Well here I am in Cambodia lodging at the Fancy Guest House, around the corner from the Palace and the National Museum. This morning I got up very early and walked along the river and watched Phonm Penh wake up and go to work. This included the last elephant in the city, being walked down the main road. Others in the palace grounds died during the Pol Pot wars, and this animal is saved for tourists. The city is a huge mix of beautiful and ancient buildings, old French Colonial buildings and then some terrible poverty all over the streets. It is lots poorer than Hanoi. Many people and children live on the street, many beggars and sick people. It's less hectic than Hanoi because fewer bikes and cars and easier for western tourists because all the ex-pats, ngos staff and tourists have created lots of market for services. You have to specify that you don't want marijuana on yr. pizza! After touring at the Palace today, I had lunch at a restaurant,Friends, a training restaurant for street kids who clean, cook and serve there. It's a little weird to be just a tourist again, but I am enjoying the respite and managing to stumble around by myself with occasional retreats to the tiny balcony of my room. Hope to figure out photos later. I planned to NOT go to the Killing Fields with its towers of skulls, but a Cambodian man suggested I should go to show respect.Not sure...
I suspect you have made your decision by now. I did find it very significant, though stark, and I had the feeling that I needed to take in the realities. I had read so many first person accounts and it was the best way I felt I could pay tribute to both those that suffered and died and those that suffered and lived. I was glad I had gone to the prison in the city first. (Now a memorial museum.) That was often the route of those that were killed, to first spend time in that prison.
ReplyDeleteThen I spent a long time just sitting at a temple.
I can definitely understand not wanting to go.
In the end I did not go. I am still proccessing a lot of very intense experiences from Vietnam. That and the very evident poverty all around was what I could handle right now. I admire anyone who could be present with it.
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