Cambodia Part 2 : Phnom Penh

Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Monument.

After the general awesomeness of Siem Reap, wherever I went next was always going to have a hard time living up to it, and to be honest, Phnom Penh, which I reach after another day long bus trip, doesn't make a great first impression.  My hotel is near a busy, and loud, construction site, and walking through the city is a hectic experience at best.  There is no traffic control here, and Cambodians share with Indians the great idea of having an unofficial extra lane next to the edge of the road, mainly for mopeds, going against the flow of traffic.  This all makes crossing the road a whole lot of fun.  Then there is the way that here in Phnom Penh, being outside is to be continually assailed from all sides by people trying to sell you things, mostly tuktuk drivers and motorcycle taxis, but I also get men trying to hawk fake rolex watches, kids offering string (one dollar), and the tuktuk guys offer other things, 'mariwanna', or indeed 'ladies'.  A sign inside my hotel room gravely informs me that sex with children is a crime.  Hmmm.

The Ton Le Sap / Mekong confluence is directly behind me.

Still it's not all bad, there are a couple of broad, paved avenues near my hotel, leading to the Independence Monument (every former colony has to have one), these are good to wander along, quiet during the day, at night they're crowded with locals, groups playing football or some kind of 'foot badminton', not to mention the very popular 'sandal boules', and there are also lots of monks sitting and chatting.  Plenty of temples here of course, all gaudily painted in gold and silver, one near the Royal Palace is lit up like a christmas tree at night too.  There's a nice riverside walk too, the Ton Le Sap river, much wider here than back in Siem Reap, meets the Mekong here, and you can stroll for a mile or so up from the confluence.  Nice to see the Mekong again, many miles downstream from where I last saw it in Vientiane - I am struck by the idea of boating down it all the way from Huay Xai to here, or even through Viet Nam to the South China Sea - think there may be issues with border police though.

Inside the Royal Palace complex.

Back to the Royal Palace for a look inside - again somewhat expensive at $10.50 for a ticket.  It does seem that everything here, with the exception of beer, is surprisingly pricey, I guess the weakness of the pound against the dollar does not help.  Turns out you don't get into the palace itself for your money, rather there are a couple of substantial walled gardens containing, oh yes, temples, plus a large number of stupas, which I gather contain the cremated remains of successive members of the royal family.  Cambodia seems to be, like Thailand, staunchly monarchist these days, there are pictures of the king everywhere - not too surprising given that their period without a royal head of state turned out... badly.  Well, it's interesting enough here, the huge collection of gold and silver Buddha statues inside one of the temples is impressive, and I'm struck by the mural that runs all around one of the walled gardens, depicting various mythological scenes - for instance, giant demon with a mouthful of sword wielding monkeys, next to a scene of a similar giant demon, again with the monkeys, but this time another giant, this one with many hands all holding swords, is cutting him to pieces.  Of an evening, I enjoy that cheap beer, and more local food - seems the spicy beef with rice thing I had in Poipet is 'Lok Lak', my favourite though is Khmer speciality 'Amok', a yellow curry with coconut and, I think, cabbage, is most tasty.

Schoolrooms converted into a cell block.

The memory I will take away from Phnom Penh though, is rather a grim one, after spending a rather harrowing few hours at the former S21 prison, converted from a high school by the Khmer Rouge back in the seventies.  I find myself unable to skip any part of the audio guide, stories from some of the handful of prisoners who survived out of the 20,000 who passed through here, details of what happened in each room I pass through, testimony from former guards and even the camp commandant.  It is utterly horrifying, somehow more so in that this was going on in my own lifetime, with perhaps the most poignant thing being the sheer absurdity of Pol Pot's regime.  They abandoned modern, urban civilisation, driving people out of cities to communal farms, believing this would somehow create a communist utopia - of course the result was mass famine, some two million people died in all.  Intellectuals were rounded up and brought to prisons like this, hundreds of them around the country - although the Khmer Rouge leaders were themselves university educated, having picked up revolutionary communist ideas in Paris.  Here in the prison you can see the evidence of the regime's disdain for any kind of skill or education, the shoddy brickwork used to convert classrooms into cells, even the torture equipment converted from heavy wooden furniture... and of course, in the stories of the Kafkaesque madness that went on here, people tortured for weeks before an acceptable confession was extracted, said confession generally being entirely fictitious, at which point they were taken directly to the infamous killing fields.  I find myself looking with a new appreciation at the 'Cambodia-Vietnam Friendship Monument' near my hotel - I guess these people have reason to thank the Vietnamese, who invaded in 1979, driving the Khmer Rouge from power.

Memorial to the victims.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.