Phnom Penh
CAMBODIA
Phnom Penh and S21
By AARON
Monday, August 1, 2011
So since Lyndi had already been to Cambodia years ago, we decided to split up for a week while I went there and in the meantime, Lyndi would torture herself by laying around all day on a tropical island. So off to Phnom Penh I went and after crossing into Cambodia I soon found myself in the riverside town of Phnom Penh.
I checked in to Fancy Guesthouse and boy was it fancy! For $12 I got a hotel room with air conditioning, cable TV and a nice hot shower. After chatting with the friendly owner for a bit, I went for a walk along the riverside and got some food at the local food market. Here’s something strange I noticed – on the riverside there are random groups of kids who will all line up (think of “the Electric Slide”) and do a dance routine. They will do this for quite a while and I’m not sure why – there’s no tip bucket, and as far as I can tell, they’re not practicing for anything as they seem to have the routine all figured out. Regardless, it attracts a lot of onlookers, both foreign and domestic and it does at least provide some entertainment for a couple of minutes for those lone travelers like me.
Next morning I walked to Tuol Sleng, or the S21 Museum, which was a former-school-turned-prison when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge was a radical Communist group that wanted to form a society where everyone was equal, and no one was special. Sounded good at first, until they started exiling people in the cities to go work the land in the countryside, and anyone who was considered intelligent was immediately killed. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, you name it, were put to death – even wearing glasses was punishable by death as they were a sign of intelligence.
S21 came to being when the Khmer Rouge needed a place inside of the city to “interrogate” those who they thought were either working for the KGB or CIA. In fact, every prisoner sent there was asked the same question: “Are you working for the KGB or the CIA?”.
The place itself is situated in the city, and even as you stand in the main courtyard, it’s hard to imagine this as a prison, but once you start walking inside the former classrooms and see bloodstains on the walls, and pictures of interrogated prisoners, you start to get a really sick feeling in your stomach.
When Vietnamese soldiers found the prison after defeating the Khmer Rouge, they pretty much kept the place as it was found, and that simplicity, along with the pictures and testimonies of former prisoners really gives you a sense of what it was like for these men, women and even children who were sent here.
After a couple of hours at S21, I walked back to the riverside, stopping at the imperial palace and the national museum along the way. Not being a huge museum fan like Lyndi, I settled for some pictures of the outside of the museum instead, and then used the would-be $3 entry fee I saved to buy a couple of Big Paos. Oh yeah.
Since Cambodia in July and August is like living in an oven, I headed back to Fancy Guesthouse and my a/c room for a while before heading out that night for happy hour. That night I found a cool rooftop bar that had beers for one dollar, but I had to leave because I couldn’t stand the two kids next to me complaining to their dad that “this is boring” and “this place sucks” as they punched away on their separate iPads and played video games.
I wrapped up my last night in Phnom Penh at a nice street-side bar and had some good conversation with a couple of other travelers before calling it a night and preparing for my 6 hour bus ride the next day to Siem Reap.
