Sadness In A Beautiful Place

My three-day tour of the Mekong Delta turned out to be a truly marvellous trip, even if it was very touristy. The Mekong is one of the longest rivers in the world, and after travelling through China, Myannmar, Laos, and Cambodia, the river finally meets the sea in Vietnam, spilling out into one of the largest deltas on the planet. The land here is very fertile, so naturally there are rice paddies galore!

The trip was split between boat and bus, with the most amount of time spent on boats trudging through the brown silty waters of the Mekong River. The delta was absolutely massive, and even in three days we only saw one small corner of it. But what I saw I loved - floating markets, boats of every shape, size and colour, houses on stilts, bustling riverfront towns, rice paddies and palm trees, and lots of little brown naked children jumping up and down and yelling "Hello!!!"

The lower part of the delta was much more developed than I thought it would be, with houses and stores clinging desperately to the sides of this wide river. Upstream there's less people and more jungle, and it makes for an incredibly scenic ride. We had two nights in hotels and on our third day we cruised upstream right up to the Cambodian border. We jumped off the boat briefly to exit Vietnam and then one more time again to enter Cambodia a few metres up the river. Arriving in a new country by boat is definitely a cool experience!

Our last boat was quite large and we were able to sit up front in the sun as we entered Cambodia (country #5 for me on this trip!) I sat with three hot and spicy English girls and we basked in the sun and warm breezes as we gazed upon the lush Cambodian landscape. It's unbelievable how WIDE the Mekong is, and it was amazing to see all the tiny little bamboo and thatch villages along the banks. People seem really friendly here as with every passing village you'd have locals - especially those naked children - waving and yelling hello as you sailed by.

After our boat ride we took a bus for about an hour to get to Phnom Penh. The ride was extremely bumpy but through more beautiful landscapes. It's the wet season here and so the rivers are full - actually overflowing - and so surrounding the highway you'd have field after field flooded with water. Cambodia actually appears to be more water than it is land!

Arriving in the capital city you could feel a marked difference from Vietnam. Phnom Penh is calm, quiet, and very laidback. It definitely feels very 'Third World' as there's a lot of poverty and most of the streets aren't even paved, but it's got such a great atmosphere you can't help but be charmed. The Cambodians are some of the nicest, friendliest, most genuine people I've ever met. They're low-key, very easy-going, and always smiling (amazing, considering this nation's recent bloody history.) After checking into my guesthouse I went out for dinner and drinks with Cat (who's a dead-ringer for Baby Spice,) Amy, and Chloe and then called it a night.

On our first morning the four of us went our for brunch to this place called The Garden City Cafe, and we all practically burst out into tears when we saw the menu. It had a *breathtaking* array of breakfast items that none of us had seen in months and months. When our food came we gorged ourselves until we wanted to throw up. I had honey granola meusli with fruit and yogurt, and hashbrowns cooked with rosemary, and it was hands-down the best freaking breakfast I've had on this whole trip! It was a serious culinary orgasm!

That afternoon we went to the infamous S-21 prison which was just around the corner, and our breakfast high was quickly brought down to a deep, dark low. S-21 used to be a high school, but was turned into an interrogation and torture centre during Pol Pot's bloody reign of Vietnam. I won't go into all the long details of Cambodian's history, but basically this man decided to 'cleanse' the nation from top to bottom. He abolished currency, emptied the cities out into the countryside, forced people into slave manual labour camps, and opened 're-education' camps for all those who dared to question his power. This included ALL people in the country who were educated, former government officials, foreigners, monks, or anyone who was rumoured to have ties to the former revolution. During his reign it is estimated that more than four million people were tortured and killed, or simply just went missing.

s-21 was the largest of these detention centres, and from 1975 until 1978 more than 17,000 people were imprisoned there. Of all those who were taken to S-21 for questioning, only seven ever made it out alive. Prisoners were kept in tiny cells that used to the be the classrooms of the school, and eventually tortured in order to extract information or give false confessions. Most of the detainees died during this process in the most horrible deaths you can imagine, and those that did were later executed and buried in mass graves at the famous Killing Fields just outside of town.

Today S-21 is called the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, and visiting it is probably the single most depressing experience you'll ever experience. To wander through all the actual rooms where the prisoners were held, and seeing all the torture devices that were actually used, is incredibly gruesome. Even more horrifying are the thousands of mug shots of all the prisoners, and the photographs taken of their mutilated bodies after they died in the torturing process. It leaves you feeling shocked to the point of being numb. The sheer volume of sadness and misery in that place is indescribable. There's such a...heavy feeling in the air...just entering the grounds you can feel that this place is a concentration of evil. The walls drip with pain and suffering. The grief is nearly suffocating.

They also had some photographic exhibitions on display, where the lives of a few individual prisoners have been profiled, which makes the experience of visiting the museum a little more human. There was also a film that you could watch that told the story of two lovers who died during Pol Pot's reign, as told through the grieving mother.

Tuol Sleng does not seem like the kind of tourist attraction that one would want to voluntarily visit, but I think that it's an important experience for visitors. Living in the Western World, we're all so sheltered from the atrocities that occur in wars like this. Although we can never truly imagine the pain and suffering that the Cambodian people have had to go through, feeling just a small piece of their hurting by visiting S-21 reminds us of the darkness that can dwell in humanity, and reinforces the idea that things these should never, ever happen again. War is a horrible thing, and genocide the worst of all human evils, yet these things keep happening in our world. It makes you wonder if humans are actually evolving over time, or just finding new ways to kill each other.

The tourist attractions on my second day in Phnom Penh were much lighter and far less emotionally-exhausting. I visited the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda, which were incredibly ornate and beautiful, and the National Museum which was full of statues, pottery, and carvings collected from Angkor and around Cambodia. Most visitors breeze through PP on their way to Angkor, but it's definitely a city worth staying in for a few days. Tomorrow I myself am off to Siem Reap (where Angkor lies), and I'm looking forward to visiting one of the greatest monuments in the world.