Part Ten: The Travel Diary of South-east Asia

  The Travel Diary of South-east Asia

Here continues the series for anyone who is interested about my travels two years ago. I spent three months in South-east Asia. Though true to the actual handwritten diary in terms of events which I recorded on my trip day-to-day, I have changed the names and where possible gone into more detail for each day with the luxury of having a laptop this time around! For part nine click here. Part ten concerns Phnom Penh in Cambodia and The Killing Fields, so it is distressing reading.

9th of February 2019 - Siem Reap, Cambodia

Why does there have to be hangovers? Could you imagine how much better and simpler life would be if drinking wasn’t bad for you?
    I woke up needing a piss about three times in the night and enjoyed only a few hours before my body just decided it needed to wake up at 7am. So I wearily got up and got my standard egg baguette breakfast at the cheap place down the road and then went and booked my minivan to Phnom Penh for the next day.
    Other than this the day passed without incidence. I walked for 50 minutes in the sweltering heat to the museum and then reassessed my funds and decided not to pay the $20 entry. I immediately regretted this, but trudged back consuming 3 or 4 cokes in the process.
Before I really knew it I’d read the rest of the day into the evening, and people watched too from the open plan lobby of the hostel that lay at the foot of pub street. Hustle, bustle, a bit of homelessness, drunken tourists - everything that I’d come to expect by now. I did particularly enjoy an animated haggle over a shitty plastic bunny keyring between a local and what looked like a european tourist. He was obviously buying it for the girl next to him but I found the whole thing hilarious. Just pay the $3 mate and move on.
    I decided to use this couchsurf app in the end and ended up meeting these two guys from Egypt named Saadah and Akl. It turned out one was a guitar player too and we ended up chatting for ages about the kind of stuff we played. I found it really interesting to hear him talk about the standard scales he played - they couldn't be more different than the standard minor pentatonic I barely knew. Lots of people popped up on the hangout chat, but none materialised and so we head out just us three and who should show up but Mariana!
    It seemed that she had met Saadah and Akl before and had brought a friend of hers called Rosetta. The night advanced and I soon began to realise that this was practically a double date and I was officially the fifth wheel. Flirtatious words and actions seemed to pass straight through my invisible presence and I felt that they could all just start kissing each other at any moment.
    I bid my leave and headed to another bar to just watch some karaoke for a bit. Even if you’re on your own and feeling slightly dejected about your night this is the remedy to send you to bed smiling. Two girls absolutely ruined ‘You’re the One That I Want’ from Grease and then some locals got up and absolutely ruined ‘Country Roads’ - it was absolutely fabulous to watch and I enjoyed my rum and coke with a smile before heading to sleep.

10th of February 2018 - Siem Reap > Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Woke up first thing, jumped on another really uncomfortable minivan and headed out. Upon stopping for a much needed cigarette I got talking to a Mexican girl called Juana, who was teaching English in China and was taking a quick travel break for Chinese new year. She was immediately likeable and funny, and said how she had been to Phnom Penh before on her travels, so I asked if she’d show me any nice places. We swapped instas and arranged a meet for dinner at a Thai restaurant that she said was the best food around and went our separate ways. 

    The hostel seemed nice enough and to keep myself busy I checked out and decided to go and check out the royal palace which was only a 15 minute walk away. I was completely uninterested in finding out about the royals to be honest (royal families do nothing for me) - but one thing you can always appreciate is the architecture. Every structure was brilliant, symmetrical and so intricately detailed, with all the interiors so eloquently dressed with various sculptures, art and trinkets. I spent a good two hours just walking around looking at everything - as well as people watching.
    I think this location could be the best so far for seeing people take selfies and have their picture taken - sometimes not even in important places. One chinese woman was posing in front of a bin with no building behind her and a disgruntled boyfriend in front of her. It’s a funny and dismaying thing to watch. Seeing that awkward and quite ugly moment which makes the desirable insta pic is hugely satisfying and I must have seen 100 different examples of it.
    I headed back and went straight out to meet Juana at this classy but quite expensive restaurant. I went for the standard vegetable green curry and I’ve got to say it was very nice, and we both split a bottle of wine which was actually quite a nice change of pace, and I quite enjoyed it with our conversation. After the general openers which had become second nature to me now, I realised that both of us were in a pretty similar situation. We were the same age, and we were both putting off reality for a while and gaining a bit of life experience.
    After the meal we headed into the night market and switched to a strong iced coffee, talking of books and all kinds of stuff. Juana said how China was to live in, with the overall message being that it was great, but everyone was fairly rude, and teaching rude children who didn’t want to learn was fairly unbearable at times. She told me about the books ‘Lolita’ and ‘Persuasion’, whilst I told her of the new book I’d started in preparation for my trips to the killing fields tomorrow - ‘Stay Alive my Son’. I said how awful I was finding it already, not knowing much detail about the regime, and Juana warned me that tomorrow would be unbearable but necessary in shaping my view of evil in the world. She teared up talking about her experience of it without even going into details, and we ended up going into colonialism from there.
    Juana discussed the UK’s terrible past with me and also enlightened me about Mexico’s history. Apparently they were being sweetened by Nazi Germany in WWII to put soldiers on the borders before America intercepted the communication. She also talked about how Mexico has been trying to form a Latin American union for trade for years but has been consistently blocked by the US. Typical.
    What brilliant conversation though, and I felt sad when she said that she’d be flying back to China tomorrow. I added the two books to my list and shared the tuk-tuk with her via her hotel to my hostel. And yet another enlightening person I’d met climbed out of the tuk-tuk with a wave and a smile, before melting into the night.
    After this the driver had no idea where he was going and went the wrong way until I got my phone out and guided him with directions. After he tried to overcharge me and this time I really had to tell him to lower the price. We eventually agreed on $4 and my mood was luckily salvaged instantly by a message from Marianne - she was coming to travel Vietnam with me!

11th of February 2019 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I can barely bring myself to write this entry due to having the most bleak day I think I’ve ever had on this earth. But I have to, because it really was a monumental experience.
    The bus arrived for The Killing Fields and S-21 Torture Museum at 9ish. Straight away we saw a video for context in the minivan on the way there, a kind of 40 minute documentary on the revolution of communism in Cambodia, under the hand of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge party. He came to power in the mid-70’s, and almost immediately sent the country into complete disarray and genocide, sending the cities populations and anyone he deemed to be educated (sometimes just by the fact they wore glasses) out to the countryside to work intensely and malnourished - killing anyone and everyone for literally no reason.
    Even though you know what you’re about to see nothing prepares you for it. At The Killing Fields I walked around with my audio guide and stood on the soil and concrete that had been the home for evil at its purest. I wept and I shivered all over when I saw the tree where, due to not wanting to waste bullets, the Khmer Rouge would smash infants and their mothers heads against until they died before flinging them carelessly into the adjacent ditch. I saw the ditch, whose mud still churned up bits of bone 45 years later when it rained heavily. I stood in a building where hundreds of recovered skulls from the ditches looked down ominously and helplessly. All those lives, all the memories, dreams and experiences taken prematurely by one man’s wretched and flawed ideology. A man who never had to pay for his crimes against nearly 2 million who paid for their innocence with pain and death.
    It still felt palpable in the air - some great leeching stink that muddies the atmosphere with sepulchral solemness. The feel of evil and hatred that leaves you convulsing at every turn and etches itself on your consciousness immediately and forever.
    The S-21 museum was similar. What was once a school in the heart of Phnom Penh was transformed from education to torture, where supposed suspects guilty of ‘capitalist enthusiasm’, or whatever trivial false claim that took their fancy in that particular minute, were taken into disused classrooms and were beat to within an inch of their life, as they tried feebly to answer questions to which there was no right answer. The classrooms had been left as they were at the time, and bare rooms housed metal wired frames with a thin or non-existent mattress, and examples of the tools lined on the torturers table such as pliers, knives and electrically charged instruments. And this was just the torture rooms. Other classrooms had been turned into claustrophobic and filthy cells of up to 20 per room, where prisoners were made to eat faeces or drink piss, and were beaten even more for whatever trivial reason the guards came up with.
    How is humanity capable of something like this? The audio guide spoke of a psychological study that investigated S-21, which suggested that the people who worked there - in admin and non-guard roles - meticulously documented every victim. They charted everything - death, method of torture, every weapon and every prisoner number. The study suggested that this was a coping mechanism on their part. By giving themselves clear singular roles and treating them like cattle, making it almost mundane, they made it more like a processing job rather than absolute tyranny towards humanity.
    It’s an interesting study, but what of the guards? This is what I thought of sitting on the bench outside and couldn’t comprehend. Can an idea of righteousness and justice make you do those things? And if so how? How can social indoctrination be so strong as to completely negate you of your instinctual morals of good and bad? And in fact, does this mean that we don’t even have those morals within ourselves? It’s a worrying and nihilistic train of thought, and to this day as I type it up I get choked up. That experience still sits with absolute potency in my mind and comes back to me frequently.
    I can’t really go on describing any more and I don’t really want to. I think it’s up to you to go and witness this yourselves.

For part Eleven click here