A trip from 1995
I entered Cambodia from Thailand. Phnom Pehn, the capital, was not much more than a small town in the mid-1990s. Lots of scooters and mopeds, not many cars, and the largest bank note was 500 Rial; about ten Euro cents (or 0.10 US Dollar). Meanwhile (2024) there are larger bank notes, but the inofficial currency for any significant amount is still the US Dollar.
Street life in Phnom Penh was very relaxed in that time. You could cross the street without fearing to be run over. Temples on every corner, and life was cheap in general.
Cambodia was an ancient kingdom (“Kambuja”) and later under French colonial rule, but the darkest period in its history lasted from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge (“red Khmer”) ruled the country with unbelievable terror, with the backing (and financial aid) of China. The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot killed roughly 2 million people of their own population, before Vietnam moved in and removed power from the Khmer Rouge. After ten years, in 1989, the United Nations took over and established a new constitution and a monarchy in 1993. Today, Cambodia is a rapidly developing country.
The Khmer Rouge were communists who wanted to establish a Maoist state. This meant that everyone who was an intellectual, a teacher, a government worker, or who even only wore spectacles or spoke some English or French (and thus was seen as intellectual) was deported to labor camps, tortured or killed. Mothers had to kill their own babies, children had to kill their parents. People were slain or stabbed or clubbed to death, often with iron bars or machetes. Many people also died from malnutrition and diseases.
One can see this part of Cambodia’s history in various museums and sites today, e.g. in the “Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum” in Phnom Penh. This is is a former secondary school which was used as “Security Prison 21” where an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned and tortured (read more if you can bear this). Out of these 20.000, only 12 people had survived.
Another site is the “Killing Fields” (Choeung Ek) in Phnom Penh, a former orchard and one of about 300 Killing Fields in Cambodia: sites where the Khmer Rouge butchered and buried their political enemies – which were about a quarter of the Cambodian population at that time.
After this sobering experience I made my way up north, together with Gary, a Canadian with whom I had traveled already in Africa and whom I had met again in Bangkok. We took a boat on the Tonlé Sap, a river running from the Tonlé Sap Lake in the north to the Mekong Delta in the south-east of Cambodia. In the monsoon season, the Mekong’s floods cause the Tonlé Sap river to reverse its flow – a unique phenomenon.
Due to the extreme change in river height, the people built floating houses – basically a city on boats!
We arrived (after another truck ride) in Siam Reap, a small town close to the ruins of Angkor Wat. This is a large Hindu-Buddhist temple complex from the early 12th century, and possibly one of the most impressive ruins I have ever seen (and I have seen quite a few…). You may remember the Lara Croft movie with Angelina Jolie – this was partially filmed in Angkor.
Angkor Wat was damaged by the Khmer Rouge and afterwards by art thieves who looted the place and sold sculptures to Europe and elsewhere.
I explored the ruins – which are spread over a large area – with the help of a boy named Mao, with his bike. I hired him to drive me around the ruins for a few days. He spoke some English due to the UN force which had been stationed in the area two years earlier. In the beginning I was a bit scared, because some of the Khmer Rouge are apparently still alive and hiding in the jungle not far from here, and apparently they set a bounty of 10.000 US Dollar for each foreigner (including tourists) brought to them.
There was military presence all around the ruins of Angkor, and everyonce in a while I heard artillery fire not far away, where apparently the Cambodian military staged just another raid against the remaining Khmer Rouge.
What would Mao prevent to drive me right to them? But I learned quickly that Mao was just as scared of the Khmer Rouge as anyone. We stopped by a crocodile farm where he told me that the Khmer Rouge had thrown young kids into the crocodile-infested ponds to feed them. And who says that the Khmer Rouge would not kill him alongside with me, as a collaborator? Anyhow, meanwhile (in 2024) this problem has disappeared.
In Siam Reap I also visited the HALO Trust, a non-governmental organisation that clears mines. Roughly 65.000 casualties have been claimed by mines; about half of the mines in Cambodia have meanwhile been cleared. Please check the HALO Trust website, if you want to get involved, e.g. by donation.
In general the Cambodian people were very friendly and open. As always, I wanted to taste the local food specialties. Fried snake on a stick is not that bad (tastes like chicken), but fried cockroaches do require some willpower. Pro tip: Remove the wings before eating the cockroach, because these wings are very chewy!
The trip back to Phnom Penh was just another grueling journey, this time for hours on the back of a truck with lots of dust after crossing the lake in an unstable boat. Back in the city the few foreigners that were around gathered in the “Heart of Darkness”, a shady bar with a pool table that not by coincidence was named like the book by Joseph Conrad. Fun fact: The owner of that bar apparently also owned the “Apocalypse Now” bar in Ho Chi Min city (formerly known as Saigon) in Vietnam, which I visited later as well. I read that the “Heart of Darkness” today (in 2025) is a large club now…
I moved on to Vietnam from Cambodia, but that’s another story…
