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Phnom Penh - Cambodia
The journey from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh was actually our first land border crossing and it went pretty smoothly I'm glad to say. The bus company we were travelling with was pretty good and kind of shepherded us through border control and back on to the bus, although as westerners we didn't get any real explanation as to what was happening. This was most concerning when they take your money and passports - but we did as the locals did and it all worked out in the end. We found an ok guest house in an excellent location near to the riverfront, and that evening we had drinks with some fellow westerners who were also on our bus that day.
In Phnom Penh itself we went and visited the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda - they are very beautiful but nowhere near as impressive as the ones in Bangkok. It is also a shame that they have covered up the majority of the pure silver floor, in the silver pagoda, with carpets and mats!
No trip to Phnom Penh is complete without going to see the S21 genocide museum and the infamous killing fields, of the Khmer Rouge regime. We decided that we were going to do them both together in the one day as they are two halves of one story, and we had been advised by some fellow travellers to go to the museum first, so we did. The museum itself is fairly unique in that it is actually housed in the S21 prison itself so it is already atmospheric. As you enter the grounds you get to look around the individual cells first, which have still got some beds and tortune implements in them, as well as some photos on the walls of what went on inside them. Then there are the multiple occupancy cells and the wooden individual cells - in these ones you can see some bullet holes in the walls and scratching in the wood. Further round other larger cells house people's individual stories of the genocide and historical accounts of what happened etc. Then there are the rooms with the photos - rows and rows and rows of mug shots of the people who passed through the prison; men, women and children, and babies. There were also pictures of people and corpses during and after torture. Not one for the faint hearted. There were less than 10 people who ever left the prison alive and none were women or children/babies. It's extremely harrowing.
So from there, we went straight to the killing fields. Even after the museum it is very difficult to imagine the scenes at the killing fields but they were very strange, and perhaps they would have felt eerier if there wasn't local children playing here and begging to the tourists, which detracts a little from the atmosphere and disturbs you from your thoughts. The monument which houses many of the skulls is a testimony to those who died, but we actually found it a little bizarre when faced with it. The fileds themselves are quite small with many large craters (mass graves) and mounds dotted all over with a scrappy woodland and water around. There are pieces of clothing sticking up through the soil as you walk around and it is said that this is genuine clothing from those who laid there as this was never all removed, there is also many pieces of bone still in the soil, which you step over very carefully as you walk around - this does make it seem more real and it is a reminder of just how recently these terrible events took place.
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