We were up, breakfasted and ready for our took took at 8am. It was recommended that we go early as the killing fields and S-21 got really hot and busy later in the day. We weren't too happy about the fact that we had to be up early, again, but decided it was for the greater good.
The took took journey was 22km, which took 45 minutes. The journey was trechorous and we bounced around the back streets of Cambodia like ping pong balls. (This is coincidentally the same thing we called Phnom Pen originally, as we weren't sure how to pronounce it, so dubbed it Ping Pong until we figured it out).
We paid the entreance fee, got an audio guide each and made our way to a sign marked '1' with the symbol of headphones above it. We walked through all 19 stops (some with substops, where we sat down and listened to recounts from survivors and perpatrators alike).
Other killing fields scattered the country of Cambodia, but this one was chosen to commemorate the victims and used to educate people on what happened between 1975 and 1979 when the Khmer Rouge ruled the country, headed by Pol Pot.
There were bits of rag lying around on the ground and I wondered why no body bothered cleaning up; it turned out that the rags were actually items of clothing and blindfolds that belonged to the over 8, 000 known victims that were buried at this site. There were 2 human leg bones that had surfaced as well, and Edd pointed them out to me as we walked past the depression in the ground that was once a mass grave. Of the 126 (I cant remember exactly, but it was one hundred and twenty something) mass graves, only 86 had been excavated. Edd and I wondered why they'd excavated so many in the first place, and then stopped when there were less than half left.
It was estimated that 1.8 million people died by execution, with another approximately 2 million who died from starvation and disease. They had managed to wipe out 1/3 of the population in just 4 years, with Sweden sending them aid and reporting to the UN how the Khmer Rouge were assisting to rebuild the country after the Cambodian War (1970 - 1975) with Pol Pot, who was a great leader and had vision for the country. He had a vision all right, no one counted on him being severely blind, metaphorically speaking. The Swedish even sent the Khmer Rouge aid after they had been driven out in 1979 and they had representatives in the UN for 12 years after the genocide. The Swedes denied the atrocities for many years and only after the overwhelming evidence was uncovered, could the world no longer ignore or deny the history. 30 years later, only 1 of the senior officials had been prosecuted, the rest denying involvement, but are still in the process of an international trial, for crimes against humanity. They clearly did not have any humanity, so their denials were an obvious result of their ignorance.
Little did they know that lied to the people of Phnom Pen, Siem Reap and other major cities by telling them they had to evacuate immediately as USA bombing of the major cities was imminent and all they could take was what they could carry. One of the recounts from a survivor recalled that he'd taken a fairy tale book with him, among a few other bits, when he evacuated Phnom Pen at the age of 12. None of them knew that it was a ploy to get them to work in the rice fields, not benefiting from their labours, but rather dying of starvation as they were not fed enough and worked 16 - 18 hours a day. All teachers were executed, as well as anyone else that had been educated, or looked like they were smart because they wore reading glasses. What was ironic was that Pol Pot himself was a teacher and executed his work colleagues and what was even stranger was that he was educated in Switzerland, so was brought up in a western society.
The most sickening stop on the audio journey was the killing tree, where thousands of babies had their heads bashed in and then thrown into a mass grave. The Khmer Rouges' theory was that grass had to be cut from the roots, so they if they killed 1 family member, they had to kill the entire family so as to avoid revenge killings later on down the line.
One of the trees in the centre of the field was called 'the magic tree.' Loud music was blasted from speakers during the evening when people were being hacked to death, to drown out their screams. The audio guide clearly stated, 'make no mistake, no magic happened here.'
For all the brutality that had happened in the area, it was quite a peaceful place. People had been blungeoned to death as bullets were too expensive to waste on killing people, so their skulls were smashed with whatever was laying around at the time. But birds were singing in the trees and the airy atmosphere was surreal, one would not guess what had happened there if you had not been told, or noticed the human remains that surfaced after it rained.
We left feeling a sense of disappointment in humanity, sorrow for the victims and anger for the perpatrators. Pol Pot had died in his 80's, enjoying the lives of his children and grandchildren. This did no seem fair considering he had deprived millions of this sa me basic human right / norm. The only consolation was that his grave was unkept and no one visited it.
We then went to S-21 museum, built in the early 60's as a high school, transformed to a jail and torture centre under the Khmer Rouge during their reign in the mid to late 70's. The climbing frames originally built for the children to exercise on, were transformed to torture equipment. The classrooms originally built to educate young minds, were transformed into tiny jail cells and torture rooms. The torture rooms just had a metal bed base in them with occasional foot shackles or a pixilated picture on the wall of someone that had died in one of these rooms - like the Nazis in WWII, the Khmer Rouge documented everything.
We felt the museum could do so much more educating, or have much better exhibitions than the ones they'd put up. No one wants to go to a museum and read a book on a wall; it lacked imagination, not that you needed much when the atrocities committed were far beyond what any normal person could think up over breakfast.
We made our way back to our accommodation and had lunch a few restaurnts further down. Everyone quoted in US dollars, which made everything seem cheap, but once converted to any of the currencies from the countries you'd visited previously, you realized it was double what you paid anywhere else. Sneaky, very sneaky.We then went back to our rooms, showered and had a little lie down.
We made our way to the Foreign Correspondants Club at 5.15pm, being told by Edd's folks that we had to have a drink there as they'd loved it when they'd visited a few years earlier. We had 2 for 1 drinks and then made our way to the night market, having been warned it was quite a walk, none of us had any where to be, so didn't mind.
Once in the night market, we took 20 minutes to walk through the entire area. Quite an anti-climax. We then sat down and had some dinner, ordering squid that had been fished far too young and not deboned. I spent most of the meal picking cartilage from mouthfuls.
We went back to our guest house, packed up our things and then climbed into bed. I asked Edd to get up so I could shake the sheets out, I'd seen a couple of little bugs crawling around and wanted to shake them off. He then asked me to point out one that I hadn't squashed yet and suggested they might in fact be bed bugs. We then googled what they looked like and confirmed that we had bed bugs on our sheets and crawling inside our pillow cases. Edd went downstairs and we were allocated a different room, 2 down from the one we were in.
We quickly transferred our belongings and Edd opened the windows, pulled the mosquito shutters back and put the fan on. The fan was so noisy it could have woken the dead, but I managed to wedge one of their decoration sheets underneath the bit that wobbled and silenced most of the racket. It was after midnight before we actually went to bed, and with another reasonably early morning ahead of us, needed to get as much bug-free sleep as possible.