Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia, and while we were here we did all of the cultural/ historical stuff: some nice, some very sad.

On the first day we went to the national museum, which had a lot of old statues in it and had some beautiful gardens, it reminded me of Bali. Then we went to the Royal palace.

National museum

Royal Palace

The next day, we hired a tuk tuk for the day to take us to the killing fields and S21 prison to learn more about the history of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Before we visited Cambodia, we both read 'First they Killed my Father' and extremely sad an graphic book which tells the story of one young girl's sad plight after 1975 when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and massacred a quarter of the population. We also watched the film 'The Killing Fields', so we had a pretty good knowledge of what went on in Cambodia, the genocide and the sheer brutality of the Khmer Rouge, who took over the country, killed anyone they deemed intelligent, middle class, or basically anyone who wasn't a pheasant farmer, and then forced everybody to work on farms until most people either died from starvation, disease or was brutally massacred by the Khmer rouge soldiers. For anybody who doesn't know the history, it too much for me to write on here, so here's a link for more info. It really does defy belief. More information on the Khmer Rouge

Memorial tower with skulls and bones inside

I have never been anywhere like the killing fields in my life. Even the concentration camps in Germany don't have the amount of living history this place has. When I say living history, there are literally still bones and old clothes coming up from the ground you are walking on. All these years later (the killings happened in the late 70s), its incredible just how many dead bodies were dumped in the mass graves there, so much so that each time its rained, more parts come up from the earth. They say that the dead wont lie still. I couldn't believe it. Some parts are fenced off, but on the walking paths, we saw bones and clothes poking through and I even saw some teeth poking up on one part of the path.

 They have a big memorial tower with all the skulls of the victims in (the Khmer Rouge brought people to the killing fields to be murdered – they made them stand next to a pit and then smashed in their head and slit their throats, letting them fall into the pits). Men, women and children, all were killed in equally brutal ways. Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge's philosophy was that you needed to get rid of the roots of society in order to create a new perfect communist society, hence why they even killed babies. By far the most harrowing sight, was a tree, against which the soldiers used to smash the heads of babies to kill them in front of their mothers, before tossing both of them into the pits. They used to hold the babies feet and then smash their heads against this killing tree. 

Killing tree: Used for killing babies

The man who discovered the killing fields after the Khmer Rouge fled, said he knew it was a killing tree because there were bits of scalp, blood and skull all over it. Killing fields like this, existed not just in Phnom Penh, but all over Cambodia. It is so very sad.

After the killing fields, we went to S21 prison museum, which was a prison the Khmer Rouge kept people in before they were sent to be slaughtered. People hadn't done anything wrong, they were forced to sign confessions that they had been disloyal to the party etc and they were tortured until they confessed and until they signed that their family had been involved too. In the prison, as well as seeing the cells etc that they were kept in, you also see hundreds and hundreds of pictures of the victims and putting a face to all those skulls you saw earlier in the killing fields memorial is heartbreaking. They also showed us a video about a couple who were both murdered and their love story. It was a very sad and draining day, much different to the day before looking around the palace and national museum.

More photos of Phnom Penh