there is no gray, only black and white and what to do with it

Today we visited the last attraction in our itinerary for Cambodia, Phnom Sampeau.

Phnom Sampeau neatly encapsulated and symbolised what Cambodia is and means to me: a curious, amusing and more often than not sad amalgam of stark juxtapositions and contradictions. Think of Bangkok without its cockiness, injected with loads of sobriety and historical baggage.

The Lonely Planet guidebook could not have describe Phnom Sampeau better: “it is a sad juxtaposition of beauty and brutality”. The view at the summit of the hill is panoramic and unobstructed; one can see miles and miles of padi fields at all angles. The various wats and statues of Buddha erected on the hill are new and grand, while the steps leading up are well maintained and climbable.

However buried at a corner of the hill and reachable only by taking a hidden and obscure detour which we would not have discovered had we not asked our driver to lead us there are the caves which the Khmer Rouge used to murder and dispose of their countless innocent victims. The caves had a very bad vibe emanating from it and there is an eerie atmosphere inside.

My moto driver led us to a seemingly innocuous hole near the entrance of the caves. Peering into the hole, I cannot see its bottom. The driver revealed that there is where the Khmer Rouge soldiers murdered babies and children. He mimicked the motion of striking an imaginery club at the back of the head of a kneeling victim facing the hole, as well as throwing a baby down the hole.

Moving deeper into the musky and eerie caves revealed piles of skulls and other bones of the victims. A reclining Buddha watches over the remains at a corner, while the man attending to the Buddha burned incense sticks. There was a steep flight of steps leading deeper into the caves, but it was pitch black below and I did not want to see anymore of the horrors that surely await below. I donated some money and left.

The stark contrast between the new, obvious paths made for the newly built attractions on the hill like the new wats and statues and the buried paths to the caves reveals the underlying tensions in the Cambodian psyche: a struggle between the need to move on and develop, and the need to deal with Cambodia’s bloody past. What the Khmer Rouge did cannot be hidden under cover like the buried path, but there is a need to deal with such historical baggage in a enlightened and forward-thinking manner too. What the Cambodians will do with it remains to be seen, even though the Khmer Rouge regime ended in 1979. Such wounds take decades to heal.

The stark contrasts in Phnom Sampeau echo what I have seen throughout Cambodia.

While Phnom Penh’s only shopping centre towers in the sky, beggers and touts still remain on the immediate streets around the centre. As tourists like us lap up the sun and enjoy feasts of seafood at the beaches of Sihanoukville, little children ask for food and money at the dining tables.

As Angkor Wat dominates the landscape with its majestic scale, in the immediate environs are countless touts and children trying to eke out meager livings by selling souvenirs and food to tourists. The glories of the Khmer past is contrasted with the relative poverty of the Khmer descendants today.

Immediately outside the entrance of Tuol Sleng, the site of untold atrocities and the perpetual inerasible scar in the collective psychological fabric of the nation,lies a restaurant aimed at the tourist crowd recommended by Lonely Planet. Little school children happily skips past the entrance of Tuol Sleng, which was ironically a school before the Khmer Rouge converted it for its own twisted purpose. Immediately beside are residential properties high enough to obtain a view of the eerie insides of Tuol Sleng, where residents continue with their domestic tasks seemingly oblivious of their uncomfortable proximity to such a horrible place.

As my moto driver drove out of the immediate compound of Phnom Sampeau, we passed a cave from which a seemingly never-ending stream of bats poured out in uniform flight from its entrance. The driver pointed at them and said “killing fields”. I did not properly understood what he meant by that but it felt as if he was trying to point out that maybe the bats represent the poor souls of those murdered by the Khmer Rouge finding emancipation, peace and a sense of closure at last, as they filtered out of the dark cave towards wherever their next destination was.

We sped off down the dirt path leading back to town as the orange sun illuminates the immediate horizon.