By the end of last night we had planned
what we were going to do with our only day in Phnom Penh. Emily, Cara and the
boys they had met throughout Vietnam planned to go to the killing fields and
S21, so we decided to join them.
We all met around 10.30am for breakfast
and then hopped in tuk tuks for our day out. We needed 3 all together to fit
the 11 of us in. The roads in Cambodia are crazy, a lot of them are proper
roads and are smooth to drive along but some of them are dirt tracks and you
bounce around a lot!
Our first stop was at the Killing
Fields and with our entrance fee we were given an audio tour headset. Choeung
Ek is the most well known killing fields in Cambodia and is now a memorial site.
The feature building is called the Stupa and contains the skulls and other
items of all the people that were killed.
Pol Pot was the general secretary and
leader of the Khmer Rouge. He took people from the city to the country to work
on farms and killed off around 25% of the Cambodian population, so between 1
and 3 million people!
After here the boys being boys wanted
to shoot some guns so we went to the shooting range for them to do that. We
then made our way over to S21 also known as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
From 1975 – 1979 this place was used as a detention and torture centre, before
that it was a school. The rooms were made into chambers to house the prisoners.
The figures estimates 20,000 were killed over those 4 years. I haven’t spoken a
lot about it because it was quite depressing to learn about but we all felt
like we needed to know the history of the country we were visiting. The whole
day was quite draining and sad to think that all of this happened not so long
ago, not hundreds but only tens of years ago.
To cheer ourselves up we went out for a
lovely meal and to the rooftop bar.
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