We arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on the 8th, early after our night flight from Japan. We are both knackered our flight leaving Osaka to Bangkok was at 12:10 arrived at 04:30 then our flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh was at 06:30 so we haven't had much sleep at all. Just thought I'd share that
So once we checked into our hotel we basically just chilled out around the pool, and crashed out. The pool was on the roof of our hotel which also had a roof top bar in the evening giving us good views of the city.
We had booked a tour for the following day with our driver Sing who would take us to the killing fields and torture prison of Phnom Penh S21.
In case you don't know on
April 17 1975 Cambodia was taken over by a guy Pol Pot and his communist group The Khmer Rouge who tortured and killed over 2million innocent Cambodians including women and children. Over 20000 people were killed in the prison alone and the rest taken to the killing fields where their bodies were thrown in mass graves sometimes not even dead and left to rot
It was a very emotional day, we was given audio head pieces which told us the complete story and even clips from a couple of the few survivors. In 1979 they were invaded and put to a stop by the Vietnamese army, the prison which was originally a school was turned into the genocide museum. Our next blog will be a link from the web giving the outline of what actually happened here in Cambodia and the written version of our audio at the killing fields for anyone who is interested in reading in more detail. You will see from the photos the torture rooms along with real photos of victims taken as they were found on invasion of the prison, the tiny cells where they were chained to the floors in the blistering heat with very little food or water and even some of the torturing equipment used. You will see the gardens to the prison are pretty lush a world away from what was going on inside. You will see on one block that is covered in barb wire, that's because one prisoner committed suicide from the top floor and the wire was to stop them from having an easy escape.
The killing fields were even more emotional, there were mass graves where hundreds of body's were thrown in to an area of about 10m2. The victims were taken there late at night so it was pitch black sometimes up to 300 at a time, told there were homes for them there but when they arrived it was there worst nightmare. The group played loud music over the ground powered by generators just to disguise the sound of the screams etc.
On our audio it played us the sound of the music with the generators in the background being the last thing the victims heard, it was horrific. We could only imagine what it must of been like.
As we walked through the fields there were still bits of cloth and bone in the ground visible to us, as they have now stopped digging for bodies and just let the weather/rain expose the remaining. Every time bones, skulls, clothing etc is discovered it is now stored as part of their memorial. I could go on but some is discomforting especially what happened to the children. The mounds of earth you will see in the photos with the colourful tags on is the earth taken from from each grave, the tags are for each of the bodies removed. It will give you an idea of how many there were.
It's all in the audio text in detail.
Our last morning in Phnom Penh we went to visit the royal palace, which was lovely. Unfortunately we couldn't go inside the palace as the king was home.
On a lighter note.
The following day we took a flight to Siem Reap northern part of Cambodia, once we arrived we took a dip in the pool, had dinner at went out to pub street its backpacker central, after the hot dirty city of Phnom Penh it was good to chill out and chat with some other backpackers or flashpackers as that's what we are lol.
The following day we booked a tour to the the Amazing Angkor Wat temple and a few others. They were absolutely stunning and to think they are over a thousand years old, it's amazing the size and detail in them. The day was great, we had a pick up at 5am to allow us to see the sunrise at Angkor Wat, by 7am it was scorching hot, there was no air in the temples at all, by the time we finished it was over 40 degrees we were sweating buckets I'm not joking it was like we was walking around in a huge oven lol. Unbearable, the only downside was we had to rush due to the heat as we couldn't handle it anymore. By 12 we asked our driver to take us back to the hotel where we jumped straight in the pool.
For the rest of the afternoon we spent hours trying to sort and upload some of the thousands of photos on our blog
Katie was stressing lol.
Our next stop is Hanoi Vietnam, we arrive there 12/04/16 and plan to cover as much of the country as we can until we meet our pal George in Saigon early May...