September 11, 2007
By Matthew Klein
TripmaserMonkey.com
After 10 years of working for a New York City newspaper, I quit my job and bought a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia. This piece is adapted from my blog, Packmonkey.
I’M STANDING NEXT TO A TREE at the killing fields in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It’s an ordinary tree, but a sign affixed to its thick trunk reads: “Killing Tree Where Executioners Beat Children.”
It’s the first day of a two-week tour with Intrepid Travel, a company that promises “real life experience for adventurous travelers,” and the day has been filled with tales of torture and death. Despite the graphic evidence of the tree, the mass graves and the human skulls on display in a memorial to the victims of the Khmer Rouge, I’m not grasping the human angle, and the experience doesn’t feel real.
ALL PHOTOS BY MATTHEW KLEIN.Intrepid Travel was founded in 1989 with the goal of taking travelers off the beaten track in Asia. Twenty-two years later, it offers 300 trips across 50 destinations, from Algeria to Zanzibar. The company promotes “responsible travel,” which is described as travel “that both respects and benefits local people, their culture and the environment.”
At the end of the first day, however, I’ve experienced a paint-by-numbers tour of two historic sites. There’s nothing to distinguish this tour from any other itinerary-based expedition. It all feels distant and academic.
Two days later, the pieces start to fall into place. Our group of eight travelers, from America, Australia and Europe, hires motorbikes and drivers for a tour of the countryside around the city of Battambang. We spend the morning visiting a roadside hut where old women cook a mixture of sticky rice and sweet coconut juice in foot-long lengths of bamboo, and then a house where an extended family works in shifts to produce thin sheets of rice paper for spring rolls.
Later, at a hilltop temple, our local guide, a Battambang native named Pau, tells us the story of his family’s survival during the reign of the Khmer Rouge, rife with suffering, deprivation, and death. But his words illuminate the horrors of Pol Pot’s attempt to fashion an agrarian cooperative society out of a fusion of idealistic Marxist and Maoist theories in a way that the exhibits at the genocide museum and the killing fields could not.
Pau’s tale is fresh in our minds when we set off on the return journey to Battambang. As we roll through rural villages, children sprint out of their houses, whether tumbledown wooden shacks or more solid concrete bungalows, grinning from ear to ear, waving and shouting “Hello! Hello!” while running alongside our motorbikes. Their joy at seeing our lot of hot, sweaty foreigners is a small sign that the horrors of the past are being overshadowed by the new generation of Cambodians.
The tour continues with the obligatory visit to the temples of Angkor outside of Siem Reap. Thousands of tourists visit Siem Reap annually, and today visiting the temples can take on the feeling of shuffling through a line at Disneyland. Once again, we’re given a view of a distant, impersonal past. However, our primary guide for the two-week tour, Sovannarath, grew up in Siem Reap and intersperses stories of 1,000-year-old Angkor society with anecdotes about his visits to the temples while growing up. He tells us about visiting Angkor Wat as a child and running his hand over the extensive bas-reliefs that are now roped off from human touch. As a teenager, he and his friends wandered through crumbling temples reclaimed by the jungle. His experiences lent a human angle to the sites that no guidebook could offer.
After 10 days on the road, our group agrees that we’ve been introduced to the real Cambodia. But it’s an unscheduled stop that gives us the most penetrating insight into the realities of life here.
We’re on a bus heading to the beach resort of Sihanoukville when a motorbike traveling in the opposite direction moves into our lane. The bus driver tries to swerve out of the way, but there isn’t enough room. The left front bumper of the bus clips the bike. The driver of the motorbike lies in the middle of the highway in a daze, his left arm shattered, his hand hanging bloody and limp. His passenger lies dead on the side of the road. But what’s most disturbing is that no one helps the injured man out. They’re afraid of being held responsible were he to later die. He does, in fact, die at the hospital because he isn’t able to pay for medical treatment.
The incident is traumatic, but it is also the most eye-opening experience I’ve had in Cambodia. Intrepid Travel recognizes the intensity of the event and arranges for a crisis intervention once the group returns to Phnom Penh.
The accident is an unplanned event, the kind of thing that no tour company would include on an itinerary. But it is also, as Intrepid Travel had promised, the ultimate real-life experience.
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