Here we are entering another Asian metropolis, Phnom Pehn, with its noise, traffic, pollution, Tuk tuks, rubbish and phenomenally lively buzz. It came as a bit of a shock to our senses, after many days of small villages or provincial towns, to enter the capital of Cambodia where more than 2 mils people frenetically live their existence. We got dropped off after an 8 hours bus ride from Battambang at the West of town and as soon as we touch ground we got literally assaulted by tens of screaming tuk tuk drivers trying to sell a cheap ride to a guesthouse. We picked one driver because he was funny although I must admit these drivers are all a bit of a character, with their heavily accented but fluent English, colorful sense of humor and positive outlook on life, as all Cambodian demonstrated to have so far, no matter what they went through in the last 40 years or so.

We started the usual tour of guesthouses and hotels trying to find the right balance between a reasonable price and acceptable hygiene standards; however Phnom Pehn, being a city with lots of travelers passing by, seemed to have higher accommodation prices and lower hygiene standards. In the end, we settled for a cute hotel on the Riverside which is the area dedicated to travelers on the river banks and next to the Royal Palace. Bars, restaurants, guesthouses, markets, street vendors populate this neighborhood making it the most buzzy part of town and pleasant to stay in. The rumors about Phnom Pehn were not positive in terms of safety, however we quickly realized that it is as safe a big city could be and by following our common sense we wouldn't have been in any trouble.

We also quickly realized that in terms of sightseeing, PP is not one of the 7 world wonders, and the only two sights worth paying visit to were the infamous Killing Fields and the S21 prison, the bitter evidence of the Khmer Rouge regime scars left to the nation.

We started with visiting the Killing Fields the next morning, situated about 9 kms out of town, so got picked up by a Tuk Tuk driver and shared the ride with a cool Chinese/Canadian girl. She was travelling Asia by herself after uni and waiting to settle in Bejing for a year to teach English and come to terms to her mother tongue, Mandarin, which disappeared from her mind since the last time she spoke it during her childhood.

Killing Fields was one of the nationwide 129 fields where political opponents, journalists, teachers, intellectuals, artists etc etc were massacred for not fitting the agrarian utopia of the Pol Pot regime. Basically, during the 4 years of the regime almost 3 million people perished for not fitting the regime ideology. Agriculture was the only noble activity supported by the Khmer Rouge political view, which tried to convert the whole country into an isolated, self-sufficient agrarian society. The struggle to achieve this non-sense saw millions of people being deported from urban to rural areas; the whole of Phnom Phen was emptied with the population displaced and regimented in cooperatives dedicated to rice farming in the country side. This madness lasted for 4 years before the Vietnamese invaded the country and pushed the Khmer Rouge into the lame guerrilla fighting they were used to before the regime, on the hills of the Thai border. In the meantime, the Killing Field outside Phnom Pehn generated 20.000 bodies piled in mass graves around the site. Nowadays, the remains of skulls, bones, teeth and clothes dug out after liberation, have been composed in the genocide monument at the center of Killing Fields, as a proof of the horrors committed and a deterrent for it to happen one more time.

S21 was not very different in vibe than the Killing Fields. What S21 represented for hundreds of thousands of people was a prison and a torture center before they were sent to the Killing Fields for their death sentence. Visiting S21 though, gave us the chills more than Killing Fields, because of its crude way of bringing to life the sufferance of the political prisoners, by the way the tortures rooms, the tiny cells have been preserved and presented as well as the collage of real photographs of the detainees exhibited at the center. Looking at the pics, it came to our utter surprise that many kids as well as 9 Westerns were detained at S21 and killed at the Killing Fields in the 4 years of regime. The peculiarity of killing kids was justified by the fact that their parents had been massacred already and the Khmer Rouge didn't want to live with the annoyance of potential revenge by their kids in the future. In their distorted minds, eradicating the whole family was a more effective way of dealing with the problem. However, what was totally unacceptable was the way these children were massacred; in fact visiting Killing Fields we couldn't not notice the so called "children tree", named after the tree where the kids beaten out to death against it. The liberators that first entered the concentration camp, sadly noticed remains of brains and blood stuck to that tree and quickly realized the sad provenance of those body fluids or human remains.

On a more positive note, we left the day after for Sihanoukville, beautiful small city South of Phnom Phen on the cost of the Gulf of Thailand. After many days of inland travelling, we were happy to head off to the beach and some well-deserved swims and seafood.