Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh

Yesterday, I returned to Phnom Penh from Sihanoukville. This is a little beachside town on the southern coast of Cambodia. I relaxed for 2 days on some excellent beaches and hopped on a scooter to explore a nice waterfall.

After returning to the capital yesterday, I decided to check out 2 places that most tourists visit when in Cambodia. First, I went to the Tuol Sleng Museum. In 1975, the genocidal Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces took over this high school and made it a detention compound and interrogation center. The aim of the Khmer Rouge was to rapidly create a communist state, to undergo its own "Great Leap Forward". Many intellectuals, people who knew foreigners and sometime people who simply wore glasses were rounded up form all over Cambodia and sent to prisons like this. Here they were interrogated, tortured, beaten senseless until they gave name of friends, family members and anyone else they knew to be traitors of the state.

After thorough torture, the prisoners were loaded into trucks and taken about 20km outside the city to The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. I made the very same trip on the back of a scooter after visiting the museum. Here the remains of 8985 people have been unearthed. There is a memorial pillar with many of the skulls and bones stacked inside. As I walked around the fields, there were many holes, some with signs saying things like: the remains of 420 people were found here or 166 bodies of women and children were buried here - without heads. As I walked, I looked down and was amazed to see bones still protruding from the dirt. I brushed my hands across them in disbelief and was further amazed to see clothing, worn by the victims on the day of their execution, sticking out from the dirt.

On a lighter note, I continue to meet very interesting people: A former Canadian Football player who now works on oil pipelines in western Canada, on vacation until the roads freeze again and he can drive on the ice; A young Japanese kid who has been bicycling through Japan, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. "I love to bike," he says; A former English teacher in Japan who has opened his own shop in Phnom Penh. His business: loading up peoples' ipods with albums for $.75 per. I got 10 bucks worth.

Keep checking back here, I will head to Northern Cambodia tomorrow then into Laos soon after.