We nearly turned around and left Cam­bo­dia with­out ever hav­ing stepped foot out­side the Siem Reap air­port.  Our first impres­sion was in stark con­trast to the affec­tion we have for the country.

The immi­gra­tion offi­cer said he won’t issue Chan a visa because her pass­port only has “Amend­ments & Endorse­ments” and no “Visas” pages left and using those pages would clearly vio­late inter­na­tional law.  C’mon man what’s the dif­fer­ence just put it on one of the three blank pages.  A lit­i­ga­tion tango ensued dis­creetly until he remem­bered how migrat­ing a 10 buck green­back out of Yan’s pocket into his would cure his crise de con­science and mag­i­cally legit­imize the bas­tard pages.  What, a fuckin’ shake­down?  Why $10, why not 50, a hun­dred, hell take my money belt and while you’re at it which one of us should bend over.  Ok what­ever.  But this is how we’ll remem­ber your coun­try — thanks for the wel­come.  That was the last time we thought about this inci­dent while in Cambodia.

What struck us almost imme­di­ately about Cam­bo­dia is it’s young pop­u­la­tion.  The Khmer Rouge mas­sa­cred 1.7 mil­lion of their own — 1/4 of the pop­u­la­tion in the late 70s.  The effects of the geno­cide are pal­pa­ble.  There is a shock­ing num­ber of amputees.  And it’s esti­mated there are 6 mil­lion active land­mines still in the coun­try, mostly a left­over from The Amer­i­can War.  Every­one over 30 was either a vic­tim or a per­pe­tra­tor.  And they are liv­ing side by side.  And we would never know who was which and if it mat­tered to know and if we even wanted to know and what we would do if we did.  We wanted to know how they were cop­ing.  But we didn’t ask.

We saw a coun­try try­ing to move on from the hor­ror of the past and bravely into a hope­ful future but not nec­es­sar­ily rec­on­cil­ing the atroc­i­ties that have been expe­ri­enced.  We read that the coun­try is divided on whether to bring the Khmer Rouge to jus­tice in a war crimes tri­bunal or just let it go and spend the mil­lions of dol­lars on more crit­i­cal cur­rent issues.

Sim­i­lar to Burma, it felt that emo­tions weren’t eas­ily expressed.  The Burmese seem ter­ri­fied of Big Brother, while Cam­bo­di­ans are held hostage by inter­nal demons and the pain that would be stirred up within.  The Cam­bo­di­ans appear happy just to be alive.  They’re warm and gen­uine and quick to smile or laugh or crack a joke — and it’s con­ta­gious.  In fact they live life so intensely and with such imme­di­acy that it can be jaw drop­ping.  Like when we were stuck in traf­fic on our bus ride down to Phnom Penh and a father dragged his son off coach #75, yanked his pants off, had him squat by a lamp­post for a #2 while he bought some water and dried squid from the ven­dor, then grabbed the kid and jumped back on the coach that had crawled a few meters fur­ther south.

Phnom Penh is chaotic, pun­gent and it’s hard to imag­ine this city in April 1975 when it was com­pletely emp­tied.  Part of Pol Pot’s vision for an agrar­ian soci­ety required that they kill off New Peo­ple (city folk and intel­lec­tu­als) or absorb them into farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties (Old Peo­ple).  Over­all our trip to Cam­bo­dia was intense and heavy and when it was time to blow off steam we did it Phnom Penh style until the wee hours one morning.