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Published: June 19th 2009
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After a fairly comfortable five hour bus journey from Sihanoukville we arrived in the centre of one of the craziest places we have been to yet, Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh. The bus company had fenced the tuk tuk drivers and hotel touts off like caged animals for us while we got our bags off the bus so once we had sorted ourselves out we went to select one of the baying mob and asked to be taken to a lonely planet recommended place, yet another Royal Guesthouse. As expected it wasn't the kind of place you would find royalty staying in but, despite being a bit rough around the edges it was adequate enough so we checked in.
After dumping our bags and freshening up we decided to go for a refreshing drink at The Foreign Correspondents Club (the bar that all the foreign jounalists used to drink at when the trouble in Cambodia started - it's the one features in the film The Killing Fields) before exploring the city on foot, despite the baking heat of the afternoon. After lunch at a lovely rooftop restaurant overlooking the river we wandered to one of the local markets through utterly mental
traffic to see if we could find some souveniers for Diane to buy. Unfortunately, when we got there it was mostly full of locals bartering over pirate DVDs, dodgy cheap jewellery, flowers and foul smelling meat and fish. It wasn't great for souvenir shopping but did make for quite an interesting experience wandering around. Just as we were about to leave we spotted a stall selling fried insects. We had heard that Cambodians are fiercly omnivorous and have many bizarre delicacies, including fried tarantula so I decided to buy a couple of hairy legged spiders to find out if they were any good. Purchase made, we walked to a local shopping mall to sit down and try it out. The whole thing had been fried in sugar so the legs snapped off easily and were surprisingly tasty but the body wasn't quite a nice and was a bit gooey and bitter. Ah well, from now on I'll just eat tarantula legs!
After my little snack we walked up to the supposed backpacker area of Phnom Penh, Lakeside. The guidebook has suggested it was a little rough but we weren't prepared for quite how rough. The area was just a
collection of little corrugated metal huts down some dirt roads by a filthy looking lake and the whole place just felt like a shanty town. We had debated moving to the area from our guesthouse if it was cool and fun like Khoa San Road in Bangkok but after just a few minutes we hightailed it out and got a tuk tuk back to our guesthouse, suddenly grateful for it despite the fact that if it was in the UK it would have only just scraped 2 stars itself.
Somewhat exhausted we had a shower and then went out for some lovely French-Asian food at one of the riverside restaurants near our place.
The next morning we arranged with a tuk tuk driver to take us on a tour of the city's horrific Khmer Rouge sites. First he drove us 15km out of town to the infamous killing fields at Choeung Ek. There were actually many killing field sites across Cambodia but Choeung Ek is the most famous and is also the site of a large stupa (Buddhist monument) that serves as a memorial to the attrocities. The area was smalled than I had imagined, no larger than
a football pitch and it was incredibly serene and peaceful. We walked around reading the signs describing where the various buildings had been and where the people were killed before walking to the large stupa in the middle of the field. The building is a towering structure and is filled to the top with over 9,000 skulls of the people found in the 129 mass graves. Many of the skulls show fractures and large indentations where the people were bludgeoned to death to save on bullets. We lit some incence and left some flowers at the base before taking a walk around the rest of the site.
We read that over 17,000 people had been killed at this site alone and not all of the mass graves have yet been excavated. As we walked around the area we could actually see fragments of bone and scraps of clothing poking from the earth beneath our feet which, for me at least, we the most haunting part of the whole experience.
Next stop was the notorious Tuol Sleng Musuem in the centre of Phnom Penh. In 1975 Pol Pot's men turned the Tuol Svay Prey High School into Security Prison
21 (known as S21) and brought over 20,000 people here to imprison and torture them over the four years they were in power. Most prisoners were held at S21 for two or three months while the guards tried to extract confessions of completely fabricated anti-government acts and many of them died under interrogation. Those that died in the prison were buried in mass graves and those that survived were taken to the killing fields and executed there.
We walked around the buildings and saw the rooms that people were held in. Some of them simply contained a rusted metal bed frame and a harrowing black and white picture of a prisoner who had been tortured in the room, others had hundreds of photos of people who had been through the prison. The pictures were obtained when the Vietnamese army overran the prison in 1979 and the guards fled, leaving thousands of photos of inmates and their records. We spent about an hour walking around the buildings and seeing some of the attrocities that were commited there before leaving rather shellshocked.
When we arrived back at the hotel we had a shower and chilled out after a rather introspective
day. After some food we walked along the riverfront to a cool bar called the Green Vespa where we sat listening to classic rock music and sipping on ice cold Angkor beer to lighten the mood.
On our last day in Phnom Penh we had breakfast in a non-profit cookie and coffee cafe that supports local children and orphanages before walking up to Wat Phnom, the site that gives the city its name. Legend has it that a lady named Penh fished four buddha statues out of the Mekong river in 1373 and built a temple on top of the largest local hill (phnom in Khmer language) to honour the statues. Therefore the city that grew up around the hilltop wat was named Phnom Penh, literally Penh's Hill. The grounds around the bottom of the small hill were surprisingly peaceful considering that they were in the middle of the city. There was a rather bizarre but very cool looking large clock in the hillside that we climbed past to see the rather uninteresting but historic wat at the top. Also resident on the hillside were a group of incredibly cute little monkeys that some locals were feeding. We bought
some lotus stems (roots of the lotus flower that have tasty little peanut-like seeds in them) and joined in with the locals hand feeding the monkeys. We even got a video of a very polite monkey taking a seed from Amy:
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We walked from Wat Phnom down to the entrance of the royal palace, via a cafe for an iced drink to escape the boiling hot afternoon sun for a while. When we got to the gates of the royal palace we were told we had to wait until 2pm for it to open. Luckily it was already 1.30pm by this point so we just sat on the pavement and watched the traffic, monks and hawkers roll past.
When the doors finally opened we paid the somewhat extortionate entrance fee and entered the grounds. The current king of Cambodia actually lives in the palace today and, although we unfortunately didn't see him gardening in the beautiful and quiet gardens it did feel incredibly opulent and beautiful. The gardens cover a huge area and are dotted with wats, pagodas, stupas and various ornate buildings. Despite having seen many wats and temples since we've been away the royal
palace was still impressive and we got some fantastic photos.
When we got back to the hotel we went for some food and then a couple of beers at The Zeppelin, a rock themed pub that served dirt cheap beer, and celebrated our last night in Phnom Penh before heading back to Siem Reap to drop Diane at the airport.
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