So, I left Cambodia on Monday, and am writing this from the mundane and unexciting comfort of my own sofa in my own living room in comparatively chilly Oxfordshire!  I mean, it’s nice to be home and all that, but…

I decided to give myself a lie-in on Monday.  After the intensity and the long day of Angkor Wat adventures, I figured a decent sleep wouldn’t hurt.  So I arranged to meet Davin at 10am.  10am! Imagine! That was the latest start of my entire holiday!  Madness….

It was a funny sort of day.  Not long enough for proper adventures, but definitely long enough to need a plan.  So I started with a bit of last minute shopping, after which Davin dropped me in town for a couple of hours of pottering.  I sat in a coffee shop for an hour, charging my camera and chatting to a really lovely couple of elderly Australian men who had just come from a week in Thailand with a friend and were visiting Cambodia on their way to Hanoi.  They were full of twinkle and good cheer, and obviously having a blast.  Once my camera was all ready to go for a walk I set off to wander around Siem Reap – a thing I hadn’t really done, having the luxury of Davin to chauffeur me around in the tuk-tuk.  But not having done it meant I also didn’t really have street pictures of Siem Reap, and I wanted some.  So my camera and I went for a little potter.

There’s a river that runs through Siem Reap, dividing the touristy part of town from the more financial and commercial districts.  I walked a short way along there, taking photos of the sculptures on the river banks and the contemporary naga snakes on the bridge that lead me back into the more familiar areas.

Once over the bridge my eye was caught by a buddhist centre, directly opposite.  I don’t know how I hadn’t spotted this before, as I’m pretty sure we must have passed it a bajillion times, but I hadn’t, so I went and wandered around. There was quite a lot of gold, and some pretty ornate statuary (and topiary).  I’m afraid I don’t know what it was, really, or why it was there, and I’m writing this through a fuddle of jet lag, trying to stay awake until a decent sleeping hour, so I can’t even summon the name of the place from the depths of my memory!  But I took some pretty pictures, and here they are:

The reclining buddha, in particular, was amazing – and hidden away behind the main shrine (the two pictures before it) so you could have missed it completely. It was *huge*! But I think the thing that most stood out about this whole centre, for me, was how clean it was. It’s only just occurred to me, really, looking at the pictures, but it was by far the cleanest place I saw in Cambodia which is, for all the charm of the people and the amazingness of the history, pretty grimly litter-strewn and dirty.  Not this place, though!  This was amazingly neat and clean.

Then I headed into town to see if I could capture the market on film in any way that would show you how amazing and colourful it is. I don’t think I’ve quite caught the hustle and bustle of the place, but there is definitely colour!! I stumbled upon two small children playing a wonderful game.  The little girl had divided the aisle (alleyway?) into a girls’ side and a boys’ side and her even smaller brother was trying to get past her on the ‘wrong’ side.  This involved much shrieking and laughter and then – when they saw my camera – a request to have their photo taken.  So I obliged, which caused even more shrieking and laughter.  And then I made the mistake of trying to walk up the wrong side of the aisle and was roundly ticked off until I realised the error of my ways and walked on the girls’ side!

Then I met up with Davin again, and we headed off to the war museum.  This isn’t really a museum in the western sense – well.  It’s a collection of objects loosely curated to tell the story of a particular event in history, so that’s perhaps unfair.  But the objects themselves are really bits of combat detritus that have been found in the forest and fields, rather than a carefully thought out collection of artefacts.  Which is not to take away from the power of their message in any way at all.  Unusually, there was nothing separating audience from object – you could touch and handle, climb on and pick up all of the things.  There were signs asking you not to, for sure, but no guardian to stop you.

What they did have was a guide – an ex soldier – who could tell you the history of the combat period.  He talked us through the American bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail and Vietnam supply lines, which affected Cambodia pretty extensively.  And then, two days after the Americans pulled out of Indochina, General Lon Nol’s army was defeated by the Khmer Rouge and the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh and labour and ‘re-education’ camps begun.  Although the Vietnamese officially liberated Cambodia from Pol Pot in 1979, in fact the UN still recognised the Khmer Rouge as the official government of Cambodia until the mid 1980s because they were reluctant to accept China’s and Vietnam’s involvement in Cambodia.  What this meant in effect was that the Khmer Rouge retreated to the forest around the Thai border and guerrilla combat against the Vietnamese and effectively a civil war was ongoing until the late 1990s.  The whole thing is a shameful mess, so far as I can gather, in which the West was so cold war paranoid about the spread of communism that it chose to back – openly or covertly – Khmer Rouge led guerrilla troops despite the genocide which led directly or indirectly to the deaths of between 2 and 3 million people.

Anyway.  Between the Vietnam war, the Khmer Rouge regime and this guerrilla war is now one of the most densely land mine contaminated countries in the world.  The guide said they estimate that, by the time ceasefire was agreed, there was a population of 4m people and about 8m landmines, but I’ve seen a UNICEF estimate that there are (or were, in 2006) 10m.  Work has been ongoing since the late 1990s to clear the mines, but that work is both slow and dangerous, and there have been around 64,000 deaths and countless maimings because of civilians triggering mines.  The guide told us the story of a farmer near Battambang province who returned to his fields after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.  He had been farming rice using traditional methods – an ox-drawn plough, and cutting the rice by hand.  Using these methods, he’d been farming about 3 acres since the end of the 1990s and had gradually saved enough money to put a deposit on a tractor.  He knew his 3 acres were clear of mines – he’d cleared it and farmed it perfectly safely.  So he took a bank loan, bought his tractor, and began the work of ploughing the fields for his first mechanically aided rice crop.  Only, of course, a tractor is much heavier than an ox.  And when he went out with his tractor and plough he had enough weight beneath him to trigger and anti-tank mine that had lain dormant all this time, untroubled by his slow, manual methods.  The mine exploded, destroying the tractor and killing him.  In fact, all that was left was his widow, three small sons and the bank loan for the tractor.  This was last year.

The other significant problem with unexploded ordnance (UXOs, they call them) is that they are often discovered by civilians – farmers, or children playing in the forest.  In theory, if you discover a UXO you’re supposed to report it to the local authorities who will remove/detonate it.  However, there is no reward to the discoverer, or compensation for the loss of use of the land in the time it takes to dispose of the UXO.  In a country where most of the rural population lives at a pretty subsistence level (the guide pointed out some red ants nests in the trees and said that he often eats them – they make a soup deliciously bitter, apparently…) the lure of the scrap metal value of a UXO is pretty compelling.  So people are often killed or severely injured while trying to dig out or transport UXOs that they want to sell for scrap…

So, having given myself the context for the next stop, I wanted to see Apopo.  This is an amazing organisation that uses African giant pouched rats to detect UXOs.  The rats are trained to sniff out explosive, and so are much quicker than metal detectors alone – a metal detector will, of course, tell you about every scrap of metal – whether it’s an explosive or not.  And every ping on the mine detector has to be investigated by a bomb disposal expert, even if it’s an old coin, or a lost fork, or whatever else it might be.  Rats, on the other hand, are small (light), fast and accurate.  And are working amazingly efficiently to clear mines.  We saw a quick demonstration of them at work, and it was truly remarkable.  The rats are *huge* and very fast and efficient.  And while their work is backed up with a metal detector team, it at least means the detector team are working in flagged areas, knowing what they are up against.  You can read about it here.

 

And after that, there was just time to have something to eat, and pick up my bags from the hotel before heading to the airport, for my journey home.

And I’m just going to do one more quick plug, before I wrap this up – actually, I may do one final post about reflections, recommendations and anything I would do differently (not much, in truth).  But before I end this one, I’m going to put in a plug for Davin, the lovely man who patiently drove me around in his tuk-tuk; ensured I had drunk enough water and eaten properly; advised me about where to go and what to see; was endlessly patient and tolerant of my whims, eccentricities and last minute changes of plan.  If you should ever find yourself in Siem Reap, please consider getting in touch with him and giving him your business.  His English is excellent and, although he says he’s a driver not a guide, his knowledge is pretty superb, too.  He vastly enriched my visit to Siem Reap.  Thank you, Davin!