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Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Friday, 24th November 1995
Departing Saigon our flight was quite short to Phnom Penh; traveling the 115 NM (132.2 SM), on a northwesterly heading, in under twenty-six minutes on airway R-468.
Phnom Penh is situated on the banks of the Tonlé Sap, Mekong and Bassac rivers.
The French colonized Cambodia, and in 1870 turned
the fishing village of Phnom Penh into a beautiful
city, which, in the 1920s, was known as the “Pearl of Asia.”
This incredible city was destroyed by bloody war between the North Vietnamese Army, and their Viet Cong, against the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge cut off all supplies to the city for more than a year before it fell on April 17, 1975. Reports from journalists stated that the Khmer Rouge shelling "tortured the capital almost continuously," inflicting "random death and mutilation" on millions of trapped civilians.
Then the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated the entire city after taking it, in what has been described as a “death march.”
All of its residents, including
the wealthy and educated, were forced
into hard labor on rural farms as "new people."
Tuol Sleng High
School was taken over by Pol
Pot's forces, and
turned into the S-21 Prison Camp, where people were detained and tortured. Pol Pot sought a return to an agrarian economy
and killed many people perceived as educated, "lazy" or political
enemies. Many others starved to death as
a result of the failing agrarian society, and the sale of Cambodia's rice to
China in exchange for weapons and ammo. The former high school is currently the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum,
where Khmer Rouge torture devices and photos of their victims are displayed. Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields), nine miles away, is where the Khmer Rouge marched
prisoners from Tuol Sleng to be murdered and buried in shallow pits. A memorial is there to those who were killed
by the regime.
Subsequently the Khmer Rouge was driven out of Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese in 1979, and Cambodians
returned to the city. Historically Vietnam
has had many conflicts with Cambodia; so this “liberation” from the Khmer Rouge was viewed with mixed emotions by Cambodians. A period of reconstruction began, attracting all
manner of new foreign investments and aid.
Thus all types of scams occurred, relabeling the country, for those old
Asia-hands in the know, as “Scam-bodia.”
Due to the ex-Khmer Rouge, murdering-dictator Hun Sen, presently ruling Cambodia, dear reader, I was happy to spend a paucity of time in this unsafe shithole. It’s a shame the French couldn’t hang on to their “Pearl of Asia.”
In future a professional American photographer
pal of mine from Phuket, would visit “Scam-bodia,” and be set up by the local
cops for having sex with a supposedly “under-age” hooker. After being robbed by the cops of cash and
all of his expensive-professional camera gear, then spending months in prison
without a trial, and having all his toenails pulled out, because he refused to
wire transfer $70,000 USD to the cops, he at length was taken to court. Whereby he slipped away and escaped Phnom
Penh in a Coca-Cola delivery truck! It
was for him, truly “the pause that refreshes.”
Pochentong International Airport lays 5.4 NM (6.2 SM) west of Phnom Penh, the nation's
capital, with a single runway at 9,843 feet in length (050°/230° magnetic,
NE/SW). It had instrument VOR approaches
on both ends of the runway, but generally we’d use the VOR approach to Runway
Five.
After barely an hour on the ground we
launched for Vientiane, Laos; following the Mekong River northbound similar to
the trading vessels of the last thousand years.
Unlike the trading vessels of yesteryear however, instead of taking
weeks to make this journey from Phnom Penh to Vientiane, it only took my 737
one hour and twenty-eight minutes to fly the 544 NM (625.6 SM).
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