Phnom Penh - A city still recovering from the atrocities of the past

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We landed in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, after a short flight from Vientiane in Laos, and after paying $20 for our visas we picked up our luggage and got a tuk tuk outside the airport, towards the riverside area where we wanted to stay. As soon as we were out of the airport and on the main roads we saw the craziest traffic and most chaotic driving we had seen so far on our whole trip - Bangkok looked positively safe and calm compared to this! In Cambodia you drive on the right hand side, but there were cars and bikes coming towards us on our side of the road - they just drive whichever way they want and you need to dodge them - we even saw a small accident and were not surpised, when this is how people drive!

Along the way we noticed that, for a capital city, it was extremely poor and full of striking differences between haves and have nots - there were people on bikes zipping around in suits and smart shoes, alongside young mothers and children begging on dirty road sides, outside nice hotels and expensive restaurants. It just didn't seem to make sense to us.

We got dropped off after our hair-raising journey in an area by the river which we had heard was meant to be quite nice, so looked around several same same hotels and not long after we found a small hotel for the night on the main street, immediately noticing the price difference between Thailand, Laos and here - another one of many examples of how unbalanced this city is, as it is one of the poorest in SE Asia, yet has more expensive accomodation, with yet more beggers and disabled people with limbs missing begging just outside, which was so sad to see.

Our main reason for coming to Phnom Penh was to visit the killing fields and the s-21 prison, both places that were part of the horrendous Khmer Rouge ruling in the 70's, run by a man called Pol Pot and his govermental team, who killed and tortured millions of Cambodians for no reason. We knew that these places would be depressing and wouldn't be nice but we felt we had to see them and learn more about this period, so booked on a tour that afternoon to see them.

The city fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975. Many of its residents, including those who were wealthy and educated, were forced to do labour on rural farms as "new people". Tuol Svay Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot's forces and was turned into the S-21 prison camp, where Cambodians were detained and tortured. Pol Pot sought a return to an agrarian economy and therefore killed many people perceived as educated, "lazy", or political enemies. Many others starved to death as a result of failure of the agrarian society and the sale of Cambodia's rice to China in exchange for bullets and weaponry. The former high school is now the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, where Khmer Rouge torture devices and photos of their victims are displayed. Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields), 15 kilometres (9 mi) away, where the Khmer Rouge marched prisoners from Tuol Sleng to be murdered and buried in shallow pits, is also now a memorial to those who were killed by the regime.

Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites ndicate at least 1,386,734 victims. Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a population of around 8 million. The Khmer Rouge were eventually driven out of Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese in 1979, and people began to return to the city, which had become a ghost town. Vietnam is historically a state with which Cambodia has had many conflicts, therefore this liberation was and is viewed with mixed emotions by the Cambodians.

To think that these atrocities happened just 30 years ago is unbelieveable, especially after meeting so many kind Cambodians who must have known people, even their own family, who were killed during the time the Khmer Rouge were in control. After visiting the above places we left feeling sad, angry and shocked that it was allowed to go on for almost 5 years and millions of people died needlessly and horribly. It was also strange to think that anyone over the age of 40 must have lived through it somehow, either by fleeing the city or by being part of the Khemer Rouge. Whats even stranger is that it only became part of the schools history curriculum a few years ago, so people our age don't know too much about it, and is still a taboo subject which isn't really discussed amongst Cambodians.

We returned to our hotel pretty depressed at what we had learnt and seen that afternoon, and although we had noticed when we arrived the obvious poverty in the city, we didn't feel ready to experience anymore of it, knowing we couldn't do anything to help these poor people, so decided to leave Phnom Penh the next morning. It was hard seeing so much poverty and distress amongst so many people, especially alongside tourists, ex pats and locals in the many bars and restaurants lining the river front, spending money. That evening we discussed what we had learnt over something to eat but weren't really in the mood to go out so had an early night and prepared for our bus the next morning, which would take 4 hours to reach the small coastal town of Sihanoukville.

In a strange way we didn't hate Phnom Penh at all, even though poverty was all around you, and maybe would have spent an extra few day's there or gone back at some point on this trip if we'd had time and maybe volunteered at one of the many schools, but the time we did spend there was very sobering, and although the city is trying to claw its way back to normality, it still has a long, long way to go. We just didn't feel we could stay there, enjoy it and spend money when there was such blatant differences between people with everything and nothing.

So in the morning we were picked up and whisked to the bus station by tuk-tuk and were very much looking forward to some R&R and seeing what else Sihanoukville had to offer . . .

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