First Cambodia Trip, 1995

In the fall of 1995, I remember I was at a production company in NYC talking to one of my regular storyboard clients about the beauty of courier travel. Basically if you were a lone traveler with a flexible schedule you could call up a number and listen to a recording about greatly reduced last-minute flights overseas to Europe and sometimes Asia, on major airlines.

All that was required was that you had to surrender any check-in cargo space for mounds of time-sensitive corporate mail that legally required someone to fill a seat to be sent. You also had to be able to leave within a few days or a week and only travel for a few weeks, but in return you got a round trip to various European capitals for usually $100.

To illustrate this to my client I dialed the number and listened. The recording listed a rare flight to Bangkok leaving in 2 days, round-trip costing $300. I jumped on it, and within days I was headed for 3 weeks to Southeast Asia again. It was to be for a week in Cambodia, a week in Vietnam, and a week in Myanmar (Burma).

But Cambodia ended up leaving deepest impressions this time.

Cambodia was a country I had planned to visit on a previous journey (the holiday visit in '94/95) but had to cut my trip short after 3 weeks in Vietnam. The reason for this was partly that I was in love with a new girl back in NYC. But a very strong reason, I discovered years later, was that I had been on Lariam, an anti-malarial drug. After the mid-nineties they took Lariam off the market because it was found that some people had delusional reactions to it. I was one of those people.

My last week or two in Vietnam, as I wrote intense self-scrutiny about my visit to the country as a voyeur, I began to go a bit crazy. Hanging out in Saigon by myself I grew increasingly paranoid about my mental health and what I was doing there. I felt like I was living in a Joseph Conrad novel and decided to cut my trip short to get back to familiar ground. I read years later that many people had this experience on Lariam.



Anyway, this time I was thrilled to have the opportunity to visit Cambodia . I had heard much of it's romantic settings and intense history. Aside from being notorious for it's terrible genocide through the late 1970's where as many as 2 million died, ( depicted in the "The Killing Fields" )
, it was also the center of an expansive and large kingdom dating back 800-1200 years ago.

Many of the crumbling temples from this time period still dot the countryside and jungles in the center of the country, at Angkor Wat. With massive banyan trees growing up through the ruins and the sounds of birds and monkeys in the air, it makes for a very romantic atmosphere. Apparently much of the region was covered with overgrowth until the 1850's when French archaeologists "discovered" it.



I'm grateful I got a chance to see the temples at this time, when it was still not too touristed. Today the temples are clogged with buses and private cars full of tourists. Large hotels line the road to Angkor Wat.

But in 1995, Cambodia was still an edgy country, with regular reports of train hijackings and highway robbery of westerners. Much of the Khmer Rouge responsible for the genocide, it's power waning, turned to desperate means. It was my Mom who, of course, unearthed an article of an American couple gunned down by bandits near the temples. The residual effect of this was clear when I visited some of the outer temples and found myself escorted by a lone soldier carrying an Ak-47.


Phnom Penh, the modern capital, felt itself like a Wild West town. I had read that many international criminals chose this city to lay low in, due to the lawlessness. The first democratic "elections" were held only a couple years before and Hun Sen was just starting to bring stability, but there was an unpredictability in the air at all times.

I stayed in the "Capitol" hotel, (from where I sketched, above) another notorious budget hotel with a checkered history. In Vietnam, among the expats, I heard stories of questionable types roaming the halls of the Capitol with pistols drawn late at night. But it was cheap and popular on the backpacker circuit, so I checked myself in and kept my valuables on me at all times.

While I was in Phnom Penh I had a motorbike guide take me out to Toul Sleng, a former high school that had been turned into a torture and interrogation center by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970's. Some 20,000 innocents passed through this place before they were taken a few kilometers away to the Killing Fields and executed.

I had a very sobering experience at both these locations. Rather than draw anything , I just recounted in text, my hours at the high school with an incredible woman guiding me. Later, on my flight back to the states, a nice young French couple saw this book and asked to look at the sketches. When the French man got to these pages and read the words, he openly wept on the plane. It still gives me the chills. And keeps things in perspective. Below:



The Killing Fields were down a few kilometers of rough road outside the city, much of it impassable except by motorbike because of damage from monsoon flooding. The site itself was quiet and breezy, tranquil. But one only had to look to the ground at their feet to see the bone shards, teeth, and shredded clothing left behind in the exhumed graves and realize the unchecked evil and tragedy that played out there years earlier.

The writing below is from a couple motorbike guys who would take me and another American, Chris, around. My guy was named Sonny and was an affable and street-wise young man who often bragged about a Swedish girlfriend he used to bang. He had fled the country as a young boy and grew up in Thai refugee camps, where he learned his English before returning to Cambodia.

About 5 years later I worked on a Matt Dillon film in Cambodia in the art department for 2 weeks. While I was there a young man in a baseball cap would come and go, quietly running errands for the Israeli propmaster. It wasn't until my last day that I suddenly heard this guy laugh out loud and instantly recognized him. It was Sonny and I reminded him that he had driven me around five years earlier. We reconnected and a year later I returned to shoot my own film and made Sonny one of the characters in the film.