Haunting day at the museum
Trip Start
Jun 11, 2008
1
55
349
Trip End
May 14, 2009
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Friday, July 25, 2008
This morning we had a walk to TSGM (aka S-21). There are signs on the walls of the buildings asking for no talking - trust me, these signs are not needed. You are stunned into silence when you start to understand the types of atrocities that went off here! It's quite harrowing. There are 3 main buildings, that used to be a school. The first building contains the torture and interrogation rooms. The second building contains 2 floors of individual cells (each cell was approximately 0.8 x 2.0 metres) and a floor of mass cells where the prisoners were all shackled together. The third building contains some of the instruments for torture, skulls of the dead, photo's and some detailed stories and reports about the times under the Khmer Rouge rule. It appears to me that Cambodians were basically in a lose:lose situation during the 60's and 70's
Entrance to Tuol Sleng Museum (S-21)
. Neither the democratic government or the revolution were seen as the right answer! I think the whole scale of these tortures are made even harder to comprehend as they actually happened in my lifetime, not hundreds of years ago!...................
After S-21 we went across the road to a small café called The Boddhi Tree for a cold drink. However, we discovered that they did bacon & sausage baguettes, and because we hadn't had breakfast, it was just too much for us to resist and we dug in!
After stuffing ourselves, we headed for the Palace, via the Independence Monument. On the way, we bumped into some massive election parades. It was weird to see this massive boulevard split into two, the blues on one side and the yellows on the other. If this was in England you would think it was some sort of football rivalry - and it was all about to kick off into a mass brawl. However, this is Cambodia, and all they were doing was singing, dancing and making loads of noise.
Of course, there was only one side we could support....Yeeeeeelllooooooowwwsss! The might Stags are even worshipped in Cambodia. I could just picture Dan & Webby joining in and getting all the people singing Stags songs!!
Palace Boulevard
After walking through the battleground, we passed the Cambodia-Vietnam Monument and headed into the Palace.We got there for five to two, and it didn't open until 2pm so we were quite lucky as we hadn't planned that. Overall the Palace & the Silver Pagoda (which is part of the Palace grounds) are grand, but I would not say spectacular. It's worth a visit, but you only need a couple of hours at most. The Throne Room & the Silver Pagoda are the highlights of the visit but you aren't allowed to take photo's in these two areas. You can pay to get postcard pictures though - surprise surprise! I must say, this is the biggest rip off place we have been to in Cambodia. They are even trying to charge FOUR times as much for water!!
Instead of going back to the Whorehouse, we headed back to the riverside for a few afternoon happy hour drinks and some dinner. We drank Angkor Draft for 30p in the Garden Bar, then went to the Frog & Parrot for some food. It was buy one get one free here and at 6pm they even gave you an extra free beer!! Nice.
It's off to the beach tomorrow, but I think the weather is about to change for the worse - typical!!
