Siem Reap and Phnom Penh

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Hi again - another week has past and what a busy one it's been! We took a bus east to Siem Reap last Sunday and arrived late afternoon, to a very friendly hostel owner who called himself Mr Why Not! He was a really nice man and told us everything we needed to know about visiting the magnificent Angkor - the famous ancient Khmer city near Siem Reap and told us about the town. It's a nice size to walk around without the need for a tuk tuk unless you're leaving the town area which is nice so we got to know the layout quite quickly. We met up with Stephanie and Vicky the two English girls we'd met in Koh Phangan who have been in the town a couple of days already so we went out with them on Sunday night for a few drinks which was nice. On Monday we decided to get our tickets for Angkor, as if you get them after 5pm, you get an additional hour until 6pm to look around with the sunset as well as the ticket being valid for the whole next day too. So Clem the lovely resident hostel tuk tuk driver took us over to the sight and we stayed until it closed and watched the sunset against the famous 11th century Hindu temple, Angkor Wat - although the sky was filled with very dark clouds and it looked like it was going to tip it down! Luckily it didn't before we got back to the hostel! We went inside the temple compound too and got some pictures of it and chatted to some children selling postcards, before Clem took us back. On Tuesday morning, after dealing with a punctured tyre on the side of the road with the help of a couple of friendly families who had made homes there, Clem took us to see a few more temples that made up the ancient city of Angkor. As they were spread quite far apart we needed his help getting from place to place. In fact, as there are so many old ruins to visit, they sold tickets in 2, 3 and even 7 day passes, for those who wanted to visit all that are still standing. We however thought one day would be enough, so chose to see the most interesting and central temples. The visit was nice as the temples we did see were all quite different in comparison, from the Buddhist Bayon temples with many Buddha faces carved into the rocks, to the temples of Angkor Thom with many intricate bas-reliefs depicting images of important battles, Hindu mythological animals and dancers and images of everyday activities such as farming and weaving. We also saw the temples of Ta Prohm with jungle trees growing through the rocks - maintained in order to look like how they were found in the early 20th century, which was amazing to see. It really felt like something from Indiana Jones!! So Tuesday was a very enjoyable day.We spent Wednesday and Thursday enjoying the markets and relaxing in the town centre, doing some job and flat searching online. We went out again on Wednesday night too and met some nice people, some from England, some from Switzerland and some from Cambodia, so many people were out dancing in the street so we all had a good laugh that night.

On Friday we said goodbye to Siem Reap and headed south to Phnom Penh, the capital. We saw another electric storm and the fork lightning was amazing and lit up the whole sky. We went past a lot of rural farming areas - so many wooden houses on stilts, children and animals everywhere! Phnom Penh is a large city in the south of the country, and although it is the economic and financial centre of Cambodia, with many parks and temples, it is still relatively poor compared to other capitals within south east Asia, and the infrastructure still hasn't recovered fully from the communist regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979, who forced people to abandon the cities in favour of forced labour in the countryside. This regime saw many schools, offices, and operational buildings turned into prisons, with education, religion, and culture being banned, in favour of an oppressive loyalty to the Khmer Rouge and a 'classless system' of uneducated workers who farmed the land incessantly. Whilst here we visited two horrifying places which are now used to educate people about the atrocities that happened to the Cambodian people under Pol Pot's government. On Saturday we visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, formally known as the horrific s-21 prison, which was a school before being taken over as a prison. The classrooms were turned into cell blocks and gym equipment into instruments of torture. There were many pictures of former inmates when they arrived here - completely innocent members of the public, who were thought of as being 'enemies of the regime', and mostly those who were thought of as too intelligent e.g. teachers, doctors, monks and senior military personnel. It was here they were brought to be aggressively interrogated about their opinions and connections and tortured in the most horrible ways until forced confessions were made and the Khmer Rouge saw it appropriate to murder them. There were also pictures of the prisoners after they'd died due to repeated torture which was extremely upsetting and also paintings of the prisoners being tortured drawn by two painters who had been part of the very small majority who had managed to escape when the prison was abandoned in 1979 when the Vietnamese marched into Phnom Penh and took power from the Khmer Rouge. The next day we went to the Choeung Ek Genocidal Center which is located in one of the many 'killing fields' that the prisoners of s21 and other prisons were sent to in order to be brutally murdered in the night right next to shallow graves in which they were thrown - in numbers which reached their thousands by 1979. It is estimated that at least 20,000 Cambodians were sent here to be 'liquidated' in the four year period of KR power, increasing in numbers as the years went by and as the paranoia of upsurgence against the KR grew. In all it is argued that 3 million people were either worked, starved or tortured to death, as well as murdered in these years. We saw these mass graves - now large holes in the ground - along with glass boxes containing the bones and clothing that have resurfaced due to flooding etc... It reminded me a lot of Auschwitz. There is now the largest memorial to those who lost their lives throughout Cambodia's killing fields here at Choeung Ek, filled carefully with the skeletons that have been unearthed since it's opening in 1980. The people of Cambodia now wish these places to serve as educational reminders of that time in their history, in order to bring attention to the dangers of uncontested power - in the hope that never again would such atrocities effect such a number of people. We will come back to Phnom Penh after visiting a few other places, as although the places we visited were so awful, the city itself has a lot to offer visitors and has a nice feel to it, with lots of parks, fountains, statues and temples. For now, we're off to Kratie, north east of Phnom Penh to get a feel for some of the village/river life on the Mekong river - we might even see some endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins..fingers crossed! Bye for now!

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