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Outside Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (S21)
Inside, behind a stairwell some simple graffeti says:
'When this was a school nobody died,
When this was a prison nobody learnt'
The journey did take about 5 hours...and whilst it was not the worst journey ever, it was very boring..probably because it felt like we never went above 50km/h and the bus driver honked his horn all the way! The road was a lot better, but there were still collapsed bridges here and there, but nothing that made you think in bad weather you might be up a creek without a paddle.
We arrived around 7pm and were bombarded by tuk-tuk drivers as we got out the bus. We were saying we were just walking down the road but they kept going on! There's two ways to get rid of Tuk Tuk drivers, ignore them or (if that doesn't work) kill them. Given Cambodia's history that comment might be considered poor taste, but its still factually correct. Some of them are probably annoying and persistent enough to be able to realistically support temporary insanity pleas in a court of law. Anyways...
We had booked into a place called Woolly Rhino (no idea why and anything being woolly here...well!). Place was quite nice, if a bit dark.
We began to understand why the tuk tuk drivers were so pushy
The central building
The central untouched school building with all the barbed wire still in place... (that includes a literal physical interpretation of the word!)..there are so many of them and not that many tourists (at least at this time of year). But they really go about it the wrong way...we tended to go for those drivers who had not hassled us continuously. A few of them can only be described as stalkers. They wait outside your hotel, they follow you to a restaurant, then an internet cafe, then where-ever next you choose to walk.
Now Phnom Penh is not like Siem Reap - as we fully expected. It is definitely a big step down and first impressions were that it was a little (ed. lot) dirty.....although there were lots of nice cafes along the river front (catering only for tourists), walk down a street or two and one gets confronted with piles of rubbish...at least they sweep it in a pile I suppose. And the dust and the fact that there is no drainage can make it quite muddy in the rainy season. Its also pretty seedy. Whilst prostitution is visible in Thailand when you look for it (i.e. outside of Patpong's meat market), its pretty in your face here. Probably because here tourist
means punter - or more rather - money. Just as it does to the 40 million tuk tuk drivers. We aren't people, we are walking cash dispensers.
Its sad because whilst one part of your brain is saying - this is horrible - the other part is saying - would you bloody leave me alone. Its difficult also not to get cynical as clearly well off (relatively) children will put their hand out whenever they seeing a westerner pass them (i.e. someone who has a backpack or seemingly more crucially is white). Still, its not as bad as I am probably painting it, everything is relative, and Siem Reap was relatively luxurious... Like everything in life, its not always how things are, but how they are relative to everything you've just experienced...
The main reason people come here is (of course) to see the killing fields and S21 prison, a former school that was changed to a prison where people were taken to be tortured by the Khmer Rouge under the Pol Pot Regime. We visited tehe S21 prison first..where 14,000 people were taken and then taken to the killing fields to be executed. We first saw a
Inside
New doorways were bashed through classrooms to accomodate the new cell structure. video, where a survivor questioned the guards (there were only about 7 survivors) and it made for harrowing watching...the guards were clearly indoctrinated and still seem to have a sense of innocence in their job even now. They did not seem to have any remorse for their actions, saying they only followed instructions which (at least later on in the regime) often seemed to be under the fear of reprisal. Many of the guards from S21 actually ended up sharing the same fact as the prisoners as the Khmer Rouge got more and more paranoid and incoherent in its thinking.
3 million died during 3 short years... either executed (for non-existent crimes associated with them through a paranoid political system) or through starvation, exhaustion and disease in the agrarian lifestyle enforced by the regime.
A lot of these former guards, soldiers and even the leaders of the Pol Pot regime are free to do what they want in Cambodia. They are yet to be brought to justice. One can only think this is due to corruption within the political system now in place.
The school itself is a very plain building and in some ways this makes
it worse. It is walled in along with barbed wire so that people could not escape. The torture tools, cells etc have all been left where they were when the Pol Pot regime was defeated and it really is not nice. I was not sure, but it did seem like some of the marks on the walls could have been blood. All prisoners were photographed on arrival and there were rows of these photos on displays...the sheer number is just unbelievable. And you could tell from their eyes how terrified they were. Photos of torture was also shown and one was left wondering how this could have happened and how they could have done it to their own people. It really did make for a very sombre day.
The next day....the killing fields. 89 of the 129 mass graves there had been dug up. The Cambodians decided that the skulls should be put on display in a pagoda (a small temple like building) so that one does not forget what happened and in the hope that it never happens again. And seeing around 9,000 skulls on display, I cannot really explain what it felt like. The graves were all
marked along with a tree on which apparently the soldiers beat the children to death.
Leaving the camp we nearly both burst into tears (Ed. Beedge - I did).
And what did the tuk-tuk driver ask where we wanted to go straight afterwards....? "Would you like to go the shooting range?" Yes, they have the guns that were used in that time available for people to try... M-60 heavy machine guns, AK-47, even Personal Rocket Launchers... we saw them all in Siem Reap... we declined as this was the last thing we wanted to do.
Cambodia is such a land of contradiction - people are very friendly and always seem to have big smiles on their faces and it is very hard to reconcile this with what happened. It also casts a sinister shade over whatever you do in the city... you can't help wondering whether if you really piss off a local Tuk Tuk driver, he might just happen to have been part of the old regime with apparently no regard for life... That said, as far as we are aware, this has never been an issue...!
Anyway, after this there was little to do
A Cell
Cramped and depressing... almost without exception everyone detained in these cells were innocent of any crime 'against Angkar' (implicated during torture by other innocent people simply listing everyone they knew) and almost without exception everyone whom occupied these cells was executed for their crimes against the state. - we saw the palace (rubbish - like Bangkok's Grand Palace but pants), the national history museum (not very good) and the market (James said it was a good thing I had a huge cold as the blend of smells there was not very nice!). We both got a little bored and were looking forward to moving on. We had gone to the Vietnam embassy ourselves to do the visas and they were ready the next day (painless - unlike what we had read on the web). So we decided to leave on the 20th, after watching the FA Cup Final (at stupid o'clock in the morning) of course!
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