Just spent a very confronting morning at one of the killing fields outside Phnom Pen then the Genocide Museum which is in what was a school and was used by the Khmer Rouge as a torture venue. From reading some of the so-called confessions and listening to the guides relate stories of the time you wonder whether the Khmer Rouge ever questioned how the CIA managed to employ hundreds of thousands of agents including whole families. Being good Buddhists the locals eventually forgave the bad guys whereas most of us would have been sorely tempted to exact some form of retribution, with extreme prejudice.
You’d think Cambodia would be the most anti-communist place on earth after experiencing the most perverted version of an already perverted political philosophy but there can’t be too many places with both a North Korean Embassy (next door to the Prime Minister’s house as it happens) and a Cuban Embassy as well as a street called Mao Tse Tung Boulevard. I took a picture of the North Korean embassy but we weren’t allowed to take pictures of the US embassy. I guess if you’re North Korean this is probably one of the safer places in the world to be what with The Donald’s finger hovering over The Button. That reminds me, North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and under Pol Pot this place was called Democratic Kampuchea. The similarity is that no one gets to or got to vote.
Time to lighten the mood. If I asked you to name the place with the largest proportion of Lexus’s (or is that Lexii) on the road in relation to the other vehicles, you might suggest Nagoya, where Toyotas are made or Geneva (no, that’s Ferraris with Arab rego plates) or Manhattan. I guarantee you wouldn’t guess Cambodia but that is in fact the case. They are everywhere. It’s like some weird parallel universe. And I still haven’t received a satisfactory explanation as to why. It’s fated to be one of those unanswerable questions like why does a women stroke her chin when she drives or why does “change up” mean “slow down” or why can’t some people see the absolute logic of all of my arguments?