A day in Phnom Penh
I've determined that the next time I will sleep will be on a plane crossing the Pacific. In that regard, one of what will be many photo posts.
At first I considered putting them in order, but that would be much too logical. Instead, I'm starting with the most depressing stop, Phnom Penh. If you know anything about Cambodian history you might understand where this is going and why, especially after a week in the blissful haze of Ko Samet, it was a rather sobering trip. Even if you are unfamiliar with it, don't worry, I'll provide a brief run down.
Our first stop of the day was to the city's temple, Wat Phnom.
Built in 1373, the temple, or more the hill it rests on, acts as a large part of the city's "origin story". In the 14th century a woman named Penh came across some Buddha statues down by the river. Quickly she took the statues back to her people and declared that a hill be made and a temple erected atop it to house the statues. The hill is Phnom thus the name Phnom Penh or 'Penh's Hill'.
After a moment of admiring it from the base, we started up the stairs. Along the way we saw the first of many monkeys.
When I say 'many monkeys' I mean it. They where all over Cambodia, especially in Siam Reap where they'd sit along the roads leading to Angkor Wat.
Also the first of many, some dancing women.
From here I'll mostly let the temple speak for itself.
Okay, I lied. But only because I want to point out something geeky.
Check out that kid she's holding.
(sorry for the poor quality, need to get more/the better pics off my other cousin, these are just the resized ones)
Whose outfit does that vaguely resemble? And in a temple where a good deal of the images are of women?
Okay, so I'm probably a little nuts.
Back to the rest of the temple.
Outside again, we looked around the park for a bit and came across an elephant.
After feeding her some bananas and petting her on the trunk, we heading to our next stop.
The National Museum.
(note on the ticket: in Cambodia, while they have their own currency, nearly everything is paid for in USD. Though, alas, they only accept 100% untorn bills)
Not too many pictures, mainly because it wasn't allowed inside.
Though they did have a nice little courtyard in the center.
And this guy...
...with his amusing sign.
And so ended the fun part of the day.
Now, history time!
After many years of civil war, in 1975 Cambodia found itself under the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Feeling dissatisfied with state of Cambodia at the time, they renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea and settled on a goal to restart civilization. Nearly everyone was kicked out of the cities, made to abandon everything they ever worked for, and sent to work in the fields. Others, especially scholars and people who might pose a threat to this purge of culture, where tortured and/or killed outright while many ended up working to death or dying from starvation and treatable illnesses. About 21% of the population, or around 2 million people, were exterminated in this fashion over the course of 4 years constituting it as a genocide.
In 1979, the Vietnamese invaded and drove out the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot, who lived until 1998, and most of the Khmer Rouge, never faced trial for their actions.
Following lunch, we decided to follow the path those who'd been detained and killed by the Khmer Rouge. This lead us to S-21. Once a high school, during those four years it was made into a prison and interrogation center. About 20,000 people passed through it on their way to the killing fields.
The first thing they show you are the grave markers for those who where actually killed in the former school, in the picture behind the sign. After that, the rules.
1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
There is actually some debate over whether or not these rules actually existed at the prison or where merely fabricated by those who set up the museum.
Next, we saw the rooms the dead had been found in, private rooms where they were tortured to death, iirc only one was given the mercy of being shot in the head, and saw photos taken to record the passings.
From there, a tour of the cells.
The woman in the picture was our guide through out it. She was a small child when it happened and was only saved by running away to Vietnam with her mother. The rest of her family was killed. It was surreal hearing her speak of it. At one point she started crying.
As I said, this was a sobering day.
These were the cells. Small, cramped, and dark.
Next, a few of their "interrogation" methods.
In several rooms they had walls upon walls of photographs of the victims. The Khmer Rouge kept relatively thorough records and took a picture of everyone who passed through. Of them, a few stood out to me. One was of a woman holding a baby. Another, or rather another two, were these young girls who looked like they could have been twins. A third was a foreigner, looking rather out of place amongst all the Cambodian faces.
The picture above was also a common sight. The photos of the murderers posing with bodies or skulls often had the eyes poked out.
In another room they also had a bust of Pol Pot's head in a small cage. The cage, apparently, being so that people didn't kick or destroy it, our guide telling us that was a common occurrence before they boxed it in.
Understandably so.
There were 12 known survivors of S-21, only 4 of which are alive today. At least one made it out by escaping from the killing fields, others were spared because they had skills the Khmer Rouge found useful, two of which being artists(the paintings in the one picture above belonging to Vann Nath)
After that, we went out to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields.
As suggested on the ticket, we each bought a stick of incense and a flower then placed them in the pot before the charnel and said a prayer.
After that we met with a man who guided us through the area. Like our guide at S-21, and many people in Cambodia, he had lived through the reign of the Khmer Rouge. A teenager at the time, he'd lost everyone he knew before fleeing to Japan for several years and returning just in time to see the excavation of the mass graves.
He told us about how people would be taken from the prisons, after being tortured for any scrap of information, even if false, then brought here. The goal was often to kill as many people as arrived in a day though sometimes the executioners worked too slowly so they'd house the people in a sort of... I'm not sure how to describe it. It was a small, cramped structure close to the ground and fortified.
Sometimes people would die in these while waiting, other times they'd survive the killing blow and die slowly in a pile of the bodies of those who'd been with them. He said that when they started unearthing the graves in an attempt to count all who'd been lost, the smell was something he'd never forget.
At first I considered putting them in order, but that would be much too logical. Instead, I'm starting with the most depressing stop, Phnom Penh. If you know anything about Cambodian history you might understand where this is going and why, especially after a week in the blissful haze of Ko Samet, it was a rather sobering trip. Even if you are unfamiliar with it, don't worry, I'll provide a brief run down.
Our first stop of the day was to the city's temple, Wat Phnom.
Built in 1373, the temple, or more the hill it rests on, acts as a large part of the city's "origin story". In the 14th century a woman named Penh came across some Buddha statues down by the river. Quickly she took the statues back to her people and declared that a hill be made and a temple erected atop it to house the statues. The hill is Phnom thus the name Phnom Penh or 'Penh's Hill'.
After a moment of admiring it from the base, we started up the stairs. Along the way we saw the first of many monkeys.
When I say 'many monkeys' I mean it. They where all over Cambodia, especially in Siam Reap where they'd sit along the roads leading to Angkor Wat.
Also the first of many, some dancing women.
From here I'll mostly let the temple speak for itself.
Okay, I lied. But only because I want to point out something geeky.
Check out that kid she's holding.
(sorry for the poor quality, need to get more/the better pics off my other cousin, these are just the resized ones)
Whose outfit does that vaguely resemble? And in a temple where a good deal of the images are of women?
Okay, so I'm probably a little nuts.
Back to the rest of the temple.
Outside again, we looked around the park for a bit and came across an elephant.
After feeding her some bananas and petting her on the trunk, we heading to our next stop.
The National Museum.
(note on the ticket: in Cambodia, while they have their own currency, nearly everything is paid for in USD. Though, alas, they only accept 100% untorn bills)
Not too many pictures, mainly because it wasn't allowed inside.
Though they did have a nice little courtyard in the center.
And this guy...
...with his amusing sign.
And so ended the fun part of the day.
Now, history time!
After many years of civil war, in 1975 Cambodia found itself under the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Feeling dissatisfied with state of Cambodia at the time, they renamed the country Democratic Kampuchea and settled on a goal to restart civilization. Nearly everyone was kicked out of the cities, made to abandon everything they ever worked for, and sent to work in the fields. Others, especially scholars and people who might pose a threat to this purge of culture, where tortured and/or killed outright while many ended up working to death or dying from starvation and treatable illnesses. About 21% of the population, or around 2 million people, were exterminated in this fashion over the course of 4 years constituting it as a genocide.
In 1979, the Vietnamese invaded and drove out the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot, who lived until 1998, and most of the Khmer Rouge, never faced trial for their actions.
Following lunch, we decided to follow the path those who'd been detained and killed by the Khmer Rouge. This lead us to S-21. Once a high school, during those four years it was made into a prison and interrogation center. About 20,000 people passed through it on their way to the killing fields.
The first thing they show you are the grave markers for those who where actually killed in the former school, in the picture behind the sign. After that, the rules.
1. You must answer accordingly to my question. Don’t turn them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that, you are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretext about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
There is actually some debate over whether or not these rules actually existed at the prison or where merely fabricated by those who set up the museum.
Next, we saw the rooms the dead had been found in, private rooms where they were tortured to death, iirc only one was given the mercy of being shot in the head, and saw photos taken to record the passings.
From there, a tour of the cells.
The woman in the picture was our guide through out it. She was a small child when it happened and was only saved by running away to Vietnam with her mother. The rest of her family was killed. It was surreal hearing her speak of it. At one point she started crying.
As I said, this was a sobering day.
These were the cells. Small, cramped, and dark.
Next, a few of their "interrogation" methods.
In several rooms they had walls upon walls of photographs of the victims. The Khmer Rouge kept relatively thorough records and took a picture of everyone who passed through. Of them, a few stood out to me. One was of a woman holding a baby. Another, or rather another two, were these young girls who looked like they could have been twins. A third was a foreigner, looking rather out of place amongst all the Cambodian faces.
The picture above was also a common sight. The photos of the murderers posing with bodies or skulls often had the eyes poked out.
In another room they also had a bust of Pol Pot's head in a small cage. The cage, apparently, being so that people didn't kick or destroy it, our guide telling us that was a common occurrence before they boxed it in.
Understandably so.
There were 12 known survivors of S-21, only 4 of which are alive today. At least one made it out by escaping from the killing fields, others were spared because they had skills the Khmer Rouge found useful, two of which being artists(the paintings in the one picture above belonging to Vann Nath)
After that, we went out to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields.
As suggested on the ticket, we each bought a stick of incense and a flower then placed them in the pot before the charnel and said a prayer.
After that we met with a man who guided us through the area. Like our guide at S-21, and many people in Cambodia, he had lived through the reign of the Khmer Rouge. A teenager at the time, he'd lost everyone he knew before fleeing to Japan for several years and returning just in time to see the excavation of the mass graves.
He told us about how people would be taken from the prisons, after being tortured for any scrap of information, even if false, then brought here. The goal was often to kill as many people as arrived in a day though sometimes the executioners worked too slowly so they'd house the people in a sort of... I'm not sure how to describe it. It was a small, cramped structure close to the ground and fortified.
Sometimes people would die in these while waiting, other times they'd survive the killing blow and die slowly in a pile of the bodies of those who'd been with them. He said that when they started unearthing the graves in an attempt to count all who'd been lost, the smell was something he'd never forget.