Phnom Penh
Trip Start
Feb 01, 2006
1
23
37
Trip End
May 04, 2006
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The most memorable thing I did there was to take a tour of the memorial sites for the victims of the Khmer Rouge. In 1975 a bizarre communist group took control of the country of Cambodia, and for the next four years they systematically executed every one in the country that they believed was at all educated or held any position in the former government. In addition they forcefully relocated the entire population out of the cities and in to the country side where they were made to work on farms from sun up to sun down with little or no food and medical care.
The first site I saw was the Killing Fields which were about fifteen minutes outside of the city. This was an area where they held mass executions of men, women and children. In the center of the field there was a building with over eight thousand skulls in it to commemorate all of the people who died. Like I said before any indication that a person was educated was immediate grounds for execution. If you wore glasses they killed you, if you spoke another language they killed you, if you had any knowledge of medicine they killed you.
Fun people I met at my guest house
Pretty twisted stuff. All in all they executed over 2 million of their own citizens. I got a tour guide for the area and he told me how most of his family was killed there, and how he had came back in 1980 to help dig up the bodies. The guy was still visibly angry when he spoke about it. It was one of the situations where there was really nothing for me to say. I mean "wow, that's sad" doesnt really cover it. Soooo as if the day wasn't already disturbing enough after that I went to the S-21 Tuol Seng museum which is a fornmer High School that the Khmer ROuge used to torture anyone who they deemed a threat. Towards the end of their regime they turned on themselves and after forcing confessions they executed thousands of members of their own military.
All in all it was a pretty disturbing day, and afterwards I did what I could to just not think about it. Later on in the evening I was reading a book about Vietanm that I had been working on for a couple weeks, and it was just like, 'man I really don't want to think about war and killing anymore for the rest of the day,' and had to put it down.
Anyway, on the upside I met some fun people in Phnom Penh with whom I enjoyed the ridiculously low prices that go with being in a third world country such as two dollar all you can eat Indian food and fifty cent beers:) I only spent two and a half days in Phnom Penh. Aside from the above mentioned sites and a few other temples and museums there really isn't a lot of tourist attractions to be seen there. And after a couple weeks of hard traveling I was definitely ready for another dose of the beach...
