Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter Eleven
“Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extin-
guished.”
—Nelson Mandela
M
y ride to the capital was uneventful. Although at this point, uneventful to me was prob-
ably a bit out of touch with reality. I spent the night with a Polish man who had moved to
Cambodia after a messy divorce. He fed me, entertained me with stories about Polish hero-
ism during World War II, and then sent me packing. You know—all in a day's work. The
next afternoon, I arrived in Phnom Penh.
I had been to enough Asian cities by that point to expect the crush of humanity. The thick
smell of frying foods and car exhaust. The honking of horns and the ever-climbing song of
people yelling across food stalls and alleyways. But what I didn't expect was the enduring
charm that lived in all the busyness of Phnom Penh. Because mixed in with the new and old
Asia was also, surprisingly, an unmistaken flourish of old Europe, leftovers from Cambod-
ia's harsh past under French rule.
But underneath the charm of a beautiful city and the friendliness of a beautiful people
was a much darker story. As a kid I had grown up with stories of the Khmer Rouge and the
atrocities committed in their name. During the Communist reign of Pol Pot in the mid to late
1970s, nearly two million people were executed out of a population of eight million. Per-
sons from foreign countries, those with ties to foreign countries, to another political party, to
intellectuals, artists, and anyone else who may or may not have been dissenters were sent to
what were later named the “Killing Fields,” holes in the ground that would be filled with as
many as twenty thousand bodies at a time.
Though so much of my trip had been about kindness, about connecting, about coming
together despite our differences, I knew that I couldn't pass through this part of the world
and also not honor what happens in the void of all that goodwill. I had to go and see the con-
