My last full day in Phnom Penh (21st June) started with a postcard writing session in a nearby coffee shop. Then I headed towards the central market – a curious cream-coloured domed building not far from the hotel. It was a good chance to take some photos of typical street scenes…

I wasn’t sure that the hammocks helped with the efficient flow of customers between shops!

One of the things I wanted as a souvenir was a krama – the typical scarf worn by many Cambodians – as seen in this photo.

I found one and was disinclined to haggle for it, since the price was already negligible! I headed back to the hotel with my new krama:

After another postcard-writing session (I feel the urge to tell everyone about my adventures in this country) in the afternoon, I decided, somewhat reluctantly, to make a delayed second trip to Tuol Sleng – the school, turned Khmer Rouge torture centre, turned museum. I took a few more photos, several of which I am not going to put here since they are simply too upsetting.

I read more details about what the Khmer Rouge were trying to achieve – a kind of feudal “agrarian utopia” – free from the distractions of foreign cultures, knowledge, technology, and even their own history (they made 1975 the “year zero”). They forcibly emptied the cities, and forced everyone to work in the fields as slaves. Anyone who stood in their way was an enemy who had to be eliminated, and that included anyone deemed to be “intelligent”.

What I read matched very well what my guide at Angkor Wat had told me from his personal experience – how his commune of 800 was organised into “families”, while real families were separated, how all private eating was prohibited, no meat-eating was allowed, how he witnessed 15 families being “resettled” but their clothes were then sent back, and that 600 of his commune survived. I’d noted down what he said in a page of my guide book:

In the museum, I was struck by the 2 dozen photos of Khmer Rouge people on display – they looked so young and proud – 12 boys with their Mao caps, 12 girls with their identical haircuts. What could have turned these youngsters into genocidal criminals?

In the next rooms was the evidence of how meticulous they were in documenting their crimes – every victim was carefully photographed before being tortured and murdered. Hundreds and hundreds of photos in room after room… Did they really have no idea that what they were doing was wrong?

It’s easy to think that such abominations can only occur in “far away places” – never in one’s own society. Yet Cambodia is a former empire – a highly developed society built on respect for royalty and religion, teeming with arts, culture and history – until the Vietnam war turned the region upside down. The more I thought about it the more I realised it could happen anywhere – all it takes is the right trigger, and the ability (or technology…) to control people’s minds without them realising it.

I headed back to the Sameki hotel for the last time:

By the end of the evening I had a total of 44 postcards ready to post! I’d been to the nearby post office to buy stamps earlier and at 10:30pm went out to post them all. It was a lot of work – I really hope they make it to their recipients…

On 22nd June I was up at 4:30 am. My bus ticket said 6 am departure, but I’d been advised to be there at 5:30 am. A prearranged motorbike taxi was waiting outside the hotel – after my accident I preferred vehicles with lights, brakes, a horn, and turn indicators. At the bus office I got talking to what looked like another backpacker – the first I had seen since Vientiane! His name is Alain, from France. I loaded up with water and bread for the trip.

The bus was not very pleasant – it was cramped, noisy, the driver spent most of the time beeping his horn, and even when not doing that, the music blared out so loudly as to make conversation with Alain (in the next seat) near impossible. The bus crossed the Mekong on a car ferry at Neak Luong, which took a long long time, both waiting and crossing. There were vast numbers of limbless people begging for money – the tragic effect of the vast numbers of land mines planted all over Cambodia.

Later there was a very small ferry across a narrow river – it didn’t have an engine. It turned out that we were the engine. A taught steel cable (in the water) ran through pully wheels on one side to keep the ferry from being moved downstream by the current. A thick rope ran across the river above the water, also going through pulleys on the side of the ferry, about waist height.

The idea was that the passengers all pull on the rope, and the ferry goes across the river. This worked fine at first, with everyone pulling hard, then people got lazy and pretended to pull, but didn’t really, resulting the ferry stopping in the middle of the river. The ferryman yelled something, and everyone looked a bit guilty, and started pulling properly again!

There was a 3 hour wait at the Vietnamese border, at Bavet / Moc Bai. This was not exactly an efficient border operation. It didn’t help that my guide book said that “officials take a dim view of foreigners crossing the land border between Cambodia and Vietnam”.

But despite some stern looks, eventually everyone who wanted to stamp my Cambodian and Vietnamese visas had done so, and I had been reminded that (as was said on my visa) I have to be out of Vietnam on 25th June. The bus duly started on the last 2 tedious hours into Ho Chi Minh City – Saigon.

I got a cycle taxi to the Prince Hotel, and then went for a superb Vietnamese meal in a recommended restaurant followed by a whisky in a nearby pub called “Apocalypse Now”.