Phnom Penh

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Our very fancy hotel meant a very leisurely morning. It's made an awesome change not having a pre 5:30 am alarm call. Breakfast was delish! The hotel is owned by a pair of frenchs and they do wonderful pastries etc. It was all washed down with fresh passion fruit juice... Amazing!!
We had arranged a tuk tuk for the morning to take us to killing fields and S21. There was an option of going to the Russian markets afterwards (for a little light relief I imagine) but Cambodia is more expensive than other places we've been as they use the dollar as their main currency so things tend to be in whole dollar denominations. We were a little late meeting our tuk tuk but he didn't mind and we set off in the mid morning dust to the north of the city. The traffic is mental! Far less beeping than Vietnam but there are lots more tuk tuks who don't seem to have to follow ANY of the laws of the road. They are nippy and cheap though so it works well for us! Killing fields was our first stop it was $6 to get in but that included a little box with a preloaded tour and head phones. The route was labeled perfectly but at first glance there wasn't much there other than paths and trees. The headphones were a great idea. A survivor of the Khmer Rouge with perfect English narrated the tour and at each stop was a number to press on the box and it spoke about what happened there. The fact that everyone was listening meant it was very quiet. Eireann and I didn't really say a word to each other for about an hour and a half / two hours. We just walked and listened. I am usually a camera monster and will photograph anything if I think it would make an interesting picture. I decided not to take any pictures at killing fields. It was the site of things more gruesome than I can even imagine and that will stay with me for a very long time without the need for a photograph. The stories were worse than I could have imagined. Everyone was a suspect and to save money people weren't killed with bullets but were killed with farm tools, razor sharp spears from certain palm trees.. Even bare hands. Out of 8 million people 3 million were murdered for no good reason. They were bussed in, forced to line up, when it was their turn they would stand by an open grave and when they were killed they just fell in. The majority of the bones have been removed from the ground and many have had forensics done to them to determine cause of death / to look for signs of torture. Still even 30 years later bone fragments, teeth and fabric used to bind hands or blind fold are still found on the surface after a little rain. The whole place was so upsetting and so moving. It was eerie as its was (on the whole) very quiet and there were no birds in the trees but millions of colourful butterflies. I say mostly very quiet because there were 2 or 3 Chinese tour groups stomping around making a din and a woman from the SE of England who was laughing and joking with her family. I don't know why they didn't ask her to leave! To continue the feel good theme of the day we tuk tuked to s21. It was a school on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. Pol Pot banned education and murdered all of the educated so schools became obsolete. This particular school had a central courtyard and four three story buildings around the edge. They have external corridors and many rooms still have blackboards with writing on them. They have left the rooms exactly as they were although they have cleaned up the signs of their former occupants. Many of the rooms have photographs of the way they were found and the people they found are buried properly in the central courtyard. People went to s21 to be interrogated. Very very few survived and the majority were packed onto transports and taken to the killing fields once they had been tortured into "confessing" Again it was quite a harrowing experience. I took one photograph of the rules of s21 and then, again, my camera was away. After the morning was done we still stayed pretty quiet. Had a soft drink and then decided to do some more sightseeing as a form of light relief! We wandered to the grand palace but I had shorts on and Eireann had her shoulders out (hussies!!!) so we had a bit of a hike back to the hotel to sort out appropriate attire. It's been very sunny in Cambodia. Far more so than anywhere else. By the time we got back to the palace (this time with a tuk tuk) most people had gone and it was starting to cool down. This made for a far more pleasant trip. We had a good dip in the hotel pool just to soak away the day and to cool us right down. We would have stayed longer but 5 French children had taken over the small pool and were screeching and throwing ornamental rockery stones into the pool etc. their mothers just ignored this behaviour and carried on talking about shopping! Still, it was great to swim and be cool and do a holiday thing! I tried a traditional Khmer Amok for my tea. It tasted mostly of lemon grass. Not sure it was particularly authentic though. Then we headed to a lovely roof top bar and watched the world go by and lightning flash on the horizon. Not a bad way to spend an evening!!

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Comments

[Mel]

Interesting Experience
It is incredible what people do to each other. I felt much the same at the German concentration camps.