Phenom Phen
The capital of Cambodia. When I finally arrived in PP, we were so tired and really just wanting a shower and a bed to lay down. So we took pretty much the first place we saw. I finally caught up with Cris and Corey that I had met 3 weeks ago at Hanoi Backpackers. It was good to have roomates again after traveling all thru Vietnam by myself. Unfortunately, we were in the wrong part of town. We were riverside as opposed to lakeside. I’ve heard from many others that the lake is the place to stay. The first night we ended up at a crap hole of a place that the motorcycle taxis took us to. It was a whore house pretending to be a nightclub. I wasn’t inside more than 2 minutes before I said this is just not my kinda place. That’s even before walking into the dance room where we saw all these 14 year old girls dancing with fat old men.
DISTURBING MATERIAL BELOW NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART
The next day we decided to go to the Killing Fields and S21 Prison. These are the two main sights to see in PP. Not much of a happy day, but definately worth seeing. Pol Pot was an incredibly evil man, along the lines of Hitler. Pot and the Khemer Rouge did more damage to Cambodia in 3 years than anyone that hasn’t seen the carnage could imagine. In a country with a population with a population of 8 million he managed to kill 2 million during his reign from 1976-1979. The Killing Fields were filled with hundreds of thousands of bones and skulls from the victims of the genocide during Pots reign. Only a small portion of the Killing Fields have been excavated. The rest they have just left as is. The place is really horrible. As you walk around the fields, you can still see bones and clothing scattered all around the paths you walk thru. Shallow mass graves literally liter the fields all around you. There is a wicked looking old tree that they used to whack babies heads against and I swear you could still see the reminants of some of the killings left on the tree. I’m glad that we stopped on the way to the fields at a gun club because I’m not sure I would have still wanted to shoot the AK-47 after seeing the ravages of Pol Pot’s genocide against the countries religious and intellectual members. I was very suprised to feel the lack of recoil from an AK. I was expecting much more of a kick, but there was almost none at all. I can see why AK-47s are the most popular assault rifle in the world. It is a very effective semi-auto weapon as you can put a lot of bullets in a small area with only a small bit of re-aiming from the recoil. I didn’t try it on full auto because it was over $1 per bullet, but I bet you could keep the gun trained in a relatively small area even on full auto.
After the fields, we went to S21 Prison and torture camp. This place was even more disturbing than the Kiling Fields as it had photos of the atrocities that took place and you could walk into the rooms and cells where the torture took place. I’m not quite sure why, but all the rooms had a metal frame bed with shackles and a Chinese Ammo box on them. I could see what they did with the very uncomfortable shackles, but I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what the ammo box was used for. I think the most disturbing thing for me was the fact that in this compound where I would think a memorial would have been built for the victims, there were kids playing in the courtyard and people playing volleyball behind the prison cells. They invited me to play, but I just couldn’t bring myself to play in this place of horror. I mean this place had some kind of contraption that held a person’s head in place while a screw was drilled into the skull. I’m sorry, but after seeing that kind of sh*t! I’m not much in the mood to play anything, even volleyball.
Tags: Killing Fields, Phenom Phen, Travel
Kane
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