Day 45 of The Big Adventure.  
 
We had a nice lie in and woke up naturally at about 9/9.30am. Our hotel room had no windows to the outside so no natural light got in – which was actually perfect for a nice lie in. 
We decided to go to the travel agent to book onto a tour of the killing fields for that afternoon. On our way back to the hotel we decided to get some bananas, but neither of the mini marts near us sold any. We asked one of the shop attendant where we might be able to find some and he directed us to the local market. 

It was a chaotic mess of food, that looked like it had been harvested from the field/tree/sea just that morning. There were fresh squid the size of your arm in buckets, fresh pineapples (with stalks coming out of the bottom – I’d always thought the stalk came from the top!), fresh fruits and vegetables that came in all different shapes and sizes. We hadn’t realised just how much regulation goes on with fruit and vegetables in supermarkets back home until we saw just how varied they are out here! 

The market sold everything from full on cow legs that looked like they’d come straight from the slaughter house, to spices, to cabbages still covered in soil. We were the only white people there. 

We went to try and buy some bananas from a stall and a little girl came out and greeted us. She was being trained to run the stall when she was older, but at this point she could only have been 6 or 7 years old! 

She told us it was 1000riel for a bunch of bananas (25cents), but we only had a $1 note. We asked if she had change, but her English wasn’t that good. She kept running back and forth to ask her mum things and eventually the mum came out to help. 

It was quite an ordeal for a bunch of bananas and the whole family ended up getting involved! Anyway we managed to get some nice ripe ones for a much better price than if we’d bought them at the mini mart. I was going to have a bowl of muesli with banana for breakfast but when we got back to the hotel I found that a load of ants had found the muesli first, and were having it for their breakfast. Dammit. 

So we ventured down to the hotel restaurant and i ordered sausage and toast. She asked if I wanted pork sausage which was a very promising start. However, after my first mouthful it became clear that this was not the sort of the sausage I had been envisioning and was more of a chorizo sausage. 

  
Luckily the toast had come with a delightful jam/marmalade that we suspect may have been pineapple. It was delicious. 

We headed back up to the room to shower and change and get ready for our bus tour to the killing fields. 

We walked down to the tour agent and hopped on the empty bus. We were the first ones on and then had to drive for half an hour around Phnom Penh picking up other passengers before we were on our way to the S21 Genocide Museum. 

The S21 genocide museum is a secondary school they converted into a prison/torture camp in Phnom Penh. 

  

 

An estimated 20,000 prisoners passed through and it all happened only 30 years ago! 

The story behind it all was reminiscent of the Holocaust with Pol Pot as Hitler; he had a utopian vision.

It all started in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge (the followers of Pol Pot’s communist party) evacuated Phnom Penh and Pol Pot wasn’t overruled as a leader until 1979. 

He continued to rule the Khmer Rouge for another 20 years after 1979. And since the Cambodian Genocide the main leaders of the Khmer Rouge have all been given life sentences after being put on trial in 2012 for their crimes. Pol Pot died in 1997 and showed no remorse. 

Pol Pot had wanted a communal nation and did not like academics or professionals and instead thought that the peasants were the heroes of the land. Anyone with an education was considered a threat so he rounded up professionals and intellects; even anyone with soft hands or who wore glasses (signs of intellect), and they were sent to the torture camps and then to mass graves such as the killing fields.

S21 was were people were sent to be tortured until they wrote a signed confession that they’d committed a crime that would justify killing them, which ranged from stealing rice to spying for the CIA (none of which they actually committed; they had to fabricate to please their torturers).

They also had to confess that their family members and friends had also committed crimes along the same lines so that they would be killed as well. In this way, whole families were murdered and a chilling Khmer Rouge saying emerged: ‘to pull up weeds, you have to get all the roots’. 

Some of the prisoners were tortured up to three times a day. Some were there for days, some for weeks, some for months.

 

 Once they had written a signed confession, they were sent to the killing field where they would be murdered. 
They had left the shackles in the rooms where they had chained thousands of people up.

Some people were tortured 3 times a day and there were various torture weapons still on show.  

There was an air of secrecy around the holding area – the ventilation holes were boarded up to stop the sounds of prisoners screaming and outsiders knew it as the place where people went in but never came out. 

We wandered around the 3 original school buildings and you could see it used to be classrooms and the general layout of the buildings definitely had a school feeling. However, within the buildings new walls had been erected to create small prison cells.

 

 
Each prison call had a small box in it and one of the survivors stories went on to explain they were given a plastic bottle and box for their excrement and if any spiller over onto the floor they were made to lick it up.

 

 
As we wandered from room to room, photographs of the prisoners lined the walls and there were painting depicting the various torture techniques. Some were very difficult to look at and it was almost impossible to properly comprehend how something like this could happen. 
After an hour of wandering around the museum we got back on the bus (which had an informative video) to go to the killing fields. 

  
A wooden walkway had been erected and it became clear as we were walking around that it was because there were so many mass graves. Looking over the side of the walkway you could see cloth and bones poking out from the earth. 

 
   
There were certain areas that had fences around them and with roofs and it was because these had been identified as the main mass graves of the site. 

  
  
One of these mass grave sites had been labelled as women and children. And next to it was a tree where they had found remains such as hair, skull and brains on the bark of the tree and it was clear that they had smashed children against this tree and thrown them into the grave. Horrifying doesn’t even come close.

  
  
  
In the afternoon sun, with the birds chirping it was strangely peaceful and it was difficult to picture the horrific scenes that had taken place here 30 years ago. 

  
We passed ‘The Magic Tree’ – a tree where they hung large sound systems to play music to mask the sounds of the victims screaming as they were killed so that the new people arriving didn’t know what was going on here. Again, everything seemed to be kept a secret. Even from the people who were about to meet their death. 

  

  

At the end there was a large ‘supa’ – a building which housed many skulls and bones of the victims.  

 Researchers have organised the remains into different categories: male and female, cause of death, age etc. 

  
There were 17 different layers of skulls and it really put it into perspective just how many had died as a result of the communist revolution and this was only a small subset of them. 

  
There were 300 other mass graves sites around Cambodia. 
We sat under a tree and had a few minutes to take it what we’d see and then the guide came over and told it was time to get back on the bus and head back to the city. 

It hit us then just how inappropriate our cheerily-coloured bus was…

  
When we got back to our room Lauren had a cheeky FaceTime with Clark and then we headed out for dinner. 

We found a really nice restaurant and order a Khmer chicken salad, which was very lemongrassy but also very delicious. And we had some onion bhajis and some veggies in curry paste.  

 

  It was all absolutely delicious but our eyes had been bigger than our stomachs so we got the rest to go. 

A group of backpackers sat at the table next to ours during dinner and lit up cigarettes while at the dinner table. There are no regulations about smoking indoors but this was the first time we’d seen someone smoking in a restaurant and were quite shocked at how antisocial they were being. 

It made us realise how much we appreciated the smoking regulations back home. 

We made our way through the streets and headed home. We were both looking nice forward to seeing Parker and Freya tomorrow and hearing all their tales from home.