Phnom Penh - City of Sin

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The arrival into Phnom Penh was one I'll always remember. Now I know what it's like to be one of the Beetles get stampeded by fans. Yet, my claim to fame was that I was a white boy in Cambodia, and my 'fans' where hungry guest house owners keen for some $$ so they could get their next meal!

Some how we ended up in the tuk tuk of the touter for 'No problem' Guest House. They have some classic names here; Same Same GH, Happy Happy GH......It was on the cities lake which is where wanted to be and the cheapest accom yet. US4$ per night! The room was average. It had a fan but you couldn't stop the 'rotating' functions (which seems to be the case in all GH's in Cambodia).

word has it that anything goes in Phnom Penh....drugs, guns, sex and sleasiness. It didn't seem much different than any other city! Either way we knew what we wanted to do there and it wasn't going to be all daisies. We went to probably the lamest museum on our travels so far. Maybe if we knew more about the history of the Kymer, but to us it was just a few of the smaller less impressive staues of the mind blowing Angkor Wat area. As fate would have it, we bumped into a nice Canadian gal that Lee-Anne really clicked with way back in Laos. we arranged to meet for dinner.

I found a mint spot at a guest house not far from ours. You could walk off the balcony onto a boat. On the roof there was a low table and some 'chill out' mats where we yarned the night away.

Day 2 was the full-on day. It was a day of morbidity and reflection on the atrocities humanity is capable of. We hired a tuk tuk driver for the day and went to S21, the prison and interogation unit set up by Pol Pot and the Kymer Rouge Regime. Really moving stuff, really sickening stuff, really twisted things went on in there. It's hard to imagine how a few peoples extreme theories could cause a genocide worse that Hitlers (more deaths).

We then took the 14km journey out of town to where they actually killed everyone. There is a stupa erected in the middle of the field where they have satcked all the 10,000 odd skulls....quite bizzare. This was just one mass grave amongst 100's that are littered all over Cambodia. In total, near 2 million were killed by their own people!

Lee-anne and I are both devaouring a good 4 books on the whole Indo-China past. So much of the war torn past is so very deep-rooted and convoluted it is hard to follow at times. Before the US came to Vietnam, the Viets had been fighting with the french, then the viets decided to attack Cambodia. Cambodia was backed by the Chinese, but camb. was also fighting it's own civil war. One of the craziest photos I saw was when the Kymer Rouge "liberating" Phnom Phen on April 17, 1975 from Camb. army who had overthrown the king. The photo is of dozens if kids celebrating and cheering as they genuinely thought it was the end of the war....4 years later, 2 million cambodians were killed by their own people!!


Righto, day 3 we bailed and took the bus to Shinoukville on the way to quiet times in a far off island...

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Photos

killing fields
The skulls of the killing fields. Some 20,000 corpses. This was one of dozens of killing fields scattered around Cambodia

lake
View from our "No Problem Guest House".

Sign
The sign says it all.......sickning!