Hey Lady!

…you want touk-touk??? I’m sure you can apply a totally non-pc accent and imagine what I’ve been hearing all day! I didn’t realise last night – mainly because I was so tired – but there are people everywhere. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m not a huge fan of really large crowds. I know, I can hear you asking what I’m doing in south-east Asia! Well, I did an assignment on Cambodia for year 10 SOSE and have wanted to see this country ever since…

Today Amy and I were baptized by fire and got right into Cambodia’s dark and nasty history… We visited S21 (Genocide Museum) in Phnom Phen and the Killing Fields a little out of town. I was prepared for the brutal reality about what we saw, but I still found it very confronting. Lets just say that reading about something is a little bit different to seeing where it all happened and hearing about how it impacted on a country!

When you arrive at S21 you are stuck by how peaceful and calm the complex is - it was easy to imagine how children would have played on the grass and sat under the tress when it was a school. Then you notice the barbed wire. Our tour guide took us through the buildings, telling us the stories about prisoners and how they were prisoned, tortured and ultimately taken to be killed. As we moved from room to room, reading and hearing the stories and seeing photos of the captors and prisoners it was hard to comprehend that the Khmer Rouge regime only ended in 1979. After seeing some truly gruesome photos and paintings we jumped back on the tour bus and trundled out of town to the Killing Fields. Driving through Phnom Phen it’s hard to image how it could be emptied of all its residents in three days, which is what happened when Pol Pot came to power in 1975.

If you can imagine a great big piece of land with a large body of water down the back you’ve pretty much got what the Killing Fields look like… what makes this different to just about any other piece of land you’ve been on is the 50 odd ditches all through it that were used as killing pits and mass graves! The major mass graves are identified and have markers with stories about it near it, however, it took me a while to realise that as we were guided through the field that all the other non-descript looking ditches at one time or another marked a place of death. It was truly horrific.

To say out morning was pretty emotionally draining is an understatement so we headed back to the hotel, freshened up (after a sneaky little nap!) and headed out to the Central Market for a little retail therapy! We got caught out by the afternoon storm so holed up at an ice-cream parlour and had a cup of coffee (and a sundae!) before setting out to check out a bit more of the city.

We’re back at the hotel now and are all ready for bed and a good night’s sleep – hey lady, you want nap? Yes I do!

More exploring in Phnom Phen tomorrow and then off to Siem Reap!

SQ