Phnom Penh, take 1

On Saturday afternoon we arrived in bustling Phnom Penh and headed for the backpacker ghetto located lake-side by Boeng Kak. A street full of guest-houses, bars, and restuarants, it was quiet and cheap and very laid back: benefits of the off-season. The city itself is great, vibrant and sprawling, dotted with wats and filled with the ubiquitous tuk-tuks, and on the verge of reinventing itself, apparently, as the skeletons of skyscrapers are just beginning to rise.

Our first day, we had two main objectives. The first was for Ben and I to apply for our Laos visas, and the second was to meet our old Country Director who is now CD for the brand new Cambodia PC program. We accomplished both, but Ben, who had woken up with a headache and volatile stomach, started to run a fever and headed home to rest. Pierce, Hannah, and I continued on to Tuol Sleng Museum, the site of S-21, a highschool converted into the most brutal of the Khmer Rouge's prisons. According to a guide at the museum, of the more than 14,000 men, women, and children who passed through, only 7 are known to have survived, and all of them escaped from the killing fields, none from the prison itself.

Walking through this museum was crushing. The rooms full of photos and the barrage of information were overwhelming, and the halls and cells were haunting. The irony of the site was like an extra note of horror that hung in the air... the premier prison of a regime that tried to exterminate anyone educated still feels like a highschool: in the hallways, in the stairwells, and in the torture cells which still have chalkboards on their walls.

The following day, to complete the necessary tour, we went out to the Killing Fields. Ben was feeling better by this point, and I was the one feeling headachy and feverish. The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek are just one of hundreds of sites all over Cambodia where people were slaughtered and left in mass burials. At Choeung Ek there is a stupa made of skulls, though much of the shock factor had worn off for me after visiting Tuol Sleng the day before. Outside of that there are some placards noting where administrative buildings once stood, and walking paths through the small grassy enclosure. There were children picking flowers and offering to take photos, and benches under shady trees, and here and there are depressions in the ground with signs like "100 women and children, naked, found here" or "about 150 bodies found here, without their heads". I may have been sick walking into the site, but standing over those depressions with their little signs was nauseating.

On the way back into town we were dropped off at the Russian Market, a morass of bags and tshirts and fruits and vegetables, but finding it underwhelming as markets go, we killed the lunch hour with some food and an internet cafe. Pierce and Hannah continued on to the Palace, but I was feeling really ill by this point, and Ben was still a little woozy, so we headed back to the guesthouse for a rest, stopping only to pick up our Laos visas from the embassy.

Our last day in Phnom Penh we walked downtown, past Wat Phnom, the city's namesake of sorts, and strolled along the riverfront. We read for awhile in a cafe, checked out a nearby market, paused for Ben to get a haircut, and generally relaxed. That night we found a bar down our street which had Wii projected up on a big screen. We four, not having been home in almost 2 and a half years now, had never before experienced the wonderment. So that was fun too.