Phnom Penh – Cambodia, 3 April – 6 April 2014

heading from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh on the Mekong Express, took 7 hours!

the palace

along the waterfront

 At first impression, Phnom Penh was kind of a dirty city with not a lot going on. However, if you look deeper into its history, it becomes quite a remarkable place. For me, I thoroughly enjoyed Siem Reap much more, but Phnom Penh is still worth a visit.

at Wat Phnom

getting dressed up at Wat Phnom

We saw almost all the sites of the city in one day, we went to the Wat (Temple) on top of the hill, walked along the water front, went to the Grand Palace, and saw the National Museum. The most interesting place we went to in the city was the S-21 Tuol Sleng Prison. It is now called the Genocide Museum. It used to be a high school, but in the 1970s during the Khmer Rouge’s rule, it became a torture prison camp. It was absolutely awful.

The next day we hired a Tuk Tuk to take us an hour outside of the city to head to the Killing Fields, to continue the story of the S-21 prisoners. Most prisoners, after being almost beaten and tortured to death, were sent to the Killing Fields to be terminated. It is unfathomable the horrors that happened here, let alone to think they happened only 30-40 years ago completely unnoticed by the world makes it even worse.

One site that particularly stood out was the killing tree. Khmer Rouge soldiers would take babies from their mothers, grab their feet and smash the bodies against this tree before throwing the body in the grave. A famous Khmer quote was, “in order to get rid of the tree, one must cut the roots”. The large memorial in the middle of the field was filled with skulls of the remains found. The Cambodian people say that they keep places like the S-21 Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields open to the public is to remember what happened here. People must remember their history in order to prevent it from happening again.

My time in Cambodia has definitely been an eye opening and educational experience. Even though I didn’t enjoy the city of Phnom Penh itself, it is essential to go to see the real conditions locals live in and to see the history they come from. The city is interesting in the fact that the government officials drive around in Lexus’s and Bentley’s, while most of the population is still in poverty. Cambodia has come a long way from the horrible rule of the Khmer Rouge, but it still has a long way to go.