Day 12 – Vientiane to Phnom Penh

---

After hardly any sleep because of the noise from the hotel next door and also this constant drip from the air-con outside we were up at 6:00am to have a cold shower as the stupid thing wouldn’t heat up; that’s one way to wake you up. We had breakfast and made our way on the bus to the airport to catch out 10:20am flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
We left on time for our one hour and twenty minute flight. After we all successfully made it through passport control we collected our bags and we were greeted by Sophia, our Cambodian guide for the day. We knew today was going to be grim/sad/sickening/disturbing but I don’t think we quite thought it would affect us quite as much as it did.
We drove for about 30minutes to the hotel, ‘Hotel Castle’. The rooms were quite nice. We checked-in then had some time before we had to meet for our tour so Jackie, Sophie and myself made our way two blocks from the hotel to and Italian Restaurant where I had a very delicious chicken burger. We walked back to the hotel, stopping on the way to purchase three pair of ‘Ray ban’ sunglasses for $5 then we met everyone in the lobby for our 10minute bus drive out to the Cheoung Ek Killing Fields.
Between 1976 and 1979, a period of three years, 8 months and 20 days, there was approximately 3 million people killed by the clique of Pol Pot criminals.
This clique of criminals wanted to transform Cambodian people into a group who knew and understood nothing and always bent their heads to carry out the orders of ANKAK (the Kampucha Communist Party) blindly. They educated and transformed the young people and adolescents whose hearts are pure, gentle and modest into odious executioners who dared to kill the innocents; which also included their parents, friends and relatives.
This clique of Pol Pot Criminals burnt the marketplace; abolished monetary system, eliminated national culture, destroyed schools, hospitals, pagodas, and priceless monuments such as Prasat Angkor which is a source of pure national pride. They did whatever they could to get rid of the Khmer character and transform Cambodian soil into a mountain of bones and a sea of blood and tears which was deprived of cultural infrastructure, civilisations and national identity became a desert of great destruction that overturned the Cambodian society and drove it back to the stone age.
Duch, a former chief for S-21 has recognised that he had ordered underlyings to kill children. Mostly the babies and small children were killed by the killers would hold the ankle of them then smashed their heads against a tree.The adults were killed by being walked up to the end of the mass graves, hands tied behind their backs so their elbows touched and they were hit over the back of the head. To do this, the killers used things like hammers, axes, bamboo sticks etc, no guns because they were too expensive and too noisy.
Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge rule on January 7th, 1979. Soon after that date, The killing field at Choeung Ek was discovered; 129 mass graves were found and 86 of those were excavated. About 8,985 corpses were exhumed. As most of the Cambodian people are Buddhist, they believe the remains of the deceased should be kept in a good place to show respect for the dead so a wooden memorial was built to house those skulls and bones. Several years later the government ordered ministerial and municipal authorities to construct a memorial stupa at Choeung Ek Killing Field at the national lever for the education of human kind and showing respect for the dead.
The memorial is arranged in 17 tiers. Each type of bones; flat, long, short and irregular, are housed on different levels. Clothes of prisoners which were found in the mass graves are arranged on the first tier; clothes are of different sizes and colours from men, woman, children and baby.
From the second to ninth tier the skulls were placed. From the tenth to the seventeenth tiers the bones are places divided into the different types; collarbones, humorous, rib bones, hip bones, tail bones, thigh bones, shine bones, back bones and jaw bones.
This place was so sad. Still walking around there was pieces of bones poking up out of the soil and teeth and clothing being uncovered by people and natural elements. When we were getting on the bus there was a group of about six kids, some asking for “one dollar, one dollar” other asking just for water.
Dean TL had told us not to hand out money so no one did but we couldn’t begrudge the kids some water handing over our half drunken bottles of water and the kids were scoffing it down and sharing it around. As if the visit to the killing fields wasn’t enough this morning, we then moved on to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
In the past Tuol Sleng Museum was one of the secondary schools in the capital called ‘Chao Ponhea Yat High School’. After April 17th, 1979 the Pol Pot Clique had transformed the five buildings of the complex into a prison and interrogation center. The Khmer Rouge renamed the complex "Security Prison 21" (S-21) and construction began to adapt the prison to the inmates: the buildings were enclosed in electrified barbed wire, the classrooms converted into tiny prison and torture chambers, and all windows were covered with iron bars and barbed wire to prevent escapes. S-21 became the biggest prison in the Kampuchea Democratic.
The former class rooms on the ground floor were pierced and divided in to individual cells whereas the ones on the second floor were used for mass detention. Several thousands of victims, including peasants, workers, technicians, engineers, doctors, teachers, students, Buddhist monks, ministers, Pol Pot cadres, soldiers of all ranks of the Cambodian Diplomatic Corps, foreigners etc were all imprisoned and then exterminated here with their wives and their children. There are a lot of evidences inside the ‘museum’ proving the atrocities of Pol Pot clique; cells, instruments of torture, dossiers and documents, lists of prisoners names, mug shots of victims, their clothes and their belongings.
In 1979, the prison was uncovered by the invading Vietnamese army. In 1980, the prison was reopened by the government of the People's Republic of Kampuchea as a historical museum memorialising the actions of the Khmer Rouge regime. The museum is (obviously) open to the public, and receives an average of 500 visitors every day.
Again, it was so sad. After what I think was one of the most depressing days ever we got back on the bus, all very quiet, and headed to the hotel.
I stayed in the lobby for a bit on the internet before we made our way about 50m up the road to a bar/restaurant called ‘Metro’. Here, I had the best fish and chips I’ve had in ages, better then a lot of places at home. We were so full that we decided that we should walk it off before having dessert. So, we paid our bill, my main meal only cost me $4.75, and made our way up the road for about a 15minute walk to the casino and to the bridge where the stampede had happened only 2 nights earlier. We got to the bridge and it was a very somber site, not crazy or anything, a lot of people standing around with a lot of candles and incense burning surrounded by flowers. It’s such a shame that such a terrible event took place here because for so many people this 8m x 100m bridge will be hated when it really is such a beautiful bridge.
We didn’t overstay our welcome as some of the locals had already given us funny looks so we wandered up to the casino.
We didn’t stay here long, we had a brief look around at their Christmas decorations and their roof that was painted like the sky (much like the one in the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas) before heading back toward the hotel. As we had walked for a while we decided to head back to ‘Metro’ for dessert. I had the best coconut ice cream; ice cream is one thing I’ve really missed over here, it’s not that easy to come by. We went for another short walk before heading back to the hotel to use the internet and have a relatively early night.

---