The JaYmes Escape

“Pol Pot, Boom Boom Boom”, explains the young lad who has insisted on giving me a tour of the beautiful hilltop temples outside Phnom Penh with his friends and their homemade hand-fans. The ruined temple is being reconstructed with a giant Buddha statue as the centrepiece.

The journey by Moto with Peter had taken two hours with temperatures in the upper 30s, and he’s fallen asleep in a hammock conveniently provided by a lunch stall. The local kids, as I have come to expect, had lingered around me playing and practising their English. Their local trade is to vigorously wave fans at tourists as they climb the hill to the temple in the heat; a clever ploy indeed for this is very welcome and makes one feel quite important. They are much more relaxed than the city children, and so much more polite than most Western children, and with some coaxing and the help of my phrasebook, I get them to teach me some Khmer.

The kids seem to know all about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge; somehow I’d felt that these young and innocent lads would be spared such horrors. With a people who are mostly so kind and honest, from the polite playful kids to the smiling helpful adults, it is so hard to comprehend what led to the horrors of 30 years ago at places like security prison S-21, a former school, and The Killing Fields, 10 miles from the city.

The following is an excerpt from the English text, exactly as displayed at The Killing Fields:-
“They were trying hard to get rid of Khmer character and transform the soil and water of Kampuchea into a sea of blood and tears which was deprive of cultural infra-structuere, civilisation and national character, became a desert of great destruction that overturned the Kampuchean society and drove it back on the stone age”

Barbeque smoke wafts through the air with the hubbub of Khmer laughter. Grinning faces surround sturdy plastic tables covered in jugs of beer, buckets of ice, plates of uncooked food, and, at the centre of each, a tabletop gas barbeque. I’m sitting on a white plastic chair on a concrete floor under a sort of open-sided marquee; pitched on what feels like it might be a car-park. It’s not though, most Cambodians don’t drive cars so there’s not much call for car parks here.

“You want to go somewhere the Cambodians go?”, Peter, my moto driver, had asked. A moto is basically a motor scooter and also a kind of taxi. Weaving around the traffic in Phnom Penh holding on for dear life during a torrential plee-uhng downpour is a truly Cambodian experience. Peter wears an Inter Milan shirt which is unlikely to be genuine, and has never heard of McDonald’s.

We order some beef and vegetables, plus a side of bread. It comes with a little bowl of sauce and a bowl of chopped chillis – you can put as many chillis as you want into your sauce then dip your cooked morsel in it before you eat. The beer comes in big jugs – 2 pints for US$2, and the waitresses run around refilling glasses with beer and large chunks of ice. I really can’t get into having ice in my beer so after the first couple I politely decline.

“You want some cockroach?”, Peter asks with a massive grin, I’d seen the waitress wandering around touting a large tub of someting that looked a bit like nuts, but I hadn’t really paid it much attention. I laugh and politely decline explaining that the local experience only goes so far, but could I take a picture of the lady with the big tub?. She agrees, provided we buy 1000r (US$0.25) worth of roaches, which come in a little bag. He dumps a handful on his plate, eating them raw with a big grin, I think, realising that I probably don’t want him to throw them on our barbeque. “Cambodian eat everything”, he says with a chuckle, and I think to myself that fresh cockroaches might well be healthier than McDonald’s anyway.

I gaze across the muddy waiting area in front of another temple looking for Chen, my driver in Siem Reap, and his tuk-tuk. Every time we stop at one of the Angkor temples Chen patiently waits with the tuk-tuk whilst I explore the masses of towers, shrines and ornate masonary and try to avoid the coachloads of Korean and Chinese tourists. Seeing me, he waves and I run over and jump on, umbrella in hand.

“Now we go back to guest how, before big rain”, he looks at me, and I realise he is asking this as a question, “plee-uhng thom?”, I ask with a smile, this means big rain, so he laughs and says, “yes, plee-uhng thom”. Who am I to argue? It is nearing the end of another day at the temples. The rain is late and the clouds in the sky are getting bigger and blacker by the minute.

“Tomorrow, what time?”, says Chen earnestly when we arrive back at the guest house. This is a phrase I’ll always remember him for, as he says it just as earnestly at the end of every day. Tuk-tuk drivers are fiercely competitive, and I suspect he fears my defection if he is not there ready to service my every transport need.