S-21 and Killing Fields

S-21 and Killing Fields

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Asia

Dad and I got up today not even caring where we were in the world, the more important thing was that the Patriots had played last night against the San Diego chargers and we had the recorded version to watch on my computer. We went downstairs in Me Mates Place and had some breakfast while we watched the Pats kick ass again, for a second week in a row! The breakfast in the hotel was pretty good, and the connection was good enough to watch the whole game without interruption.

While we were at breakfast we met a couple of other travelers from Australia and Germany (Joel and Eva) and we all wanted to see the same things during the day. We shared a tuk-tuk from the hotel to our first stop, Toul Sleng Genocide Museum (aka: S-21). This was a high school that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975 and turned it into a prison. It was used as a torture camp and interrogation camp as well, and the atrocities that took place here were just horrific. It is in the city center of Phnom Penh, but the Khmer Rouge had moved all two million occupants out of the city into the countryside, so nobody really knew what was going on in the city.

We were able to walk around in the classrooms that were turned into prison cells and read up on a lot of the senior officials in the Khmer Rouge. Some of them have still not been sentenced for the crimes they committed to this day. It’s amazing to see what these rebel Cambodians did to their own people. This fact was realized even more at our next stop, the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. This place was a disgusting eye opener. It is about 18km (12 miles) outside of the city, and it’s just off a main road. The Khmer Rouge had taken over a plantation from some farmers and decided it would be a good place to kill 20,000 of their own people. You could still see bones and clothes from the dead coming up through the ground. They excavated most of the mass graves, but 43 of them have been left.

It was a really sad sight to see, but it’s always a good thing to know what’s happened in other parts of the world. To think that three million people were killed over four years, only 30 years ago, is very scary. The prison and killing fields are a good reminder to any tourists that this kind of thing cannot happen again. For some reason, this did not get as much news coverage as many other atrocities like this, but it’s just as sickening to see the effects.

We left the killing fields and headed back into the city toward the Royal Palace. Since it was already about 3pm, we decided to stop for some lunch by the river. The four of us found a little cafe that was serving all kinds of food and settled in for about an hour. Because we were outside on a terrace, there were quite a few peddlers trying to sell us their wares as we were eating. One little boy, about five years old, thought I was interested in his scarves, and he just kept throwing them at me. He was being playful the whole time, but after about ten minutes of it, it was getting old. I made the mistake of giving him a little Red Sox wrist band, and within a minute there were at least six other kids at our table trying to get one from me. They were all saying it was not fair he got one and they didn’t, but I only had one left, and he was kind of amusing. I hope he doesn’t get beat up for it later.

While we were eating lunch the rain started to fall. It wasn’t just a little shower, but a full on down pour. So much so that they closed the Royal Palace early, so by the time we got there at 4pm, we couldn’t get in. We came back to the hotel and got our passports back from the Vietnamese Embassy, and booked our bus to get to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam for tomorrow morning. I wasn’t sure that the passports with the visas were going to come back so quickly, but they were sent and returned within 24 hours, not too bad. We have our bus picking us up at 11am, so hopefully we’ll have time to see the Royal Palace in the morning. I think the jet lag finally caught up to Dad a bit tonight, he fell asleep in our hotel at 6:30pm and slept till about 9pm. He’s gonna be all messed up trying to sleep tonight!

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