Return to Phnom Penh

After a generous breakfast across the road from our shack we bid our farewell to Jamie, Eliouse and GirlAndi and hit the road for Phnom Penh, a city that we had only passed through in order to get to Sihanoukville for the festive season, entering the cities outskirts I looking out of the window at the pollution, motorbikes and rubbish, here we go again! the bustle of the city seemed a world apart from the salty air and laid back vibes we were enjoying just hours ago. The tuk tuk vultures surround our bus as soon as we stop but we manage to dodge them and find somewhere to stay that seemed adequate although our room had a structural wall removed to make way for a en suite bathroom (which we quickly blocked and  had to switch anyway). Tired from the sea air and transport and missing the beach and the people just a little bit, we crashed out. The next morning we decided to indulge our immature ego and got a tuk tuk driver to ferry us to a military base where we sat down in front of a vast array of weaponry and where given a gun menu. The list included; rifles, handguns, AK-47s, M16s, machine gun, even grenades and rocket launchers. I had heard a myth from other travelers who had come to the same place that you could fire a RPG at a live cow if you so wished, I had to ask and got the reply yes if you have the money, pretty sick, although I didn't believe the travelers when they told me, the fact it seemed to be true didn't surprise me anymore, but don't worry there wasn't anyway I was going to shoot anything living. I settled for a AK-47 and a coconut as my combatant. After payment you are led into a long narrow room with a table and chair, the rifle is loaded and prepped single fire so you don't spray bullets wildly rambo style. As you squeeze the trigger the sound erupts and reverberates down the room, you feel a recoil punch your shoulder and a rush of air hit your face and see the flash from the end of the muzzle, quite a big flash, the hot empty cartridge ringing as they hit the floor just like Hollywood. It does get your adrenaline going, but I was amazed by how blazay you can be about it, right in that moment I was firing a killing machine, after a few practice shots I aligned the sights and pierced the coconut that exploded in white pulp. About half way through my round the military guy said I could set my weapon to semi-auto where I wasted the rest of my magazine. I stood up and watched Andy use his rounds, it was so surreal but seriously when will I ever be able to fire a AK-47 again. As we left we saw a Aussie gun-nut and his weapon; a Russian heavy machine gun being set up. I knew he was a gun-nut because he grinned and winked at us in childlike elation and started reeling of facts about the weapon and the cheapest place in Asia to fire a rifle. It pretty much vapourised the targets but was over in less than a minute, he told us he had spent $80 on that and seemed wildly satisfied, I was going to take one of my empty cartridges home as a souvenir but the Aussie said "don't let the airports catch you or they will fuckyou up". and that we shouldn't fly for at least 5 days because the gun residue is still on our skin. Food for thought.

Our next morning our tuk tuk driver brought us too the killing fields. It is such a strange place, but I wasn't sure what I was expecting, as you enter there is a large stupa in front of you, it has a door and glass inside but it is unclear what it holds from a distance. The rest of the area is grassland with trees, orchards and lake. Birds are chirping and dragonfly and butterfly dart and waft through the air, we arrived fairly early, it is such a peaceful place that contradicts it's violent past. On entry you are handed an audiotape that helps explain what you are looking at and the atrocities that occurred here, pretty much where you enter is where the trucks used to pull up unloading vast numbers of people ready to be executed meters away. They were tricked into believing that they were being moved to better homes. The Audiotape explained how the Khmer Rouge came to power, how Pol Pot wanted to revert the country to year zero, a communist utopia where 'the old people' the peasants only existed, how he needed to destroy all intellectuals or anyone who had ''soft hands''. If something similar happened in the UK one in four of the people you know would have been murdered by the end. Pol Pot recruited uneducated children and young men from the fields to become soldiers they had very little understanding of the outside world and after the conflicts in Vietnam and the US bombardment they were looking for a way out, one that the Khmer Rouge promised. Pol Pot became paranoid of losing control and so even the "old people" suffered, they were forced to work in the rice fields for impossible grain quoter and many of Pot's own troops where beheaded on hunches. Reading some of the Khmer Rouge's propoganda slogans you begin to realise that a whole generation of Cambodians didn't stand much chance once such a misguided and evil ideology infected minds;

"Better to arrest ten innocent people by mistake than free a single guilty party."

"Better to kill an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake."

"He who protests is an enemy; he who opposes is a corpse."


Around the killing fields there are numbered placards in the ground that you key into your audiotape. At one point the audio explains how the sugar plant is used for food and shelter in the country but the base of the plants stem has serrated edges like a saw and this was used to cut the throat of victims, Pol Pot had ordered that bullets not be used on the victims as bullets were expensive, instead they used blunt instruments like rusty farm tools. The sounds of screams were drowned out by music and diesel engines. Walking round the site I see more and more craters in the ground, scars in the earth, these are the mass graves. The rainfall has exposed a layer of clothing, bones and teeth. some of the things that have happened here are beyond words. The audiotape finally leads to the stupa, as I walked closer the contents became clear. It was a great totem pole of shelves, all displaying the skulls of victims, men woman and children, The shelves are full to the brim.

S21 stands for security prison 21, there where many like it but this one stood on the outskirts of the city and was used by the Khmer Rouge to in-prison, torture and execute mainly political prisoners, the cells are awful, prisoners were treated worse than animals, chained to a metal bed and tortured until they would sign false confessions often making they were affiliated with the CIA, on the walls of these dingy, dark, bloodstained cells there are photos of the state the prisoners were eventually discovered in, all dead and decomposing on the same bed that still stands there today. Inside some of the larger cells were mugshots of all the prisoners who had been processed through S21 some still looked defiant some looked as though they had given up hope. Out of all the people that entered S21 between 1975 and 1979 there where only ever seven survivors, we managed to meet one of them, a frail old man who was trying to sell his yet to be completed book on his experiences. Phnom Penh proved to be one of the most uncomfortable but thought-provoking places I have traveled to.