The border crossing into Cambodia was relatively easy, there were lines of local buses shipping tourists from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh. Once we'd actually realised that we were not in Britain and forgot our polite British ways of queuing and started sharpened our elbows, we were out of Vietnam. We didn't even have to show our faces to get out Cambodian visa! A few miles across the border the landscape changed again. Fields of green & rice with palm trees as far as the eye could see. Farming is one of the main occupations and rural people live in wicker houses on stilts in the fields. In many ways to us it resembled India, only it's a bit greener, with slightly less rubbish & you don't have to dodge as many cows on the road.
We arrived into Phnom Penh & we were staying near the centre of the city, close to the waterfront. We did something when we arrived that we hadn't done in nearly 4 months! Had a Sunday roast! It definitely wasn't a delicious as a home roast, but it tasted pretty darn good.
The following day we rented mopeds with another 2 couples. We were given a rather small, bright pink moped, which Alex was thrilled about. To make the trip more interesting between the 3 mopeds only 1 had a speedo that worked and another one had a fuel gauge. Anyway between weaving our way through back streets and negotiating Asia traffic whilst trying to travel in convoy, we all made it fully intact.
We headed to what used to be a school before Pol Pot's regime & the Khmer Rouge changed it into a high security torture prison. It has now been made into a museum. The buildings were in blocks all looking onto a patch of grass that had been made into the gallows. People were brought here, imprisoned, starved and tortures until they confessed to the crime that they were charged with and were then sentenced to death. Families were torn apart, loved ones disappeared & never came back. People were kept in minute, individual cells and barbed wire surrounded the building to prevent any prisoner from attempting suicide. Needless to say this place was horrendous.
There was an exhibition section where the photos of the prisoners were displayed & some of the weapons of torture. When the regime fell and the prison was broken into only 7 survivors remained. One of the survivors was at the museum, he has now set up a charity for people dealing with the after affects and he said, "I did not blame the people who tortured me, because they were at risk of losing their life too." What grace!
From the museum we headed to one of the killing field sites. There are over 300 killing fields in Cambodia, a lot of them are inaccessible and have landmines scattered amongst them. The museum had been horrific, this place was absolutely harrowing. The beauty and tranquillity of this place now, hide the horrors that happened there in the 70's. You get a audio guided tour through & are taken through the prisoners journey to their end when they arrived at the site.
You walk along paths that have shards of bone sticking out of them and there are bullets still on the ground. The worst was how they killed babies and children. Either by throwing them up and trying to shoot them whilst in the air or, because bullets were expensive, beat them to death against a tree, normally with their mothers watching before they too were killed.
Then centrepiece of this area now is a monument filled with skulls and femurs. Apparently, there was no room for all the other bones to be displayed. As you look at the shelves of skulls, you start to notice multiple fractures or bullet holes in most of them.
Given the history, it was very tastefully done but there is no avoiding how horrific the whole history is. Especially given how recently it all occurred, less than 40 years ago.
Sorry to leave you all with that but there isn't really any other way to say it! But we are on to nicer things and off to explore the rest of Phnom Penh.
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