PHNOM PENH 6TH-8TH JANUARY 2007

We got a rickity bus, five hours, back to Phnom Penh and took a room in 'Narin 2' for $5 a night.

Phnom Penh is quite confusing at first glance. Parts of it, for example Riverside, are very beautiful where other parts are chaotic and charmless. Its a huge city and i think you would need to spend some time here to get a real love for it, but as most tourist attractions are low-key many traverllers spend only a short time. It is two different world living in one city; wealth next to extreme poverty and this creates a lot of beggers.

On our second day we hired a mo-ped and went to Tuol Sleng Museum (S-21) and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek which was a huge eye-opener and a very sad day.

Pol Pot's security forces turned an old high school into a secret prison known as 'Security Prison 21' (S-21). This soon became the largest centre of detention and torture in the country. Between 1975 and 1978 more than 17,000 men, women and children held at S-21 were taken to the extermination camp at Choeung Ek. The Khmer Rouge kept extensive records of each prisoner, and all were photographed, sometime before and after torture. You can walk through S-21 and see it how it was; all the cells, the torture rooms, and room after room of black and white photographs of the prisoners that were later killed. It was this mass genocide only 30 years ago! It is so sad and extreamly sick! The Khmer Rouge 'revolution' trained innocent children to be ruthless killers and even began devouring its own at the heights of its insanity.

The killing fields of Cheoung Ek was where the 17,000, men , women, children and infants who had been detained and tortured at S-21 were transported to and murdered! They were thrown into large dug-out pits, hundreds at a time, and burried. They were often bludgeoned to avoid wasting precious bullets. You can walk around the field, and as you do, you see fragments of human bone and bits of cloth scattered around the disinterred pit and coming up from the ground. I was a truely shoking day!