THE RACHELEN PROJECT

We arrived in Phnom Penh early this morning on a surprisingly comfortable but cramped sleeper bus. You had a single bed between two, but it was private and not too bumpy. We slept relatively well until a couple decided to get up and have a loud conversation in the aisle at 5am.

The bus arrived at about 6am, and we got a tuk tuk to the hostel. It was closed and we had to bang on the door to wake up the staff. They let us leave our things but we couldn’t check in until midday, so we went for a walk to find some food.

Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia, and similarly to Bangkok it doesn’t have an obvious centre; however it’s not as built up as the Thai capital and it’s clearly still developing. Like everywhere else we’ve been so far, stray cats and dogs wander the streets and we’ve been advised to avoid eye contact with the dogs especially.

We booked a bus to Sihanoukeville for tomorrow morning, from where we’ll get a speed ferry to the island Koh Rong. We’ve only had one day in Phnom Penh so we did the Killing Fields tour this afternoon after a quick nap.

This started with a trip to one of 300 actual Killing Fields across Cambodia. It’s where prisoners were brought to be executed after imprisonment at S.21, a torture camp, during the Khmer Rouge regime. We did the tour backwards so I’ll start chronologically.

After the civil war, Khmer Rouge came into power under the leadership of Pol Pot. The goal was to eradicate the class system and start civilisation from scratch. They wanted to take the country from ‘new people’ – i.e. people from the city; doctors, lawyers, scholars – and give it back to ‘old people’ – people from the countryside. Anyone who was considered a new person was brought to secretive camps like S.21 and tortured into making false confessions, after which they were taken to one of the Killing Fields and executed under the pretense that they were being taken somewhere new. Some people were accused just because they wore glasses. S.21, the museum we visited, was once a school but was used by Khmer Rouge as a torture camp.

During this regime, from 1975-1979, it’s estimated that between 1.5 and 3 million people were killed. This is shocking considering Cambodia’s population of 8 million at the time; around 1 in 4 people died. It was shocking to learn about it and hard to understand why it doesn’t feature in education back home.

At the end of the museum is a memorial, which serves to remember those who died and as a reminder of what can never happen again.

After visiting the two sites, we visited the night market. This was different to the one in Siem Reap; it was used by locals as well as tourists and had a large food court where you could sit on mats to eat your tea. We had noodles with some strange meat things.

We’re now back at the hostel and about to go to sleep. Our bus leaves at 7am so it’ll be another day before we get a good night’s sleep.