A dark side in our lifetime...

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After a good bus ride from Siem Reap we were greeted in Phnom Penh by a tuk-tuk driver holding a sign with our names on.. how good is that! No we hadn't found some way to pre order them, he was a brother of one of the guys in the hotel we had just stayed at. The best bit was that he actually asked us how much we wanted to pay and yes we have his number if anyone wants to book him!

Our first afternoon and evening in Phnom Penh were spent with 2 friends, Luke & Lil who we'd flown to Rio on the same plane as.. and ended up in the same hostel 9 months ago. Since that time we'd criss crossed the world always keeping in touch with each others adventures and wondering if we'd meet up again.. Phnom Penh was the place to do it! We all had great stories to share about each place we'd visited with us all agreeing that Bolivia was probably top spot so far.. if only for the funny stories we all had from there! It was really funny to see how much we'd all changed, both in look and attitude in the months that had passed and we all laughed when we looked back at our first few days in Rio. We'd all been like little mice so scared to catch buses or leave the hostel alone in the dark, it's incredibe how much we have all adapted to life on the road and how different our time there would be now! The price we pay for things was another major difference with us blowing a whopping £30 on a meal in our first few days away.. now we begrudge paying anything over $2! Sadly we only got one night to spend with them before they were shooting off down South and had to retire to bed at midnight ready for their 7am bus the next day.

After a day spent getting to know Phnom Penh by wandering the streets and perfecting our 'no thank yous' for the million tuk-tuk drivers we encountered on every street corner, we planned to spend our 2nd day learning more about Cambodias horrific past under the rule of the Khumer Rouge and the leader Pol Pot. After getting such a good deal with Mr Monrith (tuk-tuk driver) on our arrival, we called him up again to book him in for the following day.

Our first stop was the Toul Sleng Genocide Museum or Security Prison 21 (S-21) which we'd read and heard so much about. Nothing can prepare you for what a terribly depressing and horrific place this is until you set foot though the gates and see it for yourself. The museum has largely been left in the state it was found in in 1979 and you can still see many bits of evidence of how it woud have looked for the tens of thousands of prisioners who were shut in the tiny 2m wide cells for anything up to 7 months enduring not only detention but intense interrogation, torture then possibly murder. In some of the buildings we learnt that they installed glass windows so that the sound of the other prisoners being tortured could be heard more clearly by those in incarsaration.. it's really hard to imagine how awful that would have been.

There are many memories of the past on display as well including one with room after room of photos of the unfortunate, some even showing the after effects of the torture which make for very hard viewing, there are others with the history of the Khumer Rouge and how they went about things to achieve their goal. It all made very depressing reading and is made even worse for us because this all happened in our lifetime which is beyond belief.

With the images of the museum still clear in our minds we made our way to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek which is exactly the path that thousands of those from S-21 would have followed on their way to their execution. Here they were processed, the 'lucky' ones being murdered on the day they arrived, but the unlucky ones having to wait days in small dark cabins listening to what was going on outside and wondering when it would be their turn. The wait was due to a backlog having built up because there were just too many prisioners for the guards to cope with on one day.

We saw the many pits where the prisioners were buried in the mass graves after their execution, most of them having been dug themselves before their murder. They have many signs around the site to inform you of what went on in each area with possibly the saddest being the tree they used to kill the babies. As you walk round there is a school next door and it's refreshing to hear the children laughing as they happily play in the ground, for what these people had to go though it's amazing that they are getting back on their feet and rebuilding their lives so well and always with a smile..

We spent the afternoon doing something a little more lighthearted and ticking off one of Dale's ambitions... shooting a gun.. not just any gun but an AK47! After driving into the grounds of the Cambodian Special Forces base watching the army doing their exercises we were led to the shooting range.

We'd first heard that you could do this here whilst being in South America and rumours were heard that if you have the $$'s then you can pretty much shoot what you want.. cars, cows or chickens with handguns, machine guns, grenades or even rocket launchers!!! Obviously Dale didn't want to shoot anything living and as it turned out they didn't offer it at the place we went to (thank god) so after having a look at the gun menu and trying to make the tough decision on an M-16 or AK-47 he opted for the latter.

It's actually a really quick process once you have picked your gun which was a bit of a shame, you get bustled into a little room with patio doors, told to put on your industrial strength headphones, the guy puts in the magazine of 30 LIVE bullets and off you go! Sophie was elected photographer for the event and we were both a little shocked after the first shot at how loud the thing is! Perhaps a little naive but it would probably shatter your ear drums without the protection! Dale was so excited and after a few manual shots were fired he decided to go for the automatic.... WOW! It was so funny from Sophie's point of view watching his face clearly getting into the role of a soldier!

So we returned to the hostel to watch the sun set on the city of Phnom Penh both thinking about the irony of a day which showed us the dark side and how people were repressed into being slaves in their own country and us also being amazed because it's so liberal that anyone can shoot a gun if you've got the $$'s to do it..

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Photos

Barbed wire
looking out to Block D

Photographs of the prisoners held here
This is just a few of them

Skulls in the Buddist Stupa
Some of the 9,000 recovred

Sign at S-21
basically stopping the prisioners from doing anything

Cell in Block A
These were the larger cells

Gallows
Here people were hung upside down by their wrists. If they passed out they were dunked in putrid water to revive them then the torture woudl start again

Barbed wire at the front of the building
This was to stop people from jumping to their death

Comments

[Dee]

Your worrying me Dale!
Dale! You look too happy and at home firing that Ak47.

[steve]

hi
Hi mate hope you are both well and safe, that prison looks grim don't get on the wrong side of them ! Are you missing home yet and nans yorkshire puding ,