"Another Difficult Lesson in War"

Sunsets in Vietnam - on to Cambodia
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Our last week on the Indochina tour - 4 weeks goes so fast!

We arrived in Cambodia by boat, after taking a bus from Saigon to the Vietnamese border (Chau Doc) for an overnight stay and a gorgeous, last view of Vietnamese sunset and then a boat up the Mekong river to cross the border and arrive in Pnom Penh, the capital of cambodia.

Our last week on the Indochina tour - 4 weeks goes so fast!

Our first afternoon was fairly subdued after all of the traveling - just a visit to the National Museum and to the Royal Palace - both of which were very interesting. Phnom Penh was a little shock to the system first of all as it is a poorer country than Vietnam and there are more children asking for money (many without clothes or shoes) on the street and more litter and rubble around the pavements. However, the country has only really begun to be popular with tourists since the year 2000 and so tourism is still relatively in its infancy here, although the country has a lot to offer. In the evening we headed out in Tuk Tuk to a great local restaurant and enjoyed some delicious, flavoursome food as Cambodia uses more spices and flavours in its food than Vietnam.

Man washes water-buffalo (road trip scenery)
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On our full day in Phnom Penh we were picked up early by our guide to visit the Genocide museum and the Killing Fields, which are just outside of Phnom Penh. This part of our tour was not very pleasent but it would have been disrespectful to not try and understand what has happened in Cambodia over the last 30 years.

We started our day at Tuol Sleng museum. This place used to be a school but when the Khymer Rouge took over in 1975 they turned it into a 'security office' or prison known as S 21. The irony was that when the Khymer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh they were cheered by crowds wishing an end to the torment of civil war....this clearly didn't happen. The people were given 72 hours to leave there houses and evacuate to the countryside, all businesses were closed and money became worthless overnight.

Museum in Phnom Penh
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On exiting the cities all intellectual people (teachers, diplomats, media, managers) were told to stand to one side so that they could claim a better job under the new regime. This was however Pol Pots plan to control his new country by 'subduing' the intellectuals. The people that stood to one side merely sent themselves straight to a prison where they would be tortured for information and then sent to a 'Killing Field' to be brutally killed. This fate was extended to the full family of the person and so all children and women were included. In all 16000 people passed through S 21.....in 1979 when the Vietnamese overturned the Khymer Rouge there were only 7 survivors found.

The rules of S 21
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Seven Km's away is Cheung Ek Killing Field. This mass grave is one of 358 discovered in Cambodia so far and contains over 8000 dead bodies. The skulls have been unearthed and put in a monument to the dead and as a reminder of what happened.

All in all between the direct murders of the Khymer Rouge and the indirect suffering of the people working in awful conditions out in the fields 1.7million people died in 4 years.

Words can't really describe how these places made you feel......