Friday 25th March

The ship traveled overnight to Pnom Penh in Cambodia & at 6.30 it moored, or I thought, anchored, in the city. We are near the bow & when it anchors the sound of the anchor chain being lowered is very loud. The ship was moored up next to another Mekong cruise boat & we caught up with some friends from Perth who had arrived in Pnom Penh 2 days before us.

We had an early start at 8.15 after breakfast to get buses to the 'Killing Fields' about 15 km from central Pnom Penh. The city has many modern buildings & we passed several embassies including the Australian one on the way but the outer streets are lined with small workshops & shops all the way to the site of the genocide.

Here we parked & walked through to the area where people were brought to be killed & buried in the early hours of the morning. Pol Pot was determined to wipe out all the professional & educated people to return the country to the most basic agrarian levels so he had this group rounded up, tortured & then killed in a totally basic way eschewing the use of firearms & resorting to extremely crude methods. Each killing & preparation for burial in a common grave was quite slow so only a limited number could be executed each night whilst the rest were held over for the next night.

It is a strange place & only a fraction of the mass graves have been unearthed so far. The centrepiece is a memorial of many skulls in a tower building & it is a very odd experience to visit it.

Leaving the site we returned towards the city to visit the ‘S21’ Genocide museum in a school about 1km from the centre. It was an interrogation centre where prisoners were systematically tortured, again in very crude ways, to extract confessions, before their execution at the Killing fields, if they made it that far. One rather bizarre & macabre facet was the ‘survivor’, who was selling his account of life in the prison, one of only seven not killed. It was a salutary morning as it has been estimated that Pol Pot had about 1/3 of the population killed in the 4 years of his reign of terror.

After lunch we drove to the Royal Palace complex & toured several of the buildings on the site. The complex, constructed in the 14th century in wood, was then rebuilt in stone in the mid 1800s. It has fine gardens & a mixture of buildings, the highlight being the Silver Pagoda which contains the royal collection of Buddhas, mainly in gold some encrusted with diamonds & other jewels. Its name derives from it having a floor covered in solid silver tiles, now mainly covered with rugs. Unfortunately the display lighting was poor, so that the magnificence of the items was largely lost to the visitors.

One strange incident that occurred during the visit was when the guide thought one person of the 26, was missing. He asked us all to number off & so, in no particular order, individuals called out the next number, which lead to complete confusion. After a second try the procedure was abandoned much to our amusement & somehow we had a full crew again.

On the return to the ship most of us were dropped off at the central market, a fascinating building with a large central dome surrounded by circular rings of stalls. We wandered around but were unimpressed with the merchandise & returned to the entrance to wait for the bus. Both of us were exhausted in the heat & humidity.

Before dinner there was a display of Cambodian dancing from students which Jane sat out. Surprisingly to d*** the music by the Gamelan style orchestra sounded vaguely like Celtic music in its tunes & rhythms.

Saturday 26th March

After breakfast we set out in local 4 seater tuk-tuks for a tour of Pnom Penh starting at a big statue of Norodom Sihanouk the last king of Cambodia & then went to the Russian Market, another warren of stalls selling everything but nothing we wanted. One area was devoted to spare parts for motorbikes, including second hand engines, whilst others were devoted to meat vegetables & fish & a huge array of seamstresses making clothes.

Leaving the market we went on to see the original Buddhist Temple built on a small hill, before returning to the vessel exhausted by the heat & humidity.

As we had lunch we left Pnom Penh to go upstream to the village of Koh Chen, famous for its copper & silversmiths, making mainly embossed items from jewellery to ornaments. Unfortunately a wedding was in progress & the very discordant music was deafening, which encouraged us to move on rapidly to the primary school where the group sat in with year 2 kids & they sang to us. The village houses were fairly basic but it had a very recently & lavishly built, temple which surprised us.

We returned to the ship & it moved across the river to get away from the noise.