Hope and Anchor Hotel/Bar - Phnom Penh

After a three day stay in Sihanoukville Nick and I had enough of the sea, sand, and sun. We booked next morning's bus to Phnom Penh and checked out of the Angkor Arms. Upon hearing about our departure the hotel owner Roland wrote down the address of a salubrious hotel in the capitol.

It's a good drinking bar by the river."

"Thanks for the suggestion."

"Let me buy you a round."

One round gave birth to another round and we drank ourselves into oblivion, but made the 9am bus.

We slept all the way to the Cambodian capitol.

Three hours later we deboarded at the bus terminal near the city's central market. I searched my pockets. The scrap of paper was gone. I had probably used it as a toothpick and Nick laughed, "You can't hold onto anything."

"Do you remember the name?"

"My mind's a little blank after last night's twenty vodka-tonics."

Stepping off the bus nearly fifty tuk-tuk drivers crowded around us echoing, "Where you go? Where you go?"

"No idea, thanks to genius." Nick lit up a cigarette. "Let's stay the same place as last year. You remember the name?"

"Who can take us to Mike's?" The name dropped from an old branch of the brain stem.

"Not Mike's anymore?" The youngest driver pushed his way to us. "Now Hope and Anchor."

"There's a Hope and Anchor in Islington." Nick loved pubs. He also loved bars. I shared the same affinity for a wooden counter with a cold glass in my hand.

"Hope and Anchor, it is."

I nodded to the driver and we scrummed through the rejectees, who muttered Cambodian curses for not having chosen them. Business was slow this time of year.

"You come to Phnom Penh before?"

The tuk-tuk gracefully weaved around the market's stupa structure.

"Many times." Nick and I had made several trips to the Cambodian capitol to renew our visas.

"We're avoiding Songkran." The old Thai celebration had gotten out of control in the new century.

"We have Songkran here. Not same Thailand. Pheap sabbayrikreay."

"Pee-ap sabbyik reah?"

"Fun."

"I know fun."

"Where you want go tonight?"

"Sophie's, Martini's, and Sharkey's," answered Nik.

"Pheap sabbayrikreay."

I was broken-hearted and not after any girls.

"Drink was my fun."

"Now many girls go home for new year." He veered onto 51 street. The public sanitation squad were still recovering from the Khmer Rouge purges and garbage lay uncollected on every corner. Vagrant families camped before vacant buildings. The pace was hundred times slower than Pattaya.

"What about Sophie's?" This bar was rated #1 sleaziest bar in the world by anyone who had been to the short-time lounge.

"Closed for the holiday." We were nearing the river.

"Closed?" Nick and I chorused in unison.

"Governor say close for religion."

"Damn." That closure blew out our first destination.

"But many other bars open. I drive you later."

"No, we're going to rent motorbikes, so after the hotel you can take us to Lucky's Bike." I was acting as tour leader, since my memory was better than Nick's battered brain cells. Not all the time, he was really strong on 80s pop hits and 70s punk classics.

The driver stopped on Quai Sisowith before a renovated colonial building.

The Hope and Anchor.

Nothing had changed since a year ago other than the bar staff.

We took two rooms.

"Which one you want?" I asked Nick.

"I don't care."

I picked the better one and Nick complained, "Why you always get first choice?"

"Because you always tell me it's up to me."

25 Bucks for AC and Cable TV plus a good bed.

Beers $1 baht for drafts and $1.50 baht for a can of Angkor. Vodka-tonics $1 baht too. The dollar was still accepted everywhere as the nation's second currency. Phnom Penh was a drunk's paradise and the Hope and Anchor was a good harbor offering a storm of libations. Food was not bad either. Nick and I swore by the creamed spinach.

"Makes you regular in the morning."

The attractive girls behind the desk are most helpful in arranging travel plans and the boss, Peter, was a good man to drink with as the night nears the dawn.

But I'm not sure if it is still there.

The website is gone.

Same as Nick and I.

Wish we were back there.

Eighteen years ago.

Duch Choi Châ' kai Anh

Written on Jun 11, 2017

In 1975 the Khmer Rouge converted the Tuol Svay Prey High School on the outskirts of Phnom Penh into the murderous Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison. An estimated 17,000 prisoners had been subjected to the following code of behavior enforced by its administrator Comrade Duch or Kang Kek Iew and his killers.

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 to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer 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. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your secret or traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

In 1979 the Vietnam Army ended the horror and liberated Phnom Penh. Twelve inmates exited from the three-story building. S-21 prison's executed inmates had been buried in the killing fields. The architects of this genocide fled the reprisals of the Vietnamese in 1979 and the most notorious killer Comrade Duch sought refuge in Thailand. Pol Pot demoted his underling for having destroyed the incriminating documents at Tuol Sleng and Duch had escaped justice by teaching school.

During the Khmer Rouge reign teachers had been executed without remorse.

After the murder of his wife Duch had sought salvation with the Western religious fundamentalists of the Golden West Cambodian Christian Church pursuing souls in Cambodia, but his past chased him into a corner and in 1999 he was arrested by the new authorities ie ex-Khmer Rouge compatriots.

In 26 July 2010 an international court of justice in Phnom Penh sentenced Duch to life imprisonment. During the trial he said, "I think the Khmer Rouge would already have been demolished, but Mr. Kissinger and Richard Nixon backed Lon Nol, and then the Khmer Rouge took advantage of their mistake and victory was a golden opportunity for us."

Duch asked to be released by the tribunal, admitting his guilt.

"Kissinger was walking free. Why shouldn't he?"

He had a point, but he was sent to prison. Not SR-21.

After the end of the Civil War I visited Cambodia many tiems to renew my Thai visa and I've asked the few surviving older people what they think of the Khmer Rouge and their reply comes as a surprise to most westerners raising on the litany of 'never again' for the Nazis.

"It's over. We want peace. Nothing more," one taxi driver said waiting for two Dutch tourists visiting S-21.

"What about the trials?"

"We don't understand trials. All we know is that it's over." He was old enough to have lived under the Khmer Rouge as a teenager. He spoke a little French, which would have condemned him to the Killing Fields under the Khmer Rouge.

"Au revoir."

I doubted that I would see him again, but later that night we shared a beer on Quay Sisowith. Choi laughed with all the joy that five Angkor beers can give a man who has lived long enough to wake up from a nightmare with his humor intact.

Duch Choi Ch'kai Anh

Read THE GATE by Francois Bizot.

It says it all.

January 5, 1979 - East Village Journal

The Kinks are on the radio. YOU REALLY GOT ME. A British Invasion festival from 1963 to 1966 marking an unexpected musical explosion from Great Britain. Many of the bands had been condemned by the Pat Boone loving conservatives. Few of those groups survived the Sixties. THe Beatles are dead, but the Rolling Stones survive.

The Kampuchea of the Khmer Rouge has been invaded by Vietnam backing up the Cambodian rebels to overthrow the genocidal madness through Pol Pot's attempt to create a classless agrarian society. Vietnam succeeded in defeating the RVN in South Vietnam after the USA betrayed their allies. The Pathet Lao, a communist coalition backed by Hanoi, rules Laos after the failure of the CIA to secure the landlocked country. The Nixon Administration had illegally bombed once-neutral Cambodia into the Stone Age and after the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the cadres forced the population out of the city into the country. Despite the defeat the Khmer Rouge have retreated to the Parrot's Beak, once an NVA stronghold, to continue the struggle, after Hanoi decided to kick out the ethnic Chinese, Red China, the main supporter of Kampuchea.

The Khmer Rouge number 90,000 against Vietnam's army of over one million with Soviet Russia's backing. Southeast Asia appears ready for a massive regional war. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia versus Thailand, but no one was to fight them, so the Domino Theory stops at the Thai border. The Soviets, while dedicated to world revolution, want to bide their time for capitalism to collapse. The USA will never go red. We are fiercely in love with potato chips. The eucharist of patriotism from east to west.

Foto of the Khmer Rouge evacuating the cities.

No Sophie's Bar Phnom Penh - Songkran 2007

In 2007 Nick and I had scheduled our Cambodia trip to avoid Songkran in Thailand. My wife thought this voyage was simply a sex tour, but we passed through Koh Kong and Sihanoukville without a passing glance at the local talent, mostly because S-ville's Chicken Farm has been dramatically reduced by the port expansion and the bars of Victory Hill were devoid of pulchritude. The taxi drivers vainly attempted to hook us up, but we opted to wait until Phnom Penh.

We arrived in the capitol in the late-afternoon and installed ourselves at the Hope and Anchor Hotel on Quai Sisiwoth. Several beers smoothed the edge of a five-hour bus trip and darkness turned our minds to Sophie's Bar.

The sleaziest bar in the world.

We rode our rented dirt bikes around 153 St.

For 30 minutes.

Finally finding the infamous haunt of sex tourists.

No lights.

The doors shut.

I asked the taxi drivers, "What's up?"

They signaled with their hands.

Closed.

"Closed?"

Nick asked, "Why?"

"How the fuck should I know." I tried to hide my disappointment, because I considered Sophie's Bar one of the Seven Wonders of the world. Its closure was more tragic than the Taliban's blowing up the giant Buddha statue in Afghanistan. After all those statues were stone and Sophie's Bar was flesh and blood.

Martini's and Sharkey's were too tame for my taste and I returned to the hotel alone to sat with Peter, the owner.

"Is Sophie's closed permanently?" I had to know for socio-anthropological reasons.

"No, only for the Buddhist holiday by order of the mayor. He didn't consider it a holy place of worship. Not like some. But it will be open after the New Year."

"I'll be gone then."

"Win some, lose some."

"Yeah." Next year I would have to plan my trip more carefully.

Anything to preserve antiquity.

SOPHIE'S Bar - #9E, Street 118/53

Short time - $10 for one/ $20 for two.