Phnom Penh: The Curse of Lakeside #10

Living on a tight budget requires a fair bit of compromise on the traveler's part, especially when it comes to accommodation. So when we arrived in front of Phnom Penh's train station the other day, we beelined it straight to Lakeside #10, one of the cheapest spots in the city center. For $2USD a night, Andrew and I scored a top floor room (hardly a penthouse) for a few days. Problem is, for that price you can't really expect much by way of quality.

The guesthouse is broken up into three distinct areas. The first is the super cheap partition built entirely of wood with filthy shared bathrooms at the end of the hall. I stayed in this portion of the guesthouse the first time I was in Phnom Penh. So poorly constructed is this wing, it shakes at the slightest movement. While I stayed here, the whole place swayed to the rhythm of a young couple's late night indiscretions a few doors down.

The more upscale wing is further down the hallway in a concrete building. Rooms here are maintained quite well in comparison to the rest of the guesthouse and remain relatively cool during the sweltering daytime heat. This is where the Swiss girls stayed.

Section three is a metal girdered monstrosity constructed haphazardly atop the concrete building. Most people don't stay here because it's inconveniently located and the tin roof makes the rooms unbearably hot during the daytime. This is where Andrew and I stayed.

Though clean, little care is taken on the maintenance of the building. As such we were left to deal with series of catastrophes, increasing in severity with each occurrence. I've documented them here:

June 17th - Room 402 - A heavy rain had rolled in as we sat down for dinner a few blocks from Lakeside 10. When it subsided, we returned to the guesthouse and found our room completely flooded - our bags were soaked through. The seals in the windows, it turns out, were inadequately weatherproofed. After a bit of complaining, we switched over to room number 403.

June 18th - Room 403 - The afternoon storm that kept us from going to Choeung Ek had leaked through the ceiling onto my bed, soaking my bag (again). We complained and were switched over to Room 404.

June 21st - Room 404 - It was around 1 AM, Andrew had left for Vietnam, Hobbes and I were fast asleep, when part of the ceiling collapsed and landed on the bed. Thankfully, neither of us were hurt in the incident. By this point we were out of rooms to switch over so we just had to deal with it.

The hole above the bed:

June 23rd - Room 404 - As the sun set, a plague of insects of Biblical proportions (beetles, grasshoppers, mosquitoes and moths mostly) descended on the room through the newly created opening in the ceiling. I stress, insect repellent is a must in Southeast Asia.

June 24th - Room 404 - For whatever reason, last night's swarm of insects had migrated to greener pastures, allowing me the freedom to work on the blog (play freecell) in the comfort of my own bed. After about half an hour, I was blinded by searing pain. A tiny beetle the size of a sesame seed found its way up my shorts and took a bite out of my... ah... sack lunch.

June 25th - Room 404 - I woke up bright and early to prepare for a long bus ride to Saigon. Unfortunately, the water had been shut off so I spent an extra twenty minutes in bed and stank up the bus with my improper hygiene.

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: 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: