Phnom penh and the Mad Monkey

15/02: We had touched down in Cambodia and relieved at the fact that we weren't going to be airborne at ridiculous o'clock for a few months. We now had a choice of two currencies; either Riel (4000 to the US$) or the US dollar itself.
It was hot. I had wrapped up in the intensely air-conditioned airport in Bangkok, and quickly stripped off in the 34 degree heat of Phnom Penh.
Driving through you would never have believed this was a capital city. The main roads were tarmacked, and the rest were dirt roads. There was a mix of shacks, half-built building, dilapidated and abandoned French structures and every now and again a pristine and shiny construction.
We were really pleased with The Mad Monkey! It was in a lovely area, felt really safe, staff were really friendly and had loads of social events lined up and day tours. The staff were all local youngsters. The Mad Monkey prided itself on the fact that they could help the local community by offering jobs as opposed to filling the hostels with friends and acquaintances back home from Britain. They were lovely, couldn't do enough for you and smiley!
We opted for a half day tour on the Saturday as opposed to the full day; we paid $16 for our own tuk-tuk driver to take us to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum followed by an audio tour of Choeung Ek museum; these graveyards were given greater international acclaim by the Hollywood film, and better known as The Killing Fields.
The Friday was an uneventful day with roughly a 24hour viewing of the inside of our eyelids.
We woke up this morning feeling bright eyed and bushy-tailed, up before our 07:00 alarm. We had finally adjusted our body clocks! We showered and indulged in a huge breakfast of a fresh fruit salad with vanilla yoghurt, pancakes and maple syrup, freshly squeezed orange juice and two coffees (me) and a classic american brekki of pancakes, bacon and maple syrup for Blair.
We were set up for a big day of touring the most poignant places in the Capital. It was really hot, we met and shook hands with our tuk-tuk driver; a smiley local. You could sense the friendly competition between the tuk-tuk drivers (all of whom work for the Mad Monkey). As we drove off one of them yelled: "you're driver is crazy!" We all started laughing, and drove off through the streets of the city to Security Prison 21.
It was a short five minute drive. Our driver indicated he would wait for us opposite the museums gates. We paid a $2 entry fee each and picked up a pamphlet.
We walked into a courtyard with a red arrow indicating the beginning of our tour and where to go. Big information boards stood, starting us off on our teachings of the Khmer Rouge: their leaders; intentions; atrocities, torturing and genocide of a third of Cambodians; their own people.

The courtyard had fourteen white toom's, engraved with Khmer writing, we were about to learn that these were the last fourteen prisoners of Pol Pot's secret interrogation prison. They were murdered before the Khmer Rouge guards fled the converted high school from the Vietnamese. These neighbours who had been embroiled in their own war against the giant force of the U.S. came to the aid of the Cambodian people. The Khmer Rouge had ruled with a fanatical Communist ideal to purify the Cambodian race; the ideal being the uneducated prolitariat Cambodian; these were named the 'base'. Currency, postal system, businesses, the educated, free-thinkers, elderly, disabled and babies, children, and family members of any of these were murdered; the reasoning behind the murdering of the young or family members was to avoid revenge later on. This was bolstered by one of many slogan's of Pol Pot and repeated throughout the Khmer Rouge: "to kill the grass one must tear up the roots".

There were three blocks: A, B and C. Each had three floors. Each floor had a specific purpose, mainly the detention, torture and interrogation of people arrested by the Khmer Rouge. What was confusing is that many of the country folk and farmers of Cambodia had fled to the safety of the cities, from their rural hometowns, away from the fighting of the civil war between the Communists (backed by Sihanouk who was greatly loved and admired by the Cambodians), and the Government under Lon Nol , (who's coup overthrew King Sihanouk in 1970). The Cambodians also had endured the overspill of the Vietnamese war, and still to this day have a huge amount of undetonated bombs and land mines. 

The city's veil of safety soon uncovered the dictatorship of Pol Pot's regime. Notable inhabitants of Phnom Penh were arrested, the majority never knew the condition of their charge. They were then tortured by the most horrendous means until they had been broken physically, emotionally and mentally; most confessed to the crimes they had been charged, regardless whether true or not. Pol Pot's paranoia was focused on detecting which of his Cambodian people were infiltrated CIA or KGB agents.

S-21 claimed the lives of 17,000 prisoners. Six of which were foreigners, one Australian, two New Zealanders and three Americans. The Khmer Rouge were meticulous in their records; keeping photographs of prisoners once arrested and once deceased; taking names; heights; ages; occupations; names of family members, spouses and husbands/wives. These old classrooms, were converted into metre wide prisons, and now transformed once again into large spaces, but now of boards displaying hundreds upon hundreds of white photographs of arrested prisoners and again photographed once they had been murdered. Cabinets of skulls revealing causes of death (bullet holes, fractures to the skull indicating huge trauma to the head). Portraits animating the atrocities and methods of torture were the closest thing I could ever describe as the true work of evil. It is one thing to read of history's immoralities, but to see it portrayed in the ways we did today made me truly understand the words of an aesthetic philosopher who said: "to say that a picture paints a thousand words is a fallacy; a picture exercises an entirely different currency".

Accounts of the survivors, Khmer rouge guards and family members of the deceased were protected and translated in plastic folders. I soaked up every word of every board, folder and pamphlet, much to Blair's discomfort of the intense heat. I was immersed in a world of horror. The historic enthusiast in me came to the forefront.
Once we had finished and guzzled some much needed water, we walked in a daze back to the tuk-tuk and our smiling driver.
We drove thirty minutes out of the city to Choeung Ek for our tour of the Killing Fields. With an entrance fee of $5 each, we were given an audio pack, which we controlled as we walked around, posts indicated the number of the talk we were to listen to.
One hundred metres from the entrance stood a beautiful  monumental tribute to the victims of the killing fields under the Khmer Rouge. Before its occupation it had been a Chinese cemetery. The audio tour was given by a survivor of the Khmer Rouge Occupation; a man who had sought refuge in the Cambodian jungles, but had returned to discover only half of his family had survived.

Pieces of cloth, bone and teeth were still surfacing, even on the designated walkways. The harrowing realisation that we were treading on remains was indescribable.

We were instructed to walk to small depressions in the earth; we were told that these were pits where hundreds of people had been thrown to be buried or left to die. Sheds of the chemical DDT was used with dual effect: firstly to extinguish the smell; secondly to kill any of the victims that were still alive. We were shown a large tree where babies were held by their lags and were smashed against its stem. Another tree, a sugar palm, was distinguished as having incredibly sharp and hard properties, such that they were used to slit the throats of victims;  bullets were too expensive. Another of Pol Pot's slogans were quoted to us: "to win you is not a gain,to lose you is not a loss" as well as "Better to execute an innocent by mistake than spare an enemy by mistake". This only bolstered his obsession to exterminate any one believed to be an enemy of the Khmer Rouge regime.

At the end of the tour we were invited to enter the towering memorial. Inside lay seventeen shelves of scientifically sectioned skulls, jaws and teeth of victims. It was explained that caretakers circle the grounds monthly to collect newly resurfaced artifacts. The monument was not large enough to encase all that was discovered.

The last stop was a small museum. The most compelling part for me was the sentences passed on the five superior leader after Pol Pot died under only a years house arrest in 1998. The head of security in S-21, under the alias Duch was sentenced 35 years imprisonment for war crimes, including genocide. This was a minor sentence in a country where possession of drugs renders a sentence of life imprisonment. He was the only senior member of the Khmer Rouge to admit to and acknowledge the atrocities.
Duch was taken to the killing fields and when he was shown the tree used to brutally murder babies and young children he knelt at its roots and wept. This reaction demonstrated how the most senior members of the Khmer Rouge seemed oblivious to the heinous methods their minions were carrying out. The tree now is a shrine for the lives this tree had been used to execute. It was, and still is, covered in wrist bands and bracelets of the thousands of visitors; a gift to the children of the killing fields.
Our driver was waiting for us outside. We drove away from the Killing Fields, the images of what we had seen vivid in our minds. Another difficult thought I found difficult to process fully was that this Holocaust had occurred during the adult lives of our parents and only a decade before we were born.
The paradoxical character of Cambodia could not have been illustrated greater than our next scene. Not even half a kilometer from the killing fields - the deep scar on Cambodia's landscape - was a shooting range. Tourists are offered these tours at every hostel and guest house and viewed as very profitable. You can pay as little as $20 and have your choice of weapon, including an AK-47. For $300 you can shoot a bazooka, throw grenades and even use livestock as targets. A friend told me, if he wished, he could bazooka a cow.
That evening Blair wasn't feeling too great. We cashed in cork coins painted with monkey's faces on them for two free beers. We sat and drank them at the open air bar, two floors up and looked over Phnom Penh. Blair headed up to bed so I stayed, and  was  made the Mad Monkeys own signature cocktail: the love hug. Every time I finished and placed the glass down a new one appeared.
I ams now n my third , enjoying the music and have finished the blog for the day :-)

Up relatively early today. Had another brilliant breakfast before we were taken by tuk-tuk to our bus. We were heading to our second destination in Cambodia: Jasmine Valley. Blair had pre-booked room number seven a few nights ago to avoid disappointment; there is limited availability, a very popular place in Keep.