 The Bayon, Angkor Wat / Cambodian family |
 Phnom Penh tour guide Bun Nguon knows every step of the bone-shaking road journey from the capital up Route 5 to Battambang: from the Khmer Rouge labour camps of the Cardamom Mountains he trudged 400 kilometres home and pick up the pieces of his life.
One of many thousands of city dwellers evicted after the Khmer Rouge takeover on 17 April 1975, Nguon survived by reverting completely to the peasant speech and mannerisms of his childhood.
Five of his twelve siblings proved fatally less adaptable. His second sister, a secondary teacher, was then about 31 and ‘very beautiful’ but quite short-sighted. Her glasses become a fatal give-away during the enforced reassimilation into the countryside. An infant sister, six years old, disappeared without trace from a ‘people’s commune’.
Eventually the remnants of his family were despatched west by train, river boat and then on foot into a camp in the heavily forested Cardamom Mountains of south-west Cambodia. His ankles still bear the scars of heavy shackles, but Nguon was one of the 15 percent of students who survived.
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