The big relax

I have been playing around with the title to this post, trying to add some humor to temper it down, but theres really nothing I can do to change it. Today was as bone chilling as life as a spectator can get. I am talking of a place obvious to those who have visited Indochina, but practically unheard of to those back home, Teul Sleng, otherwise known as S-21.

A converted high school, the prison housed up to 20,000 men, women and children from 1975-1979.  The actual school is now a museum, this means that for $2, you can get the opportunity to walk into the torture rooms of the school. This is certainly not for the faint hearted.

The first block of the school is where the majority of actual torture took place. In each room there is simply a rusted metal bed, some chains and a single torture device, be it a shovel, a metal can used to contain bullets or  a meter long metal bar. Behind most of the beds, is a picture in gruesome black and white of one of the victims of the particular room. There was a lot of blood in every picture.

Even more horrific was the room that didn’t have a bed or picture in at all. At first I thought that it was a nothing room, used for storage maybe,  but just as I was about to leave I realized that the walls were covered in bloody hand prints, and dark brown splashes of blood on the ceiling and walls. I was left dumbstruck, as was Lauren.

We then headed into the documenting rooms, which held mug shot style photographs of as many people as could be discovered about. I still tremble slightly thinking about those terrified eyes. Some of the children didn’t look any older than two.

Then onto the tiny prison rooms which some prisoners were kept in solitary, these were small and cramped, with nothing to use as a toilet.

The final; building held the worst part of the entire tour, worse even than the torture rooms. A room full of skulls belonging to the people I had seen in the pictures ten minutes previously. Some had clean bullet holes in the tops of their heads, delivering a fast kill. Others were not so lucky and instead had large chunks taken out of the temples or back of the head, where bludgeons had been used to save on precious bullets. Surrounding the skulls were paintings (thankfully not photographs or I don’t think I’d ever be able to sleep again,) of some of the atrocities committed under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, including photographs (no mercy to the tourist of paintings this time,) of the corpses. I’ll spare you the descriptions of those.

Of the 20,000 (est.) people who came through the doors as prisoners of S-21, only 7 live. the rest spend their eternity in mass graves either within the prison’s grounds, or 15km south west, at the Killing Fields.

After harping on about Vietnam’s greatness for the past month or so, it was a genuine disappointment to find Saigon to be, well, gross. The area we stayed in, I forget the name and don’t have my Lonely Planet to hand, was described as Bangkok’s Koh San Road in minature, which is  a  huge slur on a place even before you get there and my prejudgement was running high well before I set foot on Saigonese soil. My prejudgements were to be quashed quickly though, I could barely imagine a place as seedy as I found the place to be. Rent boy’s ride the streets on bicycles shaking rattles to let people know that they are ready for hire. If you are unfortunate enough to catch one of their eyes, and considering that they stop next to your table at a restaurant and keep shaking the rattle until you look up it’s fairly plausible that this will happen, they offer a massage. By ‘offer a massage’ I mean that they come and start touching you until you tell them to go away (which of course they give the obligatory ignore too on the first request, like I’m just playing mind games and actually do want to be rubbed up by a rent-boy and I’m just saying no ‘ços Lauren’s there) It’s all very personal space invading stuff.

So we left the city for different climbs and here we are in Phomn Phen, capital of Cambodia. We’ve only really had a little explore which went quite disastrously, all we wanted was a bite to eat then return to the hotel to sleep off the 7 hour bus journey, but we ended up lost as you can get in 45 minutes. The reason for this being that the roads are all given bizarre numbers which only loosely run in any order. The road that our guesthouse is on, for example, is something like Road 115. The road running parallel to that, however, isn’t road 114 ( I checked, 114 is about 2 K.M’s north) it is instead road 232. Confusing? you bet. So we got lost, but ended up having some cheapish mediocre food. I read somewhere that thanks to both the American war with Vietnam and Pol Pot’s genocide in the mid to late 70’s along with the terrible onspread of AID’s, means that 40% of the country are under 15 years old, and it shows. There are kids everywhere. Considering the country has a stupid big population in the region of 110million, that is a whole shedload of little úns running the streets. It’s all very odd, it looks a little bit like Disney’s Pinocchio where all the children go to the island where they rule the roost and can do whatever they want. Hopefully the children of Cambodia won’t go the same way as the wooden one and his pre-pubescent mate’s  though, if I remember right they all turned into asses, Cambodia just doesn’t have the infra-structure to deal with that.