This morning we met with one of the students from the bunong people in son monoram who moved to Phnom Penh a couple of years ago to go to university. He got us a "deal" with a tuk tuk driver to drive us around through the morning for 15 dollars....I'm not sure it was such a great deal but I suppose it is the city and it saved us from walking every where like we usually do. It was a comfortable ride as well.
We went to wat phnom first which is a Buddhist temple built in the 14th century. It's the tallest religious structure in the city and is a nice looking building very similar to most other Buddhist temples. There seems to be 2 stories how it came to be built, one involves a woman who found some Buddha statues and built a shrine to put them in and protect them. It was built on and around and eventually became what it is today. The other account is that one of the kings from around that time moved from angkor and built the new capital in Phnom Penh including the temple. One of the stupors apparently contains the kings ashes. I'm not sure which is true but those are the ideas around it. We spoke to Bunley as we walked around about his home life and his move to the city. We spoke about different foods and the differences between the Khmer and his people the bunong. Apparently they speak completely different languages so I think we'd best conserve our language learning for the bunong as that's where we will be living!
We then went to the national museum which I found really interesting and could have easily spent a lot longer there but I don't think Liam or Bunley found it anywhere near as interesting. It has thousands of statues, sculptures, artefacts from the prehistoric period, Angkor period and so forth... so really old! All in really good condition as well. It's quite big on the promotion of Khmer culture, teaching the younger generation to have a sense of pride, identity and continue the cambodian culture. I enjoyed looking at all the expressions on the faces of the stone sculptures because if you look really closely you start to get an idea of which century they're from depending on how they look. There were tonnes of impressive stuff, all really old which is hard to explain unless you see it I suppose. They also had a lot of information on angkor wat which is quite useful because its given us a bit if an idea about it before we head up there in a couple of weeks.
On the way to the next place we asked Bunley how often he gets to go home, by the sounds of it he goes home quite often due to ceremonies and parties they have regularlyl he isn't religious (he says less and less young people are), but his parents are animistic as are a lot of other bunong people. He's going home in a few days time because the water festival begins in the city and it gets very busy. He was at last years festival and told us of how about 300 people died...maybe others have heard about it and we're very ignorant of world affairs but we didn't know about it. The big bridge collapsed with lots of people on it and people died from falling and also from being crushed by the stampede. He said he had been there at the time, and in his words he only survived because he is "strong" and had to flee for safety despite all the people around him crying for help and grabbing him. It sounded terrible!
And to stay on the same track of terrible things we then arrived at the genocide museum. It used to be a high school until the Khmer Rouge gained power in 1975 and turned it into a prison and interrogation unit. We knew about the genocide but didn't know any details at all including the reasons behind it, who was involved and what happened. Before going off on a long winded description I had best explain to anybody reading this the details of the regime. The Khmer Rouge came into power at a time that was already very fragile due to various political struggles since ww2 and the Vietnam war. Once they were in power, within days they had evacuated everybody from the city of Phnom Penh to neighbouring countryside provinces to work as slaves, even the children and elderly. They said that everybody should be equal, there would be no education and no upper class jobs, that it would be a country of agriculture and farming. The whole country was worked half to death, many many people died from being over worked and many more from disease and malnutrition in the years they were in power. Within a short time even the leader became suspicious of his own people and began killing them off too. An estimated 2 million people died in those 3 years. When the city was evacuated it was like a ghost city. Because they had scrapped education they then turned several places like schools into prisons.
The one we went to held an estimated 20,000 people in the time it was open and held up to 1500 prisoners at any one time. People would be arrested and taken to the prison where they would be tortured to such an extent that they would "confess" to what they were accused of. They would also name "associates" who would then also be arrested and the same happen all over again. If one person was arrested, the whole family would go down with them. Torture included everything you can imagine, ill leave that up to you to think about and I can guess they more than likely did it so I won't go into detail. We began our walk around at one of the classroom blocks that had been converted. All of the classrooms of all 3 floors of all 3 buildings had been changed into cell blocks. Some rooms had brick cells erected for individual cells that were really small with shackles cemented to the floor. Others were the same but with wood. Others were for mass detention so there would be hundreds in the same room all shackled together by metal bars to their ankles. The bottom floor of the first block we went into had around 15 rooms, all of which had been used for individual torture and detaining. You walked into the room and there was a metal bed in the middle with a range of torture instruments there. The floors had loads of black stains on, and at the side of the room there was a single black and white photograph of a man lying on the bed in an awful beaten state after torture with pools of blood under the bed and on the floor. It was horrible....and the same thing in every single room. Each new room drilled it into you more and more each time what had happened there.
When the prison was taken over and the reign of the Khmer Rouge ended, they fled from the prison very quickly and left behind thousands of pieces of documentation shoeing what they had been up to. There were rooms and rooms filled with thousands of photographs of people with their numbers, they had biographies of all of the prisoners and signed "confessions". It wasn't just cambodian people, it also happened to foreigners including one British man who was captured when sailing with some friends and in his written confession he confessed to being a member of the CIA since a teenager which is family, obviously, say is ludicrous. They still havnt located his remains.
You went through the rooms seeing all the photographs of the prisoners, it was like the ones at the concentration camps. One room had a massive cabinet of clothes from the prisoners both adult and children's, and dozens of human skulls. They originally buried the dead in the prison but when those mass graves got full they then started tasking them to a place 15 km away to brutally murder, chop up and put in mass graves, men women and children. We don't have time to go there today but will another day. After looking around we were on our way out when we were met by an elderly gentleman who was one of the 7 people left alive in the prison when it fell. Liam was moved by him and bought his book, which he signed. He's one of 3 now who are still alive to tell the tale. We tried to see the royal palace but it was closed to the public due to the recent death of the king so had to give that a miss.
After returning to the hotel and left alone we went out in search of a well known shop and bakery run by an organisation getting girls out of prostitution and into jobs. But we got there and it was closed! Liam then had a hair cut and a shave, we wandered around trying to find me some trousers and a tshirt as mine are a bit dire now but to no avail. After food we went back and packed up ready for the early start tomorrow
