With the Songkran festival quickly fading to a blurry memory, I had two weeks to kill in southeast Asia before I was due to arrive in Australia as an immigrant. Naturally money was tight, which made my next destination – probably the only liveable country in the world where you can buy a beer for 25 US cents– the ideal spot to spend the interval.
I first visited Cambodia last year and had a torrid time on the notorious ‘scam bus’, which ferries eager, wide-eyed backpackers from Bangkok to Phnom Penh and squeezes them for cash via an elaborate series of rip-offs every few kilometres. But this time round, I opted to make life easy for myself by flying straight to the capital.
I walked away from Cambodia last year satisfied that it was my new favourite country, and my second stay had been planned to within an inch of its life. I had a tonne of places I wanted to visit, so I opted to go for a transport option ludicrously expensive nearly everywhere else on the planet but practically free in Cambodia – a personal driver for the meagre sum of $8 per day.
I approached the first motodup (motorbike taxi) I spotted outside my hotel and happily, the driver turned out to be a gent of a guy who I spent a week knocking around Phnom Penh with. Narun knew every site I mentioned, along with a rake of others I didn’t. During the day we went to the Royal Palace, the Silver Pagoda, the Killing Fields and a load of other enjoyable tourist traps, and after dark we spun around the nightspots on his battered old motor.
Narun was a somewhat shy, unassuming guy and he tended to decline when I asked him in for a beer in the boozers we pulled up outside. Every time I offered he would look at the ground and shake his head with a smile and say, “Nooo. I wait you here!” Phnom Penh is a fun town, but I found it difficult to enjoy myself fully when I knew there was a bloke – who was quickly becoming a good mate – sitting outside on his motorbike waiting for me.
As a way of making his evening a little more enjoyable, and my conscience less put upon, I would buy an extra beer every now and again, and then nip outside to give them to Narun. Pumping your motorbike driver full of beer probably isn’t the wisest thing to do, particularly in a country with roads as lethal as Cambodia’s, but Narun seemed to really appreciate the gesture.
During one of our slightly drunken late night chats, Narun told me about what happened to his family during the years of the Khmer Rouge – the genocidal ultra-communists who controlled the country in the late 1970s. For no reason that he can ascertain, his parents and elder siblings were taken from their home by Khmer Rouge cadres and have never been heard from since.
With his family assumed murdered, Narun was alone in the world by the time he was 10, although in the absence of documents or older relatives he doesn’t know exactly how old he is.
When the Khmer Rouge came to power after ousting the US-backed Lon Nol government in a bloody civil war, which culminated in the invasion and evacuation of Phnom Penh, they declared it ‘year zero’. The outside world was to be shut out and the past, which was tainted with foreign influence, was to be forgotten.
Children, who had no knowledge of the past or the world beyond, made the ideal recruits for the new regime. Orphans and other youngsters were rounded up and put into ramshackle countryside camps, and Narun was among them.
Days were spent working on a rice farm or in rudimentary factory making sandals out of old car tyres, and nights were filled with indoctrination classes involved long lectures about the greatness of Angkar and the terrors waiting to overrun their sacred Cambodia from within and without.
Food was scarce and disease rampant, and many of the children in Narun’s camp joined the estimated two million fatalities of the period.
When the Khmer Rouge was eventually forced into the hills by an invading Vietnamese army, the cadres deserted Narun’s camp and the children who had survived were taken to a refugee settlement near the Thai border.
Happily, Narun is no longer alone in the world – he now has a wife and two young daughters who he gets to see two or tree times a week, when he has time and money to make it back to his rural home some two hours away.
“Would you like to meet them?” he asked as he dropped me off at my hotel shortly before I was due to leave the city. “You can come and stay with us!”
It may have been a suggestion made more out of politeness more than anything else, but I intended to take him up on it regardless.
To be continued...
