Sizzling mid-afternoon heat has driven indoors to an internet cafe with AC...it's 2:45 pm sat (you're all sleeping...probably...) Cambodia once again has left me with few words to describe the horror and shock of what I saw just a few miles outside Phnom Pehn this morning. About a half-hour moto ride found me in a bucolic field of a few acres just off the main road where I began wandering around the grounds of the Pol Pot's killing fields of Choeung Ek. I made my way down a dirt path and was instantly confronted by a tall, white momunent to the more than 2 million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot's regime from 1975-1979. A sign on the large white edifice urged visitors to keep silent and take off their shoes. Rising about 100 feet in the air and fronted by glass on all sides, the memorial had shelf after shelf of human skulls piled high. I mounted the steps towards these shelves in utter disbelief...they are on display for the world to see.
The interior of the monuent only allowed for about 6 visitors or so to make their way around inside. The cramped quarters meant that we all were within inches of thousands of skulls of executed Cambodians stacked in heaps all the way to the monuments top shelf. My horror was only compounded by the fact that this massacre happened during my lifetime. Pretty tough to digest. The few acres surrounding the momunent were open green fields that looked like a moonscape. Huge craters littered the grounds marking the spots were millions of Cambodians were killed and dumped in mass graves. It was a largely quiet and surreal place--the only occasional sound coming from a poor Cambodian boy or girl begging for some change.
I left the grounds and was driven by mot rickshaw back to the Central Market of Phenom Pehn where I browsed a bit and had some lunch in the teeming bazaar...
That's it for now...time to leave the comfort of the AC for a bit...
Keith
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