Phnom Penh is a dusty and smoggy city which is on the brink of becoming modern. Most streets are wide, traffic continuously moves though relatively safely and controlled (regardless of the stampede of roaring mopeds that can sometimes be unpredictable), most buildings are low (if more than just a line of shops in open garages, then not higher than a few floors) and a few recent tall, but not quite skyscraping buildings (there seems to be a lot of development on this front).
After an excruciatingly long walk from the bus stop to a street food restaurant mentioned in the LP guide, I was finally permitted to try the supposedly staple food (but very difficult to find in tourist areas): Bobor (mentioned below). I did however feel sorry for letting my stubbornness drag Sarah (the German girl) along for the ride...though I did carry her bag which was significantly heavier than mine (props to her for carrying it around SE Asia so far!).
We found a hostel then hit some of the major inner city sites. Apart from independence monument and the Royal Palace, there isn't much to see on that front. It was more interesting to see the city teeming with life (e.g. playgrounds full of kids and their parents, locals dancing in organised classes on the riverfront and the odd beggar cleaning their kids in the street).
Saturday was a very productive day. We started early with the Choeung Ek killing fields 15km South of the city. It's a small field of mass graves from the genocide perpetrated by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge from 1976 to 1979. A tower stands directly in front of the entrance with darkened glass casing up the middle and a cross-pollination of Chinese and Indian symbolism littering the upper levels with upturned roof corners, seven headed snakes and imposing Garudas. Built by the Vietnamese in the late 1980s, it contains the skeletons (literally) of 8985 people found on this site so far - this is just under half the total expected murdered at Choeung Ek.
After signing a forced, but nonetheless legally binding confession, often blindfolded and hands tied behind their backs, the guards (supposedly soldiers trained from adolescence to believe their victims to be criminals) would beat their victims with bamboo sticks, axes or farming tools (which I suppose represents the regime's genocidal obsession with agricultural based communism). The local farmers were completely unaware of this due to the loud party music used to cover up the screaming and Deet (insect repellent) used to cover the smell (and kill any survivors of the beatings).
Their skulls are on show in the centre of the tower. It's utterly harrowing to be stared in the face by the empty sockets of the consequences of one of the 20th century's worst atrocities and one of humanity's greatest flaws: the interplay of identity and violence (see Amartya Sen's book of the same title for more on this subject). The glass casing is open on one of the lower floors to display skulls that have been specifically beaten with an axe or bamboo stick. On the bottom floor are the rags and clothes worn by the victims.
Walking around the grounds, our guide pointed out bones in the ground. Small white fossils sticking out the dirt...one a skull, the other a jawbone, another a hipbone. Then the killing tree where mothers were made to watch their kids be bashed against it, before suffering a similar fate themselves - an important part of the regime was to kill of the intelligentsia, wealthy and elites to start back at year zero. By killing the children of those people, they were both destroying the grass at its roots and avoiding creating any rebels to the regime.
It's shocking in itself that something so atrocious could happen during our or just before our lifetime, but just as the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide, among others, it should remembered, lest we not repeat our mistakes. However, I was shocked at how the victims, having not chosen their fate, are on display for all to see. I can't imagine how it must feel to be a relative of someone who went missing during the regime's rule, to think their remains may be staring back at you in this glass casing. Why are they not given a proper burial? Why even dig them up? It hasn't been done in the concentration and extermination camps of the Nazi regime. My mum made a good point that it may simply be cultural differences. I'll have to leave it at that.
The museum of S-21 is similarly as harrowing, but more so because it has been left the way it was found, except for the bodies of 14 torture victims which were interred in the courtyard and photos in each respective room now display how they were found.
After this heavy morning, we hit the Russian market for some souvenir shopping and to get some last minute presents. Unfortunately poor, we had to walk back the immense distance to the hostel...and then even further on, as we were looking for a travel agent so that Sarah could buy her bus and boat ticket to Phu Quoc Island in Vietnam. Tired and exhausted, we made it back safely after an incredibly productive day.
On Sunday, I flew from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur and got on the first bus to Georgetown, Penang.
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