Phnom Penh was the main focus of Pol Pot when he decided to eradicate all 'new people' in the cities and bring Cambodia back to Year Zero. Phnom Penh became a ghost town overnight back in the 70s and the S 21 museum and Killing Fields are really tragic sites to visit. S 21 was previously a high school which Pol Pot used as a prison in which to torture prisoners. When the Vietnamese came in they found only 7 people still alive out of thousands who were imprisoned there. The cells have been left entirely untouched and they are barely big enough for one person to fit inside, and the blood stains remain inspite of the prison being cleaned relentlessly since its been turned into a museum. Our guide was a victim of the Pol Pot regime with her father, sisters and brothers being killed by the Khmer Rouge and she was imprisoned in a children's camp but somehow she survived.

The Killing Fields are just one of many mass graves that exist in Cambodia. As you enter the compund you're confronted by a monument made up of 8,000 skulls of those bodies who have been found at the site but that's from only a very small area that they have excavated so far. As you walk around the clothes bubbling up out of the ground are a continual reminder of all of the bodies still lying just
underneath the ground. It's horrible to imagine anyone committing the crimes that Pol Pot did but its even worse (if anything can be worse) that he committed these crimes against his own people, the Khmer.

To lift our moods somewhat we also visited the Royal Palace which was beautiful and very intricate and in such contrast to the city of Phnom Penh itself (which is rather run down and rubbish covered to be honest) and also the other sites we visited.