Not much of a city, but surrounds are nice

So there we were; Phnom Penh. The capital of and largest city in Cambodia. Nice architecture, ordinary food, crap roads, friendly locals whose favourite pastime is ripping off tourists... Hmm, sounds like the rest of Cambodia so far.

Not to worry, since we werent really there to soak up the local culture and stench. No, we were there to do some sightseeing of the Killing Fields and S21, which was the main detention centre during the Khmer Rouge occupation of the 70's. And by detention centre, you could probably read that as torture centre and black hole for human rights. The building was a school before 1976, when it was converted into the S21 Prison. The prison was used until 1979 as an interrogation prison for those accused of being spies or having committed crimes against the Angkar, which was like the composition of Khmer Rouge beliefs as described by the KR leaders. The prison has since been converted into a war museum, with the majority of the original barbed wire and metal bars still in place. We got to walk all around the grounds and see all the buildings in the compound, not just the main cell area; another benefit of not being chained to a tour group. One of the buildings was specifically used for 'interrogation' and there are still clear bloodstains on most of the floors of the rooms. it was a very creepy experience walking through the rooms used as mass prisons, looking at the thousands of pictures of people who died in the prison. It was hard to imagine the pain that had happened there not so long ago. Apparently only eight former inmates survived their time at S21, the rest were killed one way or another. If you havent read up much on the Khmer Rouge and their 'year zero' social experiment, i would recommend jumping onto Wikipedia and reading up. really makes you realize what Cambodia has been through in recent history.

While on the topic, we also visited the Killing Fields, which is the site of over 100 mass graves of victims of the Khmer Rouge during their occupation of Cambodia in the 70's. I got a cold jolt down my spine when i realised that the 5 story war monument at the site contained an equally tall glass case of human skulls, which were exhumed from the mass graves around the site. they were categorised by sex and age, and it was scary seeing the pile of skulls belonging to children who were under the age of 5 at time of death. the silence at the site of the fields, which is about 18km outside of Phnom Penh, really gives your imagination time to go over exactly what happened there, and how crazy that time must have been. I read that almost 20% of the Cambodian population was wiped out between 75 and 79. thats a lot of people.

The only other sad thing that happened in Phnom Penh was that our tuk tuk driver abandoned us after we got to the killing fields... so we had to arrange another lift back to town or face posible extinction. we found another tuk tuk and got back to town, only paying a couple of bucks more than we originally intended to pay.

The other thing we visited worth mentioning was the shooting range, just outside town, where you could pay (a lot) to fire any one of a number of high powered weapons, including an AK-47, M-16 (complete with underslung grenade launcher... which you couldnt fire), uzis, shotguns.... and machine guns. yep. full blown M-60 machine guns, and other big boom sticks were on offer, and you could get 100 rounds for way more than i was prepared to spend. i just went there with a friend to have a look, but didnt bother wasting my money on this stuff. i figure computer games are more cost effective.

as for the city itself, well, it has a very pronounced french influence, which comes through in the architecture, the languages spoken, and the obsession with baguettes every morning. Those things were everywhere, and they were pretty darn good actually. real cheap too.

anyway, from there we went to Sihanoukville, which is a small, sleepy town down south of cambodia, on the beach. The aim being to relax the rest of our cambodian visa away until our time to head to vietnam. we will update the blog when we get to 'Na'am'.

Till then!
//Brendan