The dark side of Cambodian history

We’ve left Sihanoukville and I miss the beach already! We arrived in Phnomh Penh yesterday lunchtime and headed straight to lunch at the Friends restaurant – a charity run restaurant aimed at training street kids in waitressing and cooking – tasty tasty food and for a good cause.
I explored the Palace after lunch – amazing Khmer architecture and it is where the king and queen currently live so a lot of the grounds are cordoned off. The Silver Pagoda is the highlight of the palace – a large temple with a solid silver tiled floor (hence the Silver Pagoda…) and contains both the Emerald Buddha (actually made from jade) and a diamond encrusted Buddha. Lots of sparkle… They also have a display of models of the King’s coronation – they’re very proud of the monarchy as is to be expected when it was overthrown and the country taken over by communists intent on ruining the country.

Crossing the street in Phnomh Penh is quite a skills - there are motorbikes, tuktuks, cars, buses and bikes everywhere and the centre of the city is built on a grid system so you have to cross many many roads. Made the mistake of heading back to the hotel yesterday during rush hour. Oops.
Which leads me nicely on to today’s visits to the genocide museum and killing fields. A haunting experience, but really opens your eyes to the terrible history of Cambodia. The genocide museum is located in a old high school that was used as a prison during the Khmer Rouge period. The classrooms were turned into cells and thousands of people were held and tortured there before being taken to Choeng Ek to be executed. Some of the classrooms contain row upon row of copies of all the mugshots of the prisoners. Some of which were babies and very young children who obviously would have had no idea what they were there for. So horrible you can’t even imagine what they went through. We then went on to visit Choeng Ek (known as the ‘killing fields’) about half an hour outside the city. The site is surprisingly small as nearly 9000 corpses have been exhumed from 90 mass graves on the site. It is believed that there may be 30 more graves not accounted for so far. It is a sobering place to visit, not helped by numerous rags of clothing poking out of the mud, and the glass stupa filled with skulls.
That was all a bit depressing so I apologise, but it is a very important part of Cambodia and it amazes me that people who have been through so much, and almost every Cambodian was affected in some way at the time, are such friendly and happy people – they always have a smile.
It’s our last night in Cambodia and I am sad to leave it – we’ve had an amazing couple of weeks, and have learnt so much through our guide and the local people we’ve met along the way. Bring on Vietnam…