It’s been a sobering, reflective time in Cambodia. I’ve been all kinds of out-of-sorts recently — too much bouncing around, too little spending time with friends — but I knew it was coming. Two months is a long time to be on your own. I’m starting to slow down the pace I’m traveling at for the rest of this trip through Southeast Asia; until then I’m just taking things easy, doing less, relaxing more.

But if some of my mood is just circumstantial, a great deal of it is Cambodia. I spent a lot of time traveling around Vietnam thinking about war. I’ve spent a similar amount of time in Cambodia thinking about genocide.¹ And both are deeply intertwined with the utterly disastrous foreign policy mistakes of the United States, so it’s hard not to feel some small measure of responsibility.

My first exposure to Cambodia was from the film Swimming to Cambodia, Spalding Gray’s monologue about his time filming The Killing Fields.² The US military pursued³ a series of bombing campaigns (and later, ground operations) which were intended to hurt the North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong who were taking refuge over the border. There were ultimately 500,000 tons of bombs dropped — more than the US deployed in the Pacific theater during all of WWII — and the resulting carnage killed around 100,000 thousand civilians and destabilized the Cambodian government sufficiently to allow the Khmer Rouge to eventually take over the country in 1975.

During the four years they were in charge, they implemented a brutal campaign intended to break completely from the past and become an agrarian worker’s paradise. Hundreds of thousands were systemically targeted and killed, and hundreds of thousands more died of starvation or fatigue or overwork.⁴ After the Khmer Rouge were finally overthrown⁵ the death toll had hit roughly 2 million people, or 25% of the pre-war population of the country.

I’m pretty sure everyone knows all that, but it’s important to be reminded of it from time to time. And while you can read about it or watch documentaries and understand all that, there’s really no substitute for actually being there. And so I went.

I had flown from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Pehn, largely because I couldn’t figure out what border crossing the bus used or how the visa-on-arrival policy worked, and I was sure I was less likely to run into problems at the airport. So naturally the first problem I ran into was with money.

Southeast Asia is the first place I’ve been traveling where I couldn’t use credit cards as a matter of course, so I’ve had to do the “How much am I going to need” guesswork, as well as generally paying extortionate fees to take out money.⁶ I needed to get cash at the airport to pay for the visa, only to discover my ATM card didn’t work for some reason. Luckily, I had a spare,⁷ took out what I thought was going to be $150 in the local currency, and ended up with $150 in US dollars.

The effective currency in Cambodia turns out to be US dollars. All the prices around town are listed in dollars. ATMs dispense dollars. You pay in dollars and get change in dollars.⁸ There’s a fixed exchange rate of 4,000 KHR to 1 USD,⁹ although the only time I needed to worry about it was trying to figure out change. I often found it easier to just make sure everything I ordered came to one whole dollar.

I’ll admit, I find the entire thing a little odd. It’s a sign of how integral tourism is to Cambodia, how weak their own currency is in the global economy. And it would have been fantastically convenient if I were traveling round-trip from the United States. But I’m trying¹⁰ to meet these cultures halfway; I’d just as soon not be so aggressively catered to.

So my time in Phnom Penh was taken up with recent history, namely the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. Tuol Sleng is the former primary school turned prison¹¹ turned museum. It’s nearly impossible to wrap your head around. The architecture is unmistakably a school of that era — I caught a strong resemblance in the tiled floors and layouts and materials to the place I attended grade school in the United States — but they’ve somewhat hastily mortared together bricks to create separate cells.¹²

Those are disturbing enough, but the real horrors are in the torture rooms. They’re mostly empty, now, save for the wire bed frames they’d chain the prisoners to, and occasional examples of the car batteries or various tools they’d use to extract confessions. But what sticks with you is the blood stains, pooled on the floors, still visible after all this time.¹³

After that, I visited the Killing Fields. There are thousands of them, scattered about Cambodia; the one at Choeung Ek is particularly close to Phnom Pehn and has been converted to a memorial park. It’s peaceful and somber, with the ability to take your time as you wander through the memorial and an audio guide that explains what you’re looking at.

What you’re looking at is the remains of the nearly 9,000 people who were murdered there. The regime was trying to save bullets, so people were clubbed to death or stabbed or suffocated under the weight of bodies piled on top of them or sometimes to weak and injured to do anything but die of exposure. The bones aren’t buried too deeply; prisoners were often required to dig their own graves, and the haste of the executioners and the general condition of the prisoners meant sometimes the bodies were only a foot or two under the ground. Most have been removed, but there are a number still there, still visible. Even now, when it rains, teeth or jawbones or other remnants will occasionally rise to the surface.

It’s nearly impossible for me to imagine people who would do this, on this scale. I can understand killing someone in anger, or even mobilizing a nation to war knowing you’re committing thousands or hundreds of thousands of people to die. But the vast majority of the people who did this weren’t sociopaths. They were the sort of faceless bureaucrats and administrators and guards Hannah Arendt talks about, the sort of functionaries you find in any society. It may not be particularly easy to do, but with the right mix of nationalism and indoctrination and political systems in place, you could do it just about anywhere.

But that’s why it’s so important to try to understand what causes something like this. You can see, in hindsight, all the events which led to that horror, all the decisions that were made, all the consequences, all of which ended in the murder of over two million people. And if you can see them, then, you can take a fresh view and open your eyes and try to see them now. And now, if you do, you have the opportunity and the responsibility to act.

At the center of the Choeung Ek park is a memorial stupa. It’s fairly modest, as stupas go, white with a gold roof, elegant in design. You can go in if you like. Inside are skulls, over 5,000 of them, recovered from the surrounding area and interred in the memorial. I’m certainly not squeamish, and I’ve cheerfully visited the Paris Catacombs and all manner of other crypts and tombs where the occupants were visible. But for once, sitting there in the shade with a soft breeze, after an hour wandering though the site and a morning touring the prison, I decided I didn’t need to see it for myself.

The last three days in Cambodia I spent in Krong Siem Reap, a tiny tourist town just outside of Angkor Wat and essentially a jumping-off point to explore that region. It served as a kind of antidote to the atrocities from the first couple days. Being kind of emotionally wiped out didn’t make me want to think or plan much, so I booked a guided tour of Angkor Wat and the surrounding area.

I had debated between the one-day and two-day tour, and I settled on two days, and I was very happy I did. I suppose I didn’t really understand the sheer size of the temples; Angkor Wat alone is about the size of Disneyland. But that’s only the start of it; Angkor Wat is simply the most famous of the religious sites comprising the Angkor Archaeological Site. There are more than a dozen temples sprawled over an area larger than Walt Disney World,¹⁴ all in various states of disrepair and restoration.

The first day of the tour involved getting picked up at the hotel at 4am, which gets you to Angkor Wat in time for sunrise. After a few hours there (and a brief stop for breakfast) we visited four other temples, then returned the second day at a much more respectable 7:30am to see another six temples. So that’s two eight hour days tromping around in withering heat.¹⁵ The bus¹⁶ was supplied with plenty of bottles of water and cool washcloths, all vastly appreciated. Even so, you really start to drag; stopping for a site you start to wonder if you really want to get out and tromp to the top of another one.¹⁷

But the answer always turned out to be yes. Each is different — the temples were built over a period of six hundred years — so you’d see different building materials, different sculptural traditions, different meanings or purposes. Most of the temples mingle Buddhist and Hindu iconography.¹⁸ Every one, having seen it, felt like it brought me a deeper understanding of all of them. After the two days I almost wanted to start back at the beginning, and reevaluate everything with what I had learned.¹⁹

But really, weirdly, I think I just really needed to spend time wandering through holy sites, surrounded by gods and demons and nagas and garudas. An apsara dancing delicately may be a small consolation in the face of what humanity is capable of, but it is something, and sometimes that might be enough.

Next: Kuala Lumpur to Singapore
Prev: Ho Chi Minh City (SGN) to Phnom Penh (PNH)

Footnotes

¹ Granted, yes, okay, I spend an inordinate amount of time reading and thinking about atrocities. I’d probably be more chipper if I didn’t. But it’s just as possible my melancholic inclinations lead me to read so much about atrocities. It’s a chicken or egg thing.

To put a finer point on it, we live in an age of unremitting bullshit. If you tend towards existentialism (which I do) and hold in esteem virtues like trying to live honestly and truthfully (which I do) you can’t just ignore it. You have to try to understand it.

² Maybe oddly, I hadn’t actually seen The Killing Fields, so I found a copy and watched it, only to discover I had somehow confused it with The Year of Living Dangerously, which I also hadn’t seen. I assume I just jumbled them up from watching At the Movies.

I proceeded to rewatch Swimming to Cambodia and even watched Lara Croft: Tomb Raider which, ick.

³ Directed illegally by Nixon and Kissinger, who deliberately hid the operation from Congress. Both of whom should really have been tried as war criminals.

Let me just also take this moment to point out that Nixon, as a private citizen, successfully interfered with the attempts of the Johnson administration to set up peace talks to ensure they wouldn’t screw with his chances of getting elected. Hey, what’s the cost of another thousand American lives when it’s your election on the line, huh?

What I just found out is that Johnson knew about this before the election and decided not to make it public, because he was worried the fallout would destroy the country.

There’s a lot of ways to take that anecdote; at the moment I’m reading it as a strong invitation to burn motherfuckers to the ground any chance you get. Do we get Trump if Nixon never gets elected to the Presidency? Hard to say.

⁴ Turns out making a bunch of city folk work in slave conditions on farms doesn’t produce much in the way of agriculture. Especially if you keep killing off the ones who are any good at it as a challenge to your power.

⁵ The Pol Pot regime eventually provoked the Vietnamese government once too many times, leading to the Vietnamese invading and toppling the government of Cambodia and driving the Khmer Rouge back to the jungles.

The United States responded by funneling money and supplies to the Khmer Rouge for a decade, fully aware of the genocide, but figuring it would help destabilize the Vietnamese forces.

⁶ Whenever possible I’ve been using ride-hailing apps — all of which use credit cards — and getting money only after I’ve gotten in town, which helps somewhat.

⁷ I’ve got a lot of backups in case one or the other fails.

⁸ Unless you would get coins back, then you get change in riel.

⁹ Informally, not officially. There are countries which peg their currency to the US dollar, like the UAE and Panama. And there’s countries who don’t even bother to mint money, just using US dollars for everything, like Ecuador and Zimbabwe.

¹⁰ If often failing

¹¹ Security Prison 21

¹² The construction quality is about what you’d expect if you’d killed off all the skilled craftsmen in your country.

¹³ There were similar tiles in the hotel I stayed at in Krong Siem Reap, minus the bloodstains, and I still found it a little unsettling to stand on it barefoot.

¹⁴ Or San Francisco, which is what everyone seems to compare Walt Disney World to

¹⁵ And February is the the cooler part of the dry season, too. Don’t visit in May, is what I’m saying.

¹⁶ Air conditioned, mercifully

¹⁷ Really the ideal way to see the complex is to spend four hours each day over a week, much like I’ve suggested touring big museums for two hours a day over three days. But I don’t know who has the luxury of actually doing those sorts of things. Two eight-hour days in the archaeological park is a reasonable compromise between seeing everything and spending your whole vacation playing Tomb Raider.

¹⁸ Early temples were Hindu, but Jayavarman VII converted to Buddhism and constructed a lot of Buddhist temples, only to have Jayavarman VIII return to Hinduism and crudely deface most of the Buddhas in the temples in the process of making them Hindu again. Buddhism eventually won in the area, but virtually all the Buddha statues are later additions to the sites.

¹⁹ Well, what I really wanted was a foot massage and a nap, both of which were within my grasp.