DAYS 40-41 PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA “KILLING FIELDS, TORTURE CHAMBERS AND A PRETTY PALACE”After almost t

DAYS 40-41 PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA “KILLING FIELDS, TORTURE CHAMBERS AND A PRETTY PALACE”After almost three weeks of travelling in Vietnam, from the karst water scenery of Halong Bay to the busy-ness of Saigon, this would be my last day in Vietnam. My fellow travellers who had been my companions on this journey now made their separate onward journeys. I was once again on my own on this continent, ready for the next adventure.On reflection Vietnam had been so different from what I had expected. I had perhaps naively expected to be living in some ramshackle accommodation in the middle of jungles listening to anti-American propaganda with illiterate rural types. However the Vietnam I visited was moving forward at great velocity and its people were educated to some of the best Asian standards. Vietnam left in me an impression of a country so far removed from the Communist paradigm which I had associated with that it was scarcely accurate to define it politically (nobody I met was political).For all the fun I had in Vietnam with my new friends I felt, like the lion who must eventually leave the pride it was time for me too to venture out into the heart of Asia on my own and as in India experience its discomforts as well as its pleasures.Cambodia would be my next destination on the Asia circuit and it was not a country I knew a great deal about other than that it housed one of Asia’s great jewels, Angkor Wat, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia’s maniacal leader “Brother Number One” Pol Pot. However I would otherwise very much be entering the heart of darkness, a new adventure.The journey from Vietnam to Cambodia was straightforward enough. Unlike the majority of farang tourists who went by the usual chartered bus to Phnom Penh (the capital of Cambodia) I managed to get myself on a bus wholly filled with locals. I did feel a little uncomfortable initially, not because of the people on the bus but more by the absence of travellers to talk with on the journey. However on our first pit stop after crossing the border into Cambodia a nun no less came to my rescue and acted as an intermediary between me and the locals. She helped me to get a chicken leg in some rich, I assume Khmer, sauce with rice. It was very tasty. If this was how Cambodian food tasted I had just been sold.On the journey to Phnom Penh it started gradually to become clear that I was entering a poorer country. I saw kids washing themselves in the stream, ramshackle roadside stalls, government posters warning against recruiting child labourers. I felt the country I had now entered had rather more in common with India than Vietnam. Gone were the women with their burka-esque outfits (to protect against the sun), and in came the women with more pressing matters to consider. Even the vehicles had changed with the tuk-tuk making a comeback in the form of a ‘remorque’ (a motorcycle with an attached passenger unit).We arrived in Phnom Penh by late afternoon. I rocked up to ‘The Mad Monkey Hostel’ which had been highly rated for backpackers (though I don’t recall who recommended it). So the initial traveller drought of the coach journey to Cambodia was now a traveller glut. To reinforce the point I found I now had a bed opposite to Anna Saaltink, one of the Dutch backpackers I had befriended in Hanoi, so I was certainly back to familiar terrain again in no time. And it was dirt cheap at $7 a night.A group of us clubbed together to have dinner some hours later. After my afternoon’s culinary experience I was keen to get some more Khmer cuisine so I took the group to a local place which looked interesting in the Lonely Planet guide called Khmer Borane. Except what seemed a 10-15 minute walk to the restaurant seemed to take forever, and I couldn’t help thinking the group were silently wanting to kill me when we had not arrived there after some 25 minutes (especially when we couldn’t immediately find the restaurant). We did eventually manage to find it- it appeared to have changed name - and thankfully everybody applied their knives to eating and not to killing…With all the angst of trying to find the place I had forgotten to try the very dish which had been recommended in the Lonely Planet guide (Lok Lak – a sort of fried beef dish with a salt, pepper and lemon dip) but I did get to try a nice enough chicken curry.The night scene in Phnom Penh was lively enough with plenty of Cambodian people about, but it was nothing on Saigon.  Notwithstanding the long distance we had covered to get here it was a great opportunity to pass the well-lit Independence Monument and the Royal Palace.The following day I organised to go with Anna and two of my new traveller friends to the sites of the Killing Fields and Site 21.The Killing fields of Choeung Ek, for which Phnom Penh is most famous, is the site where the revolutionary communist leader Pol Pot sent near to 17,000 people to be bludgeoned to death. This is one of 20,000 other such sites where a total of a million people were sent to their deaths during his 4 year reign of terror. Perhaps another million or so died from starvation and disease. In total just over 1 in 5 Cambodians died at the hands of Pol Pot. At the Killing Fields we were shown the full horrors of the site, from the skulls, bones and teeth of victims, to the tree where babies’ skulls were smashed, and other ghastly things.The central memorial stupa was built recently and houses over 8,000 skulls, which are visible through an encasing window (as seen in the main photograph above). For the faint hearted this may have all proved to be too much. We must have had strong constitutions then as we progressed from the Killing Fields onwards to the notorious S21, the torture chambers where many of the people who would later die at the killing fields were initially interrogated. I needn’t go into detail about the nature of operations here, but it was a sinister place given that it was converted from a school into a torture institution. The site regulations were particularly harrowing.My travelling partner Anna had certainly seen enough and I was the last one out of the Torture museum. Am I so hardened to suffering?Regardless of my hardiness we were all in need of a change of environment after all the preceding gloom. So after a quick lunch it was off to the Royal Palace, a treasury of fine architecture, manicured gardens and intricate stupa. I think this was a wonderful diversion and certainly worth a visit for a rounded visit to Phnom Penh.We lastly finished off by visiting Psar Thmei, an interesting art deco-esque central market. After all the day’s activities we arrived rather late there so couldn’t spend long exploring, but I did come away with some pink ‘Paul Smith’ shorts. I put it in inverted commas as I presumed it was a fake, but my travelling companions seemed convinced that it was probably the real thing, off the back of the lorry. I suppose it’s possible.After taking in a beer and a few skewers of meat being sold on the street corner, I got my bags together for the night bus to Siem Reap, home of Angkor Wat. -- source link
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