Phnom Penh and Sihanoukville

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So spent about five days in Phnom Penh and had a very nice time. Its a lively old place a bit rough round the edges but the people on the whole have been very friendly. Its not a place that's full of what you might call tourist attractions but it has some interesting temples and a lively market.

The main places on interest are all a bit gruesome and connected with Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The first place I went was the Tuol Sleng museum it used to be a school but under the Khmer Rouge it was turned into a prison and interrogation centre. People were taken there under any old pretext then tortured made to sign confessions and sent off to be executed. Out of 20000 people that passed through the place only 7 are known to have survived. You could get yourself arrested for pretty much anything - wearing glasses, being educated, speaking a foreign language or even having soft hands. After Tuol Sleng prisoners were trucked out to my second stop The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Now this is a grisly old place. The prisoners were made to kneel blindfolded in front of a pit and as bullets were in short supply were then whacked over the head with something heavy and/or had your throat cut before being thrown into the pit.
There is now a memorial stupa there full of hundreds maybe thousands of skulls of the executed. Not surprisingly its a solemn old place and even today bits of cloth, bones and teeth work their way to the surface and are collected by the caretakers and placed in glass cases. I don't think ant one is exactly sure but its estimated that 1 in 4 Cambodians died during the few years of Khmer Rouge rule so its surprising that after all that the Cambodians are such a happy friendly bunch of people.

So after my time there it was on the bus and off to the beach town of Sihanoukville - I thought Siem reap had changed a lot but this place really has. There is a whole strip of bars, restaurants' hotels etc running right down the beach front and all the small roads leading from it. I'm sure last time I was here there was none of this and I stayed on a virtually deserted beach lived in a house on stilts and shared the bathroom with a bright green frog. On the up side at least this time I haven't got dengue fever and spent half the night beating cockroaches to death with my sandal. Anyway will be here for Christmas before briefly passing back through Phnom Penh on my way to Vietnam assuming the nice man at the embassy gives me a visa.

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Comments

[David Willows]

Hey Paul I was in Cambodia in June, all looks familiar. When you are back in PP be sure to have a beer at the foreign correspondents club & perhaps take in an afternoon at Cambodian fighting, I didn't go the RPG but had a toot on the M60. Did you try the tarantulas?