Christopher R. Cox

From "Tales from Nowhere: Unexpected Stories from Unexpected Places," edited by Don George (Lonely Planet Publications, 2006)

Excerpt:

"After we had been rattling around on rocky, rutted roads for four hours, the smooth track along the ridge of the Dangkrek Range came as a relief. Level and shaded by lush jungle from the dry-season sun, it prompted my driver to push his battered Nissan truck to nearly 50 kilometers per hour -- warp speed for a byway in one of the most abject provinces in Cambodia. In the dappled midday light, he didn’t see the studded, soda can-sized object in the middle of our route until it was too late to stop. No use swerving off the beaten path; red stakes jutting from the undergrowth meant the road’s shoulders hadn’t been de-mined. As the Chinese-made Type 58 fragmentation mine disappeared beneath the pick-up, I thought: It’s only big enough to cripple, not kill.

Blame it on Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tyrant who took Cambodia to a dark place where as many as two million people were executed or died from disease, starvation, and exhaustion. Those wretched excesses were now the stuff of memorials – complete with gift shops – that made this traumatized nation a global leader in holocaust tourism. It was a morbid niche market, for sure, but it annually attracted thousands of foreign visitors to Choeung Ek, a notorious Khmer Rouge killing field outside Phnom Penh, and Tuol Sleng, an old school in the capital that became their horrific torture center. If the package tourists would pay to see a glass tower of bludgeoned skulls and rusted bed frames where prisoners bled to death, then why not Anlong Veng, where Pol Pot and his murderous henchmen made their final stand?

So it came to pass that Prime Minister Hun Sen designated a dismal district in a far corner of Cambodia for tourism development. The authoritarian leader (himself a Khmer Rouge officer in the 1970s) wanted to preserve the site -- a thickly forested, heavily mined mountain range on the Thai border -- as a vast Khmer Rouge theme park, presumably without club-wielding re-enactors or interactive self-criticism sessions. Of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who annually traveled to Siem Reap to see the ruins of Angkor Wat, there were bound to be half-baked world travelers who would tramp a further 140 kilometers north to visit Genocide World. See Pol Pot’s villa! Marvel at his ash heap! Experience Year Zero today, in Anlong Veng!

And a few half-baked writers as well. I was sitting in the Ivy Bar, just off the Old Market in the revitalized colonial quarter of Siem Reap, nursing a happy-hour Angkor Beer and considering the drive up to Anlong Veng (bound to suck) and the destination itself (bound to suffer drug-resistant malaria). Perhaps I could convince my editor to take a travel story on the beach resort of Sihanoukville instead. The roads to the coast were excellent; the lobster dirt cheap. But something on the pub’s wall caught my eye: a framed toilet seat. And not just any toilet seat. A small label proclaimed this to be Pol Pot’s toilet seat, retrieved from Anlong Veng.

"The seat of power for many years," read the label. "Even Pol Pot had shitty days."

I ordered another Angkor Beer and tried to imagine Brother Number One copping a counter-revolutionary squat atop his bourgeois commode. This xenophobic despot had advocated the liquidation of anyone who spoke French, wore eyeglasses, or had technical training -- let alone shat like a foreigner. That his Western-style porcelain throne might still be out there in the jungle was an irresistible notion; my Sihanoukville seafood dinner would have to wait."