Emotionally drained after a very morbid day in Phnom Penh

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The day started at 8.30am this morning when the tuk-tuk picked me up from my hotel and shuttled me to the killing fields. The killing fields are around 14km out of town, and by tuk-tuk you can get there in around 30mins through the fairly busy roads of Phnom Penh.

At the killing fields you can hire a guide to show you around which I did. The charge is a donation, so I gave my guide USD$5. He was very thorough and spoke very good English. There's things that I would never have known if I didn't have a guide.

We started by sitting beside the stupa which is the monument in the centre of the killing fields. Morbidly the stupa displays around 1800 skulls of people who were killed there. It's there that my guide talks to me about how the killing fields came about and about the number of killing fields throughout Cambodia.

These killing fields housed many people who were either killed or tortured at the S-21 prison. It is one of over 300 killing fields in Cambodia, although they are fairly sure that not all killing fields have been found. Many of the people killed here were doctors, lawyers, government officials of the old regime and soldiers of the old regime. The Khmer Rouge tricked many of these people into returning to the city by saying if you were educated or were from the old regime they wanted them to help make the new government, they then killed them. Secondly, if you were observed working in the fields and someone shook your hand and found it to be soft (so you hadn't been doing hard labour all your life) you were identified as educated and were killed.

From the outside of the monument we walked down a dirt pathway to the back where the mass graves are. The first few graves that we visit are small and look like overgrown golf bunkers. The pathway we walk along is flecked with white which my guide tells me are bone fragments. Parts of clothing can still be seen around the graves. I start watching where I'm stepping on the path after this as I really don't want to step on someones remains.

He then takes me to a covered mass grave which is where women and some children were found, before taking me to another covered grave where 450 bodies were found in this tiny area. It's an astounding view of the darkness that some of mankind can carry in them. There's a few other places he points out, one of which is a tree but I won't mention here what they would use this tree for as it was too shoking.

I was able to discuss with the guide current Cambodian politics as I keep seeing signs saying Cambodian People's Party throughout the places I have visited. This party apparently does have communist roots, however is now a democratic party and the party in power. He mentions that they often give land or money to farmers before elections to help keep them in power - this is kind of like tax cuts to low and middle income earners in Australia I guess.

We also discuss the lack of education in Cambodia and the problems that this brings, although apparently there are a number of universities now in Phnom Penh it is still not that educated in the country. Apparently many bigger families are now leting the younger children study while the older children work the fields to get money for the younger children to better themselves.

After taking a very brief look at the row apon row of skulls in the temple and a walk around the museum nearby, my tuk-tuk driver drove me to the site of the S-21 prison which is now potentially the most shocking museum in the world.

S-21 was originally a high school before the Khmer Rouge came to power. It was named after a King and when the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh and drove out it's inhabitants closing hospitals, schools, markets and making money useless, they turned this school into S-21.

On the walls of the A building are images of the dead, tortured bodies that the liberating army found laying on the torture beds when they liberated Phnom Penh from the Khmer Rouge. The beds still lay in their rusted and often dented morbidness with some of the torture tools (some may be replicas for effect) sitting on them. The liberating army found 14 bodies when they arrived at S-21 and only 7 prisoners alive, these prisoners managed to use their skills to keep themselves alive, such as a mechanic to fix the trucks the Khmer Rouge used to transport prisoners and artists who were made to draw Pol Pot images and sculptures to be distributed throughout the country.

Where as the A building was the torture chamber, the B and C buildings were the housing. They built crude cells out of cement and brick to seperate people, making them sleep on the floor. On building C you can still see the barbed wire that was erected after a woman jumped from the top floor to her death to avoid torture.

Throughout the buildings there are pictures of soldiers, prisoners before, during and after torture and morbid information about what happened on this site. I didn't take any pictures while on site as for me it felt wrong to do so, as it did at the killing fields (although at the killing fields I did take a picture of the entry gate with tthe stupa in the background) - at both venues you can take pictures.

I'm in two minds about whether it's healthy or not for the Cambodian people to keep this site so in tact. My guide for S-21 lived through the Khmer Rouge regime and lost family members to their brutality. It's remarkable that she takes people around the most brutal site. Even one of the survivors of the S-21 prison sells his book on the grounds.

It's something that I knew I would have to do here to understand Cambodia's past more, but it's something I will definitely not do again.

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