Taking a slow boat into the capitol and back in time, Cambodia has much ado about not developing. Despite this, the kingdom remains a wonderful place to visit for its amazing people, alternately beautiful and terrible sights, and of course, the food.
During the reign of the extreme marxist Pol Pot in the 1970's, millions of the country's citizens were killed and the entire population was enslaved into agrarian work camps. Dreaming of a one-class society where all workers fueled agricultural production, Pol Pot slaughtered any academic or dissenter his genocidal party could find. We shared a morning tuk-tuk to the Choeung Fields killing fields with Tanya and Eugenia, the Russian-Canadian sisters turned awesome traveling companions we met on our way into the country from the Mekong Delta.
Upon arriving at the fields, you're greeted by a beautiful stupa that towers over a peaceful orchard. Butterflies flit about and the ubiquitous southeast Asian chickens cluck along peacefully. You think to yourself how lovely it is until your foot steps on a skull fragment.
Housed inside the stupa on 17 shelves are nearly 9,000 skulls recovered from the roughly 20,000 people that were slaughtered here. Organized by age (from children up) it's a frightfully somber reminder of how horrible humanity can be. As you tour the sight, you see depressions in the ground where the seemingly innumerable mass graves were/are. There are terrible things here, and most of you would be better off not having your day and mind so afflicted by such atrocities. It's a strange feeling, a powerful mix of sadness, shock, and disgust. For anyone wondering why this wasn't stopped when it happened in just the 70s, well, look at Burma right now. . . and support the Free Burma Rangers.
Not yet sufficiently depressed, we continued on to Tuol Sleng, a school that was, quite symbolically, turned into a prison-torture center. Some of the rooms are still stained with blood, and large portrait photos on the walls showed the bodies found in them when the detention center was liberated. Other rooms showed the brick and wood barriers built up to house prisoners in tiny cells formed within the larger classrooms. Exhibitions with photos of the detained also added an all-too-personal reminder of the human cost of genocide.
Having seen enough after walking through the section on the torture that occurred here, we left to find lunch and a little sanity outside in the capitol. Happily, we found our way to Friends restaurant, a wonderful organization that serves Cambodia's street youth. We are always happy to be patrons of organizations like this and greatly enjoyed our delicious, if overly American-priced, lunch. Kendra, still feeling the effects of our morning's festivities, opted simply for a lemon-soda, adding soda water to lemon and sugar mixture. I thought that was neat.
Continuing on, we found ourselves freed from the horrible sights of the morning to view the better half of Cambodia's history. If you were to listen to a conversation in the Kingdom of Cambodia, 1 out of every 4 words spoken would probably be "Angkor." They're phenomenally proud (images of its main temple adorn just about every vertical surface) and rightly so, the temples, as we would later see in person, are incredible. After being refused entry at the Royal Palace for not being dressed in a sufficiently respectful manner (it's okay, it's basically a small carbon copy of Thailand's Grand Palace anyway), we would catch our first glimpse of Angkorean ingenuity at the National Museum, housing a multitude of the Khmer Kingdom's finest stone masonry all surrounding a gorgeous central courtyard.
After filling up on the beautiful carvings, we sought to fill our tummy's at an authentically Khmer, and authentically delicious, food market outside the Psar O'Russei market-center. It was a full day in the capital, and what better way to prevent burnout then to take a trip down to Cambodia's 'premier' beach destination at Sihanoukville.
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