Day 70 - Phonm Phen Cambodia

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Leaving Saigon you buy a ticket directly directly to the capital of Camboida which is Phnom Penh. The funny thing is when you arrive at the boarder the bus just stops and you get off. The driver doesn't say anything to you, and I am pretty sure he doesn't speak any english. You have to walk from one country to the next. It was also quite odd that when you leave Vietnam the put all your luggage through the X-ray scanner. I guess they are making sure you aren't smuggling anything out of the country. I have never seen that at a boarder before, well besides at the airport. Anyways I made it across the boarder with no problems. I got on a different bus on the other side and was on my way to Phnom Penh.

I finally got to Phonm Penh and as I got off the bus there was a police man with a machine gun keep all the touts away from us tourists. The city has a really weird vibe to it. There are guards in front of most buildings with huge machines guns. There is this feeling of unrest, or lack of any sense of communal order. I wasn't aware of Cambodia's most recent history but between 1975-1979 the country was controlled by the koumar rouge, or the Pol Pot regime. During this time 25 % of the population or over 2 million Cambodian's were killed.

The first day I was in Phnom Phen I went to the national museum, the silver pagoda(which was just another temple with a dullish grey floor), and took a long walk along the Mekong river. The second day I hired a motorbike driver and he took me out to the killing fields. This is the closest one to the capital but apparently there are many many similar sights throughout the entire country. This particular one 9,800 people were killed and buried in mass grave sites. They have dug up about half of the grave sites and placed the skulls of all those found in a huge pleixglas pillar as a memorial. The whole site was absolutely horrible, you can walk around to where the mass grave sites are, there are pieces of clothing coming up through the ground all over the place, there are piles of bones in all different spots. It wasn't easy to see all these brutal things, but it's all part of the traveling experience. It really helps you put things in perspective and makes you realise how lucky we are to be living in such an amazing and free country.

After the killing fields I went to the S21 prison. This complex use to be a high school and was converted into a secret prison when Pol Pot took over cambodia. The prison saw 20,000 prisoners through the 5 years it was operating, and only 7 of them survived. The cells were small brick enclosures, which were just big enough to fit a human body. The prisoners would be tortured until they finally confessed to be plotting against pol pot, and then were executed. It was definitely a rough day but like I said before it really opens your eyes to things that happened and are still happening around the world today.

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Comments

[crys]

thank you for this entry
this was one of the most jolting entries yet. it's all about perspective; you learn to appreciate your roots more and more as you gain such impressive and eye-opening experiece.

[Stuart]

Look for Beauty
I lived in Cambobia frm 1960 to 1963 and it was a beautiful place at that time. In late 1963 the U.S. began bombing this lovely and historic land of beautiful people. Millions of Cambodians died at th hands of the Americans and the Chinese. The opinion of this person seems to be that Cambobia place of death, however I think that Cambodia has come a long way back from the sorrow that was unfairly placed upon them. Did you go to Ankor Whot, take a river boat up the Mekong, go to one of the silk making viligages I visited when I was a kid. Did youride an elephant? Did you ride in a ceclo? Cambodia is a place full of bautiful people, let's help them forget the killling feilds and replace the wonderful life they have enjoyed for centuries