Lao Rap Volume 3: tragic entertainment on SE Asian bus journeys

Laos Techno Volume 3. Tragic bus journey entertainment

Before my whole visa/life passed by in heavenly Luang Prabang city, I had to get back on the road. Until now, my journeys in Laos had been in the relative luxury of hired minibuses with suspension, friends, and drivers racing to get home before nightfall. Now I was going to cover ¾ of the country on the public buses.

The 6 hour ride to Nong Khiaw was by sawngthaew (“song tao”) meaning 2 rows: a flat-back truck with 2 benches facing each other along the sides. My travel companions included a boy holding a rooster round the throat to keep it calm, women with unliftable sacks of fresh vegetables, and a bag full of chopped animal chunks in ice (that rapidly melted and sourced a stream of leaked diluted blood that meandered and surged towards different peoples’ sandals with the weaving of the road). Under someone’s bit of bench was a box of chicks chirping, more frantically so after going airborne over pot-holes then thudding back down. We were told to twist our torsos diagonally, as shoulder-against-shoulder limited space for only 18 passengers, and there were always ethnic minority grannies and snotty urchins and their sacks waving by the road to be rammed in, on, under, over us. Now proverbial sardines, another stop and another family and their market stall of produce was somehow wedged in between our elbows and feet, on the roof, in pockets, and probably behind the box of chicks.

Fellow passengers

On the roof were wooden armchairs, amongst other things. You can take anything on Lao public transport and people do. I saw one sawngthaew loaded to axle-buckling with 3 huge water buffalo, another with motorbikes on the back. Is the idea of piling a whole town onto a pick-up truck to re-enact The Grapes of Wrath? So far, fascinating.

Boarding the bus

Before picking up passengers

The luxury intercity bus

The next day I discovered how to get even more thrill from the sawngthaew ride: to sit almost hanging off the very back. You don’t get buried under sacks of papayas, snozzcumbers (did the BFG live in Laos?) and pig innards, and you’re literally in, rather than watching, the scenery: jungle mountainsides and rickety hut villages flanking this deserted and only paved road from central Laos to China. We chugged past pre-teen kids lugging great baskets of logs on their backs, some weight transferred from back to neck by a strap round their foreheads, forest-slashing machetes in hand. Mothers in their thirties are worn and wrinkled to double that age by 10 mile a day hikes for water and firewood through sun, sweat, toil, and having suckled 4 offspring and a couple more who didn’t survive their early years. Primary rainforest smothered by creeping vegetation grows right down to the roadside where it hasn’t been slashed and burned to soily mountain slope and charred logs. The price of progress.

Typical roadside scenes

At Odomxai Chinese trading town I was relegated into the worst interior-designed bus ever. Metal lumps and sharp ridges, screws, bolts and handles projected from windowsills and seats, right where elbows and legs naturally fall to rest. On every hairpin, my kneecap would swing sideways and thwack into a steel knob or chunk of tough plastic projecting outfrom the back of the seat 20cm infront, there solely to end foreigners’ pub-league football careers. The bus designer evidently never took into account human sized passengers or the bus being hurled round corners at speeds Asian drivers put the Schumachers to shame with. It was like being wedged into an oil drum with the contents of a mechanic’s toolbox then rolled down Kilimanjaro. Millionaire wannabes take note! Design a bus for passengers taller than 5 foot 5 to be built in Asia, and you’ll be sharing canapés with Bill Gates in no time.

Despite my grumbling, I was lucky to have a ‘proper’ seat, rather than one of the nursery school pink chairs with buckling legs that were lined down the aisle, that a big Aussie was thrown onto the hot gearbox cover from at every left-hand bend. And I didn’t have to hand over my papers for intense scrutiny at checkpoints as the locals did.

Women in the aisle seats

So far still alright, though grumpiness inducing after 8 hour stints. But on doing a U-turn after visiting the far north, so did my luck.

For the length of the country southwards (60 hours), the bus journeys were from The Pit. I’d barely survived them across Cambodia and Indonesia, and was close to weeping at again being punished for untold sins in this manner. What makes me judder as I write this isn’t the poor road quality, manic driving, each square metre of interior and roof taken up by 10 human, avian, and dissected porcine bodies, or even the male choir of hoikers and spitters that leave the bus aisle glistening with little lime green parcels for tourists to slip on. Oh no, it’s much worse: the music and the puking.

The music on that first 14 hour journey south had broken me in Indonesia. Thankfully the driver didn’t like it either, and demanded his teeny DJ boy (there purely to eject the scratched music DVD then instantly reinsert it, 30 times a journey) turn it off. Phew! But within 5 minutes he was bored and ordered it back on. Gutted! Then after 3 songs back off. Then on again. Then off again. Then just one track on repeat. Why 12 hours of this? Because he has a Southeast Asian male brain. There’s no other explanation and none is needed. By midnight I was rabid with rage. Either leave the din on and piss me off, or leave it off and let me relax as much as your kamikaze driving allows. But why get my hopes up on dozing to the relatively soothing tones of an over-revved diesel engine then shatter them every 5 minutes? I had to smile at the irony of having Faithless’s ‘Insomniac’ going round my head during the brief respites from Siam house music.

So what is it about the bus music of Laos and Cambodia that has me twitching with an aural equivalent of Gulf War Syndrome even now? I’ve identified the main elements of that music that, hand on heart, drove me to plot murder.

1. The singer is the same camp Thai bloke on every DVD. He sounds like Roy Chubby Brown with a chandelier-shattering falsetto and a peg on his nose, speed reading a Marvel comic into a kiddies Fisher Price music synthesiser (£4.99 in Woolworth’s).

2. The tempo is set by a cow bell struck twice a second, dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink dinkdink in every song, never letting you relax. How would you feel stuck in a phonebox for a full day with an attention deficit disorder kid on Ecstacy, his frying pan and metal spoon?

3. The volume is so loud that the loudspeaker casing resonates, giving a tin can effect to the din. I might as well have stuffed my, “Quieten by 29 decibels” earplugs up my nostrils for all the effect they had.

4. The mentality of the driver who on an energy-draining, scorching, 15-hour, twisty-turny journey on steep mountainsides with a bus full of geriatric and child vomiters, and tourists desperate to read (why do the southeast Asians never read on buses?) or sleep, thinks booming Thai techno will soothe people’s stomachs/nerves/tempers?

Another glance at the clock and it’s now 1am.

5. The fact that none of the locals seem affected or even aware of this racket leads me to feel it’s a team conspiracy just to see if they can make the foreigner pop with rage.

6. The videos (this is karaoke after all) accompanying the music are dire, well the lead males anyway. An absolute insult to the Y chromosome! There are three roles:

A. A full-blown drag and drama queen;

B. A pre-surgery ladyboy wannabe: a mega-camp Ant or Dec eyebrow-flirting from a shiny, make-upped and skin-bleached face, like an Asian Orville and as bad a dancer;

C. An effeminate middle-aged bloke with his T-shirt tucked into his trousers and trying to be tough: think Eddie Izzard posturing and pouting and air punching like a gangsta rap ape.

On the on-stage gag concerts the men are either transvestites, unbelievably camp, or actually wail and tantrum in mimic of toddlers. They whine and whinge and cower and cry as much as speak, and act like adolescent apes in the presence of ladies. WHAT THE F**K IS THIS?! And why do the women tolerate it, on top of being full-time servants to their men?

To be fair to Laos, this is Thai ‘entertainment’. But there’s no excuse for buying this DVD, or subjecting me to it for 10 hours every day! Maybe it’s a government ploy to prevent uprisings by keeping the people numb. And if these are Laos’s, Camodia’s and Indonesia’s male role models, is it any wonder that the women are so interested in Western men. At least the teen Thai girl on the arm of the 60-year-old, pot-bellied and balding German sex-tourist gets some exposure to testosterone.

The karaoke disco bus to Savannakhet. Thankfully only a 10 hour journey today.

The 10 hour Phonsovan to Vientiane journey was one of the worst, the music capped by the pukers. After only 20 minutes and still crossing flat plains, the girl sat behind me and the woman opposite me were hurling and dribbling the contents of their stomachs into those transparent plastic bags you put your apples in in Tesco. The old woman only had one bag for comfort and didn’t want to be without it, so she clutched it shut as its watery yellow load bounced and swayed with the bus. She even fell asleep without letting go of it. The Asians have incredibly intolerant stomachs for journeying, yet could fall into a snoring coma on a speeding rollercoaster.

I got quite irritated by the lad infront who kept opening the window and chucking stuff out, along the grassy verge of one of the top 10 most stunning vistas in Asia. Couldn’t he have kept his bags, each with a banana skin in, until he could put it in his home litter bin? Then it dawned on me it wasn’t plastic-wrapped fruit skin he was chucking out. Hmmm.... probably best outside the bus, though biodegradable sick bags could be a niche market product.

Why would anyone want to throw their vomit on this scenery?

By the fourth 7pm I was soooo relieved to be back in the capital, unfairly labelled as, “Ah Vientiane, the Croydon of SE Asia” on my hostel room graffiti. I only had 16 more hours bus travel left to the Vietnam border. But first I needed a few days in Vientiane to recuperate.

So if anyone’s contemplating travelling Laos or Cambodia by bus, the most important consideration is a well-located seat. It’s a real task to get one, and requires careful planning and quick thinking. Not because of a scrum of Lao people charging on; they just stand in the aisle waiting to be yelled at by the driver where to sit. But because you have only 3 seconds to assess where is a balanced distance between front karaoke screen and rear seats near the engine (it’s +35^oC before the engine is switched on, although the screaming engine does drown the music a little). Seats over the back wheel arches offer zero leg space: no good as you’re going to get boxes and sacks and kids and squawking/bckaaawing/snuffling farmyard animals dumped on your lap. Front end sit the puking grannies, at the back the puking, spitting, wailing, drunk men. A window lodged open is bad, despite the cooling breeze, as a puker’s load jettisoned out the bus from somewhere aft will re-enter in your face. But above all this, the urgency of your speedy scanning is for the locations of the overhead music speakers. Getting 2 rows and 10 decibels away from them makes all the vomiting trivial.

A week in the capital next…

Ancient mysteries and American bombs: Laos

Ancient mysteries and American bombs: Laos

I was going to see ancient mystery monuments around Phonsovan that we know less about than Stonehenge and Mayan pyramids. The bus bumped across central Laos along Route 13. A teenager sat behind me cradling a machine gun. Several public buses have been ambushed on this road, once leaving 13 passengers dead, 12 killed in another. The government blames banditry by Hmong tribesmen while others say the attacks are politically motivated. In 2000, bombs went off in the Laos capital’s bus station and day market. Thirty Hmong rebels were assassinated by the government last week (Bangkok Post). Kid Crackshot and his AK47 behind me were there to protect us. But this violence is tiny compared to the atrocities that Phonsovan district is also renowned for.

Phonsovan is a one street (dusty track) mish mash of a town surrounded by flat grassy plains. The Indian restaurant has pictures of hamburgers and hotdogs on the placemats. There’s a must-visit office of the Mines Advisory Group on the main street. To stop me losing my guest house hotel room key it was wired to a giant bullet casing. In the garden, benches and fencing were bomb casings ½ the size of kayaks.

There are 3 unusual features around Phonsovan: mysterious ancient jars, the Ho Chi Minh Trail and unexploded ordnance (UXO). A group of us hired a jeep and guide to visit three of the jars sites; the other 2 features would be ‘bonuses’. The Plains of Jars are areas of prairie littered with giant ancient jars whose origin and purpose are little understood, like ceramic Easter Island statues. We could only visit 3 of the many jar sites as the others haven’t been cleared of UXO.

The UXO is a daily reminder of how dangerous bombs dropped from airplanes can still wreak havoc 40 years later. During the Vietnam War, much of Laos was carpet-bombed by the U.S., even though Laos didn’t partake in the war. The Americans objected to the transport of arms from North to South Vietnam through Laos along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which is fair enough. To cut this supply route, my guide informed me, “U.S. airplanes dropped 3,000,000 tonnes of bombs on innocent Laotians. Every 8 minutes for 9 years”. To put 1.5 tonnes of explosives per Lao person into perspective, it took only 1.5 tonnes of IRA explosive to obliterate the centre of Manchester in ‘96*. Not fair enough.

*http://www.manchester2002-uk.com/buildings/bombing.html

At each Plain of Jars site we walked on narrow paths defined by a brick every few metres and painted white on the in side to designate ‘area cleared of UXO, so safe to walk on’. The out sides of the bricks were red, ‘area only surficially cleared of UXO, step out at your own risk’. There are hundreds of huge jars at each site of maybe 1000 years old and purpose not fully understood. Maybe they were funeral urns, or made to hold Laolao local rice whisky. Some were carved from sedimentary rock, others made with sand, mud, water and buffalo skin and leaves for binding. They are typically 1.5m to 2m high though range from drum-size to the largest at 2.25m tall and weighing 6 tonnes. That one must have been for a province king.

Big, mysterious jars

Bricks indicating where's safe, and not safe, to walk on

Part of an American bomb crater

Across the jars sites are trench lines dug by Lao people to transport arms or hide from bombs that left craters of 5m diameter and 2-3m deep. Horrifying UXO clearance statistics display: ‘Site 1. 2.4sq km subsurface cleared. UXO destroyed: 127. Scrap pieces found: 31,814”. There’s a desire for the Plain of Jars to be a UNESCO world heritage site but it can’t while hiding 60 UXO per km² for as far as the eye can see to all horizons.

Sad statistics

Lunch was at a Hmong tribe village to see Laolao whisky being made. Advertised as a ‘whisky-making village’, the attraction was a gnarly old woman by her wooden house stirring vats of fermenting rice. She puts 8kg of rice into water to soak for 9 hours, then adds 2kg of yeast, boils it up then leaves it to ferment for 2 days. Then she boils it again, now and again chucking under bits of firewood found nearby, and allows the vapours to condense down a strip of wood to make 18 litres of tequila-tasting sweet rice whisky. The first litre off is 90% alcohol and used for cuts and grazes. The rest is diluted down to 40% and sold to tourists like us for $1 a litre. A couple of little kids peeped shyly at us as granny gave us a toothless grin and siphoned off her brew into our plastic water bottles.

Granny pouring us whisky

Driving to jar site 3 the hill slopes are scarred with bottle-shaped patches of non-vegetated earth. They aren’t odd-shaped bomb marks but swallow traps. A couple of swallows are tied down flapping in the dust, attracting a flock to land to investigate the commotion. Hiding people swiftly yank ropes and a big net flips over the birds. 100-200 whole swallows are then put in a jar to ferment for a fortnight before being barbecued.

Going to the jars we walked along a rickety bamboo bridge then along the narrow walls keeping the paddy fields water in, persuading the guide to take us to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which he agreed for another $4 (day’s wage) from each of us. On the way we stopped off at a snack store and I asked the guide which dimension of the ‘Number 1’ condoms was the 52mm proudly boasted on the box referring to. He assumed it was the diameter as he was sure the length is 10cm. Is that not about the size and shape of a cigarette box!

Bamboo bridge and water collection

The Ho Chi Minh Trail wasn’t a sign-posted and paved highway as the American lass was disappointed by. Rather it is a few metre-wide dusty tracks anastomosing around wooden houses in and between Hmong villages. The cute kids who nervously followed us don’t speak Lao, just Hmong language, my, “Jaw sabaidee bor?” as foreign to them as it was to me a month ago. Houses and chicken coops were on stilts of 500lb and 2000lb bomb casings. Land-dividers are rows of bomb cases nearly as tall as I. Black pigs snuffled about, chickens pecked at fine gravel under discarded bombs. It is this network of narrow foot- and bicycle-trails and these people the U.S. tried to block by dropping twice as many bombs as were dropped on Nazi Germany.

Part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Garden wall, woman for scale

Stilt houses utilising B-52 bomber ‘gifts’

The U.S.’s targets during the bombing wouldn’t have been much different to these

A risky but necessary cash-earner for these people is scrap-metal collection, for which they receive $1 for 7kg. But until the men or kids bend down to pick up the chunk of U.S. iron they don’t know whether its explosive charge is still live. One easier source of income was a WWII Russian tank used here by the Vietnamese and now stripped down to the bare hulk that’s too heavy to carry away.

In those 8 years of U.S. bombing, countless Lao people died. Survivors of the never-ending bombardment lived in caves, trenches or under trees. At the detriment to their health they were very careful to trap in every puff of give-away cooking smoke, for days at a time. Who can blame poverty-stricken villagers with little knowledge of the outside world from accepting money to carry a parcel a few kilometres to the next village? Especially as its contents are to be used against those who, for some reason unknown to them, are destroying their kin and ancestors’ homes and land from a cowardly safe 10km above. Yes, we know all about the Vietnam War, they’ve glorified their part through the Hollywood ‘U.S. world-beater’ propoganda machine. But how many people know of the U.S.’s attempted destruction of the Lao population for daring to do paid jobs, and its effort to destroy communism in a land where sharing the labour and the harvest is necessary to survive.

The U.S. dropped bombs weighing up to 2000lb (1100kg) each on wooden shacks and rice fields. They dropped more bombs on Laos than were dropped in World War II. But why am I harping on about this 40 years later, especially as the Laotian character is so laid-back it would personify, “Forgive and forget” better than any other nation?

The issue is that not all those dropped bombs exploded on impact. Many are still active and ticking by just under the grass, waiting for a playing child or grazing cow or field-ploughing parent. The results continue to devastate communities by destroying limbs, livestock and loved-ones every day. And is the U.S assisting in cleaning up their mess that’s maiming and killing innocents 2 generations later? After spending $9 million a day dropping the bombs, it now donates $1 million a year for clean up^#. ^#http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2003-12-11-laos-bombs_x.htm

Where land cannot be cultivated or used to build schools or clinics or attract tourists, how can people who earn less than $2 a day improve their quality of life? That is the UXO problem.

Thankfully, there are agencies working on clearing the UXO, e.g. UXO LAOS, NZAID and MAG, the Mines Advisory Group:

http://www.magclearsmines.org/

http://www.magclearsmines.org/news.php?s=2&p=1039

At the current rate of bomb searching and safe disposal, it’ll only take another century or so to make this land safe to live on again.

- Facts, figures and dates I haven’t referenced came from our local guide.

Anyone for duck foetus? and other odd Laos/Vietnam foods

Anyone for duck foetus? and other odd Laos/Vietnam foods

When living in South Korea, I tasted bundegi: boiled silkworm larvae (once was enough) and mettugi: crunchy fried grasshopper, for dares. I tried raw fish and octopus, got a taste for dried then blowtorched squid-on-a-stick. I became addicted to shin gimchi jjigae: cabbage fermented for 3 years in chilli, garlic and ginger then made into soup. Most controversially, I nibbled a meaty lump from a bowl of bosintang: dog soup. So I reckoned I was a bit tough in the 'odd foods' department. I hadn't counted on befriending Laos lass Tou and her uncle in Luang Prabang night market, Laos.

In Luang Prabang night market, there's a lively alleyway crammed with little food stalls. I went there every night for the 5000 kip (30p), all-you-can-pile-in-the-bowl vegetables and noodles buffet. Spot on! The first time I went I was a bit grossed out walking by stalls selling bits of pig brain, intestines, liver, kidneys and even whole heads out of slop buckets, as the sellers waved plastic bag-on-twig flags at the flies. I gradually got accustomed to the offal through its daily 50 second inclusion in my dinner time. But it didn't prepare me for the foods I was to try.

One evening, Tou suggested that if I like spicy food (Too right! Chicken Rogan Josh is well up there on my list) then I should try the papaya salad she was making. After a chopstickful, then 10 minutes of firemouth (Rusholme vindaloos and Osaka tablespoonfuls of wasabi are gaylord soft in comparison), I suggested she rename it 'red chilli salad with a sliver of papaya'. Not content to let me eat something more regular, Uncle forced me to try a sliver of pig skin. It wasn't crackling or crispy, with its only slightly cooked, juicy and centimetre-thick white rind. And with the hairs and goosebumps protruding out the other side, it felt like a rubbery bit of a fancy dress moustache. "No I don't want to try any buffalo skin, thank you."

The next evening's delicacy for me to savour was ant's eggs and fish paste. Actually, it didn't taste that bad, but I didn't like it because it sounds so wrong. Leaving the foodmarket, I made the mistake of asking Uncle why the piles of white-shell eggs had the numbers, 1, 2 or 3 written in blue pen on the shell. When will I learn to keep my mouth shut? Literally.

Uncle was thrilled that I'd shown interest in another Laos delight and bought two eggs from the '2' pile. It turns out they were duck eggs, but unlike their chicken counterparts, these weren't unfertilised blobs of yellow in white. Uncle uncapped one to reveal a 2-day/week(?) developed baby duck, sat upright in clear juice and attached to a hard yellow yolk that had hair's breadth black lines running through it: placenta and blood vessels, I presume. He necked the amniotic fluid, cracked the shell open wider and wolfed down the foetus whole. As I was wearing the most disgusted facial expression to his dessert, I was cajoled into opening the other egg. Jocken slurped some of the juice, and Terrie and I nibbled the smallest crumbs of the yellow lump we could pick off. It had a much richer flavour than chicken yolk, and was a melt-in-your-mouth guacamole smooth.
Ever the scientist, I studied the foetus, prodding its partially-formed and still transparent head with curiosity. But then I saw its open eye and dropped the egg in shock. The shell split open and the tender foetus splattered into the gutter. So what does one do next? Pick it up? I apologised to the unborn duck, sighed dishearteningly and walked away to Uncle's, "Don't worry about it". I felt guilty leaving it there, but would picking it up, dusting it off then scoffing it have been any better? At least a crooked-tail cat got a meal.

Mooching through Laos, I've come across some odd things on menus. Some may be typing mistakes, others sound pretty minging, and a few plain unfathamable. Anyone fancy:

Breastfast
Rap beef
Fried spaqhetti with beef
Soup eggs vegetable not saited
Transparent noodle with chicken soup
Soup pork not saited
Fried morning glory with pork
Fried morning glory with chilli
Steamfish inside banana life
Steam picklefish and stewed vegetables
Day meat smashed style Luang Prabang
Sausage buffalo style Luang Prabang
Lao style intestine, onion salad
Silent,Deeply pork
Pork Fried ginger (chilli)
Banana flower soup with pork
Muang Sing Sour Rice (no meat) - White rice mixed with tomatoes juice, fried garlic chilli served with cucumbers and water buffalo rind
me (noodle) yum yum with vegetables
Rice and F.hot morning glorying & fried egg
Baguette + omelet with fresh minced milk & tomato ?

Was the pig a philosopher or a computer hacker?

Anyone for seconds?

Despite these odd main courses, Laos has some delicious national dishes. The PVO cafe's (Vientiane) scrummy foot-long hot baguette rammed full of pate, pork, ham, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, beansprouts, chilli sauce and a fistful of coriander got my breakfast vote every morning. But the best meal I had was a giant bowl of noodle soup containing handfuls of freshly torn coriander and mint leaves and hearty chunks of water buffalo rump. If anyone's passing, it's available from a noodle stall by Luang Nam Tha bus station (near the Laos-Burma-China border) and is the perfect stomach filler for a 14-hour-long bus journey through mountainous north Laos. Shame about the in-bus entertainment (another instalment).

In Vietnam, the occasional restaurant boasts just as yukky foods as in Laos:

Roasted chicken with black leg
Noodie soup brown in fat with hear and kidney
Turn upside down rice - pickles brown in fat with beef
Dove stew with eastern medicine
Snail browned infat with chilly
Grilled perfume snail
Sea product miscellaneous mix.

Also:


And not forgetting the countless dog meat restaurants in Hanoi and by the roadsides. And is it going to get any better in China!

Sleepy sleepy Laos

Sleepy Laos

"The Thais plant the rice, the Cambodians watch it grow and the Laos people listen to it grow". (quoter unknown). After months of full-on Bangkok, militant Thais, active volcanoes, Bangsal Harbour's mafia, Timor, Komodo dragons, 33-hour long bus journeys, a couple of motorbike accidents, no cheese, landmine victims and genocide sites, Laos sounds like a perfect place to pause.
Laos is one of the lesser known of the 11 countries with four lettered names, and is landlocked between Vietnam and Burma, China and Thailand. Pronounced, "Lao" (silent 's' added by French colonialists), it sounds more like a Lancashire pub name than an Asian country; I can imagine Peter Kay announcing in Chorley speak he's, "Just off down to't Lao's Head for a few pints". Or The Cow and Lao, The Old Nag's Lao, Lao and Pigeons.
But best of all, soporific Laos and its people are undoubtedly the most relaxed in Asia.

Arriving into Vientiane city I found myself beaming at its placidness: near-empty streets, every second car an old style VW Beetle, temples adorned with gold, crumbling French colonial buildings with wooden verandahs, no traffic, no din. If this is the capital, how laid back are the rural villages going to be? And when the tuk tuk drivers do raise their heads above their hammock rims to enquire if you need a ride, they take your head shake for an answer the first time! And their list of services is more interesting and extensive than other nations’ taxi-drivers: "You want transport? ….. Smoke? ….. Boom boom? ….. Opium? ….. Something?" Most buildings proudly display the Laos flag by the entrance, alongside a Soviet flag of hammer and sickle. Communism sort of rules here.

Temple and tuk tuk

After gorging on Asia's best sandwich in PVO Vietnamese cafe: a foot long hot toasted ‘Everything Baguette’ stuffed with lashings and lashings of pate, pork, chilli, coriander leaves and salad, came D'Tech for some Communist-style nightclubbing. The crowd of early twenties Laotians, looking prim and proper in pink skirts and smart shirts weren't really jumping, but who could to Laos R'n'B? A few denim-wearing and spiky-haired radicals jerked to Laos grunge and loved The Cranberries' 'Zombie'. I was the tallest there and most of the petite Laotians were fascinated and confused at our size, necking of beers, head moshing, and piss-take Scottish jigging to Laos Techno Volume 3. By midnight closing time most of the teenyboppers had piled onto motorbikes, taking the litter from the dancefloor with them, while some of those remaining helped to sweep and clean the already spotless toilets.

Vientiane seems like the perfect city to settle down in, what with its ultra-calm vibe and many conveniences of modern Western living: ambient coffee shops, creperies, outdoor swimming pools. A typical exchange of greetings with a stranger goes:

"Sabaidee" - Hello
"Sabaidee" - Hello
"Sabaidee bor?" - How are you?
"Sabaideeee. Sabaidee bor?" - Fine. How are you?
"Sabaideeee" – Fine.
Then smiles and nods all round, before continuing on one’s way.

However, Vientiane’s ugly side revealed itself to 2 friends of mine as they were walking home from a Mekong Riverside bar after a World Cup footie game. Drunk men with machine guns had them dash into a side street, where prostitutes trotted between black cars with black-tinted windows. As an old woman questioned what the hell they were doing walking on the streets at night, a prostitute had them jump on her motorbike and she drove them away to safety. Taking a stroll with a Laos girl by the river after dusk can have you arrested, passport confiscated, then deported, and her fired from her job. But most dangerous of all is walking back to your guesthouse drunk. In the gaping holes left by crumbled-away paving stones lies festering sewer porridge that you wouldn't wish your worst enemy to stumble into, and by Sod's Law is always situated at the furthest points between dim street lamps.

Flowing by Vang Vieng town is the tonic to any uneasiness generated by the subtle iron fist rule of Laos (people are still sent to 're-education' camps by the government if their ideas aren’t deemed suitable by the Party). The Nam Xong River meanders by some world-class karst mountain scenery, and one can float along on a truck inner tube and marvel of what rain can carve out of limestone. Every few hundred metres are riverbank bars of bamboo (or teenage entrepreneurs waving a bottle of lager at you, “MISTERRRR! BEERLAAAAO!”) and giant rope swings and slides. A wave of the hand and they'll haul you in, pop a mighty bottle of Beerlao, undoubtably Asia's best lager, into your hand and put on the chill-out CD of your request. Before you know it everyone's kamikaziing from the highest point of rope swing trajectories into crisp, clean water, splashing about, getting tipsy. There are grottoes chock full of mega-stalactites to bicycle to and caves containing subterranean turquoise lakes.
In confusing contrast to the sublime sunsets behind the row of Sugar Loaf Mountain-like domes are the restaurants on Vang Vieng high street. They screen either Friends, The Simpsons or lame Hollywood flopbusters all day long to crowds of mesmerised Westerners. Outside is one of the most spectacular mountain vistas I've ever seen (think Guilin, Halong Bay, Ko Phi Phi), and most other tourists are too zombified by 'happy pizzas' or personality dysfunctions to look out the windows or even smirk at Bart's or Chandler's 'wisecracks'. I’m not going to express my thoughts?

Vang Vieng

The ancient city of Luang Prabang is infinitely better for the soul. This old capital and UNESCO world heritage city has only a few streets, lined with exquisite temples and palaces of gold and red, between beautifully restored French colonial buildings. The little cobbled alleyways are lined with stalls heaped with tropical fruits: pink and spiky dragon fruit, heaps of honey-sweet mangosteens, huge orange mangoes so juicy it dribbles stickily all down your forearms. The night market blocks the main street with women in traditional ethnic costumes peddling their hand-stitched duvets of a thousand colours and patterns, antique opium pipes, jade ornaments. And at the end of the lanes rushes the mighty, caramel-coloured Mekong River, hurrying its Himalayan load to the South China Sea.

Evening market hand-made goodies

Oh! and Laos has ladyboys. They're not as feminine as Thailand's, as without the surgery they're just lads with make-up on and salon hairstyles, white vests and Adam's apples. Some are as young as ten (what are the fathers thinking?). Behaviourwise, they are neither male nor female. They don't do any heavy lifting or carrying or toiling for 18 hours a day as Lao women do, but do sit doing bugger-all like a typical male. However, rather than squat on the kerb, chain-smoke and gaze into space as most men do, they pout, flick their hair and file their nails all day. The manager of Hive Bar perfectly demonstrated the ladyboy attitude. When I asked him to put some alcohol into the glass of milk he'd sold me as a White Russian, he screamed and shrieked like a young girl having her hair yanked out in a catfight, then threw the glass at the wall. Demanding I fight him, I couldn't block all the slaps as I was laughing too hard to let go of my stomach.

Our gang (Andy the ex- elf rollercoaster operator at Camelot, indie Heather, arian Brigette, the so chilled Orie and giddy Kelly) bartered a jumbo tuktuk ride to Kuang Xi waterfalls: a cascade of turquoise water tumbling from travertine pool to pool. As the calc-rich water roars through rainforest it coats fallen trees with a limestone skin; dried-up water routes can be traced where mini-stalactites hang from protruding roots and branches of trees on steep slopes. And by one lush, aquamarine natural swimming pool is the tiger. She was apparently rescued from a poacher when a cub, and now has a ‘better' life in this cage and outdoor enclosure. She seemed sedated, even when I sat just half a metre from her head (on the opposite side of the bars, of course). Would an alert tiger have ignored my close presence? The keeper joked the tiger was sad because she didn't have a boyfriend. But my! She perked up when Heather held a chunk of raw meat on a stick above head height; the cat stood way over 2 metres tall to snatch the steak with a bbbbiiiigggg and toothy mouth.
In the next enclosure are 8 'moon' bears: black Asiatic bears with a white crescent of fur on their chests. I'd once been told these rare bears only lived in the no-man's-land between the 2 Koreas, so I was happy to see them here. Except the parents were segregated from juveniles pacing frantically in mental torment. Though I guess it’s better than them ornamenting someone's fireplace, or being a jar of bear bile Chinese medicine?

Kuang Xi waterfalls

One rainy 5am, we got up to give alms to the many novice monks of the city's temples. Most Lao men do monk service, usually as teenagers. Older monks are often convicted criminals opting to serve Buddha rather than a prison sentence. Although all monks have a shaved head, orange robes and a food jar, ex-criminal ones are distinguished by their forearm tattoos, permanent frowns and often sneaking a cigarette when they think no-one can see.
Every dawn, the hundreds of monks file along the streets to receive food from the city's mostly elderly residents and early-bird tourists. Wanting to provide the monks with some dietary variation beyond the scrunched fistfuls of sticky rice given by everyone else, I handed out bananas to each robed chap. Heather went one better, trying to present the kilo of pre-peeled, sliced, and cellophane-wrapped papaya to each young lad who walked a curve into the road to avoid her token; it wouldn't fit in their hip-held food pots.

Novice monks collecting food at dawn

To experience real rural Laos, among people who maintained traditional costumes and lived by jungle in wooden huts without the luxury of electricity or sanitation, I took a 2-day ride on the back of a pick-up truck bus, a 'sawngtheaw', to the Laos-Burma-China border region. My fellow passengers were a few old women, some in colourful costume and all spitting, and a boy holding the neck of a twitchy cockerel to prevent it wandering. Along the tarmac strip, women and kids walked buckled under the weight of enormous baskets on their backs. 5pm must be washing time, as where gushing waterfalls met the road groups of women stood showering with sarongs on. Rickety bamboo huts lined the road and market stalls boasted a few piles of cucumbers or green oranges. What is it with rural Asians, all standing together and selling exactly the same product and wondering why none make a decent income?

From Muang Sing border town I pottered along little tracks between paddy fields, relaxed by wafts of something coriander-like, to traditional hamlets. Between the stilt houses were few signs of modern technology, no electricity cables or satellite dishes, though I did see a rusting motorbike. Under the stilts, cows, water buffalo, black pigs, dogs, cats, roosters, ducks and geese sheltered from the oppressive sun. Disappointingly, most of the traditionally dressed women were hidden, so I only met men dressed in rags and insolent kids demanding money and trying to sneak their mucky paws into my bag. There are so many young kids here, a post-war baby boom maybe. One 5-year-old urchin had her teething baby brother strapped to her back. German Uncle Klaus had them all enthralled with his impossible, ‘catch the $10 note and it’s yours’ trick.

Village urchin

In each village I was offered a sample of the cash crop, opium, by the old women. Opium is an accepted part of daily life for the elderly of this region, but, worryingly, many teenage boys are smoking it to look cool in the eyes of foreigners, with disastrous results to village work practises, families, harvests and economies. Exiting a village we took care not to walk through the ancient gateway, designed barbarically to keep out the evil spirits who roam the forest.

Evil forest spirits not welcome

Back on the tarmac road into Muang Sing town I got a snapshot of rural China, the country 5km to the north. The roadside was lined with piles of Chinese lager bottles and instant noodles’ E-number sachets scribed with Chinese characters (is Chinese waste management simply to empty the garbage truck just over the Laos border?). Spluttering trucks and tractors bore unfamiliar brand names FAW and Chuang Li on their grills. Unsurprisingly, the only non-Chinese vehicles were Toyota Land Cruisers tattooed with the motifs of OXFAM, UNICEF and other major aid agencies, surprisingly using charity donations for shiny, white, top-of-the-range vehicles for their field workers to travel in luxury to villages with malnourished and begging kids. Every cafe in Muang Sing town had Chinese karaoke blasting out and the people were surly, quick to grab money, and showed no interest in returning a, "Sabaidee": so unlike the typical Laotians. In our cafe, the owner was scoffing rice as the TV advert for skin-bleaching cream insisted, "White is right". The waitress/cleaner/dogsbody/ yelling target is chunkier than most Lao lasses and has a false eye. The 1/2 Vietnamese owner exploits her to the full. The pity-inducing lass earns $13 a month working 16 hours every day, and must forfeit a month's pay to leave to visit her parents (the bus ticket is another month's salary). What chance has she of getting a husband and ticket out of her slavery in this society?
"Laos people pity folk who think too much" (source unknown), so I'll stop there.

Phonsovan region next for mysterious ancient monuments, the place also disturbingly titled, ‘Most bombed place on Earth’...

8000 skulls: Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2)

8000 skulls: Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2)

Sickened deep into the gut by the horrors of Tuol Suay Prey High School/S-21 security prison, Andy and I took a motorbike taxi (3 men squeezed on one 100cc motorbike and 1 helmet between us - the norm) through bustling Phnom Penh. We were following the route taken by the S-21 survivors to their final resting place: Cheoung Ek Extermination Camp.

Just beyond the entrance to the Killing Fields, the first tourist 'attraction' is a memorial stupa that whacks the tourist with a direct hit the scale of the brutality that Pol Pot inflicted onto his own people, at this site. From a distance, the memorial resembles some modern art piece: a 15 or so metre high tower of clear perspex and white brick with a roof of golden spikes. But on reaching the entrance step one sees that it houses the remains of those who died here. The 16 shelves are loaded with human skulls, sorted by age and gender. At shoulder level directly beyond the entrance is the 'juvenile females age 15 to 20' group. The front 2 skulls stared back vacantly at me, showing off their lethal bullet and bludgeon marks, as the silent echo of their last scream resonated in my ears.

The memorial to the Cheoung Ek victims – bottom 5 of 16 shelves

Some of the 'juvenile females age 15 to 20'

Nauseated, I dragged my feet along to the tourist information boards, informing that from the 88 of 129 mass graves unearthed here, 8985 corpses have been recovered. A long message titled 'The Most Tragic' attempts to describe what happened at this giant tomb and across Cambodia under Pol Pot (Kampuchea, Campuchea):

"....we imagine that we are hearing the grevious voice of the victims who were beaten with canes, bamboo stumps or heads of hoes. Who were stabbed with knives or swords we seem to be looking at the horrifying scenes and the panic on stricken faces of the people who were dying of starvation, forced labour or torture without mercy on their skinny body. They died without giving their last words to their kith and kin.... How bitter they were when seeing their beloved children, wives, husbands, brothers or sisters were seized and tightly bound before being taken to the mass grave! While they were waiting for their turn to come and share the same tragic lot.

The method of massacre which the clique of Pol Pot criminals carried out upon the innocent people of Kampuchea cannot be described fully and clearly in words, because the invention of this killing method was strangely cruel so it is difficult for us to determine who they are for: they have human form but their hearts are demon's hearts, they have got the Khmer face but their activities are reactionary. They wanted to transform Campuchean people into a group of persons without reason, or a group who knew or understood nothing, who always bent their heads to carry out Ankar's orders blindly. They had educated and transformed young people and the adolescents whose hearts were pure, gentle and modest into odious executioners who dared to kill the innocent and even their own parents, relatives or friends.

They had burnt the market place, abolished monetary system, eliminated books of rules and principles of national culture, destroyed schools, hospitals, pagodas and beautiful monuments such as Angkor Wat temple. They were trying hard to get rid of our Khmer characters and transform the soil and waters of Kampuchea into a sea of blood and tears, deprived of cultural infra-structure, civilisation and national character. [Here] Became a desert of great destruction that drove our society back to the Stone Age."

And beyond the billboards, the rest of Cheoung Ek's 'sights' are just a handful of the excavated mass grave pits. The victims were made to dig large pits and stand inside as they were either shot or buried alive (1). They're about bus-sized, 2 metre deep indentations, fenced off, sheltered and signposted with details like:

Grave 5. Mass grave of more than 100 women and children

Grave 6. 450 victims

Grave 7:

It was eerily peaceful strolling around on hard earth punctured by up-projecting human bones and faded fragments of clothing, still attached to their owners lying inches below my feet. By the unexcavated Chinese mass grave is the site where Khmer Rouge soldiers practised clay pigeon shooting using babies that were alive when they were tossed up into the air. Birds chirped in the tree that still displays marks where ropes once held child victims to its trunk to be flogged. Around me, young lads playfully chased a chicken. Tinny karaoke music and adolescent singing drifted on the faint breeze. Chocolate-skinned kids dive-bombed and swam in a swimming pool sized rectangular pit holding a muddy pond (that may have been a giant mass grave?!), while on the other side of the embankment a woman toiled in her rice field and white cows munched grass. The swimming kids waved and sought my attention by following my head turn with, "Hello hello mister" and 1/2 submerged, wobbly headstands. However I felt too drained and depressed to have the standard 20 times a day, "What's your name? Where you from?" Q & A session with these ragged urchins.

Human rags and bones in the earth between excavated mass graves

8985 corpses of ordinary Cambodians and foreigners have so far been dug out from the earth of Cheoung Ek extermination camp. Only 7 people sent here by the Khmer Rouge exited alive. The Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths of up to 2 million people by the most atrocious methods. Only 2 members of the Khmer Rouge are being held for their crimes (1 in a coma) and it's taken until this month (July '06) for officials to be sworn in for long-awaited UN-backed genocide trials! It's looking highly unlikely that any Khmer Rouge murderer will ever be prosecuted for what they committed here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5182534.stm

Staring at these horrific death count statistics, I continue to wonder what could drive a human, often teenage, to: bury others alive; murder without any guilt, mercy or conscience; feed innocent people to crocodiles; butcher and torture their own nationals and even their own parents and siblings. Is this 'ability' learned, genetic, innate, conducted out of fear, or simply acted out to stay on the preferred end of the gun barrel/sword handle? I don't have any answers; I'm just a geologist.

In these last 2 mails I have only scraped the surface of the treatment of the Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge. For more details do read:
(1). http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/genocides/cambodia/CambodiaHistoryLavinia.htm

In my 6 days in Cambodia I could only focus on the big tourist sites, which unfortunately were centred on ruined temples, landmines, torture and genocide. The snapshots of everyday life I saw were also filled with people building their lives and country with much vigour, and joy at the simple things in life. Definitely worth a visit.

Laos next for some much deserved cheer..........

School of torture: Phnom Penh, Cambodia (1)

I went to Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh, specifically for the tourist sites S-21 and Cheounk Ek, to see and write about the atrocities committed there during our lifetimes.

The bus trip into Phnom Penh was about average quality for SE Asia. The bus had air con and did about 40 miles in an hour on a road that was tarmac (excellent!). On the down side, the karaoke started at 8am and the following entertainment was even worse. As in most SE Asian movies or music videos, the 'comic' star was a pathetic excuse of a male, acting like an ape in the company of the dollybird and like a complete dickhead at all other times: unable to do simple tasks and screeching about with the voice of an overly camp fairy holding his nose. And at full volume! And I'm so disheartend to see this alive and well on the streets.

Anyway, I wasn't coming to Phnom Penh to be baffled by the local male psyche. Rather, there are 2 major symbols of the Cambodian genocide years under Pol Pot to see. Led by dictator Pol Pot, the communist Khmer Rouge regime undertook a radical experiment that attempted to turn Cambodia into a classless society by depopulating cities and forcing the urban population into agricultural communes. Money, private property, education and even religion were outlawed as all Cambodians were rehoused in concentration camps as farmers. Many were overworked: toiling for almost 15 hours a day non-stop with only one meal. Work lasted from 6am to 9pm, after which they had to listen to classes on the greatness of the Khmer Rouge. Men, women and families were separated and contact with each other was prohibited. One could even be killed for trying to find one's wife or child. The regime reigned from 1975 to 1979 and its policies were responsible for the deaths of up to two million people from starvation, disease, overwork, and execution (1 and 2).

Before seeing some remnants of this regime's toll, Andy and I took a 'tuk tuk' (motorbike-pulled covered trailer) to meet friend 'Hawaii' in the Bodey Tree restaurant for brunch. Despite sitting amongst the blooming gardens and wooden panelling of this fine French colonial house, with gorgeous Cambodian coffee and melted gorgonzola on toast, it was difficult to avert our eyes from what lay directly opposite:



The view across the lane

After having our fill of luxury food, we slowly crossed the lane to the high double wall topped with several coils of barbed wire: genocide horror site 1. In 1975, Tuol Suay Prey High School was taken over by the Khmer Rouge killing machine and became the S-21 security prison. In S-21, people were detained for such things as having an education to high school level, or wearing spectacles. They were imprisoned and exterminated for being peasants, workers, engineers, teachers, doctors, students, Buddhist monks, ministers, Pol Pot's cadres, soldiers of all ranks, foreigners, and all their wives and children. By early 1977 it was claiming 160 victims per day; these 'lucky' ones were buried on site in mass graves. Most detainees however ended up in the nearby Cheoung Ek Extermination Camp: 'The Killing Fields'.

Each of Building 1's classrooms contained only a metal bedframe (no mattress), a bullets can/toilet and a wall-mounted photo of the room as it was found, including the bird-pecked corpse of the ex-government official who died trussed to the bed in each cell:

A classroom/prison cell

Outside in the yard is a billboard listing the rules and regulations that had to be adhered to by the detainees, and the punishments if they weren't:

1. You must answer accordingly to my question - Don't turn them away.

2. Don't try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.

3. Don't be a fool for you are a chap who dare thwart the revolution.

4. You must answer immediately my questions without wasting time to reflect.

5. Don't tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.

6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.

7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet.

8. Don't make pretext about Lampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.

9. If you don't follow the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.

10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either 10 lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

*Remember, these people were being detained simply for being peasants, workers, engineers, teachers, doctors, students, Buddhist monks, ministers, Pol Pot's cadres, soldiers of all ranks, foreigners, and all their wives and children.

Building 2's balcony corridors were sealed by barbed wire mesh to prevent detainees jumping to an easy death. Below it, the gym frame had been converted to gallows:


The gallows

"A pole with cables attached had been used for the students to conduct their exercise. The Khmer Rouge utilised this place as interrogation room. The interrogators tied both hands of the prisoners to the back by a rope and lifted the prisoners upside down. They did like this until the prisoners lost consciousness. Then they dipped the prisoner's head into a jar of smelly, filthy water, which they normally used as fertiliser for the crops on the terrace outside. By doing so, the victims quickly regain consciousness, and that the interrogators could continued their interrogation."

The long rooms inside Building 2 are filled with presentation boards, upon which hundreds of photos of sullen-faced and pained Cambodians are mounted. These males and females aged 8 to 80 were some of the Khmer Rouge soldiers and their victims, the soldiers only differentiated from their prey by not having a number tag around their necks:

Victims

Khmer Rouge soldiers

Classrooms have been converted into galleries that exhibit photos and biographies of village youngsters (CHILDREN!) who'd entered the Khmer Rouge, what atrocities they'd personally committed and how they'd come to an early death at the hands of other Khmer Rouge soldiers.

'noble heroes'!


Child soldiers and their 'work'

One of the many examples is of Uy Ren, who was born in 1951 and joined the revolution at the age of 19:

"Ren was a simple woman, not so bad. She asked her parents' permission to join the Khmer Rouge because at that time, everyone was joining. It was better than staying in the village and carrying dirt. The female youth teams in our village were asked to carry dirt at Tuol Krasaing and they all disappeared.

Ren was sent to the battlefield near Tonle Mekong to fight. There were only females in her unit and they fought on the front lines. She was a group chief.

Ren first visited home quite a lot before the Khmer Rouge took control of Phnom Penh. She came looking for cows. In July 1977 she came home again to find food, this time in an army lorry. The others with her carried guns but she didn't; she only carried her gun in the battlefield. She stayed one night. She didn't say much.... After that she disappeared.

I kept her picture for the future in case she came back one day.... One person told me she died in the bombing at Srey Royong. Someone else said she was taken to Tuol Sleng [S-21]"

Ren, the "not so bad" girl

Other rooms were divided by brick partitions into torture cells the size of portaloo toilet cabins, containing only a bullet tin for a toilet and a leg-chain floor mount. Another storey was filled with graphic images of torture methods used and photos of people, when alive and dead, who'd succumbed to them. Building 3 contained photos of Khmer Rouge high officials that had been graffittied by Cambodian expletives.

I was too distressed to look at any more of the Khmer Rouge's work, so I looked at the graffiti on corridor walls. Some was drawn at the time the buildings were still Tuol Suay Prey High School: outlines of girls wearing stylish, brimmed bonnets, cars, a maths equation.

Schoolkid art

Other scrawlings were by tourists, and range from the poignant:

"When this was a prison no-one learned.
When this was a school no-one died"

through the ignorant and moronic:

"Jesus is the answer"

"Jesus reigns"

to some of dispicably bad taste, considering the setting:

"This is socialism? Go U.S.A"

"They hate us [U.S.A.] because they're jealous of us"

Of course, the last American opinions had provoked a spiderdiagram of responses by people as horrified as I to see such narrow-minded and disgraceful thoughts actually written. Did these idiots know the Khmer Rouge were armed and financed throughout the 1980's by China and the U.S. (indirectly through Thailand of course) (3)? Graffittied responses included mention of Abu Ghraib (The U.S.'s very own torture camp in Iraq), Thatcher's "You must understand. There are responsible members of Khmer Rouge", and:

"Are we supposed to be jealous of your [U.S.A.]: literacy, poverty, violent death rate, pollution, racism, trash culture, imperialism, ignorance, obesity?"

What a pity pro- and Anti-U.S.A. slanging matches are even being set onto stone in a former torture centre.

Of course, S-21 wasn't the only security prison of it's kind in Cambodia, as this key of a regional death map shows (Genocide memorial - 77; Security office (Prison) - 167; Killing sites - 343; mass graves - 19440):


How many?

Sickened deep into the gut by the horrors of Tuol Suay Prey High School/S-21 security prison, Andy and I then took a motorbike taxi (3 men squeezed on one 100cc motorbike and 1 helmet between us - the norm) along the route taken by the S-21 survivors, to their final resting place....

(1) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1202_051202_cambodia.html

(2)http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/33d/projects/genocides/cambodia/CambodiaHistoryLavinia.htmSoutheast

(3) Southeast Asia on a shoestring. Lonely planet, 2004.