Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Phnom Penh, capital city and commercial hub of Cambodia, is often overlooked by international visitors, who tend to fly into Siem Reap for the Angkor ruins and then back to Bangkok or Saigon. But the old city has much to offer: it is the only Southeast Asian capital that still looks the part, in spite of some new construction in its centre and along the Bassac River to the south. As our vessel approaches up the Mekong and into the Tonle Sap River in the early evening hours, the first thing to catch our attention is the great gate of the Royal Palace, silhouetted in hundreds of lights.
The morning shows a different picture: a rapidly modernizing city full of bustling crowds, Lexus SUVs and motorcycles as we make our hazardous way in “cyclos” to visit the Palace and the adjoining Silver Pagoda. The Palace is closed for a Buddhist ceremony attended by King Sihamoni, so we do not have a close-up view of the magnificent throne room, but the grounds of the Silver Pagoda and associated palace buildings housing royal artifacts keep us occupied. The Palace only arose as the permanent structure we see today in the early 20th century, when the country was under French “protection.” The French influence is evident in the equestrian statue presented to King Norodom in the 1860s by Napoleon III, but with the later substitution of the head of Norodom himself.
The Silver Pagoda is unique in that its floor is made entirely of solid silver panels; the miracle is that the Khmer Rouge, during their four-year regime in the late 70s, did not completely loot it. It is dominated by a two-foot “emerald” Buddha, who is, in fact, made of a pleasantly translucent jadeite contributed by Burma.
We top off our morning excursion with a visit to the exquisite National Museum, built in 1917 in traditional Khmer style and featuring fine examples of Cambodian statuary of the pre-Angkorian and Angkor periods and a quiet and relatively cool central garden.
After a fine Khmer lunch at the classy Malis Restaurant, we split into two contingents. One heads out to the “Killing Fields” at Choeung Ek, where (mainly) political prisoners were taken to be killed after being tortured and forced to sign spurious confessions at the S-21 Interrogation Centre. Today, to honour the dead there is a large glass stupa, full of skulls, some large, some very small. Choeung Ek has been “groomed” in recent years, but one still finds bone fragments poking up from the ground. On the whole, however, it is a quiet and dignified place, which completes the story of those tortured at S-21.
Another group has a quite different objective: the shop operated by the NGO Tabitha. This Cambodian institution was founded some 18 years ago by a remarkable Canadian woman, Janne Ritskes, who greets her visitors personally and shows them a graphic PowerPoint presentation about Tabitha’s major objectives in the area, mostly in rural development. The organization, with the support of Foundations in Canada, the USA, Australia, Singapore and the UK, sinks wells, builds houses, and supports village infrastructure. Its most important program, however, is a savings scheme which encourages people to put aside even a small amount of money a month, then pays interest on their savings. These modest savings grow until a family is self-sufficient. The travellers are generous—they not only “shop until they drop” for lovely silk and silver handicrafts, they contribute to yet another hugely ambitious project—the building of a hospital dedicated to women’s diseases, including cancer.
Members of both groups gather late in the afternoon at the infamous “Tuol Sleng” Museum, known under the Khmer Rouge regime as “S-21,” where graphic images are on display of the roughly 17,000 victims who were tortured and killed, here or at Choeung Ek. This is a reminder of the vicious regime that caused the premature deaths of at least 2 million (of a population of perhaps 9 million) Cambodians during its short term of three years, eight months, and twenty days, ending only with the intervention of Vietnamese forces in 1978.
We round out the day with a lively presentation by Jean-Michel Fillippi, Professor of Linguistics at the Royal University of Phnom Penh, on the modern history of Cambodia from 1954 to 1993. Fillippi is a spellbinding speaker, who brings those forty tragic years brilliantly to life.
