Moving on

After spending about two weeks in Siem Reap, I finally headed on my way. A few days earlier Laura befriended a girl named Palynath on the way back from Phnom Penh and she lived in Battambang. So Laura, Rachel, and I shared a taxi through the less than comfortable roads to the less touristy Battambang province to pay her a visit. We were in luck because Palynath works at an NGO, teaches at a school, and is also a tour guide. So after lunch Rachel headed off with her friend Sak and Laura and I got a free tour of the city from an official guide. Its a lot different from the feeling you get in Siem Reap. There's less people hounding you for tuk tuk rides and souveners and it seems to just be more of the Cambodia that you think of. You have to check out the video I took of us riding the bamboo train. Its essentially a bamboo platform placed on a set of axles. There's a motor with a belt that attaches to the back axle and thats how people get to and fro. The next day I also visited a set of caves outside the city where the Khmer Rouge executed numerous people. Its an odd setting seeing this one 'mountain' in the middle of the plains of Cambodia. The beauty there is mixed with an eeriness of whats happened there in the past.

Moving on again I made my way to the capitol of Phnom Penh. Its more of a fast paced city with a lot of bigger buildings, flashing lights, and other quirks you associate with bigger cities. When you are there you definately can tell there are some very rich (by Cambodia standards) people as well as some very poor. But I think here more than any other city there is a pretty solid middle class.

The main two places in Phnom Penh I wanted to see were Toul Sleng and Choung Ek. Skip this part if you don't want to hear about some of the dark and sad stories of Cambodia's past. Toul Sleng was formerly a school that was converted to a prison during the Khmer Rouge reign between 1975 and 1979. Here prisoners were taken in and interrogated and tortured until they confessed to crimes they didn't even commit. There was an estimated 20,000 people who went through the facility and less than a dozen of those survived to talk about it. For some unknown reason they took photos of each prisoner and many of the pictures are on display throughout the buildings. One of the most disturbing things was the amount of children that went through. Its just hard to imagine. But the thing that struck me the most was the expressions on the faces of the victims. They looked as if they had just accepted their fate and there was no fight left in them. Some even had a little smirk on their faces. A lot of these prisoners were taken outside the city to Choung Ek or the Killing Fields where they would eventually end their journey.

The first thing you see when you get to Choung Ek is a large stupa where hundreds of excavated skulls and clothes are displayed showing what happened. The skulls sometimes had bullet holes through the top but often they just showed signs where they had been bashed in with a blunt object. Outside of the memorial there really isn't all that much. Its essentially rows upon rows of mass graves that were excavated after the end of the regime. Most of the prisoners were brought in at night and were taken one by one for execution. Some had to dig their own graves. There is one grave that was filled with women and children while another one contained only headless bodies. Its hard to imagine what the prisoners as well as the soldiers went through. But as you meet and talk with the locals you really get the sense they just want to move on. I think thats why so many people I've come across really love this place.