Entering Cambodia

Early in the morning of November 14, my adventure in Vietnam came to an end as we boarded a bus in Ho Chi Mihn City on our way to Phnom Penh. The bus was a full public bus, but it was a pretty pleasant ride and fairly comfortable. We rode for about two hours to the border, went through the border formalities, which were pretty painless because the bus company did most of the work, had lunch at a local shop and then continued through Cambodia. From the border, we rode another two hours to Phnom Penh.

After arriving in Phnom Penh, we took some time to clean up and then we went on a short walking tour in the area around our hotel. Phnom Penh has about 1.7 million people, so it’s a pretty big city, but our little tour was limited to the area around the Mekong River. The area around our hotel was pretty touristy, so that was a bit of a disappointment.

The group went to a bar to drink before dinner, but the place was a little upscale and not to my liking, so I ditched the group and went across the street to a bar that had much more of a dive feel to it. I was glad I did. It was happy hour, so the Angkor draft beers were only sixty cents a piece. (Money Note: Everybody uses U.S. currency here. The only time you see Cambodian currency is when people have to make change. About 1000 Cambodian Riel equals 1 U.S. quarter.) After having a few beers, I met back up with the group for dinner. I had prawns cooked in butter sauce. It was good, albeit a lot of work taking the heads and shells off of the prawns, and that was the opening day in Cambodia.

We got up early the next day for the touristy part of our first stop in Phnom Penh. We started off by visiting Ek Tuol Sleng, a.k.a. Security Prison 21, in which approximately 17,000 prisoners were held and tortured prior to being executed during the regime of Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Now, it is the site of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The buildings are a converted high school that were transformed into a prison for political enemies of Pol Pot, as well as various other enemies of the state, such as intellectuals. According to the stories we heard, wearing glasses was enough to qualify you for imprisonment during this period.

We visited cells where people were held and executed. In some of the cells, there were pictures of bodies that were found there when the Vietnamese liberated the prison in 1979. You could almost feel the ghosts of the victims in the cells.

Inside other rooms were pictures of the guards and hundreds of the victims because the atrocities at the site were extremely well memorialized. In addition, there were paintings by an artist that was one of the seven people still alive at the prison at the time of liberation. The paintings depict the tortures and executions that took place at the prison. Of course, most of the executions didn’t take place at the prison, but rather were held in the Killing Fields. Since I think I have enough evil for one posting, I think I’ll save the Killing Fields story for the next entry. Sleep well.