"To me he [Nhem En seen with KR memorabilia for sale] was one of the most evil men I ever met and should be locked up, but it turned out he was deputy governor of a district, because the Khmer Rouge are still sort of in charge." - Dom Jolly (Photo: The Phnom Penh Post)
Bargain hunting ... Dom was tempted to buy Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot's shoes for £500,000Monday, September 06, 2010
By DOM JOLY
Excerpt from The Sun (UK)
COMEDIAN and travel writer Dom Joly has journeyed the globe - only to discover that his weird take on life as portrayed in his show Trigger Happy TV is not a patch on bizarre behaviour in the real world. His particular joy is to visit where the average holidaymaker would never dream of going.
Now he has written a book - The Dark Tourist - about his experiences.
Here he takes us through a few of his odder adventures...
I'M not really sure why I have this desire to travel to strange places.
But because I grew up in Lebanon, I always quite liked the fact that people would say: "Oh, that must be dodgy."
I quite liked feeling: "Yeah, I'm a bit tough," whereas I actually knew there are some really nice bits of Lebanon.
Even so, I think that just growing up there naturally gave me a slight adrenalin fixation. I get really bored on normal holidays. I don't like beaches.
I think a lot of the world has been kind of Starbucks-ised.
About the only places you can go to now to learn something new, sadly, are these kind of dodgy places I find so interesting.
CAMBODIA
ON day one I was sitting by the swimming pool and a man came up and said: "Would you like to meet a man selling Pol Pot's shoes?" Of course I would.
So I went with this guy miles out of town to this house. This other guy came in and after we chatted, he fetched some shoes and a camera.
This was the guy who photographed every person who went into the Killing Fields before they were executed by the Khmer Rouge regime in the Seventies.
To me he was one of the most evil men I ever met and should be locked up, but it turned out he was deputy governor of a district, because the Khmer Rouge are still sort of in charge.
He had a picture of himself with Pol Pot, Cambodia's former dictator. I asked him how much the shoes were and they were a snip at half a million pounds!
He claimed if I paid it he would use the money to set up a museum for the victims of the Killing Fields, but I found that very hard to believe.
I found Cambodia a fascinating country of contrasts. There were minefields everywhere, while in other parts backpackers wandered happily. Then someone invites you to pay $500 to blow up a cow with a rocket-propelled grenade, which is a major tourist attraction.
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