Cambodia! From Killing Fields to Angkor Wat

So yes, I know, it's been a full week since Charlie and I got back to the US, and I still haven't posted anything about Cambodia. BUT better late than never, right? :)

Phnom Penh

From Ho Chi Minh, Charlie and I took a bus to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. It was about a 8-9 hour drive, and crossing the border was surprisingly easy. We stayed in a hostel called Onederz (pronounced "wonders"... get it?) right on the water in the center of town. Of course, we were next to a night market and many other tourist shops but at that point in the trip we were tired of shopping and haggling, and really just tired in general. We only had one full day in Siem Reap, so we booked a tuk tuk tour through our hostel that took us first to the Killing Fields and then the S21 Museum - both educational sites from the Khmer Rouge. If you don't know about the Khmer Rouge time, or who Pol Pot was (don't be embarrassed, I didn't really know anything about it before I arrived in Cambodia), it's quite a story. 

First, the Killing Fields. This is where the Khmer Rouge brought tens of thousands of people to be slaughtered, and is now a mass grave site. We received a headset as we entered the Fields for an audio tour. This was nice, because when the stories got too graphic or hard to stomach, we could pause it and take off the headphones. I'll include some of the details of what we learned here.

So, for those who don't know, Pol Pot was a super radical revolutionary who took harmless Communist principles and turned them on their heads into deathly decrees. He was trying to save the country from starvation (they had been heavily bombed by the US from the Vietnam War), but ultimately his ideas became harsh, extreme, and fatal. He sent his army to all of the city centers in Cambodia to start marching everyone who lived there to the rural areas, because he believed that the "new people" (people with soft hands and light skin - educated people, doctors, teachers, etc) needed to be killed in order to have a country of only "old people" (farmers, pretty much). Almost all of the "new people" were killed either as a result of the march or the forced labor or directly through being brought to these Killing Fields (there were a lot of them around the country). By the end of it all, 3 million people were murdered (more than 1 in 4 Cambodians at the time).

One of the most chilling pieces of this that I learned was the way captured Cambodians would eventually die. Prisoners were marched into this place with blindfolds on, and nobody living outside or around the Killing Fields knew what was going on inside. At night, because the Khmer Rouge didn't have bullets or guns, they would use farming tools like hoes, shovels, pick axes, etc to bash in the heads of prisoners. In order to cover up what was happening, they would blast propaganda music to cover up the moans of the dying.

Some of these pictures and information is really disturbing. Feel free to skip to the Siem Reap section if you want.

This is the main pagoda, where hundreds of skulls that were found and used for research on what actually happened here were on display. I did not take pictures of the bones. They all had cracks or holes in the back of the skull, showing how brutal their deaths were:

Some signs on the grounds, explaining how horrific it all was:

The tree where the speakers hung (left) and the collected clothes found in the mass graves (right):

Then we went to S21, which was a high school before the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison. They would capture "new people" and keep them here until they "confessed" to some made up crime. They were brutally tortured until they wrote and signed a confession (usually they confessed to some sort of crime against the Khmer Rouge principles, like taking more then their fare share of food, or knowingly helping foreign institutions, or really anything to stop the torture), and once they signed their confession they were sent to a Killing Field to die. There seemed to be this really gross underlying assertion that the soldiers weren't doing anything wrong because all of the people who were killed had "confessed" to something that rendered their death. It seems like no matter who the "bad guy" is in situations like these, they always justify it somehow.

The rules that the prisoners were to follow while in the prison:

 This is where prisoners were kept while they were being tortured. There were nearly 50 rooms like this, and in each room you can see a picture on the wall of what was found there (usually a dead body chained to the bed and heavily mutilated). There are still blood stains on the floors and ceilings.

 

I didn't take many pictures during all of this because it didn't really seem like something to take pictures of. The audio guides at both the Killing Fields and S21 were brutally honest and chilling. Cambodia still has a lot to reckon with in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge (it's been only 40 years since it ended). Pretty much everyone living in Cambodia now is related to someone or knew someone who was killed during the Khmer Rouge. I learned a lot from this experience, and I know there is more to learn about it all, but I was thankful to have experienced this story in the place where it happened.

Siem Reap

We flew to Siem Reap and stayed in the Lub d hostel there (remember Lub d from Koh Samui in Thailand a million years ago? haha). We had two days in Siem Reap in order to explore the Angkor Tom and all of the temples within it. "Angkor" means big and "Tom" means city. There is also Angkor Wat, which means big temple, and that is the most famous temple within the Angkor Tom area. Charlie and I booked a private afternoon tour the first day, and a sunrise tour the second day we were there. I'll include basic information about these temples, but there are tons of stories and facts that go along with these pictures that I won't include because, honestly, it's more interesting when you're actually there. And, these temples are gorgeous and they speak for themselves!

Here is the Banteay Srei Temple, built late 10th century, and nicknamed the "Lady Temple" because of its pink stone and its many female gods depicted in the stones:

Here is one of the entrances into Angkor Tom. The gods are on one side and the devils on the other, pulling the snake back and forth and forever churning the ocean. Notice that all of the heads are missing - after the Khmer Rouge, Cambodians were so poor that they broke into these temples and cut off the heads of nearly all of the statues in order to sell them and make money to feed their family. Most of the Buddha statues in all of the temples are headless.

Unfortunately I forgot the name of this temple, but it's gorgeous!

OK, so on the first day I didn't take enough notes and I forgot the names of the temples we saw. This one was a healing temple (actually, it was considered their hospital!), and people used to go here when they were sick. There are four square ponds that represent each element, and when someone was sick they would be told by a doctor which element they lacked, and they'd bathe in and drink from that pond:

We went to a very tall temple at the end of the day to see the sunset:

The next day, we woke up at 4am (!) to join a group tour from our hostel to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat, the largest and most famous temple in Angkor Tom. I took more pictures of the sky than the actual sunrise, because the sky changed colors literally every two minutes. 

 Here is the view everyone was there to see:

And here's a picture of everyone taking pictures of the sunrise:

Some facts about Angkor Wat:

-It was built between the  years 1113 - 1150, with the help of 100,000 slaves, 300 million tons of rock, 4,000 bamboo rafts, and 7,000 elephants. 

-It is the highest temple in Angkor Tom and it is forbidden for new temples to be built taller than it.

-30% of the temple has fallen down, but the rest remains as it did when it was built.

 These are the Absara, the heavenly dancers, and there are 1,862 of them in Angkor Wat:

It was built as a Hindu temple that honored the god Vishnu, but was later converted to a Buddhist temple when a king at one point converted to Buddhism, and then was converted back to Hinduism later on. When it became Buddhist, they added sculptures and statues of Buddha, but when it went back to Hinduism people added beards to the carvings of Buddha or simply carved them out of the stone.

Here are some carvings. The one on the right depicts heaven above, humans in the middle, and hell below:

The temple is huge, with 12 towers total:

 Views from the outskirts of the temple:

Then we visited Ta Phrom, which is dubbed the "Tomb Raider Temple" because the movie was filmed there. Some quick facts about this temple:

-50-60% of it has fallen down, because the temple was built in a rush due to fact that the king that built wanted to build 5 temples during his reign. 

-It costs $10,000 USD per day to film here.

This temple has so many cool trees that are centuries old and that have roots that go in a million directions before they finally find the ground:

Lastly, we went to the Bayon Temple, which is located at the dead center of Angkor Tom. 

-It was originally built Buddhist, and later turned Hindu. 

-It was built between 1181-1218

-Originally it had 49 towers, but later 5 were added to total 54 towers (which was a symbol of how many provinces the kingdom of Cambodia had back then).

-Now, half the temple is Buddhist and half is Hindu in attempts to keep the peace between the two religions and prevent further destruction.

-Each of the 54 tower has four faces, facing the four cardinal directions, representing Buddha, Vishnu, Krishna, and the last one is unknown.

-Many of the carvings depict the Cambodian Kingdom's win in the war with the Champa Kingdom.

The next day we took a plane to Bangkok and had one day of rest before we flew back to LAX!

Well, that's it! We actually managed to travel through three countries in 7 weeks and live to tell the tale! I will do another post that lists what we packed, mistakes we made, and things to know for next time (mainly I do these posts so I don't forget and to remind myself if I ever go back!). For those of you who read the whole journey - thank you! I hope you enjoyed seeing what we saw. This was a life changing trip, and we are so glad we did this! We met some incredible people and saw things I never thought I would see with my own eyes. For now, I will probably need to break from traveling (apparently it's time for me to return to the real world), but there will be more adventures like this one in my future for sure! :)

Ho Chi Minh City!

Getting to Ho Chi Minh from Da Lat was a wild ride. We had booked a van to take us, but when we arrived at the specified pick up place the van never showed up! We took a taxi back to our hostel and asked them to book a regular bus for us, but when we got to the bus station the bus they booked had left! Thankfully another bus was leaving in 30 minutes, so we got on that one and headed to Saigon.

We got there in the evening, and the travel difficulties were not over! This time the problem was finding our hostel - called Bui Vien Hotel (by the way, "Bui Vien" is the name of a very popular walking street with blaring music and tons of street food. It reminded us of Kao San Road back in Bangkok at the beginning of our trip). Google Maps doesn't seem to work well at all here, so after walking for an hour we just gave up and walked into a different hostel to spend the night. Thankfully, the next day we found our original hostel (after they sent very detailed instructions in an email). Once we checked in, we headed out to the War Remnants Museum.

Charlie and I watched my dad's documentary Sir! No Sir! earlier to get re-acquainted with the Vietnam War before going to the museum. I was really grateful I had watched the film because pretty much the entire first floor of the museum is, essentially, my dad's film in museum form. Most of the people and events that were featured in his film were in the museum. Oh, and so was my dad!

Here he is at the summit put on by the War Remnants Museum in March of 2018 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the My Lai Massacre (hint, he's in a checkered shirt under the Sir! No Sir! poster!):

As I made my way around the first floor of the museum, I was fascinated by how much of it was dedicated to the GI movement in the US. It seemed very important to the Vietnamese that many American citizens were protesting the war at the time. Oh, and what we call the "Vietnam War" is called the "War of US Aggression"here. Another surprise as I walked around was seeing that there are clips of Sir! No Sir! being played in the museum!

The second and third floors of the museum are much harder to swallow. We walked through the exhibit in quiet horror as we saw graphic images of American soldiers murdering poor Vietnamese peasants and read stories of the lies and hatred that fueled this war. The hardest part to stomach was the section of the museum dedicated to victims of Agent Orange - pictures of both people who were sprayed with the chemical directly and their children who suffer from severe and painful deformities were haunting, to say the least. We had to go outside at one point to take a few deep breaths of fresh air.

Overall, the museum was done very well, and really made us more aware of the impact of the war on Vietnam as a whole, and how that impact still is very much alive today.

The next day we took some time off to rest and recuperate. On our third day in Ho Chi Minh, we took a tour of the Cuchi Tunnels.

About 2 hours outside of Ho Chi Minh City, the Cuchi Tunnels is a historical site where Vietcong soldiers dug an elaborate series of super small tunnels to hide from American soldiers and attack without being found. On the tour we learned more about how creative the Vietcong was when it came to weapons and war tactics. While the Vietcong were waiting for their Russian allies to send them guns, which they did not have, they made traps with sharpened bamboo and shrapnel and bomb shells left over from American weapons. The traps were hid in the jungle floors and looked extremely painful:

They would search for "dead bombs" or "blank bombs" that the US had dropped but hadn't exploded, and then saw the bombs in half to use the dynamite powder to make their own land mines. In order to keep the tunnels from getting rainwater in them, they would use ant hills as ventilation so as to both ensure no rainwater got in and to effectively camouflage their vents.

They had small rooms within the tunnels that served as kitchens, and they would strategically place their chimneys next to bomb craters so that if American troops smelled smoke they would assume that it was leftover from the bomb. Their knowledge of the land was what allowed them to build these tunnels in ways that were sustainable and that worked. We got to crawl through one of them (they're super small!) which was wild. Here's Charlie in one of the entrances:

At the end of the tour, they showed us a propaganda video that seemed to be a sort of recruitment video for the Vietcong, or at least a video supporting the Vietcong. Something that stood out to me was that most of the stories they told of the soldiers were stories of Vietnamese wanting revenge on the American soldiers, and that hatred and resentment being the force that fueled their drive to fight. Their hatred for the common enemy was strong, unlike the apathy and (ultimately) outrage and disgust felt by American GIs about the war.

Charlie asked our tour guide if Vietnamese people hate American tourists, and he said that they actually love American tourists. He said that they know that the war wasn't supported by a lot of American citizens, and they understand that it wasn't what all of America wanted - that's why they "just hate the American government" but not the people.

Ho Chi Minh was our last city in Vietnam. The next day, we boarded a bus that would cross the Cambodian border and take us to the Cambodian capital - Phnom Penh. In my next post I'll talk about the two very different cities we visited in Cambodia, with the first being full of horror as we learned about the Cambodian Genocide and the Khmer Rouge just 40 years ago, and the second being filled with awe during our exploration of the gorgeous centuries-old Angkor Wat temples.