Cambodia Day One, Morning: Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng

Cambodia was almost exactly what I was looking for. This came as a surprise, considering everyone with whom I spoke before this trip encouraged me to only spend a few days here. I could get lost here for weeks. My first day was essentially split in half, a morning of shock and reflection followed by an afternoon of awe. Here's the tough part.

I landed in Phnom Penh at 9am with about three hours of sleep logged in. I looked up a hostel in my Lonely Planet guide while waiting in line in immigration, picked one that sounded decent, and hailed a tuk tuk into town outside the airport. I dropped off my bags, paid for a night, and hopped in another tuk tuk for a day trip to see the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng genocide museum. The ride to the outskirts of town demonstrated to me the madness of this place. There don't seem to be one- or two-way streets here, only roads filled with motorbikes and tuk tuks packed with people driving in whatever direction they feel like. The panicked driver in me foresaw at least twelve accidents on the road, but they handle it with precision. Unlike Bangkok, Koh Phi Phi, or even Chiang Mai, this is not a place for tourists. I have seen very few in my one day here. It's a place where the culture and unfortunately the poverty is very real, and you can see it everywhere.

My eyes and throat were raw with gasoline fumes and dust kicked up from the street by the time we reached the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. The experience was unlike anything I had seen on my trip thus far. Pol Pot's haunting legacy was left in this roadside memorial to the devastation he created. The dirt roads studded with bones jutted between the concave remains of mass graves and memorials to the dead. Altars were resurrected along the way, some studded with memorial bracelets, others with excavated jawbones. The most haunting realization of this very dark place is the fact that the bones continue to rise from the earth with each rainy season, a continual memory to the hell that the dictator unleashed on these people.

Two things about the Killing Field struck me in very different ways, aside from the horror the experience is supposed to create. First, next door to the memorial, a mere fifty feet from where tourists and locals alike were paying homage, a resort was hosting some sort of party with a full DJ and loudspeaker. The contrast between the solemn dictation of the audio tour and the pounding bass of "Gangnam Style" in the distance was haunting in a very different way. Like any region that has experienced a tragedy like this, there are people who remember it and people who don't. When I arrived at the memorial stupa, a forty-foot tower of human skulls and bones in the center of the field, I saw four very young kids standing on the edge and dancing for the tourists, the walls of skulls at their backs.

Second, at around the middle of the tour there's a long trail that runs alongside a lake, which is essentially another mass grave that they have chosen not to excavate. At this point of the tour, visitors are encouraged to listen to any of the eleven stories from the genocide that are a part of the audio tour. This is also where a legless Cambodian man hangs by the fence, beckoning tourists to give him money. He is impossible to ignore, especially surrounded by such gravity, but it is also impossible to see his presence as manipulative. He, like many other people of this nation, is a victim to the horrors of Cambodia. Over the course of the day, I saw many people just like him, preying on tourists and begging relentlessly. Even tuk tuk drivers here don't try to sell you on the sights; they beg. They tell you that they need the work and ask for your help, which makes them difficult to ignore.

The Tuol Sleng genocide museum was haunting simply in its presence and the story that it tells. There's little I can say that isn't inherent in the story. The museum was a converted high school that was used by the Khmer Rouge as a prison and torture chamber for several Cambodian citizens. The museum walks you through the cells, the torture devices, and the walls of faces of the victims. This last part was what affected me the most, because of one face in particular I spotted among the hundreds in the building.

I walked past the walls of photographs and at first was simply struck by the numbers, similarly to how the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. always leaves me breathless. But then I started looking closer, and putting each face in the context of the story, how each one of them felt and how their expression was a reflection of how they faced their death, which was staring them in the eye through a camera lens. Some of them glared with anger. Others gave blank stares. The one that floored me, second row, second from the left, simply looked away.