comparable to peak ancient Rome. Why it was suddenly abandoned in the 15th century remains a mystery. Our guide told us that a combination of constant attacks by Thais made the city impossible to defend while the Empire’s gradual rejection of Hinduism for Buddhism (the temples at Angkor are dedicated to Hindu gods) made Angkor redundant. Other theories include drought and subsequent severe flooding which damaged beyond repair the city’s waterways, crucial for its survival.
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It’s impossible (and ill-advised) to visit Angkor alone—the distances between temples are vast and without a local guide important context will be lost. We joined a small group for a two-day tour—enough to see the main sites. There are dozens of travel agencies in Siem Reap offering tours—the most popular are those which include an early start to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat. Unless you happen to be visiting for the spring or autumn equinox (when the sun rises directly over the Wat’s central tower), avoid the crowds and take a tour that starts a little later. We used Siem Reap Shuttle Tours, who offer a variety of Angkor itineraries the pace of which we found to be perfect. Tickets for Angkor are currently priced at $37 for one day, $62 for three. They can be purchased online.
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A short drive south of Siem Reap is Cambodia’s beating heart—Tonlé Sap. Southeast Asia's largest freshwater lake, it plays an indispensable role in the life, culture, and economy of the country. The lake's fisheries are amongst the most productive in the world and provide the primary source of protein for millions of Cambodians. Fishing in the lake supports the livelihoods of many communities that live in floating villages on its surface.
The residents of the lake’s many villages have adapted their entire way of life to the ebb and flow of the lake. Houses, schools, shops, temples, and even government buildings such as police stations are built on stilts or floating platforms to accommodate the dramatic change in water levels throughout the year.
We visited one village, Kampong Phluk, in early December, at the beginning of the dry season. The lake had already largely drained into the Mekong, revealing the tall stilts on which many of the buildings are constructed. Nevertheless, most villages remain accessible only by boat throughout the year.
With most of the village’s men employed in fish (or even crocodile) farming, it’s the women who take care of visitors, patiently waiting in turn for customers before expertly steering their small wooden boats through the mangrove swamp to the open water—in the case of our particular boatwoman, with a young child resting in her lap. Here, payment is made direct to the boatwomen—we had heard reports that in other villages on the Tonlé Sap (such as Chong Khneas, the closest to Siem Reap) most of the money goes to middlemen and agents, something we had been keen to avoid.
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If the floating villages of Tonlé Sap are often held up as a testament to human ingenuity and adaptability, offering a unique perspective on living in harmony with the natural environment, albeit with modern challenges (such as overtourism) that need careful management to ensure the sustainability of both the community and the ecosystem, then Cambodia itself is a testament to the will of a nation to simply survive.
Without the remarkable resilience of its people—deeply rooted in history, culture, and perhaps most pertinently, Buddhism—Cambodia simply wouldn’t have survived the devastating four years of the Khmer Rouge. Nearly five decades on, the scars of those four years—quite literally in the shape of the killing fields at Choeung Ek—remain.
Having faced such unimaginable hardship with courage, Cambodians have remade their country in a haphazard, chaotic way that betrays their devotion to Buddhism and its pervasive idea of impermanence.
Everything changes and nothing lasts forever, one Cambodian, born during the Khmer Rouge years, told me. That’s why we embrace chaos.
Notes
We flew to Phnom Penh with AirAsia from Bangkok, and then back to the Thai capital with the same airline from Siem Reap. From Phnom Penh to Siem Reap we took a bus—there are scores of departures each day, but the standard of vehicle can vary enormously. We took a bus from Giant Ibis—it was comfortable and air conditioned and the journey took seven hours with a stop for lunch. There is no central bus station in Phnom Penh—each bus firm has its own departure point.
There is not much in the way of public transport in any of Cambodia’s cities (there is a small metropolitan bus network in Phnom Penh but details of routes and stops are patchy). Instead, use the Grab app to hail a tuk-tuk. The price will be set in advance—hailing a tuk-tuk off the street will result in extended haggling and invariably a far higher price.
Be careful where you stay in Phnom Penh—the city, beyond the old colonial quarter, is not walkable. We chose an AirBnB (this one) in a high-rise complex complete with two fabulous pools and amazing Mekong views, but it meant getting a tuk-tuk every time we wanted to head into the city centre.
Cambodia’s currency, the riel, circulates in tandem with the US dollar. All goods and services can be paid for in either riels or dollars (dollars are usually preferred but riels are never refused). It is not unusual to pay in dollars and receive change in riels. Although ATMs are ubiquitous (dispensing both dollars and riels) bring plenty of low-denomination dollar banknotes with you. Most hotels and restaurants will accept card payments.
We visited (not a definitive list)
Phnom Penh
Royal Palace
Choeung Ek Genocide Centre
Central Market
Russian Market
Wat Phnom
Silver Pagoda
Siem Reap
Bayon Temple
Banteay Srei
Ta Prohm
Preah Khan
Kampong Phluk Floating Village
Central Market