Phnom Penh – and a visit to some of the most horrible places in the world

(Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 13-15th of February)

The flight to Phnom Penh in Cambodia took 45 minutes (it is all about starting and landing) as it is only around 145 km away from Saigon. If we had a bit more time in our schedule we would have gone by bus.

Phnom Penh is another of these big noisy cities but at least the inhabitants seem to follow the  simplest traffic rules, almost all the time…

One night out dining we had a Cambodian speciality, Tarantulas, nice, crispy but hairy…

As we only had planned to stay 1,5 day in Phnom Phen and really just focus on The Killing Fields and the prison S-21 it did not really matter where our hotel was situated. We had a Khmer meal for dinner our first evening in the city. Really nice! Rice, shrimps, noodles and pork. Very similar to the Vietnamese food but a bit more spicy. A bit surprisingly the prices were the double to what they where in Vietnam, 5 to 10 US-dollar per person. In Cambodia they use both Riel and US-dollar, all prices are written in USD but it is always possible to pay with Riel.

We hired a tuktuk to take us first to the Killing Fields and then to the S-21 Thung sleng prison.

The Killing Fields are situated outside Phnom Penh and it is such a peaceful place, it is hard to think of all the horror and violence that once took place here. When you pay 6 USD for entering the Killing fields area it is including Audio – you could get it in a lot of languages, also in Swedish. It was really sad to walk around and listen to the stories from the period when Pol Pot was in charge in Cambodia. In the area we visited they estimate 17.000 people have been tortured and then lost their life. All the bodies are not found yet, you can still see bones and clothes finding their way up to the surface. 

The worst place, and the most horrible story to listen to, was the one about the children who had been murdered here.

The Red Khmers did not want to waste any bullets on the children, instead they often beat them with sticks or hit their bodies towards this very tree.

At the S-21 they had made an exhibition about the people that got caught when Pol Pot was a leader. If you were an academic person, wore glasses, had soft hands etc you could get prisoned and later on killed.

Very often they prisoned a whole family to be sure no one would be left behind and come back later to revenge their murders. Some pictures were really hard to look at. A lot of the people at the Killing Fields outside Phom Penh came from this prison. The building had been a school and they had rebuilt the class rooms and divided many of them into smaller cells.