Curiosity ~ Lucidity ~ Humanity
Dusk descended outside my second-floor Royal Phnom Penh Hotel room accompanied by what sounded like strings of distant firecrackers popping that often accompany family celebrations, but the short bursts made them different – rather like gun shots in the distance.
Looking out through glass sliders from report writing on the previous week’s work in Laos, I noticed the distant sky began to flicker red.
Then flames became visible beyond the building across from me with the sound of rioters yelling, doors being smashed in and glass shattering with all moving closer.
Next an angry crowd assembled just below my room, having already looted and set fire to the adjacent wood-framed building that had become an inferno brightly lighting its surroundings, including my room that had been plunged into darkness when the power went out an hour earlier. Relief must come.
The building I was in was now under assault with vibrations from breaking through doors. It, too, was afire with the hallway filled with dense, acrid smoke to the floor – no way out – need to put a wet towel across the door’s base.
I had placed my luggage and bed sheets tied together as an escape rope on the room’s balcony. Then rocks thrown at the closed glass sliders at first bounced off before the doors were shattered. I held a side drape against the wall to deflect the shattered glass that spread across the room. When the rocks stopped coming, I stood behind the balcony fully lighted by nearby flames, when someone across the way saw me, started to point and shout. I stepped out onto the balcony and pled for help from the gathered rioters below who looked up at me aghast. Then one was climbing vines toward my balcony but couldn’t reach it when I extended my hand, helped him up and shook his as if he was my savior.
He saw my luggage on the balcony, threw it down to the crowd, walked past me, entered the room, picked up the TV and lowered it to the crowd using the sheets I had tied together. He then gestured that I should leave but wouldn’t let me use the sheet rope. The only option, with computer bag and travel documents on my back, was to leap to a nearby, out-of-reach, tree from the balcony.
I jumped to its branches, somehow gripped two, and then lowered myself down to the waiting mob. I began shaking their hands, treating them as my rescuers. After a minute or so, they indicated I had to leave but not to an open field to the back where I wanted to go but rather to the front through the burning lobby with embers falling and floor wax melting.
With no choice, I approached the lobby door, took a deep breath, marched across it as quickly as possible out the other side then realized a young guy had picked up my suitcase and followed. A tall barricade of piled up hotel furniture and fixtures between the burning wings of the hotel obstructed us.
Somehow after a few moments, a passage was created through the barrier to the adjacent, narrow street that was flowing with an endless crowd of intense demonstrators moving in both directions. A uniformed man approached. I asked for his help, and he directed me to a main thoroughfare a mile’s walk away. The young fellow who accompanied me dropped my bag and ran off into the crowd.
An hour later in the dark, I reached the main lighted road to find trucks speeding by filled with shiny silver helmeted troops.
A uniformed officer approached who spoke English. I asked for help getting a taxi.
He went away and another offered a bottle of water. Several minutes later, he returned with a shirtless young man who said he had a taxi. I said, “Great, bring it,” with little hope. About 15 minutes later, he returned with a friend and a car.
After winding around roadblocks and avoiding troop trucks, we arrived at another hotel where I knew some colleagues were staying. Before the two departed, they gave me their names and a phone number in case I would like a tour of the city the next day for which I thanked them.
While waiting to finish checking in, a young woman was staring at me from across the lobby who then approached and anxiously asked if I had any contact lens washing fluid. I had none. She, too, had sought refuge in the hotel but without luggage. The rest of the night was uneventful – except for my calling my wife at her office in DC to tell her I had changed hotels in case she needed to reach me. She said she was in a meeting. “Let’s talk later.”