I would be lying if I said that Rich and I were looking forward to the eight hour bus journey from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. Our experience thus far of road users in Cambodia showed that it was going to be anything but a peaceful and relaxing journey. The fact it would take us eight hours to travel one hundred and thirty five miles showed that the drive would not be easy.
Our initial impressions once on the bus weren’t too bad. There were air vents for the air conditioning, window curtains to keep the strong sun at bay, comfortable enough seats, wifi on board and a complimentary bottle of water and a breakfast snack for each passenger. The Mekong Express bus company looked pretty good to us and all for only thirteen dollars each!
“No one seems to stand still in Cambodia, everything is constantly in a state of flux.”
Then we started moving. Given that it took all of two seconds for the driver to use his horn (this is Cambodia afterall), we instantly realised that the horn was sounding inside the bus! Who puts a horn inside a vehicle?! Being sat on the front row, to the right hand side of the driver, we had to do something to drown out the sound of the horn and the asian pop music playing throughout the bus too.
Thank goodness we brought a laptop with us travelling! We then spent eight hours watching movies and re-runs of Neighbours. Rich managed to find archived episodes of Neighbours online so he literally won’t miss an episode of his favourite TV show whilst we are travelling now!
Amidst the movies and Neighbours re-runs we did occasionally look out of the windows. We saw road works in progress with health and safety efforts no where to be seen. Lorrys manoeuvring backwards and forwards across a road that had no traffic management to ensure vehicles safely passed from either side. It was every vehicle for itself and in Cambodia nothing stops until it has to, so our bus ploughed straight into any available space it could to squeeze through the road works as quickly as possible.
We saw streets and streets of markets by the side of the road with parasols covering them from the beating sun and people carrying more stuff than you would ever think possible on motorbikes, weaving their way through the traffic. No one seems to stand still in Cambodia, everything is constantly in a state of flux.
Arriving in Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, we realised that this was a much more developed place than Siem Reap. It certainly felt like the capital city with the tall office buildings, wide roads and nice cars driving around. I saw three Range Rover Evoques on our way to the bus station alone. When we eventually made it to our hotel we were exhausted, it seems watching back to back episodes of Neighbours is actually rather tiring!
After a quick rest we headed out to stretch our legs by visiting Wat Phnom temple at the end of our road and to find more tasty Cambodian street food! After our little walk we found a street food seller, we knew he was good because we had to wait ten minutes while he cooked dinner for all the local people working in the shops around him. We realised that he spoke no English and so resorted to seeing one of the meals that he made, pointing at it and then holding two fingers up to indicate that we wanted two of them.
We had no idea if he understood us or not, so we waited and waited while he cooked food and ran around delivering it to people up and down the street. Eventually he looked at us and then started cooking…it was worth the wait. We had found the best street food yet! Noodles, vegetables and sweet chilli sauce topped off with a fried egg. Delicious. We liked Phnom Penh already.
The following day we were picked up at eight o’clock by our tuk tuk driver who drove us forty five minutes out of the city to Choeung Ek, a place known as The Killing Field. Before coming travelling neither Rich or I had heard of the terrible atrocities inflicted on the Cambodian people by their ruler Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime. When talking to fellow backpackers about our travel plans to Cambodia, we soon realised that there was a very sad and relatively recent history of Cambodia that we had to understand more of.
With a population of around eight million people at the time, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime killed more than one in every four of their fellow Cambodians between the years of nineteen seventy five and nineteen seventy nine. It is thought that three million people were brutally and savagely murdered under the dictatorship of Pol Pot.
With an ideal of wanting to run an agrarian socialist state that gave back to the workers and didn’t profit intellectuals, Pol Pot (despite being an educated man himself) set about dispelling everyone from cities and moving them to collective farms and forced labour projects around the country.
“Where the graves have not been exhumed we could see parts of bones, teeth and pieces of clothing breaking through the surface of the soil.”
Working conditions were tough with long hours and such low food allowances that people literally starved to death. If anyone was caught stealing food, they were sentenced to death. It was a no win situation. In order to ensure there was no rebellion against his regime, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed those who were educated and in professional occupations. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, politicians, monks, teachers and those who wore glasses were all targeted and put into prisons.
There they were tortured until they signed false confessions about committing a crime. Truck loads of prisoners who had signed confessions were then transported to one of over three hundred Killing Fields around Cambodia to be executed. The workers in the communal farms knew nothing of the horrors that took place in The Killing Fields or that they even existed until they found them after nineteen seventy nine.
For Rich and I to be standing on land that forty years earlier saw the worst side of humanity was unsettling to say the least. However, when we visited early in the morning there were few people there and the big tour groups were yet to be seen. We listened to our audio tours in quiet contemplation as we were told about how life and death took place there.
There were one hundred and twenty nine communal graves at Choeung Ek and it is estimated that seventeen thousand prisoners from S-21 prison in Phnom Penh were executed and buried there. Eighty six of the one hundred and twenty nine graves have been exhumed and the bones recovered have been put on display in the memorial stupa, which was built as a tribute to those that died there.
Where the graves have not been exhumed we could see parts of bones, teeth and pieces of clothing breaking through the surface of the soil. Every time rain falls more and more pieces become visible as the soil erodes away.
“Choeung Ek was hell on earth.”
Fences now mark the areas where mass graves were found and friendship bracelets are left on them by visitors in memory of those who were found there. Buildings that once stood at the site no longer exist, having been demolished as soon as Cambodia was freed from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime.
Buildings housed the prisoners before they were taken to their graves, the tools used to kill people (hoes, hammers, shovels and knives) and chemicals used to spray on the bodies before they were buried to try and reduce the smell emitted when they decomposed.
The only things standing that could be recognised from the time were two trees that were very significant at Choeung Ek. The first was used to hang speakers from and during the night music was played to cover the sounds made by those being executed. No gunfire was used, bullets were too precious and so people were battered to death. The second was a tree which when discovered was covered in blood, hair and brains. This had been used to kill children, with a grave to the side where their bodies were then thrown. It gives me chills thinking about children’s heads being swung against the tree. Choeung Ek was hell on earth.
Despite the fact we were standing somewhere that had witnessed such horrors, in the present day it felt like a very different place from all those years ago. Away from the hustle and bustle of the city it was peaceful and quiet. Green leaves filled the branches of trees, butterflies flew around us and we could hear the happy melody of birdsong. There were no frills or tacky tourist stands, the site was sectioned off respectfully and enabled us to understand exactly what happened there. It was truly a special place to visit.
Leaving The Killing Field in our tuk tuk our mood was obviously somber, however we had one more place to visit which showed us another part of the story. The Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh was established in the S-21 prison which people were transported from when being taken to The Killing Field.
“Out of around twenty thousand prisoners that entered S-21, seven are known to have survived.”
A former school which was closed by Pol Pot (all schools and universities were closed down and education banned under his regime), The Genocide Museum is made up of four distinct buildings. School rooms were changed to prison cells, the outside gym equipment changed into torture apparatus and where school children could once lean out over walls to see the central courtyard below, barbed wire stood.
Walking through each building we saw hundreds of photos. These were the head shots of the prisoners that were catalogued as they entered the prison and were truly haunting. They had no idea of the terrible, short future ahead of them as they stood straight for the camera. By the third building there were photos of prisoners when they were found dead at the time the prison was rescued from the regime. I could barely look at them.
I had to leave the third building half way through and couldn’t face seeing what was in the fourth. I had seen enough and will never forget what we learned that morning in Phnom Penh. It still astonishes me that this happened in a world less than five years before I was born. Out of around twenty thousand prisoners that entered S-21, seven are known to have survived.
It’s not possible to ‘lift the mood’ after such a morning, so we settled for a quiet lunch and stroll around Phnom Penh and the riverside. We walked around the Royal Palace and with exquisite grounds and ornate palace buildings on display it was as grand as you would expect a palace to be. Our afternoon could not have been more different to our morning.
We enjoyed our last dinner in Cambodia eating our favourite food, noodles from the street food vendors, before we packed our bags ready for an early start and the beginning of our travels to Vietnam. Whilst our day in Phnom Penh was not jolly or filled with fun, it made us fall in love with the country even more seeing how they are overcoming such recent atrocities.
We only spent the briefest of time in Cambodia and we know there is a lot more to see, we barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer. We saw a lot of greatness in the country and its people but it still faces challenges.
While sitting in the airport waiting for our flight we met Jason Holbeche, co-founder of the charity The Misson Worldwide. We learned that Cambodia is a country that battles with corruption, human trafficking and the exploitation of children within the sex industry.
Unlike forty years ago there are charities and organisations like The Mission Worldwide that are working in the country to help Cambodians stay clear of abuse and exploitation and it’s people looking out for other people, no matter what ethnicity, race or religion that will help make our world a better place to live.
As we left Cambodia, we were resolute to remember that everyone can do small things to help make the world a better place. I hope this is something we never forget and are able to demonstrate in our daily lives going forward.
Lambs on the loose 
What an experience you had and eye opener for you.
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