Phnom Penh

Only our second, and unfortunately our last, stop in Cambodia was Phnom Penh.  We wanted to be in Phnom Penh in time to watch the All Blacks game, so we booked ourselves onto the 7:30am bus from Siem Reap, so that it would arrive at 1pm which would give us enough time to check into our hotel and get to the Irish Sports Pub in time for kick off.  Mission successful. The early start was worth it as the All Blacks rolled the Argentinians on my home ground the mighty McLean Park.

Our hotel was very central so this allowed us to walk to the Royal Palace which was actually closed for lunch when we arrived! We should have read the guide book more thoroughly as it clearly gave the information that it was closed between 11-2pm for lunch.  So on we walked to the Friendship and a Independence monuments.

From here we got a tuktuk to the genocide museum, known as S-21. S-21 was once a school but in 1975 Pol Pot (leader of the Kumer Rouge) transformed it into a prison.  From here innocent people were tortured and forced into confessions that then saw them shipped off to the killing field.  For me the worst thing about the prison was seeing blackboards still on the walls reminding me that it was a school first and foremost.

We then went back to the a Royal Palace which by now was open.  The palaces looked amazing from the outside but were nothing much on the inside.  One of the rooms housed an emerald Buddha and also a gold Buddha decorated with 9,584 diamonds - it was very sparkly!

We found a cool bar for drinks that overlooked the river front and busy main road.

Day three was a morning visit to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. This is where prisoners of S-21 were executed.  As bullets were expensive and in short supply prisoners were often bludgeoned to death with garden tools - spades, axes, hooks.  We saw a tree where children were murdered by officers who held them by the ankles and swung them so their heads smashed into the tree trunk. There are no words to describe how disgusting this is.  I found the killing fields to be rather small, but I guess I was comparing them to the large concentration camps I had seen in Poland & Germany.  The difference here being that prisoners were executed the day they arrived so there was no need to build dormitories to house prisoners.  The last stop was the memorial stupa which has 8000 skulls of victims, and their ragged clothing, on display.  

The awful truth about visiting these sites is the reminder that genocide is still happening around the world as I type this.  How this practice is able to be undertaken without world super powers doing anything to stop it is beyond me.

For our last night in Cambodia I had a Khmer red curry which is not as spicy as Thai curry, but had a similar taste.  I prefer the spice kick of a Thai curry myself.