If we were nervbous entering HCMC getting into Phnom Penh was even scarier we'd read stories of bag snatching and gun point robberies so i was scared. Holding onto my bag for dear life we walked through what appeared to be dirty back street to find out hostel and were relieved to get to some sort of safety!
The hostel itself was quite nice considering the location, and we were happy with our room and set off in search of food. Couldnt find much but found a nice little cafe and sat down. I ordered noodle soup (very nice out here) and Si had noodles. On arrival of the food i was surprised to see a leetuce leaf on the top of my soup, apparently moving! On closer inspection it was swarming with ant..i mean covered in loads of the things! At the look of disgust on my face the waitress came over and had a look at my lettuce and my pets at which she said ""oh" smiled and walked off..nice! I spent the rest of the meal fishing tiny carcusses out of my lunch! After this we stayed to hotel eating.
That evening as we were going to the killing fields the following day we figured we should really watch the film again, and we did with nice ant-free food!
Next morning we were up bright and early (an incresingly rare occurance) and set off for the killing fields (for those that dont know it was one of the major execution grounds of the Khmer Rouge regime dring their reign in the 70's). to be honest theres not that much to see there theres a lot of shallow pits, many filled with water, that we are assured are graves but it escapes me how they could fit hundreds of bodies into one as they were so small the answer is simply the didnt fill it in the just covered it over. Every where you walk there are clothes half covered in the ground, we could find bits of bone fragments everywhere...even teeth. We saw a tree that used to have a loud speaker hung from it to cover the sounds of the gun shots and the moans of the dieing. In order to pay tribute to the thousands of people that were mercilessly killed there they had built a huge monument, and from the tousands of bodies in the unmrarked graves they had place the skulls inside to demonstrate the sheer scale of the attrosity that occured. It was horrifying but the worst (in my opinion) was still to come. Next we went to Tuol Sleng or S-21, the prision that held prisoners before their transportation to the killing fileds. Here you saw the cells they were held in, the shackles that held them, the barbed wire on the balconies to stop people jumping out and comitting suicide. BY far the most disturbing thing was they was in which the Khmer Rouge documented their captives. All had photos taken and were recorded, all these phots were displayed, most of them were the skulls we saw earlier at the killing fields. It really hit home. The cells were tiny and their treatment was insaine. When the Vietnamese "liberated"the Cambodians in '79 they found many prisoners that had been killed while the battle for the city raged outside, the guards didnt leave until the last second, couldnt resist one more innocent slaughter. their photos were also displayed. The most disturbing thing was that before this...it was a school. The prison cells were once classrooms, a cruel irony considering how the Khmer Rouge tried to wipe out all of the educated people, infact it was one of the many trivial crimes which could land you in s-21.