Last week was the Khmer Water Festival (Bon Om Duuk), and Shirley, Martin and I took the opportunity for a week's holiday in Koh Kong. The town is a provincial capital, but it is very close to the Thai border, and is becoming popular as an entry point to/from Cambodia, as well as for 'visa runs', where expatriots in either Thailand or Cambodia cross the border and back just to get their visa renewed.
We stayed at the
Apex Hotel, which proved to be good value for money ($15 per night, extra for breakfast), but the hotel had some of the usual eccentricities! The hotel is only about a year old, but the plumbing is already in trouble. In one of our rooms, whenever you used the pedestal basin in the bathroom, about half the water contents simply flowed out onto the floor (and your feet and trouser legs)! The hotel was very full, and this caused two problems of note. Most (all?) rooms had DVD players - we had spotted this on the website, and so taken some with us to watch - but only some had the essential remote controls. The hotel staff said that when the hotel was not so busy, they took them from empty rooms, for guests who wanted them. As the hotel was busy this week though, we would have only one control between our two rooms! Somehow, it didn't seem to strike them as a situation that required any more action than this. A more irritating problem though was the electricity - for three evenings, the hotel was so full that the electricity kept overloading, throwing the circuit breaker in reception. The whole hotel would be plunged into darkness, but the desk clerk would calmly walk over, throw the circuit breaker back in, and go back to his desk. For a few hours each evening, the power went off for 30 secs every five minutes! This, of course, made it impossible to watch a DVD - you could not wind back to the point you were at before the power went off again. We discovered, however, that reading a book with a torch to hand was still possible. Anyway, the restaurant was good value, there is a swimming pool, it is conveniently located, and the hotel's eccentricities are by no means unusual in Cambodia!
On an entirely positive note, we found a lovely restaurant, Fat Sam's, on the main street. This is owned and run by a Welsh man (Sam of the title) and his Cambodian wife. They have tracked down and serve high-quality and affordable British cooking, such as we hardly ever find in Cambodia. Delights included battered fish and chips, steak pie and chips, cumberland sausage and chips, baked potatoes, apple & blueberry pie and custard, and apple & rasberry crumble and custard. The owners and staff made everyone very welcome, and we met quite a few Brits over meals there, entertaining one another with travelling tales, and receiving tourist information from Sam as well.
Although most of our week was sleeping, watching DVDs, reading, using the internet cafe and visiting the restaurants of Koh Kong, we did manage one trip out to a nearby mangrove swamp, which has had access walkways installed to allow visitors to go right into the forest with ease. At the end of the walkway is a pedestrian suspension bridge, and from there it is possible, as we did, to take a boat trip out to nearby sandy island. Although some people showed us photos of snakes they had taken under the branches, the Sinclair party proved far too focused on not falling off the walkway to spot all the available wildlfe. However, the trees proved slow moving enough to get on film.
Altogether, it was a very enjoyable week, and we look forward to doing more of the potential Koh Kong day trips on future visits.
Although we went to see the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum fairly early in our time in Cambodia, somehow that seemed enough horror for us. We only finally made a visit to the killing fields of Choeung Ek in 2008. This is where the 17,000 prisoners of Security Prison 21 (S-21) were taken to be buried. Some died under interrogation and torture, some died at Choeung Ek immediately before burial, some were buried alive. A little over half the thousands of bodies have been exhumed from the mass graves, and the skulls placed in a glass windowed stupa, with the remaining bones housed in the roof. Part of the site is now under water, and so the graves in that section have never been opened.
For some visitors, as they walk around the many, many mass graves (now not so deep due to the earth being washed back in over the years), with the soil surface still littered with scraps of clothing from the victims, the horror seems greater than that of the prison. For me, somehow, the deaths at Choeung Ek seem almost merciful following the terrible torture of Tuol Sleng, as the prisoners desperately tried to satisfy their interogators and so bring an end to their suffering in death. Either way, both sites are an horrific reminder of just how near unspeakable cruelty and genocide can be.
