Jarrod and Sara’s Site

Hello everybody, hope you’re all doing well and not letting the winter get to you too much. We just arrived back in Bangkok and are about to enter the last phase of our trip in Southern Thailand. The last week or so was spent traveling in Cambodia and it was an excellent experience, with our time basically split between the capital, Phnom Penh, and Siem Reap, where the Temples of Ankor are located.

The first day we spent in Phnom Penh after taking a boat up the Mekong from the Vietnamese border. This journey and border crossing went very smoothly. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the Mekong trip in Laos, but it was still a nice introduction to Cambodia and we got to see a lot of the riverside village life along the way. In Phnom Penh, we spent the first day exploring the city and checking out the markets and a few sites. While it was different and was a large city, we didn’t really find too much to see of interest in the city itself (at least compared to the other big cities in Southeast Asia). The best part was probably going out to lunch at a place called Friends. This place was set up to provide training for young adults in Phnom Penh and all the profits went to a charitable foundation for the progaram. They run the whole place themselves, cooking the food, providing the table service, etc. and the younger workers are taught by older kids who have already gone through the training and are learning to be supervisors. The food and service was amazing and the place was full. It is a great program to get children into the exploding tourism industry in Cambodia. The other highlight was probably going out to dinner in a local Khmer restaurant that was completely packed (we were the only westeners). It had three floors and there was not an empty table in the place (which is rare here) and it had a great energy as it was loud and people were merrily eating and doing a lot of drinking. We found the food pretty good, and although similar to other countries around here, it had a unique style. We made it back to the hotel early and relaxed there as there were a lot of big gatherings/parties going on around the place we were staying and we didn’t want to be walking back through them late at night (we were probably overly cautious here because of stories/stereotypes we’d heard and read, but we weren’t in a backpacker area and it just didn’t feel nearly as safe as other places we’ve been).

The second day we spent here was pretty depressing, but we’re glad we were able to learn some of what happened here at the places they actually happened. We started the morning by taking a tuk-tuk ride to the Killing Fields. Here we basically walked around on a small self-guided tour of the small park like setting where the Khmer Rouge performed thousands of their mass executions. The first sight is a large glass enclosed monument of the victims of the genocide. It is basically shelves containing the skulls of the victims from the excavated mass graves (half have been excavated to date). Having them in front of you, especially due to the sheer volume, was very sobering. After that we walked through a path around the mass burial sites and they had various signs explaining what had happened where and how it was arranged. It was a very eerie place in that, now, it is extremely peaceful and it looks like a park, except for the excavated circles that look like bomb craters where the people were buried. And it was also located directly opposite a large fence from an elementary school where we could hear and see the kids outside playing, very surreal.

After that our guide for the day, dropped us off at the S21 museum. Another eerie place. This was actually an old high school that the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison/interrogation facility. Here we watched a short documentary and then walked around and saw the whole facility. Basically, the classrooms were subdivided into tiny, tiny cells made of brick or wood that you could go inside and see. There were also small classrooms that were left as is and were used as interrogation and torture rooms. Many of these had sort of abstract drawings of what had taken place inside. They also had many rooms that contained the pictures (like mug shots) of all the people housed there, that were taken by the prison controllers when they arrived. It was difficult to see the actual faces of the people after you had just learned what had happened to all of them, especially since it was all types of people: young children, teenagers, adults, and elderly, both men and women.

I don’t really know what else to say about this. It was pretty horrible to imagine that people can do these types of things to each other. We felt it was a good experience to learn about this (especially since it happened 30 years ago, but seems like something from the middle ages), but we were happy to leave.

Thats really it for our quick trip through the capital. Sara and I had a much more enjoyable stop seeing a more inspiring part of the Cambodian history in Siem Riep, where we went next.

Again, hope everyone is doing well. Keep in touch.

Jarrod and Sara