We were lucky enough to make a special friend on the rest of the 12 hour bus ride to Phnom Penh, a majorly cute little kid who I caught watching An Idiot Abroad over our shoulders on the laptop. I got Ben to put on a cartoon for him and we set it all up at the back so his family could watch, we sat together and shared our snacks while we enjoyed the film "Up". Unfortunately we arrived in the city before the end but he didn't seem to mind and said thank you about ten times as he left us! We jumped into a Tuktuk to the centre to find somewhere to stay, and out driver Bobby took us to a popular area. We found a lot were full but we managed to check into a semi decent one which was $12 a night. After moving in, and on closer inspection, it turned out the bed was rock hard and like laying just on the springs, and the bathroom had a kind of gone-off damp smell which permeated the room. Still, we weren't planning on being in there much anyway as we just had a day to see everything, so early the next morning we jumped in with Bobby again and took the long dusty road that thousands of others have travelled to the Killing Fields. We are, however, lucky enough to know we will be coming back again.

The area was originally a fruit orchard surrounding a Chinese cemetery and you can still see some remains of the headstones, most of which were destroyed by Khmer Rouge soldiers before they turned it into the murderous mass grave known as Choeunk Ek. We listened to audio commentary as we walked around, telling us the prisoners were brought in by trucks from the S-21 prison 30 minutes away after being told they were going to a new home. The trucks were guarded by solders to make sure no one tried to jump out. As the people had been working 15 hour days farming or doing manual labour with just watery porridge to eat twice a day, they could fit more people in as everyone was so malnourished. They were always dropped off at sunset and then led to what was known as the gloomy prison, a room with a corrugated iron roof and no lights. After the paper work was carefully checked to make sure no one had escaped, they were led to a grassy area where they were hit across the back of the neck to break the spine, with tools varying from a farming hoe to a hammer. Sometimes they would slit the throats with the bark of a palm tree. The bodies were then stripped naked and kicked into the graves. When they were all done, they would cover the bodies in DDT which is a chemical that stops the smell as the bodies decay. Not all of the victims would be dead in some cases but just left surrounded by the corpses and covered over. This was around 100 people a day. By 1978 there were so many people that it was 300 a day and there was no longer time to strip them, and still now after the rainy season, pieces of clothes and also bone fragments can surface in the areas where the mass grave were. The biggest grave was 450 people. There was one found were the bodies had been decapitated, and this was the grave of Khmer Rouge Generals who were executed for reasons of suspected treason, or just simply because they were out of favour at the time. The worst of all was a site next to a huge tree where the naked bodies of over 100 women were found with their babies. Some had been raped first and the babies had been killed in front of them, by being swung from their legs and bludgeoned against the tree, which was known as the Killing Tree. When the site was discovered after the Vietnamese overthrew the regime in December 25th 1978 after 3 years and 8 months and 20 days of control, the tree had fresh blood and remains still on it. No bullets were ever used as it was deemed a waste. This was one of many Killing Fields across the country, then known as the Democratic Republic of Kampuchia, and many people died of disease or starvation, or simply of exhaustion before they made it to these terrible places. We also leant that they played loud patriotic songs to drown out the sound of the screams so the surrounding areas were supposedly completely unaware. The final part to horrify us further was a massive Buddhist Stupa filled with 8000 skulls found in the area, as a dmemorial to those that had their lives so unnecessarily and barbarically ended prematurely. It was hard to listen to the witness reports from ex soldiers, some of which were just too terrified to protest and also from survivors, although of course, there weren't many of them. It's hard to read, I know, and harder still to see the evidence around you of something that happened just one generation before ours, and like the war in Vietnam it is still affecting some families with lost parents and relatives.

We followed this up by a trip to the S-21 prison, otherwise known as Tuol Sleng, which was a high school until the security forces of the Reveloution turned it into the largest centre of detention and tourture in the country. 17,000 people were taken from here to Choeunk Ek. We saw the thousands of mug-shots of the inmates guilty only of being educated, wearing glasses, or living in the city. The point of the whole genocide was to create a pure race of people who were self sufficient completely by living from the fat of the land, these were known as the "old people" and the "new people", anyone who was a "city dweller" was to be extinguished. Money was abolished, any freedom obliterated and it was turned back to the year zero. All boarders were closed so the country was isolated and the people were trapped inside. This regime caused a quarter of its population to be killed in the time it had ultimate power, and the famine that followed killed a quarter more, and the crazy thing is that the Khmer Rouge had a political power in the country because of a coalition agreed by the UN, and they only lost their funding in 1993. This, plus a secret bombing campaign from the US during the Vietnamese war leaving live land mines all over the eastern side of the country, has been devastating to the next generation and still now the country has no political or financial security, they are listed 151 of 163 countries by an anti-corruption watchdog.

I will leave you with the disturbing echo of Pol Pot's famous mantra in your mind;
"It is better to kill an innocent, than let someone guilty pass us by".