[ Zoom Map ]

Phnom Penh, Cambodia
11° 33' N 104° 54' E
Nov 14, 2006 10:13
Distance 0km

Choose another map, showing:

• Thailand
• South East Asia
• Asia
• Eurasia
• Eurasia, Africa & Pacific
• The World

Other entries in Phnom Penh

Lazy Morning, The Killing Fields, Market Shopping

Text written in: English

I had a little bit of trouble rousting myself out of bed in the morning.  I ate a tourist breakfast and then spent some time on skype talking to Laura.  She told me I should visit the Killing Fields and so when I left the internet cafe there was a taxi driver who overheard me and offered me a trip 15km for the going rate which was $5.  So I grabbed my camera and minutes later we were weaving through the crazy traffic of the Cambodian capitol.

 

We stopped some petrol and then road out of town.  The second half was a rough dirt and gravel road. There was some ditch construction going on.   There was only a few times that I had to close my eyes while riding on the back of the motorbike.

 

When we arrived the first thing I saw was the temple with the bones of thousands of people stacked up behind a tour of glass.  Because of seasonal flooding many of the bodies were partially exposed, so the remains were collected into a temple tower out of respect for the dead.   The tower had the bones of about 8,000 people in it.  When I approached it I was nervous to go inside because there was very little space inside that wasn’t occupied by the shelves of bones.   But a caretaker sensing my nervousness motioned me to come inside and pay my respects, so I took off my shoes and did so.

 

Outside and around the temple tower were a series of sunken mass graves with numbers on them. It was the high water season so the graves that were sometimes partially submerged were fully submerged, so I didn’t see a field of bones like I was worried about.  There was a tree with a bell that was used to make noise while they executed the prisoners.  This one was the largest killing field with 20,000 victims of political murder, but they indicated that the country was dotted with them and so many of the killings didn’t take place in an organized manner.   So confronted with that kind of evil, what can you do but pay respects to the dead and hope for a more peaceful world.  The whole sight was smaller and more modest than I was expecting.  I didn’t really spend so long there.  I felt like it was time to rejoin the celebration of the life among the living.

 

So I hopped back to Phnom Penh with my trusty motorbike driver and had him drop me off at a large marketplace in the center of town.  I thought I should do some shopping before I left town but I didn’t really spot anything I wanted.    I went to second crowded market center and didn’t find anything there either.    That took hours and tired me out pretty wonderfully.   Along the way I did find a computer store and a small microphone and bud earphone for $2.  I stopped for some street food. Even afterwards I wasn’t sure what I was eating, but it tasted all right.

 

At dusk I walked back to my guesthouse and enjoyed another tourist dinner and some easy living. I went to a travel agent and bought a ticket that would get me to Siem Reap, I don’t think I got such a great deal on that, but it was still cheap.

 

The bar attached to my hotel was a floating bar, all the bars and hotels were floating on the lake.   The bar next door had some live entertainment that I was listening to for a while.  Really it would have been a great place to just hang out, but I could feel the pull of Angkor Wat and my calendar showed that I was running out of tourist days.