Phnom Penh, Cambodia 03.03.08

First impressions

The city of Phnom Penh is absolutely filled with scooters and motorbikes! We went for a walk down to the river on our first night there, and felt like our lives were in jeopardy everytime we tried to cross the road. There are pedestrian crossings, but nobody on the road sees or cares about them. We had to learn to just step into the traffic and trust that they'd avoid us. Phnom Penh is a much wealthier city than Siem Reap, but there are still many poor people. As we sat by the river, we were approached by at least four people begging for money within 15 minutes.

Even cops enjoy close proximity in this town.

We stayed in the same hotel as Artur's Polish friends, and had dinner with them again. They took a boat from Siem Reap, which we are very glad we did not try! They were left on the roof of the boat for the whole 6 hour trip, and arrived very sunburnt and exhausted, but still in good spirits.

Our hotel street was lined with tuk-tuk drivers who would call out 'Tuk-Tuk' one by one as you passed them. It was like a Mexican wave of them saying 'tuk-tuk' and us saying 'No! Our hotel is just here!'. The hotel was on both sides of the street, so we considered asking them to take us from one side to the other, just to be silly!


Lakeside District

We stayed in a guesthouse on stilts for our second night. It backed onto the lake - which was really more of a marsh. It was cheap, but it was by far the dirtiest room we'd taken so far, so out came the sheet liners and sleeping bags.


It was worth staying there though, as the atmosphere was just so great! There were restaurants and bars on either side of the little street, and people lived in tiny houses mixed in between.


We decided that we hadn't breathed in enough pollution by this point, so we should fix that problem by smoking a Shisha. If you have ever seen a Turkish restaurant, with everyone sucking on long tubes that lead to a pot of flavoured tobacco, you'll know what I'm talking about. We tried apple flavoured tobacco, and had a great chat with the owner and read a few Aussie magazines. Artur had a few coughing fits, but overall coped pretty well.



Toul Sleng Museum S:21
On the way to Phnom Penh, Loren read a book called 'First They Killed My Father'. The book was an autobiography by a girl that survived the Cambodian genocide, and told the story of her family's struggle to live. So what she saw in the museum, didn't come as a great surprise. Nevertheless, everything that we saw there sickened us to the core.










Brief history for anyone that isn't sure: Cambodia was taken over by a communist regime called the Khmer Rouge, who believed that the peasant farmer was the epitomy of goodness and that the country needed to be ethnically cleansed of all foreigners or people with foreign blood. Anyone involved in a goverment job, a regular trade in a city, anyone who showed signs of intelligence (glasses), anyone of another race, or people that may be capable of rebellion, were killed without a second thought. 2 million Cambodians were killed in the time between 1975 - 1979. This was a quarter of the population.


S:21 stands for Security 21, and it was a prison camp that was formed out of a deserted school building. Only 7 of the 12,000 people held here, survived. The rooms in which people were held and tortured were all left intact, and some of the beds, chains and weapons still remain there today. The walls are lined with haunting mug shots that were taken of each prisoner. Hundreds of children were among them. Other photos show the lives of the people in the prison. Most are so skinny that they look little more than a skeleton, and of people lying in their own blood.



Truck loads of people from the prison were taken to the killing fields, which I'm sure you have seen pictures of at some time or another. Most were killed by being hit in the back of the neck and then having their throats cut. This method saved the Khmer Rouge from using their ammunition. The pits in which they were thrown were dug up years later, and now the skulls and bones of the victims are in huge piles. Some are still outside in the pits, and others are stacked inside an enormous barn. Just thousands and thousands of skulls.


We were exhausted and silent when we left S:21. I can't believe how much we didn't know about Cambodia before we came here.


Royal Palace


We were once again told that the Palace wasn't open that day, but we decided to go anyway. It turned out that it was open, but we didn't have enough cash on us to buy the tickets. We were a dollar short, but we couldn't convince the lady to let us in, even though it closed in half an hour.

We decided to wander around the outside of the the palace, just inside the outer wall. No one checked to see if we had tickets, so we kept wandering. We watched a movie on the history of Cambodia, and then snuck in through the inner gates, which were left ajar. We practically tiptoed throughout the inside to see the silver pagoda and gardens. There were people tending to the gardens and other people still wandering, even though it should have been closed by then. We snuck out again, and left through a 'No Exit' side gate, heheehhe! We are too naughty. We did try to pay though and they had no atm or EFTPOS machine, so what can you do?