My mother. My father. My uncle.

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I always knew that I was going to ask the question. Still, I spent several minutes contemplating if I really was going to, and if so, how I would phrase it. "So were any of your relatives affected during the Khmer Rouge regime?" I asked as softly as I could. The guide lifted his head and looked me in the eye. "My mother. My father. My uncle. All taken away. All killed." He turned away. "Horrible. Horrible. Crazy. Crazy," he muttered.

The killing fields: The Choeung Ek site
We were at Choeung Ek, perhaps the best-known of the more than 340 killing fields in Cambodia. The number is increasing, as researchers are still finding more sites. Hiring a tuk-tuk driver for the entire day, we were going to the killing fields first and then to the infamous S-21 prison, which is now known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

However, misinterpreting the English of our tuk-tuk driver, we first ended up at a shooting range of all things! We politely refused to pay perverse prices to shoot with an AK-47 Kalashnikov and other automatic weapons, noting in the back of our heads that the group of 18-year-old blond Swedes seemed to enjoy themselves. Half an hour later, we met the same group of people at the killing fields - what a bizarre warmup to go shooting with automatic weapons before visiting one of the most grotesque history lessons one can encounter live!

At the Choeung Ek site, we further noted that most people walked around without a guide! Who travels around the world to visit such a monumental site and is then unwilling to pay the four dollars or whatever we had to pay to actually learn something?! In fact, the site itself is fairly unimpressive without a guide, except of course for the stupa filled with skulls. It means nothing to look at a tree with a stool or chair in front of it until a guide tells you that victims had their heads placed in the chair before being clubbed to death and that babies were simply grabbed by their feet and then swung like a baseball bat against the tree to have their heads smashed. And then these guideless tourists walk around, nodding knowingly to each other, talking with lowered voices about how such awful things could happen, because that's what they are supposed to do, they think, and then they ride the tuk-tuk back to their hostel where they argue with the driver over pennies, before they sit themselves down on the floating balcony and enjoy the wonderful sunset, drink beers and smoke weed, and talk about how great the beaches are back home, in Australia, in Florida, in California, and that marijuana should be legalised, shouldn't it, shouldn't it, what do you think, where are you from, oh, Norway, is that the capital of Sweden?

The Choeung Ek site was an extermination centre, a place where prisoners from Tuol Sleng were taken to be executed. In principle, the prisoners were to be executed immediately, however, the flow of prisoners sometimes exceeded the capacity to murder in time, and prisoners then had to be held for several days before they were killed.

To save bullets, means such as hammers, spades, axes, and sharpened bamboo sticks were used to kill the prisoners. In some cases when all these tools were occupied, executioners resorted to banana tree branches that had sharp teeth, almost like a saw. Although reasonably sharp, it would take the executioner a lot of effort and time to decapitate a prisoner, resulting in an extremely painful death to the victim.

The Khmer Rouge communist regime, led by Pol Pot, ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Estimates by independent international researchers of the number of people being killed under Pol Pot's regime vary from 800 000 to about 3 millions. The government's own figure today is close to 3 millions. Indeed, as our guide affectionately expressed many times during our visit, Pol Pot must have been crazy. He was trying to transform the country back to the stone age. People were to be illiterate and unable to read and write. The society was supposed to become an agricultural one, and nothing else. I wonder if the plan was to start over, like when you kill all processes in Windows XP by pressing the restart button; to build up a new civilization from scratch and avoid all the bad things of modern society. In an obscene psychoanalytic kind of way, that could perhaps make a very tiny bit of sense when trying to understand the atrocities that took place. However, even this doesn't seem to have been part of Pol Pot's plan, at least according to our guide or staff at the Tuol Sleng museum. One thing that seems clear though, is that Pol Pot was firmly backed by China, and one may wonder what was China's plan in all of this.

Apart from the stupa with more than 8000 skulls, the Choeung Ek site consist of lots and lots of mass graves as well as signs telling what took place at various places of the site. As mentioned above, there is a killing tree with a head chair in front. There are small buildings were prisoners were held if the executioners didn't manage to finish them all off in one day. There are human bones lying on the ground many places. And of course, there are lots of dug-up mass graves. Walking around we tried to absorb the information and visualise what happened here, in modern times, only 30 years ago. Still, even with a guide, it was somewhat abstract to us, as it is almost impossible to believe, even when looking at the 10 metre high stupa filled with skulls. A visit here is of course a must for anyone going to Cambodia.

Security prison 21: Tuol Sleng
Formerly a high school, the Khmer Rouge converted Tuol Sleng into the infamous Security Prison 21 (S-21) in 1975. From 1975 to 1979, around 20 000 people were imprisoned and tortured and most were also sent to Choeung Ek for execution. The prisoners were usually former Khmer Rouge members and soldiers accused of treason. Anyone inside the Khmer Rouge who question what was going on had a great chance of being sent to S-21.

Prisoners were constantly shackled to the floor. Each prisoner had two containers in their cell as their toilets. In addition to the awful sanitary and health conditions, prisoners were tortured in order to get confessions out of them. The most common torture methods were electric shocks, hot metal items, and hanging upside down. After interrogation and confession, prisoners were taken to Choeung Ek for extermination.

In 1979, the Vietnamese army uncovered the prison. They found 14 dead prisoners in torture chambers or their cells and estimated that the prison had been left about a week earlier. The 14 last victims were buried on site and their grave stones can be seen when doing the museum tour.

We walked around the buildings and into the prison cells and torture chambers while our excellent guide, who spoke very decent English, explained everything in detail. In many ways, we appreciated the visit here a lot more than the Choeung Ek killing field, as our guide was much better in conveying information. And being a museum, there were lots and lots of interesting photos, items, and information posters. As the Choeung Ek, Tuol Sleng is a must-see for visitors to Phnom Penh.

Sunset at the river
Staying at the excellent Simon II guesthouse in a hotel-standard room (have you heard that one before?!) we were just a short walk from the river. After the very interesting visit to the killing fields and the S-21 prison, we took our tuk-tuk driver for a drink on a stationary house boat on the river. Sitting at the roof top of the boat on pillows, we had a wonderful view of the river and the sun slowly sinking into the horizon. Kids were paddling their kayaks around and Elvis Presley was on the stereo. It was the perfect finish of a memorable day.

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