There have been but a small handful of times in my life that I have known that my life has just changed and will never be the same.

Today was one of those days.

A trip to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum/S21 Prison and The Killing Fields in Cambodia

I’m still far too much in digesting mode (forget processing – that will take months), but I feel like something about this day and the things we’ve seen, learned, and experienced today needs to be acknowledged, shared, and SOMEthing put out there, now. Immediately. Yesterday. Five years ago.

To begin with, since my own pieces on the subject and experience will be long in the making, please check out these links to familiarize yourself with what I’m about to talk about. They’re not too long and are fairly digestible while still being incredibly educational.

Chances are, you may have never even heard about this. The bigger chance is, even if you’ve heard of it…something…you had no idea the half of it. I certainly didn’t.

I should have.

We should. You should.

There’s much more that goes into this, but this will give you a good starting point and you can read more if you are so interested in understanding the context. Eventually after I return home, I will have something on here to put the pieces together in a simplified form.

For now, start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_Fields

Those are the two places we went today.

When we got home tonight, I wanted to sit and write a post or a journal or SOMEthing, but as I did some searches to get more details, context, and a bigger picture of everything now that we’d seen and experienced the places in person, I found myself feeling fairly agitated.

I wanted to talk to someone about it, but whom? I know not many of my friends and contemporaries would know about this enough to fully appreciate the magnitude of what I really wanted to share, one major part of the day and the experience, and I wouldn’t expect them to.

Fortunately, my good friend Scott was on, and he was just the person I needed to talk to.

I’m still feeling too antsy about today to really adapt this into much of a coherent post, but maybe this sort of thing is better that little bit raw anyway.

He wasn’t anticipating it being a public conversation, so I’ve edited it to just my parts of the dialogue, and it may be too much of a bitch to read in this format. If so, don’t worry about it…there will be a proper post (probably several) eventually. But for now, this is what I got, so I thought I’d give it to you:

me: i always think when we visit places like this that it should be mandatory to visit at least one if not several as part of one’s higher education
at any rate this was NOT given due study in school, especially given that it JUST OCCURRED IN 1979
wikipedia says In all, an estimated 1,700,000–2,500,000 people died under his leadership
i just feel like, for as terrible as the holocaust was, the way they (cambodians) carried theirs out just seems so much more brutal
pure torture
that was pretty much all they did
i’m not making the comparison to belittle one or the other, rather to say how shocked i am that something was actually at least as bad, perhaps even more acute

me: yeah even i didn’t (have any idea about cambodia) until starting to plan this trip, and really, even until today
i knew roughly something had happened…that there was something to learn about it, it was bad, maybe really bad, and that i’d be learning about it soon
that was the extent of it til today pretty much
but today it was so mind-blowing (and after everything we’ve seen, done and learned about the past two years, both good and bad, that’s saying a LOT), i actually took pages and pages of NOTES, which i never do
in addition to the 675 photos
fortunately they let you take pictures of EVERYTHING, so i will definitely be sharing it

me: yeah we actually hired a guide to take us around the prison and i’m SO GLAD we did
usually we just walk around stuff like this, just to see it… usually that’s fine. this was worth it for sure
there are still bloodstains on the floor in some spots
i even found a bloody handprint on one of the walls
it’s an empty room whereas most others at least had a bed (actual one left from the torture) and a photo of the last corpse found there… so since the room was empty, most people didn’t walk in
i was pretty shocked when i found it, as the guide didn’t even point it out (he pointed out the stains on the floor in another of the buildings that we may or may not have noticed)
that made it pretty real
you could still see the prints, like fingerprints, from the hand

me: and you want to know the most unexpected thing? the thing that i find myself, now that we’re back and i have some time to process, is totally spinning my head? not the stacks and stacks and stacks of skulls and bones, or the horrible photos or the blood….
there were at least 14,000 people who came through S21 and all were severely tortured (btw it got HELLA creepy in there when it started getting dark…and i’m not usually spooked by such things – but it did start feeling different)

[edit: this is my own current understanding/interpretation (and simplification for personal understanding) of what I've read and from the visits; don't take it as gospel]

they were basically tortured to extract a “confession” to wrongdoing, to justify killing them
because basically pol pot was trying to cull everyone who was educated or had any ties to the western world or mentality (including nothing more than living in the city)
he needed only 1 million to fulfill his agrarian utopia dream
the rest needed to go, so that’s why he was culling those people
so basically this prison was just the way to extract a “legal” and political justification, right, then once the confession was signed, off they went to the killing field
dropped off from a truck, blindfolded, handcuffed, nationalistic music playing full blast to cover up the screams so no one arriving would panic and fight back
they perched them on the edge of the ditches and beat their skulls in to kill them to save bullets
babies got their heads beat against a tree, or tossed up in the air and sliced by the bayonets
torture, then killing fields, boom… they excavated only 86 of 129 sites i think it was (will give you exact figures later)
but that still uncovered almost 9k corpses
there are like 300 of these fields elsewhere in cambodia too
walking around….
i thought it would just be like you go and look over some barely looking like anything field, from faraway
walking around…they’ve left things pretty preserved
they excavated almost 9k skeletons and skulls but left who knows how many still buried
and even from the pits they excavated………
as the soils shift from rain, flooding, etc…. bone fragments, teeth, and clothes still surface
they leave them there (and ask visitors to do the same obviously), and the staff goes around every 2-3 months and picks them all up
but until they do that, they just lay there – so i saw teeth, bones, and the scraps of clothes used for binding their hands and their blindfolds
saw the tree where they’d beat the babies heads against before throwing them in the adjacent pit
when the site was found, that tree was covered in bone, skin, hair, and brains

me: so that was the killing fields….to back up a little, so before they go there, they’re tortured
listen to some of this  
i’ve heard of torture stuff
i went to a torture museum or two, saw the hanoi hilton
this was new shit i’d never even heard of
there was the classic waterboarding and other dunking stuff
they used the school’s (the prison was formerly a school) thing, you know where they have a rope that you climb up for PE?
they’d tie the prisoner’s hands behind their back and winch them up on there that way…from the picture, it looked like they’d winch them up from their bound hands BEHIND THEIR BACK
then flip them upside down and dunk them
they had to shit in ammo boxes and pee in jugs
if they spilled, they had to clean it up off the floor with their tongues
after their 6 second every-4-days “bath”, they had to clean that up with their tongues
(those were just living conditions) the actual tortures…things like pulling off their fingernails and pouring alcohol on it…or this one was new:
for women, they’d pull off their nipples with pliers… and then sting them in the wound with scorpion venom and centipedes
oh and the babies wouldn’t always make it to the killing fields… they all got their pictures taken when they arrived at the prison, and if the baby cried at that time, the guard would take it then and there and do the tree or bayonet thing in front of the mother
they would also have electric wire stuck in their ear and shocked, stuff like that
so, some 14,000 people at least passed through this place with these things being done to every one of them
wikipedia says 17,000
it’s hard to say for sure, but figure at least around there
of those….there were 7 survivors
the only reason they weren’t killed was because they were useful
a mechanic, a painter, etc.
(had to paint pol pot in his perfect likeness, you know)
yeah. SEVEN.
so like i was saying earlier, all this shit that i’ve seen, done, read, heard, walked on, etc. today
what’s still kinda freakin me out the most right now…
after our tour of the prison, the tour guide says…

Would you like to meet one of the survivors?

me: i was shell-shocked. uh. YES???
i couldn’t really believe what he was asking though; it was so unexpected.
when i was doing all my research last night i saw there were 7 that survived, 3 of which were still living (at the time the articles i was reading were written)
during the tour, the guide said now only 2 of them were still living
and one of them was there

Indeed, Mr. Bou Meng was there at the prison, and he had copies of a book about his life that had been written last year by a researcher. We not only got to meet him, shake his hand, talk to him, but we got to take a piece of it and one of the most harrowing, horrible, and mind-blowing pieces of history with us: a book of his story, signed by him.

AND he was so happy we both wanted a copy, he even gave me a kiss on the cheek! (Ray’s cheeks apparently weren’t as kissable though.)

He was happy to take pictures with us and though I wasn’t sure whether we should smile or look solemn, I looked over at him to see and he had a big smile (close-lipped…almost all of his teeth were bashed out of his face during his tortures at the prison).

I suppose in retrospect the moment was brief, a few minutes, compared to the many minutes that make up a lifetime. But that experience will stay with me the rest of my life. Those few minutes worked like glue to help me put together both the tour we’d just had of the prison/school/torture chambers/cells/museum, the ghastly fields we visited just after this encounter, and the haunting roaming around we did to take it all in on our own when we again returned to the museum a few hours later, after seeing the fields.

The Khmer Rouge, the genocide, the Killing Fields, Tuol Sleng/S21, they all – unbelievably, unexpectedly and amazingly – now have a face to me. A moving, breathing, smiling, talking, touching, cheek-kissing face. It was only a moment, but it was a moment that made it all a whole lot less History book, news article, or Wikipedia article…and very much more personal.

I can tell you one thing, with regards to how this personally changes my life directly: forevermore, if I’m having a “bad day” or if something makes me nervous or uncomfortable or worried…this is my benchmark. This is what a PROBLEM is. This is what a BAD DAY is, the shit I saw today. What people went through. What my few-minutes/forevermore friend went through. I’ve learned about problems before, both historical and modern (all the moreso since traveling through India and Asia). I generally try to reflect on those to keep perspective anyway. But this is a new level – and perhaps most importantly…one I can connect with.

Our guide kindly offered to translate if we wanted to talk but I was still so stunned to be able to be having this opportunity at all that the best I could muster was, um, “Hello.” (brilliant) and “I’m sorry for what happened,” to which he replied (first, hello – thank you so much for coming, he was really glad we were there), and that he hoped we would tell many people about the story of this place and his story. He wanted people to know what had happened to Cambodia, and in Cambodia.

I don’t blame him.

I do, too.

I’ll leave you with a few links to learn more about this man’s story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/world/asia/17cambo.html
http://khmernz.blogspot.com/2009/07/bou-meng-long-term-detainee-in-s-21.html
http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodia.daily/selected_features/bou_meng.htm

Also, the Khmer documented their victims in detail. The museum is filled with hundreds of these photos, taken right after the blindfold is taken off the victim upon their arrival, confused, not knowing why they were arrested and taken away, and not knowing what is in store. You can see some of the photos we saw today here:
http://tuolsleng.com/photographs.php?photographsPage=1

The photographer was only a young teenager himself, striving to do his assignment perfectly to avoid execution. Also worth a read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/world/asia/27cambo.html

It’s that time, October 21st, and it’s G’s last year of her 20′s. Yep, that’s right, she’s the big 29.

It’s amazing to think that we just celebrated another year traveling, and now another birthday in strange new lands! It’s something special indeed and I just wanted to commemorate it here and now. G has been an amazing travel partner and my bestest friend. I feel extremely fortunate to be able to celebrate another birthday of hers while on the road, even with her T-Rex impersonations!

G, every moment has been priceless, and I can’t thank you enough for the awesomeness that we’ve been able to experience together. Happy Birthday, with lots of hugs, I hope you have an awesome day today!!

It has been a crazy night.

Today was our last day in Hoi An. We decided to take it easy, savor the amazing local foods, and chill with a couple of drinks before leaving on the night train to Ho Chi Minh City. All was well… until we had to pay the hostel tab.

We had to pull out some money, as we usually do, prior to traveling to another location. The first bank I went to told me that “The request cannot be processed”. I did this a couple of times thinking it was a limit issue, since most ATMs here let you only pull out a max equivalent of $200 USD. I gave up after setting for the lowest value I was willing to pull out for a service charge before moving on to another bank. Same thing. I figured I might have mixed up my pin, so I rearranged the possible offending numbers. No dice. As I had wasted a bunch of time already, I ran to another ATM to try again, and got an error saying “cannot be processed” and to “call bank”. The rest of which was in Vietnamese. Problem was, I never got my card back. After pushing all the buttons, and hitting cancel a couple of times with my fist, I decided to compose myself before I started kicking the machine out of frustration and rage. During the time of running back and forth between ATMs, G mentions that our minibus was there and waiting to take us to our 9:56p departure train. It was 8:30pm and the station was 45 minutes away. I’d gotten lax, this was a total rookie mistake, waiting until the last 20 minutes before we were supposed to leave before pulling out cash. Doh!

While the card issue was annoying, we did have some USD on us, so I figured we could pay with that. We keep the USD on hand for visas and other unexpected needs, plus money we’d gotten elsewhere and held onto to use when we go through those countries again, rather than losing on the exchange.

The hostel lady recalculated the bill in USD, and I went to pull out the leg stash that holds our American dinero, and suddenly things went from annoying to frantic.

No leg stash.

Not in any of the backpacks.

I tore everything apart looking for the leg stash and it was nowhere to be found. Now we had no ATM card, and no cash to settle the hostel bill and train tickets with. Not to mention the minibus (with two other customers) has been waiting for 20 minutes during my frantic scurryings, and if we didn’t make the train we’d lose out on another $100 for the tickets. AND completely ruin G’s birthday celebration, because instead of being at the Buddha Amusement Park that she’s been excited about for weeks, we’d be sitting on a train instead.

Thank goodness for our spare bank debit card, and storing our access to money in different locations. G luckily had enough left in her B of A account to pay our outstanding bills, and within enough time for us to grab a madman taxi driver. For reference, normally the trip from Hoi An to Da Nang station takes 45 minutes. We left at 9:00pm and got there at 9:25pm flat.

Adrenaline and paranoia (Vietnam is known for fraudulent activity) coursing through me, I quickly logged on to the GPRS and iPad to request a new pin number for my debit cards, and effectively lock out any other potential use. Then I transferred money back to our safety net account to float us until we can get a new set of cards and pin. Couple that with the ongoing singing of the taxi driver’s horn and the sharp turns avoiding motorcyclists, and you have the perfect recipe for a bit of car sickness. Exiting the taxi with stars above my head and black spirals in my eyes, we waited 20 minutes for our late train. As Joel would say: TIA (This is Asia). It really sucks about that leg stash, and I’m left to still wonder what happened to it, but I’m very glad we caught the train. I write this as we are on our way to Ho Chi Minh.

It’s always an adventure traveling. There are ups and downs and you just gotta run with it.

At least we’ll still have the Buddhist Theme Park for G’s birthday.

And lousy as ever with the updates! :)

But we’ve seen and done soooooo much already! It’s been awesome. Hanoi was cool, we saw and sampled just about everything we could there, the Halong Bay cruise was awesome and *almost* what it was promised (quite a feat in Vietnam!!!), the Sapa hilltribe trek was about 20 times more intense than I expected but at least 20 times more than I’d hoped, as well!

Now we’re down in Hoi An just for a quick couple of days thanks to a 12-hour flood delay stopping our train and making us lose the first day (and Joel’s only day) in Hoi An. Ray and I had a really nice day exploring though. Tomorrow night we’ll head on to Saigon, now known as Ho Chi Minh City, lookin forward to it!

We’re here!

Tabi Tabi on Tour 2.0

So we arrived to Hanoi, Vietnam, on Oct 6, pretty much no muss, no fuss!

Before we left, we had a great last week at home in Penang, I said goodbye to my beloved Korean kids, Ray got down to KL to get more pages added to his passport like I’d done in September (we filled up our whole passports on this trip already!!), and we both pulled a couple of all-nighters getting everything packed up and getting down to KL, 6 hrs from Penang by bus.

Visa Stuff

We did the “Visa on Arrival”, which is a bit of a misnomer, as actually what you do is apply and pay a fee online – Ray went with the one that is suggested by the Vietnam Embassy for $20 each, but our friend Joel went through hotels-in-vietnam.com for $14 and his worked fine too – then they email a letter with your name on it that you print and take with you, allowing you to pick up your visa on arrival. One of the sillier visa processes we’ve done, but perhaps there are reasons behind the scenes for it, and at least it meant we never had to send or leave our passports anywhere, unlike for India or China, pretty much the only other countries we’ve had to think about arranging visa stuff before showing up at the border or in the airport.

When you pick up your visa at the airport in Vietnam (the visa on arrival thing is only available for airport arrivals) you also pay an additional $25 stamping fee, or $50 for multiple entry. The letter part cost only $3 more for multiple entry so Ray thought it was a good idea to do that “just in case”. However, since it was then going to cost us another $25 each for the stamping fee when we arrived and we didn’t even need multiple entries, he had to write them back and have them change it. Fortunately, they were very obliging, no questions asked.

It still took about an hour at the airport to have it all processed, but overall if you don’t mind such things (which you really can’t when you travel), it was pretty smooth. I would go with Joel’s company next time to save the money since it seemed to work just as well. He’d chosen them because of multiple recommendations too, so it wasn’t just a fluke.

Getting from the Airport to Town without being told our Hostel burned down!

We managed to avoid all the taxi touts and no doubt subsequent scams that we read about, got pointed in 42 different (wrong) directions or told the bus was so far and you had to walk to it (suuuure), but eventually found it and spent a mere 35k dong for a ride into town – about $1.50. We then spent 70k (about $3.50) to get from where the bus dropped us off in town to the hostel, which may well have been vastly overpaying but for $3.50 we weren’t too concerned and thought it fair, especially when he actually took us to where we asked to go without any shenanigans like telling us our place burned down or taking us to an impostor.

Joel, on the other hand, had a much different experience, poor guy…….but we’ll get to that.

As for me and Ray though, we got to the hostel and checked into a beautiful, beautiful $10/person per night triple private room with bathroom, gorgeous beds and furniture, closets, TV, A/C…very nice! I tried to do some work but eventually gave in to the exhaustion from the past few days (Ray and I both pulled double all-nighters in the last week) and we crashed until our room phone rang with a poor exhausted Joel on the other end down at reception.

As Tabi Tabi-ers know, in typical fashion, simple things become an Adventure when it’s Joel we’re talking about!

Joel opted for the taxi from the airport and got the run-around once in town so got out but didn’t know where he was, had to find internet to get a map, walked to our hostel, was told we weren’t there by mistake for some reason (?), walked to their sister hostel quite a ways away (WITH all his bags) where there actually was another Ray from the USA staying, obviously not the right one, so walked back and fortunately finally they helped get him to us! Oh and apparently Facebook is blocked here, which is how we were communicating (not that it would have helped by that point), but to try to reach us he’d had to try to find a place where he could access it – some places can, some can’t.

But all in all, for meeting up in a new country, it wasn’t so bad. At least he had a nice room ready for him! We’re happy to be reunited with our snowboarding/beach hut buddy, and are looking forward to these next few weeks with him then also getting Andy, our 4th member of the Tabi Tabi on Tour fellowship, back in November for Laos and Burma!

Chillin in (Chilly!?!) Vietnam

Since then it’s been cold and rainy here (not what I was expecting at all!) and we’ve all had work we needed to take care of anyway, so we’ve been taking it easy and just enjoying being here and trying out the food and getting used to being in a new place. You can see some photos here of what we’ve done (eaten) in Vietnam so far.

We love being on a trip long enough to enable such a slow ease from one big part of a journey to another. I still feel guilt when we have a day or two of not doing much, when time – no matter how long or short that time is – is always so limited in a country anyway. But it’s good to have a few days of decompression between experiences I guess, plus it gives us a chance to earn the money to keep it all going.

Lots of fun stuff when we get rolling though…In Hanoi we plan to see:

Temple of Literature: founded in 1070 and established as the country’s first university

Water Puppet Show: “Live musicians accompany folk legends from Vietnamese history, told with wooden men, women and dragons, dancing and splashing on the face of the water.” – Wikitravel

Ho Chi Minh Museum: “Includes cars crashing through walls to represent the chaos of post-war American capitalism, soldiers charging around with electric plugs, a cave hideout re-imagined as the inside of Ho Chi Minh’s brain, and several other postmodern confections integrated with the main story of the man’s life and his country’s struggle. One of the more informative museums in Vietnam, and perhaps one of the oddest in the world.” – Wikitravel

The One Pillar Pagoda

Army Museum: “Vietnam’s military history extends back 2,000 years, and this museum covers it on four buildings with interesting pieces. On display outside are the ubiquitous MiG-21 jet fighter, T-54 tank and many bombs and articles captured on Indochina and Vietnam wars.” – Wikitravel

Probably some cafe-ing

Definitely more Vietnamese food eating

Hoa Lo Prison (The Hanoi Hilton): “This prison was built by the French at the turn of the 20th century, where they imprisoned and executed many of the Vietnamese freedom fighters. The museum exhibits the brutal French colonial regime and the struggle of the Vietnamese people against imperialism in chilling detail. The prison was also known as the “Hanoi Hilton” during the Vietnam War as it held American POW’s shot down. Little emphasis is given to this period however, and the exhibits shown can be frustratingly skewed in propaganda, choosing to show solely propaganda photos of prisoners being treated well and playing basketball, playing chess, and other staged events. They also claim to have John McCain’s flight suit from when his plane was shot down.” – Wikitravel

and possibly:

Air Force Museum: UH-1 helicopter, Soviet-built MiG fighters, a huge Mi-6 helicopter, and other aircraft

National Museum of Vietnamese History: Vietnamese history from 1,000 years ago til 1945, antiques, etc.

Museum of the Vietnamese Revolution: a museum set in a 1932 colonial French building that blends colonial French and traditional Vietnamese architecture detailing the Vietnamese struggle against first the French (1858) and then the Americans (ending April 30, 1975).

Museum of Ethnology: culture and ritual practices of the various ethnic groups of Vietnam, includes houses of some of the ethnic groups, and even has inhabitants in costumes.

Since we found seeing Mao Zedong in Beijing such an interesting, if bizarre, experience, we REALLY wanted to see Ho Chi Minh at his mausoleum…but apparently he’s in Russia now for his yearly trip for “maintenance”, damn!

After Hanoi…

Plans are still very flexible (read: not planned), but after Hanoi we’ll head out for a 3 day/2 night cruise through Halong Bay, which by everything I’ve read and heard should be a highlight not just of Vietnam but of the whole trip, which is exciting! Then possibly Sapa, or maybe just head down south.

Looking at the weather forecast though, it looks like it will be crap weather for perhaps our whole time here. This is a first, as we timed it to come during the not-hot season (success), but that hasn’t really meant rain and cold and overcast before. Apparently December is the best time to come to avoid both heat and rain. Oh well, it should be a blast anyway!

We’re excited to be here and looking forward to getting to know Vietnam. In truth, I felt a bit intimidated by Vietnam from afar (same with India and the Philippines, and this trip as a whole)…but now being here, not surprisingly I feel very comfortable, happy, and right at home right away! The people are incredibly nice, the food is delicious, and I’m sure the sightseeing will be fantastic.

To our experience, that’s how it’s been everywhere – the unknown is always much scarier and intimidating than the reality of it. Definitely a wisdom we have learned and apply to many facets of our lives now!

Vietnam!