kampuchea

sorry for the delay, loves! but a massive gastrointestinal fiesta of terror has indisposed the authors for the past week. talk about a laaaame 19-hour journey back from siem riep on buses and vans with a border crossing at which i was the lucky one whose passport failed to receive the necessary exit stamp from cambodia. i was also the lucky one who felt about to perish and started bawling, to my own horror and mortification, when the thai immigration dude told me i had to walk back to cambodia and demand a stamp, even though they'd already taken my departure card. aaaand i was the lucky one who, once through the border an hour later, got to communicate the urgent necessity of multiple unplanned pit stops--on the side of the road, if needs be--to our thai driver in my really wretched thai. and nick was the lucky one (and here i'm actually not being that sarcastic!) who picked up my bug the day after we got back. a word of caution: do not eat at the very enticing mexican restaurant in siem riep, whatever you do. you'd think i'd figure that if i get sick after eating beto's in utah, i'd probably get doubly sick after eating mexican in a place where it's the norm to pee in the street, but i didn't. and delicious as it was, it was NOT WORTH IT ; )

now that i've gotten that out of my system (hahahaha), let's get on to how awesomely amazing cambodia really is. because it is wonderful, and i can't allow my own stupid food judgments to taint my opinion of the country. phnom penh is full of the energy of a developing country, to which i've become a wee bit addicted. there are people everywhere, and eeeeveryone is talking. quite loudly. and they have these things like tuk-tuks, which are motorcycles with a buggy behind them, but they're with a bicycle, and there's more of just a wheelchair on the FRONT of the bike! i don't understand how they steer with all the weight up front, but they shore did look neat, by golly.

because we had a wee stint with the "cambodian travel association," which is code for mini mafia, we spent a day stranded in a random field and missed out on our free day in phnom penh, but we still had our day for the "khmer rouge morning" and afternoon tour of the royal palace (more like shiny village), as well as an evening boat ride up the tonle sap/mekong river. fabulous. and the next paragraph is about the khmer rouge stuff, so to my tender-hearted buds who prefer not to think about yuck, skip it if you like.

as for S-21, the school-turned-torture-prison by the khmer rouge, as well as the killing fields genocide memorial, they were horrifying. a very quick summary is that an uprising of uneducated youth from the cambodian boonies overthrew the government, forced everyone out of the cities and onto forced labor camps, where they killed all ligher-skinned/chinese cambodians, intellectuals, former government workers, doctors, etc. and did everything possible to "purify" society from capitalistic and, well, modern values. over 2 million people died, which is roughly a third of the country's population. the khmer rouge was exceedingly proud of their work and documented it meticulously, so S-21 is full of the makeshift cells and instruments of torture they used, including bloodstains the [curators?] of the place decided to leave intact for the public, as well as hundreds and hundreds of photos that turn the stomach, to say the least. i don't even know how people could think to do the things they did to these poor people, let alone actually DO them. it is extremely hard to believe that human beings are capable of such cruelty. it's also hard to believe that no one did anything for 5 whole years, especially as the US is at least partly responsible for the khmer rouge in the first place. it's rather appalling. the killing fields were very strange, because they were probably the most beautiful place we visited in cambodia, but every few hundred feet, you'd trip on a tuft of cloth or even bone protruding up from the dirt because the rain just keeps washing everything up from the mass graves. there's also a gorgeous buddhist memorial that pierces the sky and takes your breath away, and then it becomes apparent that the inside is completely full of bones. i think they said there are over 9,000 bones that were disinterred from the surrounding fields. it's a very unnerving juxtaposition of natural beauty and human atrocity. i think the scariest thing to me is that most cambodian schools don't teach about the khmer rouge, and among today's cambodian teenagers, there's a huge population that believes it's a big hoax... and it was 30 years ago! the girl who showed us around told us stories about her siblings and parents, who were sent to the camps, and yet she doesn't even know who pol pot is. scary.

after the khmer rouge morning, we toured the royal palace grounds. they are enormous. they are beautiful. one courtyard has the entire ramayana painted on the walls in minute detail, and that was fascinating. it's really cool to see the hindu influences on thai buddhism; our host mum gave me an amulet to wear or hang on my backpack (guess where it is?) of ganesh (that's the elephant with lots of arms, right? yikes, for shame), and he's everywhere, including in our family shrine upstairs. almost all buddhist girls have a ganesh amulet that they pray to for protection and for good things to happen in their lives. we're learning that thais and buddhists in general tend to just like everything ; )

it's time to end this post. everybody take a deep breath, now, and get ready for angkor wat! ; )