We spent two nights in Cambodia’s capital, before and after our trip to Koh Kong. It is the necessary travel hub for most places in Cambodia. We stayed in a cheap guesthouse and spent most of our time enjoying the city. On both visits, we spent all of our meals eating at the central market. Cambodia has delicious food influenced by Vietnam, Thailand, and China, and in the market, you can find everything you could ever drool of having and some weird stuff too.
Cambodia has a very sad history and its capital is at the heart of the story. We brushed up on our history via Google and set out to see it for ourselves. We rented a motorbike and drove to the edge of town to see the “Killing Fields.” During the horrible reign of the Khmer Rouge (1975 – 1979), the goal was to create a perfect communist agrarian society at any and all cost. Anyone suspicious of having contact with the western world or conspiring against the Rouge was arrested, put in jail, and usually executed. It’s estimated that nearly a million lost their lives – Men, women, children, academics, educators, artists, and even members of the Khmer Rouge who were suspected of being disloyal to the regime were all executed. Most claims were false and baseless and the whole family was eradicated in case of retaliation or redemption. Learning about all of this was hard and seeing it was extremely painful. The Killing Fields are plots of land throughout Cambodia where inmates were taken out of the crowded jails to be executed, usually violently, and buried in mass graves. We visited Choeung Ek, which is the largest of the Killing Fields and was mainly used for executing prisoners from the famous S1 Prison in Phnom Penh. It is estimated that nearly 9,000 bodies were buried there. A stupa was constructed and filled with 5,000 human skulls in remembrance of those that perished here. With monsoon rains washing away at the surface, clothes and bones from the executed prisoners still surfacing today.
On our second visit to Phnom Penh, we visited the S1 Prison. The Khmer Rouge dismantled all schools and converted one of the city’s high schools into a prison. This prison is largely in tact and it is haunting to tour the ground’s buildings – bare rooms with iron beds, unimaginably tiny cells, and interrogation rooms (or torture chambers). Photographs of prisoner’s mug shots, coerced confessions, and execution scenes were painstakingly documented by the Khmer and line the open holding cells, which were once classrooms.  Though visits to historical places like these are not easy, they are necessary in order to understand Cambodia and its people. It is also a necessary reminder of history and the horrible things that are now, luckily, in the past. We went to a small movie house called, “Flicks,” attached to a hostel that shows the movie, “The Killing Fields” almost every night. It’s a moving story of this time period and is definitely worth watching.
Aside from the heavy sight seeing, we did spend some time walking around the city, seeing its monuments, chic shops and restaurants, hopping bars advertised by groups of “lady boys,” upscale residential areas, beautiful palaces and Buddhist Wats. Despite the efforts of the Khmer Rouge, Phnom Penh really is a modern, advancing city.
TravelingMantor 