Day Five (Cambodia Phnom Penh)

After an early start (5:30) and a generous handful of diarrhoea tablets we set off on the 6 hour journey from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh.The journey was pretty uneventful (very bumpy but uneventful), but still managed to leave us pretty tired!

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Cambodians mode of transport.

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As soon as a vehicle stops sellers rush over pushing each other out of the way.
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Andy took lots of photos whilst we were sitting on the coach.

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My perfect job - cow walking!

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After arriving in Phnom Penh we got pulled about by men wanting to give us a ride to our hostel. They tired to pull our bags off our backs and crowded round us saying come with me. It would have probably been easy to just go with one as then the rest would have left us alone. However, our hostel wasn't very far from the bus stop so we wanted to walk.

The walk to our hotel was a real eye opener! The streets were mostly just rubble. The worst part was though they had food markets on streets with rubbish tips on. The rubbish tips were next to people's stalls and they smelt rotten and had hundreds of flies buzzing around! We also found that every hundred yards or so people were asking us to do something (buy something, take a ride etc). It gets tiresome really quickly when you are tired, carrying heavy bags and trying to find somewhere. It is especially hard when they won't listen to "No, thank you", but you are still trying to be polite!

When we got to our hostel we dropped our bags and went straight to The Killing Fields. The leaflet calls it Choeung EK Genocidal Centre (Hell on Earth in 20th Century). After you pay you 5 dollars you have the option to get a guide for another 5 dollars. Andy tried to barter the price down (his experience at all of those fleas came in very handy this holiday!) but the guide wasn't having any of it! After trying to do it ourselves we caved and got a guide for the full 5 dollars.

The first thing we decided to look at was the Charnel which is a the big monument in the picture below:

Although from afar it looks like a normal building once you get closer you get to see the horrors it hides. I don't know how to explain the emotions you feel when faced with 8,000 skulls. The worst thing was seeing that lots of them still had teeth. What I mean by this is you could pretend that they were plastic science models, but then you saw the teeth and then you couldn't pretend.

The government refused to bury these skulls as they say they act as reminder to the Cambodian people. I personally think it is selfish as many of the people killed were Buddhists. Buddhists believe if their bodies are not buried then they can't reach the afterlife. I think the government just want to save money on burials!

The skulls are in sections depending on age and sex. The shelves reach to the ceiling.

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Our guide told us of the horrors that happened, and showed us the mass graves. They have found 129 mass graves at this site and they think that there are more. Even though they have removed some bodies when you look at the floor you can see clothes and bones poking up.

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You think that the government would actually take the bones out of the ground and bury them properly!

This was the biggest grave they found. It contained 450 corpses.

They believe that there are many more graves under the river.

We did have a funny moment at the Killing Fields though! We got to a tree called the Killing Tree. This tree was used by the soldiers to kill babies. They would swing the babies round and hit them against the tree. At the point of our guide telling us this I almost collapsed! Andy, our guide and people around thought that I was overcome by the whole place. I was upset and slightly overcome with the place, but the reason for my near collapse was the return of my diahorea. I did make it to the toilet in time though!

After a really good meal and a fun ride on a Tuk Tuk we went to bed early. We had a 7:00 coach to Siem Reap (the whole reason for our trip to Cambodia!) and wanted to be fresh.