Phnom Penh - The Bad & The Ugly

I wasn't really expecting much from Phnom Penh. I had heard that there wasn't much there, it was really poor, and pretty much to pass through on the way to Siem Reap. Well there isn't really much to do, it is insanely poor, but the place has this weird energy, that I really got into, and wish I could have stayed a bit longer. There really aren't that many sights to see, and the city is so spread out that you can't really walk it, like you could the Old Quarter of Hanoi. The Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda are pretty nice, and it was good to see an architectural change from the Vietnamese. The two main attractions, if you can even call them that though, are Tuol Sleng Museum, and The Killing Fields, both haunting reminders of the devastation that Pol Pot delivered to his own country in the 1970's. My first stop was the Tuol Sleng Prison (S-21), and as soon as you enter, you just want to leave. What used to be a school, was then turned into prison by Pol Pot, and thousands upon thousands were tortured and put to there death. The museum contains photos of bodies that were found there, killed in the final days of Pol Pot's regime, and there are also cells that held the captives. One of the major displays however is the hundreds and hundreds of photos taken of the prisoners upon arrival. It's just walls of pictures of men , women and children, and it's just impossible to imagine what they went through, although nearly all were fated for death. It was just too overwhelming.

The next stop was The Killing Fields, which was the final destination of most of the prisoners of Tuol Sleng. They were put in mass graves and buried, and the land is covered with overgrown holes where the bodies were buried. In the center is a memorial Stupa which houses the skulls of those bodies that were found, and then later given a proper burial. The craziest part of all that, is that there is a shooting range across the street where for various amounts you can fire pretty much nay weapon of your choice, be it AK-47 to a rocket launcher. Supposedly you're allowed to fire a rocket launcher at a live cow if you so desire, but you would have to be one sick fuck to do that. The weird thing is ,is that your moto driver with offer to take you to both, without a trace of irony in their voice. That should tell you something about Cambodia.