Devin's Travels: Phenom Penh

After touring around the temples of Angkor Wat I headed to the capital city of Phenom Penh. After talking to lots of people who have already traveled through here I wasn't expecting very much, just a big dirty, noisy city. Arriving in the city I wasn't too disappointed, the tuk-tuk drivers were forcefully trying to get us into their tuk-tuks, we were let off in middle of what seemed like downtown so there was lots of traffic and noise and just hard to even think. Eventually I got my luggage and having had a guesthouse recommended to me before I headed off on foot to get there (as it wasn't too far away).

The guesthouse was pretty nice (for anyone staying in Phenom Penh I highly recommend staying by the lakeside) and in an area that was very quiet and peaceful, a nice change from just a couple of blocks away. I had planned on only spending 2 days in Phenom Penh, only to see the royal palace and surrounding sights, the killing fields and genocide museum. However, I ended up spending 4 days in the city just relaxing by the lake once the few sights had been visited.

The first afternoon in Phenom Penh we visited the royal palace and the silver pagoda. Both of these buildings were very impressive but unfortunately most of the grounds and buildings surrounding the royal palace are off limits to tourists so we could only see a small portion of them. We could only enter one hall (the reception hall) in the grounds of the royal palace as well as a small museum there and the silver pagoda so I'm not sure the entrance fee of $6 was entirely justified, but the buildings that we did see were very extravagent.

Over the next couple of days I spent most of the time just relaxing in my guesthouse over the lake and reading books as well as wondering through a few of the nearby markets. Nothing too special.

On my final day in Phenom Penh I went out to see the killing fields and the genocide museum. The killing fields were not nearly as gruesome as I expected, I expected to see human bones and skulls all over the place. Instead it was mainly just a large field that contained tons of small shallow depressions where mass graves had been unearthed. Additionally there was a large pagoda near the entrance that contained thousands of human skulls, this was easily the most horrific thing here as on most of the skulls you could see where the person had been bludgeoned to death. After the killing fields I went to the genocide museum, also known as Tuol Sleng a former high school or security prison 21 (S-21). Now this place was very gruesome as it mostly just contained photographs of what happened here during the Khmer Rouge regime. For those people who don't know, S-21 was the location where they brought thousands of Cambodians (and even a few foreigners) to be tortured into making confessions against Pol Pot (the leader) before they were shipped to the killing fields to die. About half of the school was turned into a prison with tiny brick cells that were only about 3 or 4 feet wide and 6 feet long. The other half of the school was kept as empty rooms where the prisoners were repeatedly tortured. While being kept there the guards kept great details including photos of the prisoners which make up most of the displays in the museum today, allowing you to get a very real feeling of what it must have been like during those times.

After having visited the killing fields and genocide museum I felt that I had seen all there was to in Phenom Penh so I left the following day for Kratie, a small town where I was only going to spend 1 day before continuing up to Ban Lung. Unfortuneatly after leaving Ban Lung though my camera was stolen so I don't have any photographs from after the royal palace as I needed to put in a new memory card then, but more about those adventures later.