Matt's been complaining about his backpack and eyeing up the backpacks of lighter travellers for a while now. He does not want to get rid of his beloved pack and so, instead, we decided to post our bulkier winter stuff to Australia where we can meet up with it later.
After spending much of the morning being sent this way and that, looking for the small, local Post Office, we were getting hot and a bit frustrated. We stopped at a posh supermarket for water and asked a British guy there if he knew where it was. He said that he would advise against sending anything from Cambodia as 'they even nick the stamps' and to wait until we got to a 'proper country'.
I was fairly put-off by this but Matt just said that it fit in with what he'd read in the guide book and that he thought it was worth sending it via Cambodian equivalent of DHL so we hopped in a tuktuk to the larger Post Office. We soon found out that it was nearly $80 to send 4.5 kilos via EML though actual DHL would have been about $250! To send overland was $32 dollars and I wasn't sure if I wanted to pay that much money for someone to steal about £150 worth of my stuff but Matt had got excited by the prospect of having more room in his bag and was going to send it anyway so I gave in. We wished we hadn't brought expensive things but since we would never have fit winter stuff in our bags or been able to pick them up if we didn't have technical stuff, I'm not sure we had a choice. Now we just have to wait 3 months or more to see if they arrive at Roy and Colleen's in Australia.
Weren't sure whether to go to the Killing FIelds (Choeung Ek) and see more terrible tragedy or just got to the palace and have a look around something pretty and pointless. It's very difficult hearing the details of genocide and torture and we very much got the point yesterday but, in the end, we both still felt like the right thing to do - despite the fact that they've been privatised and the money goes to a Japanese firm instead of Cambodia.
We happened upon a good tuk tuk driver who spoke little English but was honest and we took the 14km journey to Choeung Ek. The people who were taken there were told that they were being relocated and apparently had no idea of their fate. Given their lives under the Khmer Rouge so far I doubt that many of them were truly oblivious and I still couldn't help but imagine them couped up in a truck, heading into the unknown under the cover of darkness.
First impressions of Choeung Ek were much different to what I'd expected. I'd anticipated farmer's fields and a dark, maccabre mood but instead it was more like a pretty little park with a lake and some signposts. There was of course a sombre, sincere mood but it had been styled more like a memorial garden in many ways. Somehow it made it even more disturbing to imagine the horrors that had happened there amongst the sunshine and flowers.
One of the most appalling things was that the mass graves which had held so many were just so small. Several hundred people in a shallowish hole that you could hop, skip and jump over. It really struck me that skeletal people don't take up much space. Simply horrific.
The audio tour contained a good mixture of fact and personal experience as it led us round key points, and enabled people to avoid conversation and eye contact. Since most of the stations were informative signs, I decided to take photos so that I could use it for teaching at some point. It made me feel grim still but there was a very different atmosphere to S-21 yesterday and was very much about passing on knowledge to help avoid further atrocoties in the future.
Though most of the site was actually very peaceful and rather poignantly beautiful now, there were obviously still so many heartbreaking points. The one which clearly effected everyone very badly was the site of the grave of many naked mothers and children. There was a tree next to it where babies had been swung by their feet to crush their skulls against the trunk before being dropped into the hole where their mothers had been bludgeoned to death. There must have been hundreds of colourful woven friendship bracelets draped around the fence and hung on the bark of the tree where people had left them as a mark of respect.
We had to be careful as we walked around because, even though most of the major bones had been excavated and layed to rest in the Memorial Stupa, many more bones and rags slowly surfaced from the ground with the rains and the shifting of earth. On the site there were two boxes to house these harrowing remnants as they emerged: one for clothes, blindfolds and bonds and the other for bones and teeth.
The Stupa itself was very striking and contained nothing but shelves upon shelves of skulls and bones, categorised into age and injury. Many of the skulls were fractured as bullets were precious and so almost everyone there had been killed using farming tools and brute force. Though others had been killed using other 'natural' means such as having their throat slit with sharp leaves.
Our last stop was the museum on site, where there was more info on the lead members of the Khmer Rouge and a little on those who had been brought to prosecution. Unlike in S-21 where many of their faces had been gouged off the boards there, the photos of them remained intact and they looked frightfully ordinary. It's always hard to believe that such montrous actions do not leave more of a trace.
We were both pleased that we had been but we would also admit to being quite relieved that we could drive away from it, unless S-21 which sits darkly in the middle of the city.
We were dropped off outside guesthouse but had to find a Canadia bank ATM so there was no chance to hide under the covers and think about what we'd seen. As we passed the stadium, we noticed lots of people seemingly dancing around the rim of it so we took a closer look. It felt quite off going into a stadium without having to pay anything or speak to anyone but it was full of ordinary people exercising. We passed several volleyball matches and football matches outside on the flat section and then made our way up the hill to the top level of the seats (I'm sure there's a technical term but I don't know it!) where several large groups of people did aerobics to loud, distorted music. Down below us there were people running around both the bleachers and the track: some wore sports clothes but most just had on their work clothes.
After heading down the steps into the 'bowl' of the stadium, I couldn't resist and Matt went to sit down while I did a couple of laps in my flip flops. We're so used to being crowded or penned in in many ways that it was a real relief just to be able to run, unhindered and without having to be self-conscious. The sun was going down, it was getting cooler and there was a tremendous atmosphere; I just wished I was a little fitter so I could have carried on for longer.
When I stopped, Matt was sat talking to a Cambodian Mr.T. who was wearing camoflauge t-shirt, trousers and radio, and was fiddling with his handcuffs while he smoked a huge cigar. I wasn't sure if he'd picked up a nutter but it turned out that he was in the Cambodian army and worked defending the Thai border. We weren't sure why he was in fatigues but he was a huge fella so weren't going to question it.
We finally found the ATM and after a quick stop to admire the huge range of extraordinarily expensive Lock & Lock tupperware in the flashy mall, we bought fruit and a French stick and went back to our room for an early night.
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