death by traffic in saigon

I visited Naples, Italy, 18 months earlier and thought that the traffic there was unlike anything in the entire world. Then the following year, I went to Egypt and found that the traffic in Naples was more like a parking lot at Leisure World comparatively. Now, in Saigon, the traffic makes Egypt pale in comparison on the mayhem scale. I’d say about 70% of the traffic are motorbikes, and there is an average of two people per motorbike. At an average stoplight, I would surmise that there are no less than 100 bikes lined up waiting for green, none of which adhere to the majority of the traffic rules which I can only assume are in place. You might see as many as 30 bikes lined up right next to each other at the front of the pack spread over four lanes. If there is two feet for a motorbike to fit into, it will find that gap, and it will fill it.
Crossing the streets as a pedestrian can be quite daunting at first. I spent the better part of an hour walking around town, doing my best to head in the direction I was convinced my hostel was, and stopped to watch the traffic on several occasions and try to figure out how the pedestrians were getting across without getting maimed. It was completely Greek to me until the point at which I had a traffic epiphany, and it just clicked. The secret to crossing the street is this: don’t hesitate. What happens is when you step out into the street, the oncoming automobiles, typically motorbikes, see you step into the street, and veer in a direction to dodge you, either to their left to stay out in front of you, or to your right to swing in behind you, either way, they expect you to keep moving forward and plan to compensate for your presence. The accidents I saw and the ones that I was almost a part of came as a result of someone stepping out into traffic and then getting scared and stopping, causing the person that was going to swerve right to go behind you to now hit you since you aren’t where you were supposed to be. While it may not seem like it by Western standards, the pedestrian has the right of way, the traffic may not stop for you, but they will certainly go around you, you just have to maintain forward motion with a goal in mind.
Once it clicked, it was a whole new experience; I found myself crossing the street unnecessarily simply because it was a bit exhilarating doing so. You step off the curb and it’s like the Red Sea is parting and you are walking through it, protected and invincible; of course, you’re by no means invincible though. Speaking of sidewalks, the two times where I was most closely stared in the face by danger were when I was walking on the sidewalk and a motorbike was coming straight at me full speed. I assume a rule of thumb is in place for instances like this, but I have no idea what they are, so I winged it each time it happened, but I would jump one way or the other to try and get out of their way, a couple times nearly not making it, but each time emerging unscathed. The same rules apply to Egypt; I just wasn’t able to consciously come to a clear resolution about the way of the traffic until I got to Vietnam.
Much like every other country I’ve mentioned to friends that I was going to visit, I was clearly and sternly warned about my safety as an American traveler. In fact, one Vietnamese friend of mine (we actually dated a lone time ago, but I don’t think either of us would call each other an ex) said, “You’re going to get mugged; for sure.” So I was exceptionally apprehensive about my surroundings at first, but, much like every other place I’ve visited after having been warned, the people were very nice and I never really felt threatened or intimidated at any point.
Somehow I managed to find my way back to my hostel without so much as a glance at my map and promptly, upon my return, began feeling incredibly sick. Having gotten devastatingly sick in Rome the year before, I was well aware of the torment caused by being sick in a foreign country and am consequently overly careful about what I eat and drink in an attempt to not catch anything. That said, I was unsure of what could have gotten me sick because I’d been eating fairly conservative aside from the eel soup back in Siem Reap, but it sure felt like I was getting sick. Preparedness goes a long way when you’re traveling, because if I had to find a pharmacy in that state it probably wouldn’t have happened, but I had a virtual medicine cabinet in my toiletry bag, so I loaded up on Airborn, Vitamin C, Echinacea, and Tylenol and passed out around 4:00 p.m.

vietnam war remnants museum

Picking a guesthouse out of Lonely Planet is a bit of an art; there are several ways of doing it, but I like to go with the “close your eyes and point” method, which typically works out pretty well. My driver delivered me to the place I requested and to my surprise, when I walked in it was your run-of-the-mill internet café. The old lady sitting by the door with a pen, paper, and a stack of money seemed to be the person in charge, so I asked her if there were any rooms available, unsure if this was even a guesthouse. She just looked at me and smiled, not even really acknowledging that I had asked a question. I repeated myself two more times before I started feeling kind of awkward and began leaving when a younger guy came out of the rear of the room drying his hands as though he’d just washed them and apologized for his mother who doesn’t speak a single word of English and is fairly deaf, and asked me if I was interested in a room. He showed me upstairs to one of the rooms he had, which, to my surprise, was a dorm room. I asked if he had single rooms, and he said he only had dorm rooms. This was to be the only hostel-like place I would stay at during my time over there.
It was your standard setup; eight metal framed bunk beds, a bathroom for everyone to share, a makeshift shower that is more like a shower head in the corner of the bathroom, and a veranda big enough to accommodate two people. It cost three dollars, so I took it, and set my bags down on a bottom bunk. The city was calling my name, so I raced back downstairs, through the nerds in the café, and out to the streets to find a moto to get me to the War Remnants Museum. There aren’t tuk-tuks here like in Thailand and Cambodia, just guys on scooters who will drive you where you need to go, they call these motos.
My moto driver didn’t speak any English, he was a very old man with a few missing teeth and a scooter from the late 70’s, but he knew just where I wanted to go. I paid close attention to delineating landmarks because I wanted to walk back to the hostel.
You would never guess you were standing in front of a museum from the outside. High walls surround it, but when you walk through the main entrance gate, you are bombarded with relics. The courtyard boasts the likes of tanks, fighter planes, bombs, massive canons, and helicopters from both the American side as well as the Vietnamese side. I paid the few dollars it cost to get in and began walking around the circular area with pictures and stories posted on the walls of the inside of the building. Most of the images were gut wrenching, and I was surprised at how blatant the stories and captions were about assaulting the US. History books at home have a unique way of spinning everything to be pro-America, which makes sense, I don’t agree with it, but I can understand. With that said, I grew up with this preconceived notion that America were the good guys and Vietnam were the bad guys with respect to the war. Ignorantly, I never took into account the fact that there are two sides to ever story, and I was staring directly down the barrel of the other side. The images showed deformed and displaced men, women, and children who were exposed to agent orange, American soldiers killing Vietnamese who were unarmed, and had stories to go along with each, talking about how barbaric and relentless we were during the war.
I’d like to also point out, that the Vietnamese are obviously very biased about the outcome of the war as well, which, again, I completely understand; no country is going to glorify another for killing its children, but what I learned and feel is important is to be cognizant of is the fact that there are always two sides to every story, and understanding the complexities of a war requires having yourself grounded and aware of both sides.
A phenomenon I had never heard of, for reasons that will become obvious in a second, is a vast number of people derogatorily referred to as “Amerasians.” They are essentially the result of the American occupation of Vietnam during the war and are the offspring of American men and Vietnamese women. Countless American soldiers either married Vietnamese women, or picked them up at bars on their time off from the front, or even raped the women in some cases, inevitably getting some of them pregnant, and then bailing out and neglecting their responsibilities to their children once the war was over.
The problem lies in the fact that the Vietnamese people does not accept these people, who retain American and Vietnamese blood, because they are “tainted” and are therefore unable to get jobs, often times leaving them homeless and helpless. Many of their families have disowned them and the country even neglects them in terms of healthcare and basic privileges that full-blooded Vietnamese are provided with. Once again, we can thank the American mindset for the misfortune and detriment that their offspring are enduring as a result of their disregarding their responsibilities. We, as a people, seem to have a habit of acting without thinking, and without fully considering the potential repercussions of our actions; a perfect example is the thousands and thousands of homeless men, women and children who are reduced to begging on the streets, unable to get jobs, because they have American blood in them.
Unable to deal with seeing such brutal images for an extended period of time, I got out of there relatively quickly and set out through the town to try and find my way back to my hostel.

bye bye cambodia, hello vietnam

When Lim picked me up at the dock the day before, I asked him how much the ride would cost, and he kept telling me, “It’s all up to your kind”, basically telling me the price was dependant on how kind I felt like being, and how good of a job I thought he did. When we got back to the guesthouse, we began saying our goodbyes, because I was leaving the following morning, and when it came time to pay him, I gave him 40 dollars, the amount it would cost him to pay his two months rent and to get him out of the hole, then I gave him 1200 riel and told him to buy Kevin a coconut, on me. He began crying, and that, in turn, made me well up. It is an unbelievable feeling being able to help someone in need, especially when they aren’t expecting it. The difference I made in that man’s life I don’t think I’ll ever fully comprehend because I’ve got luxuries like credit cards to fall back on if I hit hard times, or at least I can rest assured that I’m not going to get pulled over and shaken down by a couple crooked cops on my way home at 4:00 a.m. to see my 20 month old son. Much like the monk in Siem Reap, he wasn’t sure how to thank me. I simply told him to do as I asked and buy his son the coconut with the riel, and to get himself out of trouble with his landlord. He thanked me over and over, more and more profusely, and we shook hands, a long handshake, and we said goodbye, again, knowing I would never see him again.
I sat on the deck of my guesthouse and just stared. Several different feelings overtook and overwhelmed me; I felt preposterous for making Lim sit and watch me spend his entire month’s rent on 20 bullets for an AK-47. I wished I could take those bullets back and give that money to Lim for he and his family rather than to the guys offering cows up for slaughter to willing tourists. It made me happy that I have come to a place in my life where I don’t care about the material things that perpetually consume so many that I live around and am surrounded by at home when there are people across the world starving for a fraction of what people spend on a pair of jeans. That said it also made me question my desire to stay in the States and work in order to “succeed” when I could easily move abroad and make a difference in countless lives. Is it selfish for me to stay at home and take my ability to travel for granted? What is it that makes me so special? I was blessed by being born an American, why am I entitled to rights and liberties that should be standard for humans, not just Americans? I realized that I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand and appreciate how good I have it, but contrary to my previous opinion, I don’t think it’s due to ignorance, I think it’s legitimately not possible for me to ever completely understand the way of the world in its full capacity.
Trying to sleep was futile, I had to be up in five hours to catch my bus to Saigon, and it didn’t help that I woke up to literally the loudest thunder I’ve ever heard, maybe even the loudest sound in general. It was so loud that I was actually scared; it felt and sounded like the world was ending. That was my actual thought process, “Holy shit, thunder this loud can’t be OK, the world is exploding.” I even packed all of my things in the middle of the night just “in case.” I’m not sure what I thought was going to happen, or what having my things packed was going to do to help me in case it was in fact God coming down and killing everyone with thunder. Torrential doesn’t even begin to explain the type of downpours that were taking place either, so it was no surprise when there was four inches of water on the ground in front of the guesthouse in the morning.
I was supposed to wake up at 6:00 a.m. to catch a 6:30 shuttle to
the bus station where my 7:00 a.m. bus was supposed to get me to Saigon. My “alarm” on my watch goes off and I head out to the check in desk/bar/restaurant at 6:20, only to find out that its actually 7:20 and that the shuttle never showed up, the bus was already gone, that was the only one of the day, and that if I wanted to buy some weed, he had exceptionally good stuff that day.
By this time I had mentally left Phnom Penh already and was hell-bent on getting to Vietnam that day, so I settled my bill at the guesthouse, declined the good weed, walked through ankle deep water through the courtyard, hired the first tuk-tuk I came across, and took a straight shot to the international airport.
My tuk-tuk driver was cool, he said he would wait for me while I went inside to see about getting a ticket since I didn’t have one, and right as I walked through the door, I looked over my shoulder to see him drive off without looking back.
The Vietnam airlines desk had a very cheerful staff and was very willing to work with me. Apparently it is unheard of to show up at the airport without a ticket, because they looked at me like I was a complete asshole, but once I explained my situation, and told them that I had to be in Saigon for an incredibly important business meeting that didn’t really exist, they were implored to help me. In retrospect, it’s tough to imagine them taking me seriously as a businessman of any kind considering my aesthetic. Not only was I wearing the same thing I’d been wearing for the couple days prior, but now I was running on no sleep and had been rained on all morning. I looked like shit.
They managed to get me on a flight a mere two hours later, so three hours and an uneventful flight later, I was in Vietnam. One of those countries that I grew up hearing about and studying but never thought I’d ever actually arrive in, Vietnam was more like a legend than a place I thought I would ever visit. Still suffering from years of war, it was sure to be an interesting country, and excitement was overwhelming me as we landed at Ho Chi Minh City international airport.

a glimpse into the life of a cambodian

Upon leaving the restaurant I walked out to where I was dropped off and found Lim lounging very luxuriously on a grassy knoll on the river’s edge drinking a can beer through a straw and eating some of the fish jerky made famous back on the streets of Arranya Prathet on my way into Cambodia. As per usual, when he saw me he jumped up and started heading for the tuk-tuk as though I was in a hurry. I urged him to sit back down and finish his beer. Before I could get situated he insisted that he go across the street to the lady selling beers off of a cart to buy me one. He was thrilled that I was so eager to hang out with him and not just make him drive me here and there on a whim. It was a wonderful night out, so I kicked my flip-flops off, sat down in the grass next to him, drank our warm beers through straws, and we began talking. The story that ensued changed my life.
Lim is 32 years old, has been married for three years and has a 20 month old son named Kevin. The Khmer Rouge murdered his father, his brother, and his sister, and his mother just recently fell and broke her elbow; she is very old. He and his family live in a room out in the country because the city is too expensive to live in; his rent is 20 dollars per month and he is two months behind on it. If he fell behind one more month he would be evicted leaving he and his family homeless. Lim supports his wife, his son, his mother, and his wife’s mother, father, and aunt. Kevin, Lim’s son, was recently very ill and had to go to the hospital with bronchitis. The government, and hospitals especially, are so corrupt in Cambodia, that when he got his son to the hospital, the doctor said, “How much money do you have?” You can’t get into the hospital without paying; if your child is dying, but you have no money, your child will die. Instead of telling Lim how much the procedure would cost, the Dr. asked how much Lim had and that became the price of his work. Lim considered selling his tuk-tuk, which he still owes $200 on, but that’s the only way he can provide income for his family. He emailed one of his old customers from New York that Lim invited out to see his house and the man wired him 100 dollars, which, combined with Lim’s savings, saved his sons life. Lim’s house is merely four walls and a door; there is no bathroom, no kitchen, no anything. He, his wife, and their son sleep on what sounds like is a twin bed because he said there is little to no room for the three of them. He is educated; he earned a degree in English from the university but cannot find a job. All of the jobs in Cambodia that can support a family are given to the family members of those who had it before them. You literally have to be born into a job. The only entrepreneurial thing they can do that doesn’t consist of selling nail clippers on the corner is to drive a tuk-tuk, and consequently, so many people are driving tuk-tuks that there aren’t enough tourists to keep all of the drivers busy making it virtually impossible for them to make a sustainable living doing the only thing they can do to earn a living. Lim and Savaht are partners so that when people go from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh like I did, or vise versa, they call each other and get each other business. Lim hadn’t had a customer in three days. He told me his son, Kevin, loves coconuts, which are 1200 riel, or about 30 cents. I asked him about the education system for children and he laughed. You have to pay by the hour for schooling, and it’s so expensive, only the people with actual jobs can send their kids to school. He said he couldn’t sleep at night because he is so afraid for his son’s future. He stays in the city from 6:00 am – 2:00 am every day and then has a 30-minute drive to and from his house, so he sleeps three hours a night, if he can sleep for those three hours. Sometimes when he is driving home, out in the middle of nowhere with no one around, police officers will wait for tuk-tuk drivers to drive by and will stop them, make sure they don’t have any Westerners in the tuk-tuk, and will take all of the money they have on them. If they protest, they are shot; Lim has had this happen to him several times. He said he hopes that someone will adopt his son and bring him to the United States; otherwise he will never have a fair chance. We talked for nearly an hour and a half on the grassy knoll before I asked to head back to the hotel to get some rest before the early bus the next morning. Just then we saw a black Land Rover drive by with tinted windows, I asked him who could afford a car like that when he and most of the population were struggling to eat. He laughed and explained that the government officials take all of the county’s money for themselves. In fact, the UN had recently audited Cambodia and found that none of the funds they were supplying the country with were actually reaching the people who needed it, they were merely lining the government’s pockets and buying them additional expensive cars while the majority of the country starves and their children die; the UN has severed all funding for the country.

a high school turned prison

Our next stop was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which is a high school turned war-time political prison known at the time as S-21 turned museum. When Pol Pot evacuated Phnom Penh and ended up killing all of the teachers, there was no need for the high school anymore, once named Tuol Svay Prey High School, named after a Royal ancestor of King Norodom Sihanouk. An estimated 17,000 people were imprisoned here and only seven survived, and only three of which are thought to still be alive. The majority of those imprisoned were former Khmer Rouge soldiers accused of treason, and the torture and living conditions were anything but humane.
Aside from cruel and unusual treatment in general, there was a list of ten cardinal rules posted on a large sign for all of the prisoners to see; this sign is still there today, and the translation reads:
1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

Approaching the prison was eerie enough, the coiled razor wire, high walls, and boarded up windows set the scene very vividly right away and was only surpassed by the view from inside the walls. There is a foundation set up for the families of those who died at the prison whom the two-dollar admission is donated to.
The complex is very simple; there are three buildings, which form a “U” shape and are three stories high each. There are a few palm trees lining the yard that the buildings all lead out to, which is interesting, palm trees are the last type of plant I would have expected to associate with a torture prison. The pull-up bars which children once used for P.E. class were still in the courtyard, but had been used for torture during the time the prison was in use from 1975 – 1979.
Of course, there was a walking tour to be done, so I started out walking around the first building, which you couldn’t enter, but all of the small classrooms had been turned into cells, and you could see through the iron gates and into them unobstructed. The first thing I noticed was the floor was made out of black and white checkered tile, it was quite strange, but in each of these cells there was a steel framed bed in the middle of the room with shackles attached at each corner of it. Prisoners were stripped of all their earthly belongings when the entered the prison, so there was nothing in these rooms except for the bed that the prisoners were chained to by all fours during the hours that they weren’t being interrogated and tortured.
The second of the three buildings was, in my opinion, the most powerful. The first floor seemed to be where they had general population, and had cells where several people would be chained together 24 hours a day; they even slept chained together. On the second floor there were what appeared to be isolation units. In each of the cells there were smaller cells built out of brick from floor to ceiling with a little wooden door in place to keep them from getting out; plus they were chained to the wall inside of their cells. Having spent time in jail, and visited a concentration camp or two in my day, I’ve seen my share of confinements, but these conditions seemed to be far worse then even those I saw at Buchenwald, at least there the prisoners were allowed to use a restroom, were able to walk around during the day, and were allowed to communicate with other prisoners.
Without a doubt, the third floor of this building was the most interesting part. They tore all of the makeshift cells out leaving two long rooms connected to one another by a small door. The walls in both rooms were lined with images of those who died while in captivity there, supplied by the families. These photos were accompanied by short stories from a respective family member talking about their loved one, and how they were unsure of their whereabouts. Many of the letters indicated that they were unsure of whether or not the family member was still alive. In the middle of these rooms there was a makeshift wall with headshots of thousands of the victims as they were photographed coming into the prison. In one of the cases, one of the letters indicated that the family was unaware of the whereabouts of their son until a family member came to the prison museum and saw their son’s headshot on this wall of pictures. I can’t conceive not knowing where a family member is until seeing their face among the thousands who perished at the hands of the self-righteous Khmer Rouge.
Building number two also brought with it the most appalling part of my few hours spent at the prison. Going down the floors back to the ground level, the stairs double backed leaving a little room of sorts underneath them on the bottom floor. I went around the corner into the little defunct space and found a plentiful amount of writing on the walls.
Having just seen some of the most horrific living quarters I’ve ever encountered, walking the stairs that thousands of people walked just before dying, envisioning the last breaths these defenseless and hopeless prisoners breathed, I was more than emotional, I was downright depressed; depressed to see how poorly humanity can treat its own kind, devastated by the events that unraveled in that very location. I’d expect mostly anyone to share these feelings of horror and contempt for the people responsible, what I found in this little cubbyhole of an area was something completely different. The first quote I saw on the wall was from Mahatma Gandhi, and I took special notice of it because I had just completed a short film about tolerance and used the quote in it, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” This quote is exceptionally powerful, especially when read in the context of the events that transpired on this very site. The second quote I saw was equally as powerful, however, not for the same reason. A Westerner, I can only assume an American, took it upon themselves to make what they probably felt was a profound statement about the world in which we live. “No wonder everyone hates us, they’re jealous of our way of life!” My jaw must have hit the floor, as I was unable to respond to this sheer statement of ignorance by someone from my home country. The only thing I could think was, “No, you idiot, they hate us because of people like YOU!” I couldn’t believe how apathetic someone who actually came to Cambodia could be. Why would someone come to Cambodia with that mindset? It was probably the same people I saw in Siem Reap who gave me a weird look for not having on Diesel jeans and a designer button up shirt with a Von Dutch hat, or the girls I saw at Angkor Wat who were climbing ancient statues and putting their head where the head of the statue once was for a cute little picture like the ones you might get at a fair or a carnival with the picture of a sailor painted on a large piece of plywood. And they wonder why we are treated with a bit of disrespect by other travelers.

hegemony or survival, right?

The ride back into town was an interesting one. Having just left one of the sketchiest places I’ve ever been, the illegal automatic shooting range, it was tough for me to focus on the experience at the killing fields. The adrenaline from the shooting range experience quickly wore off though, and the significance of the atrocity I had just seen bits of started to set in. How had I never heard of these Killing Fields? Auschwitz and Buchenwald are household names, why did this genocide get left out of our history books? These people were killed completely at random, with little or no explanation. Pol Pot essentially wanted a classless society where no one was more or less intelligent then the next person, so he killed off doctors, lawyers, teachers, dignitaries, anyone with an education. He couldn’t know the weight of his decisions at the time; he left an entire generation of Cambodians uneducated. What happens when you kill all of a country’s teachers? There is no one to teach the youth. Pol Pot single handedly had a devastating, lasting, and to this day, prominent effect on the state of his people. I really struggled with the fact that I had never heard the name Pol Pot, or of Cambodia’s Killing Fields. I was unable to wrap my head around America’s decision to rid such a catastrophic and culturally significant event of any relevance in our history books. The other thing it was tough for me to grasp is that this sort of thing took place a mere 27 years prior. I asked my mom about it when I returned home, asked her if she’d heard of Pol Pot, of the Killing Fields, of the genocide that took place in Cambodia, if she knew that it was the second most heavily bombed country in the world, second only to Laos, and bombed predominantly by us during the Second World War; she had no idea. Hegemony or survival, right America?
The expressionless faces of the tourists coming back towards town when I was on my way out made perfect sense; I felt myself not returning the smiles and good fortune to the people who were now on their way out. “You have no idea what you’re about to experience” is all I could think.
Food was the next priority for me, so I had Lim take me to somewhere I could get some authentic Cambodian cuisine. He recommended I go to the market on the outskirts of town that we were going to pass on the way back in. As always, when I jumped off the tuk-tuk, and scurried through traffic and into the chaos of the market, Lim stayed outside on his motorbike hanging out with the rest of the tuk-tuk drivers either waiting for their clients or hoping to pick one up.
While this market was considerably smaller than the one I’d been to the night before, it was immensely more populated and was bumping with energy. It was separated by content; there was a fish section where you could buy any type of fish most recently pulled out of the Tone Le Sap and other surrounding rivers, a cloth section where you could buy any color or pattern cloth to build your own garments, a fruit and vegetable section, which was comprised primarily of homegrown items I assume, several sections selling entirely miscellaneous trinkets and wares, and my favorite section, the automobile parts area. There were probably 30 or more stalls specializing in used and refurbished car parts. I don’t know the difference between a carburetor and a fuel filter, so I have no idea what parts they had, but I know that if you needed something for your car, you would certainly have to look no further than this market.
I make a concerted effort to not buy unnecessary things when I travel because, frankly, I don’t have anywhere to put them. Typically, though, I try to get my nephew a t-shirt and something small for my mom and my sister. My sister had just recently taken up cooking and loves Asian cuisine, so I found her a set of hand-carved chopsticks cut from a tree by the elderly woman I bought them from; although I’m fairly certain they still remain unopened.
The other exceptional part of this market was the serious selection of food vendors. There were a vast number of little bars where you could order food from among the frenzy of the market going on around you, it set the scene for a mighty strange lunch, which I gladly welcomed and enjoyed.
They all looked alike so I arbitrarily took a seat at one of the little bars, and was immediately asked what I wanted to eat. The woman who ran it legitimately didn’t speak a word of English, so we spent several minutes trying to figure out that I wanted chicken fried rice by pointing at different vegetables she had available and making motions like I was frying it and mixing it all together with a bunch of rice. There were no menus; you were just expected to know what you wanted. Had it not been for the young girl who sat a couple seats away from me, who knows what I would have ended up getting. She was studying English at the university in Phnom Penh, so she was excited to practice her English with me. We talked mainly about my trip, where I had been, what I liked about where I had been, etc. She was very nice, and much like most other youth in Asia, she seemed shy about her English skills. While she was open to talking to me, she was embarrassed by her pronunciation, but she was very cool so I bought her lunch. The one-dollar that it cost was a small price to pay for knowing what I was ordering.
Chaos really doesn’t do this market justice. Walking around the narrow aisles smelling the fish mixed with the grease from the used car parts, dodging the artful sales people slinging their crafty wares, and making a conscientious effort to not slip on the guts of the fish they were gutting right there in the market was a very surreal, memorable experience. Looking back through my photos, all of the ones I shot in the market are very blurry, but I feel like they are very representative of the fast-paced, hectic experience that is this local market on the outskirts of Cambodia’s capital.

an underground shooting range

Ignorantly, when I had read about “underground” shooting ranges, I was thinking that they were physically underground, not that they were illegal and no supposed to be happening. I’ve always enjoyed the underbelly of society, seeing it at least, not so much being a part of it. Lim and I get out of the tuk-tuk and walk with one of the guys over to a table where the negotiation is supposed to take place. The shooting range consists of high walls in all directions with trees in front of them, and in the middle, a long and skinny structure made of brick with an open patio type area on the near side. The building had slits in the walls at about five feet, the type of slits that one would imagine someone peering through with a machine gun poked through waiting to annihilate anyone within a hundred yards.
I sit across from one of the several guys who worked there; this one was obviously the leader of the pack and spoke relatively good English. He asked me what I wanted to shoot and handed me a literal menu that read:

Tommy Gun - .50/bullet
9mm pistol - .25/bullet
357 Magnum - .75/bullet
12 Gauge Shotgun – 1.00/bullet
30/30 Rifle – 1.25/bullet
AK-47 – 2.00/bullet
Bazooka – 100.00/missle
Pepsi - .50

Besides the Pepsi, I wanted the damn AK-47. I know they shoot like five rounds a second or something ridiculous, and there’s no way I was shooting less then a banana clip which he said held 30 rounds, but I certainly wasn’t spending 60 dollars to shoot a damn gun. We went back and forth, I had a Pepsi, and we talked about guns. Lim was sitting at the table behind me, not offering me much support in my negotiations, but I don’t know what I was expecting, he doesn’t owe me anything. I told him I only had 20 dollars on me and that I wanted 20 bullets for that. I’ve made a habit of carrying money on different parts of my body; twenty dollars in one pocket, 20 dollars in the other pocket, 20 dollars in my passport, 20 dollars in my bag, and 20 dollars rolled up in my hat. I even went so far as to roll a 100 dollar bill up, put it in a baggy, then cut a slit on the inside of my waistband of my shorts, and slid the baggy into the waistband. I do all of this for two reasons; I spread the money out all over my person so that in the event that I get mugged, hopefully they’ll get one of the bills, think they got all of it and be on their way. The second reason is because in situations like this, where in my negotiation I tell them that all I have is 20 dollars, and then I pull out a hundred, my bargaining power quickly diminishes. Just like if you try and talk a vendor down from five dollars to one dollar for something on the street and then once you get him, you hand him a five and ask for change. My reason for the money in the waistband is that again, if I were to get mugged and they take everything I have on me, I don’t figure they would think to look in the waistband of my shorts, so as a worst case scenario, I’ll have 100 dollars to get to an embassy, pay for bus tickets, stay overnight and buy food; and the baggy makes it waterproof!
We finally settle on 20 dollars for 20 bullets. I’m not sure how Lim’s commission structure works, but he looks happy when we come to a resolution; I bought him a Pepsi, too. They wanted me to pay right then, so I took one of my twenties out of one of my pockets, and a younger guy I hadn’t seen yet appears and tells me to come with him. He walks me to the entrance to the brick bunker that the patio is attached to and opens a door for me, leading me into a dark, musty, long tunnel of a building with a few targets at the end. He grabs one of their well-used AK-47s off the wall and hands it to me. The slits in the building allow creepy slices of light into the bunker, the dust reflecting off of the light in thin sheets. My gun guy sits down at the little chair in front of a second graders desk and opens the top drawer, revealing a mass of unorganized and arbitrary artillery. He rifles through the shotgun shells in search of 20 AK-47 bullets, brushing 9mm and 357 loads aside in search of the golden rounds. He gets 20 of them together and pulls one of the banana clips from the wall, loading a few of them in, then handing them all to me and tells me to do as he was doing, he’d be right back.
I struggle to get the bullets in; they don’t slide in like butter like they did for the guy. Are these old rounds? Will the jam, backfire? Should I be shooting this sketchy looking gun?
The main guy pops back in, checking on me, seeing how I’m doing, I tell him I’m good, wondering why he’s back now. He grabs the last few rounds and banana clip from my hands and loads them for me, looking down at it as he does so, and out of the corner of his mouth, he asks me which kind of target I want. Having seen different types, a man shooting at you, a man with his hands up, a full body one, all paper, I tell him I don’t care. He asks me if I saw the cows in the pasture outside when we came in. I confirm that there were indeed cows outside but don’t think anything of it, just eager to fire my 20 rounds. All he says is “Only one hundred dollars for you.” I tell him that we already agreed on 20 and that I’m good, I don’t want any more rounds; then, all at once, I got it. He points outside towards the cows and says again, “One hundred dollars.” He was offering me the cow. I look down the length of the bunker, into the dim lit depths of where my 20 dollars was going to end up, and sure enough, they had neglected to remove the last carcass from the range. There was a dead cow at the end underneath the hanging targets I was going to be shooting. In complete disbelief, I just shook my head and grabbed the AK back fro him. He acknowledged my lack of desire to murder a cow and he ducked back out of the range, and entered again the kid who was helping me load to begin with. He acted as though that never happened and started asking me if I knew how to shoot a gun, etc. I was given two pointers, squeeze the trigger, and lean forward, both of which I was familiar with. And with that, I squeezed, and shot the silky smooth most popular gun in the world. The rounds just sort of slid out without much recoil, I was quite surprised. I grew up around guns as a result of my fathers hunting hobby, and was expecting a kick like that of a shotgun, but was pleasantly surprised. That said, there was a bruise on my shoulder the next day in the exact shape of the butt of the gun.
After I pulled through a few rounds, my gun guy asked if I wanted to shoot fully automatic. I said, “Fuck yeah”, and he flipped a little switch; I leaned forward, squeezed and held the trigger, and shot like four rounds per second for about two seconds when I ran out of bullets. I’m not sure if that was the best 20 dollars I’ve ever spent or not, but it was certainly the fastest I’ve ever spent 20 dollars, that’s for certain. He promptly took the gun from me, hung it back on the wall, and we exited the sketchy shooting range, back out to the patio where Lim was sipping on his Pepsi.
Lim and I mounted the tuk-tuk once again and were escorted out of the compound. As we pulled back out onto the main road, the heavy steel doors were closed behind us by two of the guys, they looked around in all directions, suspicious of someone watching. I quickly got a picture of them closing the door, which one of the guys noticed, and didn’t seem very excited about it.

cambodia’s genocide

I set off in the direction that the trail told me to go, out into the fields, through the trees, and around holes upwards of six feet deep. The only way I can think to describe the feeling at the killing fields is to compare it to that of being at a concentration camp. I visited Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp just outside of Berlin the year before, and it was the same feeling. A feeling of being unsure how to feel, a feeling of bewilderment, and dealing with the inability to fully comprehend the pain and torture that went down on the very ground on which I was now standing, unable to fathom how one human could do something so horrendous to another human, perplexed as to how one man can generate such power over the masses to convince them that mass murder is the right thing to do. It just doesn’t make sense, being there, in the same place that thousands of people died, indiscriminately, and for no just reason.
The first thing I came to was what they called “The Magic Tree” which was a tall, gangly tree with numerous branches and vines running off in arbitrary direction with a sign posted in front of it that said, “Magic Tree – The tree was used as a tool to hang a microphone which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed.” Essentially the Khmer Rouge wanted to drown out the sound of their victims, so they hung a speaker in a tree to play music; I guess that was nice of them.
The holes in which people were buried were all over the place. The actual field I was in which is the only one that they have excavated was about an acre large, but they suspect the graves reach out acres and acres in each direction, they just haven’t gotten around to unburying the bodies thus far. Some of the graves have signs net to them telling how many bodies were found in that particular grave and the state in which some of the bodies were found. One such sign said, “Mass grave of more than 100 victims children and women whose majority were naked.” A few graves away there was another sign that read, “Mass grave of 166 victims without heads.” Similar to the gas chambers in German and Polish concentration camps, the victims weren’t just killed quickly and easily; they were tortured, stripped, mutilated, humiliated, raped, and then brutally murdered.
The next stop on the walking tour is another tree, this one slightly more horrific then the first. This one is called “The Killing Tree” and has a sign posted in front of it that reads, “Killing Tree against which executioners beat children.” As a human being, it is virtually impossible to stand before this tree, look at the nooks and crannies, the indentations and the gashes, and not feel deeply moved by the thought of hundreds, if not thousands of children being thrown up against the tree and beaten to death with unimaginable terror in the eyes and in their hearts. They couldn’t have any way of understanding what was happening to them or why. Having grown up in white suburban Orange County, these are feelings that I can’t even begin to try and understand or identify with. I stood in front of this tree, where children lost their innocent little lives, and tried to imagine the unimaginable, tried to think of how I would feel to have my precious nephew be put through that, and I can’t help but cry. The men that committed these crimes are often times no more than 16 or 17 years old, and were ignorantly, yet willingly, committing some of the most atrocious crimes of the century. I’ll never understand. We, fortunate westerners, will never understand.
There is no definitive number of victims posted at the site, but there is a monument that has been built to commemorate them. It is a very ornate tower built with classical Cambodian architecture and vaguely reminiscent of a wat. It stands at about four stories tall and inside is approximately 20 levels leading all the way up to the apex. The structure is only about 20 feet across with perhaps two feet of room to walk around the levels. With about 18 inches between each level, they were filled with the skulls pulled out of the mass graves. Seeing empty holes outside with a sign that says “100 people died in this hole” doesn’t do it any justice. Seeing the number of skulls pulled out of the graves all piled next to one another, some cracked, some split, some missing jaws, all with sunken eye sockets and prominent cheek bones, is really what set in the impact of where I was and what I had seen.

en route to the choeung ek killing fields

The ride out to the fields was adventurous in itself. They are located a good 30 minutes by tuk-tuk outside of the city. We passed through the most run-down part of the city I had seen yet. A lot of the apartment buildings looked like a bomb had exploded right next to them and no one ever bothered to clean up the rubble and clean the smoke off of the walls. Children were running around in hoards, who knows how far from home they were or if their parents had any idea where they were. Occasionally they would dart out towards the tuk-tuk and Lim would just smile and wave at them as though he didn’t almost obliterate them. I looked on in shock every time unable to comprehend the absolute fearlessness of these children. Every one of them had ear-to-ear smiles as well when they would make eye contact with me, I would wave and say “Sues’day” and they would return the salutation with a big wave to top it off. We got out of the city and were heading through the fields of endless green that met up with the horizon hundreds of yards away, all lined with irrigation channels that kids swam in void of any reservation about the health of the water. One of the more alarming things was the heaps upon heaps of trash lining sections of the road. It was literally uncanny how much trash was lying on the roadside in some of the stretches of road. My suspicion is that they don’t have dedicated landfills, so it just piles up wherever it piles up.
The fields turned back into houses and we were in a suburb on Phnom Penh. Dirt roads with no sidewalks, motorbikes with families of five on board, kids in little or no clothing running around, and aluminum siding held together by twine creating makeshift homes lined the streets once again. Like a page out of Babylon By Bus, the people living out here don’t seem to ever have any hope of being liberated from this poverty that is their lives. Adding the occasional insult to injury, dignitaries, high-ranking police officers and government officials drive by periodically in their all-black Mercedes S-Class cars with tinted windows so the people they drive by are unable to see the faces of evil.
We turned a corner and found ourselves driving over a bridge that swayed and creaked and flexed as we drove across, making it well known that it’s not going to last all that much longer. This turn brought us to a stretch of road similar to the one coming from Poipet into Siem Reap, nearly unnavigable. With potholes as deep as six inches and as wide as nine inches across with no more than a few feet in between each one, it made me thankful that Lim’s tuk-tuk had padded seats. During this stretch, kids were fully able to keep up with our pace running along behind, bicycles were passing us, and I was getting a headache.
Usually when you are sitting in the back of a tuk-tuk and you pass another tourist going the other way, it is common courtesy to smile, perhaps nod, sometimes wave, and occasionally say hi. We passed significantly less tourists on the way out then I had anticipated, and the ones that we did pass by were strangely, commonly, expressionless. I found myself feeling a weird vibe as we got further and further outside of the suburb and closer and closer to this gravesite of countless thousands of innocent people. It seemed as though the people we were passing had seen a ghost, almost like they were transfixed as they were on their way back into town. I wondered what was causing this seeming lack of enthusiasm, and didn’t really grasp the effect of the Killing Fields until we got there.

pol pot and his khmer rouge

Cambodia’s history is very dark. Pol Pot and his regime had an irreparable effect on the country and it’s people. This was taken from Wikipedia’s entry on Phnom Penh: “The Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. A new government was formed and the name of the country was changed to Democratic Kampuchea. Phnom Penh was full of refugees from the war. The new government drove all the refugees into the countryside without regard to the human consequences of their actions. Pol Pot also drew up death lists of former government officials who were to be executed on sight.
“Out of a population of approximately 8 million, Pol Pot’s regime exterminated one quarter, or almost 2 million people. The Khmer Rouge targeted Buddhist monks, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries, people who appeared to be intelligent (for example, individuals with glasses), the crippled and lame, and ethnic minorities like ethnic Chinese, Laotians and Vietnamese. Some were thrown into the infamous S-21camp for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Many others were subject to summary execution.
“Immediately after the fall of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge began to implement radical reforms following their own ideology and placed the former king, Norodom Sihanouk, in a purely figurehead role. The Khmer Rouge ordered the complete evacuation of Phnom Penh and all other recently captured major towns and cities. Those leaving were told that the evacuation was due to the threat of severe American bombing and it would last for no more than a few days.
“The ideological basis of the evacuations was largely unique to Cambodia and the evolution of the ideology of the Khmer Rouge. Cambodia did not have a traditional Marxist working class. To solve this ideological problem, Pol Pot and the rest of the leadership adopted the non-Marxist idea that peasants were the true working class. This, combined with the fact that Pol Pot and most of the other senior party members themselves had no working class experience (unlike Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh) led to an idealization of peasant life in Cambodian Communism.”
The next place I wanted Lim to take me to was to the infamous Killing Fields where the Khmer Rouge would take people, men, women, and children who were unable to be put to work in the fields, and would murder them, burying them in mass graves.