We are only in Phnom Penh for 2 nights and one full day before we fly to Vietnam and today our guide took us on full tour.
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| The Grand Palace |
This started in the city at the Grand Palace. This is a compound in the centre of the city with many beautiful buildings and well-manicured gardens where the king of Cambodia lives; it's quite a contrast to the poverty you can see all around in the streets of Phnom Penh.
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| Sally at The National Museum |
Next we visited the National Museum nearby. This is filled with artifacts from many of the ancient temples and other archeological sites around Cambodia, including many from the sites we have already visited in the Angkor area.
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| S-21Genocide Museum |
After a visit to a pagoda (a buddhist temple) on a hill in the city we were taken to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, also know as S-21. This was once a High School which was converted to a prison and interrogation centre by the Khmer Rouge. 17000 people, mostly innocent, were held there between 1975 and 1979 to be interrogated, tortured and killed; of these only a handful survived.
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| Buddhist stupa at the Killing Fields |
From there we went 15km out of the city to Choeung Ek Extermination Centre, one of the hundreds of Killing Fields around Cambodia, now kept as a memorial. People were brought here by truck to be killed with metal bars, bamboo clubs, farming tools or razor sharp palm fronds. We saw many mass graves, and sites where adults, children and babies were killed in the most barbaric ways. We also went to the buddhist stupa, containing 5000 human skulls, many shattered or broken, in the centre of the site. It was a chilling and thought-provoking experience. Our guide here, like our guide in Siem Reap, had lost his father at this time - simply for having a university degree.
We finished our tour with a visit to the Russian Market, a huge bustling market selling ever type of Cambodian product including food, jewellery, clothes, DVDs etc.
In the evening we used the same tuk tuk driver to take us to Friends restaurant; a project set up to train street people to cook and work in catering and get them jobs. All the food we've had in Cambodia has been really good, and our meal here was no exception.
As we were finishing our meal, there was very loud crash of thunder and the skies opened. People were waiting in the doorway of the restaurant for the torrential rain to ease, watching the lightening outside. This was the first real rain we've seen in since we've been in Asia, up to now it's been mostly sunny and very hot - over 30C every day. We looked out and we could see our tuk tuk man waiting - so we made a break for it. Fortunately the tuk tuk had roll-down plastic sides, so we arrived at the hotel damp, rather than soaking wet.
looks as though you are both having a good time out there,much warmer than we are back home.
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