Faced with the prospect of a supposed 6/6 hour coach journey to Phnom Penh that in fact would be bearer to 8/9 due to roadworks we managed to get cheap flights to save travelling time though a contact at our hotel. Great move as we later discovered it was 9/10 hours on the coach - road travel is so slow in Cambodia / Vietnam due to speed restrictions and road conditions. All 7 of us - our little band + Jan, Barry and Stephen ( or Stefan as he had been renamed by a guide on pick up ;-0) made this switch .
We were tired on arrival as we had done so much but me and Sue decided to take a little tuk tuk tour to get our bearings as the PP visit was so full on and allowed little time for seeing the city. Lots of foreign investment is taking place , especially over the rive, with huge expensive apartments that most Cambodians can only dream of. Again much evidence of foreign investors taking the wealth, including British companies but mainly Vietnam, China and Malaysia. Again the driver and guide talked of the massive levels of corruption joking that a huge anti-corruption unit building had really changes things and corruption was now on a much higher scale!
The Royal Palace was beautiful to see with trappings of wealth supplemented by stories from our guide as to why the current king is less than popular and more tales of corruption.
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| Our friendly tuk tuk driver |
Chris and Sue tried water from the well that was supposed to leave you beautiful, refreshed and renewed. It failed abysmally but no refunds were offered on admission prices -more of that corruption we heard of. Still they did not look any worse afterwards ;-).
I was grateful for the training poster on how to use the toilets. Until that point I had regularly been falling in due to my squatting position. Learning a new life skill on a holiday is always a bonus!
That said no one goes to Phnom Penh to see the city sights. It is all about the Killing Fields and S21 Prison. Throughout this holiday I was amazed at my own level of ignorance about the background to events in Cambodia and Vietnam. I had not fully realised how entwined Cambodia and Vietnam were and the land grabbing / pillaging of rights and minerals that had gone on. The Killing Fields was a very solemn visit that made you think. The journey there was fairly long and fragmented by "short cuts" through back streets that gave an insight into how people lived but I had no real idea what to expect. I had not realised that the Killing Fields was just one of hundreds of such sites of torture and murder with this one used as a memorial to the people who died and a testament to the suffering. A little background...Po Pot and the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 and by the time he fled to the jungles in 1979 his government had killed between 2-3 million ,or 25%, of the Cambodian population. Put in power by the Vietnamese and then aided by the Chinese, Americans and recognised by the United Nations as the rightful government even when in the jungles he declared Year Zero, renamed himself Brother Number One and sought to rid Cambodia of all students, professors, education , middle classes and foreign imports and investment in favour of a total agrarian economy with all working in the fields in slave labour conditions. Within weeks of coming into power he had emptied the major cities and towns under his control including Phnom Penh turning them into ghost towns . he had people`s goods and clothes destroyed so that anyone re-entering the cities could be arrested / tortured and killed as a rebel.
The Killing Fields features one monument mainly consisting of the skulls of the victims whilst the rest of the grounds has information boards and secluded areas telling of what happened there. A shocking testimony of mans inhumanity to man of which there are too many. It is quiet and peaceful and many have added brightly coloured ribbons to any structures there to show support / compassion.
The most chilling board for me was the one advising "Don`t Step on Bone". The monsoons / floods regularly bring to the surface the bones / clothes rags of victims still buried there. What you think is a tree root can be a victims very bones.
The video show rams home the scale and degree of suffering experienced by the Cambodian people. Our guide and others regularly referred to the fact that their recent history and development only really started from 1997 when Pol Plot finally killed himself on hearing he`d face war crime charges and the Khmer Rouge finally collapsed having fought on in the jungles between 1979 and 97 - still clinging to power with nominal recognition by the UN as the rightful government.
If the Killing Fields was shocking I was if anything even more affected by S21 - one of the many prisons used to extort confessions under torture prior to being sent to killing fields to be executed. The fact that this prison was the old high school complete with gym equipment in the grounds then used as torture structures and classrooms converted to prisons was all the more shocking.
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| Our guide spoke of his own families` losses and suffering - so moving. |
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| Inside a cell - an old French lesson on the board and kid`s numbered pegs for clothes |
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| The rules |
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| 4 surviving children found when liberated - still alive today |
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| Pictures were taken on arrival at the prison... |
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| and more after they had been tortured or killed |
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| Barbed wire was installed to stop the suicide leaps |
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| Chum Mey - survivor |
What hit you was the utter helplessness of people brought in. They had to confess under torture and were then killed anyway. Confession meant giving away family members / friends who were not supportive or had not been farm / manual workers but part of the intelligentsia or middle classes. There were only a handful of survivors - including Chum Mey, one of two survivors sat there each day selling signed copies of their experiences and telling all that want to listen about the horrors they experienced. All the more poignant for me was that whilst being horrified at the many thousands of before and after photos they did at least serve a purpose in that people trying to find out what happened to their children / wives / husbands and family were able to come and look through them to at least see if they had been there and what might have happened to them!
Back to more pleasant experiences in my next blog where I`ll show you what can be carried on a moped / scooter if you have a bit of nerve and total confidence in what you are doing!
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