Phnom Penh

Our final destination in Cambodia was the capitol Phnom Penh. As we were in a big city we had some shopping to do. We were both tired of Leila having to repair her best pair of trousers every time the temperature dropped so she bought some new jeans from a local fashion store and Ali hustled for swimming goggles at the Russian market - both quite an experience! We were there during Chinese New Year so we marked the occasion by having dinner in one of the city's many Chinese restaurants that was exceptionally entirely vegetarian. We had a great cheap feast but decided not to order the whole mock-meat suckling pig.

The next day we borrowed some bicycles from the hotel to explore the city. Our sightseeing included the National Museum and the underwhelming Royal Palace but these sights were really just a prelude to the intense visits that followed.

We visited the famous Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This was originally a high school but became a prison in 1975 when the classrooms were turned into cells and torture chambers during the rule of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge. In the late 1970s the communist regime enslaved, imprisoned and murdered enormous numbers of Cambodians when they emptied the cities and attempted to turn Cambodia into an primitive agricultural cooperative. In just four years, over one third of the population had been killed by overworking, starvation, disease or execution and anyone who dissented was sent to prisons such as Tuol Sleng. The Khmer Rouge photographed all the prisoners who were tortured or imprisoned there and these are displayed today on the prison walls, along with graphic images, the instruments of torture and skulls of some of the dead. Our guide was at the time a child forced to work in the rice fields during the period of Khmer Rouge control and he introduced us to one of the only seven prisoners to survive. Now in his eighties, his wife and children died in the prison but he now spends his time at the prison each day in an attempt to raise global awareness of the genocide and try to prevent it being repeated elsewhere.

After this we visited the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek, 14km out of the city and saw the mass graves where most of the prisoners at Tuol Sleng were executed. Many of the human remains have been excavated but fragments of clothes, bones and teeth are still making their way up to the surface. The memorial stupa houses and displays over 8000 victims' skulls, many cracked or with holes in where they were hammered to death so that the Khmer Rouge could preserve their expensive bullets. Both the Genocide Museum and Killing Fields were harrowing places especially given how this incomprehensibly barbaric period took place in relatively recent history and has had a profound effect on the people of today, many of whom lost family.