We decided to talk a stroll to the S21 genocide prison, I had my GPS head on but it was pretty easy to find. Phnom Penh is laid out a little bit like America with the streets looking like a grid on the map. We were walking for longer than we thought but it was a nice stretch. It's busy here, and there are a lot of built up buildings that look really posh and expensive with people driving range rivers around but with poverty mixed into it all. It's not as bad as I thought it would be here considering the Khmer Rouge ruling destroyed a lot of buildings and lives; it's been restored quite well and poverty isn't as big as we thought. Yeah there are plenty of homeless and amputees on the street but not half as many as you would expect or no where near as much as Thailand.
The prison had an eery feel about it. It's a school that was taken over by Pol Pot once he evacuated the entire city to march into the countryside and work on the farm land and in the rice paddies, most of them were split from their families and didn't have the foggiest idea of how to farm but if they answered back or didn't do what they were told they were beaten, sometimes to death.
The prison has four tower blocks with three stories, each with about ten classrooms.

Building A - torture rooms. The prisons had shackles around their feet with a metal bar so they were wrenched apart, a metal bed frame and some times a chain that was attached to the shackles so they couldn't move. What made this worse was everything was exactly the same as it was 30-40 years ago - no replica. The shackles in front of us were used on people.
The tiles were yellow and cream - blood stained.
The walls were yellow - chunks taken out of them from the axes and metal bars that were thrown about when the prisoners were being beaten.

Building B - Another torture building with blood stains everywhere, all up the walls and on the floor.

Building C - Each classroom on the first and second floor had quick built small cells of small bricks, one class room had about 12 cells that were only about 2 metres wide and 3 metres in length. On the third floor there were wooden cells in each class room that were even smaller, these cells did have doors.
Building C had barbed wire over the balconies to stop the prisoners jumping and committing suicide. Don't know how they would even get the chance to do that with no energy.

Building D, I'm not sure what happened here but there were blood stained floors and the rooms had rows and rows of mug shots of people who had gone to the prison. The first person that was admitted to the prison was 11 years of age. The skeletons of people were in there. The tools that were used to torture them were in a cabinet; they were the exact tools used, they had blood stains on them it was awful. There were knives and bamboo rods, axes and shovels. All sorts!

Outside in the courtyard was graves of the last 14 victims to die in the prison. And there was a wooden frame with three hooks on and three huge ceramic bowls underneath. They would tie the prisoners legs up and hang then upside down in the water until they drowned or lost consciousness.

Pol Pot had those killed who were intellectual. who were educated, had diplomas or were in high paid and respected jobs like railway engineers, lawyers and teachers. He wanted a communist country, he wanted them to do farm work and that's it. Although he was a teacher himself, he went to France to get a diploma but failed. Perhaps he was the jealous type.
20,000 people died in this prison, in the space of 3 years. Photos of the skeletons just piled up in heaps everywhere was awful.


Another horrendous fact.. These people weren't always guilty of working as spies for CIA against Pol Pot or they weren't thieves and they didn't try to hurt an officer. They were innocent and were forced to make up a false crime in order to stop the torture, by then they were close to death, left for dead in a wooden cell or was killed anyways.
Or of course sent to the killing fields.
The age of these people are between 0 months and 80 years of age.
It's crazy that these officers were killing their own people, for no reason.
One of Pol Pot's sayings were 'better an innocent dead than rock gaining an enemy'

Hard to believe it was once a school for young children running round happy and then it drastically changed by the click of their fingers it was a torture house.

After the prison we were feeling a little dizzy from all of the unimaginable things that had happened there we decided on a tuk tuk journey back. Nearly every tuk tuk driver asks Scott if he wants weed or a smoke, it's rife around here! Funny when they attempt to say it quietly. Scott isn't great with traffic lately, he seems to forget to look both ways or take a double look, about three times this morning he's nearly been knocked clean by a bloody moped. His head is full of spaghetti, no brain.

We grabbed a nice cream and watched the fishermen on the river. There were loads of them and they were all sat right next to each other, as Scott said it's against fishing rules to be in each other's 'swim'. I guess he was right but none of them were catching anything so there couldn't have been much in there.

I have Scott a mop chop today, bit short. I like it but I don't think he does, haha. It looks really good considering I used a pair of flimsy first aid scissors and a tiny comb that looked like it was out of a Christmas cracker.

Phnom Penh I a a lovely city. It's so much nicer in the night thorough when all the pretty fairy lights are twinkling!
It especially nice on the riverfront as well!