History & Sights of Phnom Penh

Waking up early to maximize our full day in Phnom Penh is exactly what we did, 8.30am as a backpacker is pretty early, but at home I would have already been at work for 40 mins...yikes...work...
So we arranged a Tuk Tuk driver for the day to stay with us and take us to places we requested with some suggestion of coure. First stop was the Royal Palace which dominates the skyline of the riverfront where the Tonle Sap and Mekong meet, with its classic Kmer roofs and ornate gliding. Within the Royal Palace is the Silver Pagoda, named because it is constructed with 5000 silver tiles weighing 1kg each.

A little history:
Khmer Rouge Rule
Upon taking Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 - two weeks before the fall of Saigon - the Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal reconstructings of a society ever attempted. It's goal was to tranform Cambodia - renamed the Democratic Kampuchea - into a giant peasant dominated agragarian cooperative untainted by anything that had come before. Within days, the entire populations of Phnom Penh and provincial towns, including the sick, elderly and infirm were forced to march into the countryside and work as slaves for 12-15 hours a day. Disobedience of any sort often brought immediate execution.
The revolution soon set about wiping out all intellectuals - having glasses was reason enough to be killed. The regime wiped out lawyers, doctors, teachers and person to have worked for the former government, they destroyed hospitals, temples, and schools.
Leading the Khmer Rouge was Pol Pot. As a young man, he won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he began developing the radical Marxist ideas. Under his rule, Cambodia became a slave labour camp. Meals consisted of little more than watery rice porridge twice a day, meant to sustain men, woman and children through a back-breaking day in the fields.
Khmer Rouge rule was brought to an end by the Vietnamese on 7 Jan 1979. It is still not known exactly how many Cambodians died during the three years, eight months and 20 days but the most accepted estimation is at least 1.7 million people perished at the hyands of Pol Pot and his followers.

Next stop was where the reality of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge was very apparent. Tuol Sleng Museum. Once a centre of learning, Tuol Svay Prey High School was taken over by Pol Pot (leader of the Khmer Rouge April 1975- Jan 1979) security forces and transformed into Security Prison 21 (S-21). The classrooms were turned into torture chambers and equppied with various instruments to inflict pain and suffering and death, which are still held in the rooms itself for viewing. Tuol Sleng was the largest incarceration centre in the country. The long corridors are hallways of ghosts containing haunting photographs of the victims, their faces staring back eerily from the past.
The Khmer Rouge leaders were meticulous in keeping records of their barbarism and each prisoner who passed through S-21 was photographed. Where the Vietnamese liberated Phnom Penh in early 1979, there were only seven prisoners alive at S-21 from the 20,000 who were incarcerated.
Pretty powerful stuff and to wandering on the grounds that these atrocities took place was very emotional. I'm also reading a book called 'First they Killed My Father' by Loung Ung, who lives to tell her and her families story at this horrible time. It's interesting to read her story while in Cambodia, it makes everything she speaks about that much easier to relate to.

After a couple hours reading and learning more about S-21 we took a 30min Tuk Tuk drive out to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Most of the 17,000 detainees held at the S-21 prison were executed at these Killing Fields. Prisoners were often bludgeoned to death to avoid wasting bullets. It is hard to imagine the brutality that unfolded there when wandering through the peaceful, shady former orchard but the memorial stuipa soon makes you realize, displaying more than 8000 skulls of victims and their ragged clothes.

After these two sites and all the information from the past 6 hours we felt it was time to take a break. We headed to a restaurant called Friends, that is an NGO set up for street kids, which gives them a head start in the hospitality industry. It felt good that the money we spent was going directly to them and their education, not some middle person.

We enjoyed the rest of the afternoon with our books in a cafe out of the sun, and then absorbed our minds the intense football match that evening before catching the overnight bus to Siem Reap...