Phnom Penh and the Khmer Rouge

After spending far too much money pretending to be rich American tourists in Siem Reap we decided to head to the capital city, Phnom Penh to find a less developed scene... no such luck. Cambodia seems to have exploded in the short time that it has been open to tourists, and everywhere that has any sights for tourists to visit is firmly Westernised. Its a real disappointment - Cambodia is a lot more like Thailand than we expected and the local culture seems to have been lost along the way. If you want a beer, a glass of wine or a dinner of roast lamb with mint jelly, yorkshire puddings and apple crumble for pudding then you will be in heaven here, and don't get me wrong, we had the former for dinner last night and very delicious it was too! But its not really why we're here...

We decided to see the city sights and then head out to Vietnam to see if thats any different.
To that end we spent today at the Cheung Ek site also known as the Killing Fields. This is where during Cambodia's dark years of the Pol Pot regime (1975-1979) thousands of people - men, women and children, including some foreigners, were taken outside the city limits and executed, then interred in mass graves. Only a fraction of the mass graves have been exhumed, the largest found to contain the remains of 450 people. There is one grave solely for the women and children and one where all the bodies had been beheaded. In the centre of the site there is a large charnal house where 9000 skulls of the victims are on display.
The victims came from the prison at Tuol Sleng, or S21, the former school where the Khmer Rouge took 14,000 prisoners to interrogate, torture and execute them. These prisoners included so-called intellectuals (you could be classed as one of these simply by wearing glasses or speaking a foreign language), farmers, ex-soldiers who were thought to be too lenient, monks, women, children and even babies. Nine foreigners were also sent here and later executed. Out of the 14,000 admitted, 7 survived. The cells and torture chambers remain as they were in the 1970s - we saw rooms with iron beds with manacles attached to them and photographs on the walls showing the prisoners on the beds being tortured. All in all around 3 million people were killed by the regime and the brutal civil war which followed its downfall. What is so shocking is how recently all this happened - there are many people alive today who have lost entire families, or have been injured by land mines which are still plentiful around the Thai border.

So, we have toured Cambodia's grisliest sights and paid our respects to those affected. Tomorrow we leave by bus to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) thus entering the 7th country on our trip....