Phnom Penh, Cambodia - Feb 08

In February Katie and I decided to go to a place that has had a prominent place within my imagination for years. After seeing photos of giant trees growing out of ancient temple ruins in National Geographic Traveler, this was near the top of my life's to do list but I was not confident I would ever lay my eyes upon it in person. As fate would have it, a job opportunity placed us no more than a 3 hour flight away.
Angkor Wat is an architectural wonder, a spiritual place, and one of the 7 man-made wonders of the world. I was expecting the ruins of these ancient cities of the Khmer Empire to astound me. What I was not expecting was to be profoundly impacted by an unbelievably kind, gentle and beautiful people. A people who went through an atrocious genocide at the hands of their own people that left approximately 2 million dead.


On our way to Angkor Wat, our trip started in Phomh Penh, Cambodia's capital city. The poverty in this city was very apparent. Some children in streets were naked, other people were wearing pajamas as their normal clothes, having no other options.
While in Phnom Penh we went to their palace, which having just gone to the Grand Palace in Bangkok a couple of weeks before, provided an interesting contrast. The Grand Palace was shiny, clean and new, while the Palace in Cambodia was noticibly more run down and dirty, especially inside the buildings.



We also went to a Wat, or temple that was in a park. This park was filled with extremely poor people who obviously had no place else to go. It was filled with garbage, and as we walked by, I watched an older woman finish something on a styrofoam plate and throw it into a bush despite a garbage can sitting only a few meters away. The park also had all sorts of monkeys that were playing an rummaging through the garbage. The temple itself was extremely strange(see picture below) and had someone sitting next to it who was obviously high on something. Definitely a little sketchy.

- Warning - History Alert - Warning -
To give you a bit more history on Cambodia and Phnom Penh, in the 1970's, while the US was at war in Vietnam and concerned about the Domino Theory regarding the spread of communism in South East Asia, a militia of rural Cambodians, led by Pol Pot, instituted a reign of terror over the small nation. Called the Khmer Rouge, this militia was mostly made up of boys between 12 and 16 years old. The US and France had a presence here, to try to prevent a civil war and the spread of Communism, but evacuated Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge's takeover of the capital city became inevitable. What happened over the next few years is one of the darker moments recent human history. The Khmer Rouge evacuated everyone from Phnom Penh to leave the city completely empty for over 4 years. They killed most professionals, academics and artists and forced the rest to work in rice fields in labor camps. Since most of the rice was sold to neighboring countries for guns and ammunition, many of the workers starved to death. Those who didn't were executed for such minor infractions as dropping their basket of rice they had harvested or being caught sneaking a little more food to fight off malnutrition. It was not until neighboring Vietnam came in and defeated the Khmer Rouge that this sad chapter came to a close.