FYI Phuket is pronounced Pooket. Thai's don't recognize 'ph' as the 'f' sound. Lol.
So Phnom Penh eh? Not a particularly nice city, though the food was good and dirt cheap. Cheap as in we've yet to spend over $10 total for two huge meals and 4 beers. It is American Dollars though. Also, they absolutely will NOT accept your American bills if there is even the slightest hairline tear in it. Not sure why, but it's really annoying.
I'll just get it over with and describe the Killing Fields now. I suppose a little background is in order: the Khmer (pronounced Keh-my) Rouge came to power in 1976 and proceeded to impose a strict agrarian Marxism on the country. In order to understand how these vicious turds gained power it's probably helpful to know more about French colonialism in Indochina and the Vietnam/American war, but you'll have to do that on your own time.
Anywho, the Khmer Rouge was lead by a vindictive son of a bitch known infamously as Pol Pol. Pol Pot's aims for Cambodia centred on starting from scratch... as in no cities, no money, no markets, no class systems, NOTHING. He wanted the country to be entirely communistic in nature by means of agricultural production. Every city was forcibly abandoned and the people of Cambodia were sentenced to either head to the countryside and begin their hard labour (for the good of the whole, of course), or sent to 're-education camps' if they seemed hesitant to spend their life in a rice paddy, or they were terminated as they were deemed immediate threats to the national policy.
'Threats' were doctors, teachers, architects, nurses, businessmen, landowners, basically anyone with an education, money, or who resided in the city was bad news bears for Pol Pot. As time progressed and large amounts of people died from overwork, starvation, and disease, Pol Pot did as all murderous tyrants do when they can't admit their failure... they blame everyone else. Tens of thousands of people were taken to prisons, most notably the S21 which was home to over 20,000 people during a span of less than 4 years. In prison they were interrogated, tortured, starved, and then killed. For the good of the whole.
This continued until 1979 and then joy of all joys Vietnam invaded them! That's another story though. We visited S21 (now a museum), which was once a high school but was converted into a prison where they threw together brick and mortar and barbed wire cells (maybe 2 feet by 4 feet if you're lucky). There were about 7 different types of torture devices that had been left there and were on display along with photos that the Khmer Rouge had taken of people succumbing to the devices. There are still many visible traces of blood on the floors.
The Khmer Rouge had also taken mugshots of all the prisoners, which were on display in one of the buildings. Some of the prisoners couldn't have been more than 3 years old (real threats to national security). You could become a prisoner simply because your husband had worked in a library, that made you a traitorous bourgeoisie pig. There was more than one mug shot of a women holding a baby.
After a person was thoroughly interrogated and tortured, they were taken to a killing site (of which there were hundreds all across the country). Again, most notably was the Killing Field just outside Phnom Penh where approximately 125 mass graves (one of those graves contained over 900 people) have been discovered, though they have only excavated 89 of the mass graves.
The area only seems to about the size of a school field as well. Today it's quite lovely looking with trees and grass, a lovely lei but with large circular ditches carved into them. There's a particular space where about 30 ditches (appr. 9x9 feet) are only about 2 feet from eachother. Looks like it's been cratered by small blasts, but those are just the unearthed graves. Doesn't feel like much when you're walking through there until you go into the small museum and you see the excavation photos and those ditches are piled high with bones.
They've labeled it all quite specifically as well. There's a tree where they would hang a loudspeaker which played music to drown out the sounds of people moaning and screaming, there's another tree named the Smashing Tree which is the manner and location of how the Khmer Rouge prevented babies from ever getting the opportunity to avenge their parents.
An estimated 1,700,000 people died in those 4 years.
I had even read books about this genocide years ago and it was still shocking to be there. So yeah, it's a bit of a cry fest. Mostly because it wasn't even that long ago. Apparently a significant percentage of the population suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Well no kidding, anyone over 45 would remember Pol Pot.
