Phnom Penh: Pictures

The view of the neighbouring shanty town from my guesthouse window. Gunshots have been heard coming from this direction in the middle of the night:

Crackdown on pedophelia

Thailand's got Red Bull, Cambodia has:

Mid afternoon nap:

Near accident. Motorbike drivers here are nuts:

Phnom Penh: Cheoung Ek Killing Field

With Andrew and Jo taking a head start on Vietnam today, I’m sort of left here in Phnom Penh by myself for a few days, waiting for my Visa to kick in. Since the weather has cleared up considerably, I decided to try my luck with the Choeung Ek Killing Field again.

Along the way, I learned that mullets and leisure suits still attract babes. I have neither, unfortunately:

Best seat in the house:

The giant Stupa at the heart of Choeung Ek was constructed in the late eighties as a final resting place for the 8958 Cambodians exhumed from nearby mass graves. Victims, carted here by the truckload, were almost always bludgeoned to death here to save on ammunition.

Skulls inside the memorial have been carefully arranged by age and gender:

And are piled in shelves reaching up to the high ceiling:

While clothes recovered from the mass graves are heaped haphazardly on the floor:

In accordance to local custom the memorial stupa is kept partially open to allow spirits to move freely from this world to the next. Despite the added ventilation, an overwhelming musty, almost chalky odour dominates the building’s cramped interior.

Outside, signs placed around crater like pits document victims found in mass graves

One reads:
“Mass grave of 166 victims without heads”

Another:
“Mass grave of more than 100 victims children and women whose majority were naked”

Other signs point out execution sites, while unclaimed bones sit atop bricks nearby. The ground is littered with white flecks of bone and cloth that surface with the rain. I've read that executioners would often grab babies by their legs and swing them against this tree until they died:

An unknown number of bodies still remain in undisturbed graves surrounding the site, though estimates peg the total to be around 17,000. Sadly, despite the numbers, Choeung Ek probably doesn’t rank highly amongst the hundreds of other killing fields documented around the country. The figure seems a paltry sum considering upwards of three million people, or almost a third of the country’s population succumbed to “unnatural deaths” while the Khmer Rouge were in power.

Phnom Penh - Brother Number Four

Of the hoards of smarmy moto drivers plying their trade along the lakeside backpacker district, only a precious few comprehend English sufficiently to communicate with foreigners. Even then, most were confused when we asked to go to visit Phnom Penh’s prison, a place not frequented by many tourists. Nearly all assumed we wanted to go to the S21 genocide museum, which we’d already covered a couple of days ago. The plan was to go on the off chance that they would let us in to visit Ta Mok the Butcher, also known as Brother Number Four.

Ta Mok is one of the few high ranking Khmer Rouge officials currently awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. Most of his compatriots managed to strike immunity deals with current Prime Minister Hun Sen’s (also former Khmer Rouge) administration and have made off scot-free. During his tenure as the party’s Chief of Staff, Ta Mok gained notoriety as the man who orchestrated the brutal purges (such as those in S21) synonymous with the Khmer Rouge’s rule.

Anyway, back to the story. As is daily practice here, we were continually accosted by moto drivers between the guesthouse and the main street. One particular moto driver on this stretch has taken to calling me “Ajinomoto” whenever I walk past because a) I’m “Japanese” and b) he’s trying to sell me a moto ride (get it? Ajinomoto hur hur). Ajinomoto is Japanese for MSG. We finally found a driver who was positive he could take us to the prison so Andrew, Jo (a British girl I’ll be traveling Vietnam with) and I climbed into his tuk tuk and away we went.

A retro cop car stationed near the guesthouse:

The ride went relatively smoothly until we reached a flooded out patch of road.

Soon after, our driver stopped for directions, stirring up a bit of concern between the three of us. A few minutes later he called his boss at the base station for further instructions. We did finally manage to get to a corrections facility but it ended up being the wrong one. Unfortunately, they didn’t allow visitors so we had to turn back.

Phnom Penh: Fond Farewells

Andrew and I woke up extra early this morning to share breakfast with the girls and give them a royal sendoff. Sadly, we’re parting company for the last time - they’re heading West to Siem Reap while Andrew and I are traveling Eastward to Vietnam.

An unfortunate gecko got caught in the girls’ door jamb quite some time ago:

While wolfing down our breakfasts (we were running late), we got talking with an Australian guy who was busy strumming away on his guitar at the next table over. We invited him to sit with us and he proceeded to play a pleasant little tune he wrote for a French Canadian girl he’d met in Vietnam. We paid little attention to the non-descript first couple of verses and simply enjoyed the music, but as the song progressed, the lyrics got more and more unsettling. Now, maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste but I don’t think things like sabotaging a flight and forced kidnappings fit in silly little love songs. Nice guy though.

Following breakfast, we all hopped onto a tuk tuk and sped to the waiting bus, where we all quickly wished each other safe journeys. And like that, they were gone.

Phnom Penh: Tuol Sleng (S21) Death Camp

Between 1975 and 1979, Tuol Sleng (also known as Security Prison 21 or S21 for short) served as the Khmer Rouge’s main internment camp, “processing” an estimated seventeen to twenty thousand “enemies of the state” during its operation. The high school turned prison presently houses a museum and a small memorial site.

From a cursory glance of the courtyard, it’s hard to imagine any crimes against humanity could have taken place in such a pleasant setting:

The illusion is quickly shattered upon entering the A-Block interrogation building where the bloodied corpses of the prison’s last fourteen victims were found by Vietnamese Liberators, still shackled to the bedposts. The rusted beds, shackles and ammunition boxes (used as makeshift bed pans) still remain, overlooked by photographs taken by the Vietnamese as the rooms were found. Fourteen graves rest a few feet from the building’s entrance.



A frangi pani flower placed near an interrogation room:

B-Block, the next building over, is home to wall upon wall of prisoner mug shots. Comrade Duch, who oversaw the operation of S21, was meticulous in his documentation of prisoners, carefully taking photographs of everybody passing through the system and coercing them into confessing their nonexistent crimes. A cycle developed whereby prisoners, after being tortured, were forced to name accomplices to their imaginary crimes, implicating more innocents for torture, interrogation and execution.

Hopelessness and terror:

Particularly disturbing amongst the photos, these children were branded as enemies of the state along with their probably innocent parents and suffered the same fates. The ones shown here most likely didn’t survive long enough to see their next birthdays:

Excess photos are haphazardly stored, where they slowly deteriorate over time:

An imposing building fronted by a mesh of barb wire, C-Block holds the prison proper:

Claustrophobic cells line the brick halls:

The view from this barred window probably held little hope for prisoners here:

Prisoner numbers for easier management:


Of the estimated seventeen to twenty thousand Cambodians processed here, only seven are known to have survived.

Day tours in Phnom Penh often include a visit to Tuol Sleng's sister site, the Choeung Ek Killing field which was the last stop for prisoners who didn't succumb to torture at S21. Unfortunately, a heavy rain developed halfway there so we had to turn back to town.

The rain gave way not long after we were back in the city limits so we finished off our tour at a peace statue. The statue is unique in that it's made entirely of melted down guns, including one surrendered by Prime Minister Hun Sen himself.

Nearby is a massive poster of the Cambodian Queen, who looks suspiciously like the British one: