Phnom Penh, Cambodia

On our Asia vacation, we went from having non-stop fun in Thailand, to being mesmerized by the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat in Northern Cambodia to being stunned to reality in Phnom Penh.  In Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, we saw the realities of a nation in poverty and how the genocide of the 1970s has devastated them.  Over the two nights we stayed in Phnom Penh we experienced a lot emotionally.

When we arrived in Phnom Penh, we were welcomed into a lovely hotel room that is a converted apartment building.  It had two large bedrooms, a kitchen, private laundry, two bathrooms, a large family room, and beautiful views of the Tonle Sap River.  After dinner at a lovely restaurant, we were unfortunate enough to walk by many brothels with what looked like young teenagers sitting outside.  They looked comatose and bored, waiting to be purchased.  Reading later on about how young girls from the countryside are trafficked, victims of the abject poverty they grow up in, was sobering.

In the morning, we went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Prison (also known as prison S-21).  It was used during the Khmer Rouge genocide from 1975-1979, and was one of the Khmer Rouge's nearly 200 torture and execution centers around the country. During the genocide, nearly 2 million people were killed, or 25% of the population, which included nearly everyone with any education.  We didn't take any photos in S-21 because it was too depressing.  

Then, we went to Choeung Ek, known as the Killing Field and learned more about the Cambodian Genocide.  It was one of the execution fields where in total about 1,000,000 men, women, and children were brutally executed and buried in mass graves.  The stories in the audio guide were heart wrenching. The areas in the photos outside of the walkways are mass graves.

Executioners would bash the heads of children and infants belonging to people they had executed against this tree to kill them and then toss their bodies into the graves with their parents.  The rationale was they didn't want the children to grow up ready to seek revenge for losing their parents.  The brutality committed here was disturbing and horrifying.

We did have some 'fun' time in Phnom Penh as I had booked us on a Mekong River dinner cruise that day.  The evening consisted of a buffet dinner and a sunset cruise on the Tonle Sap and Mekong Rivers and we had a great time.

The city of Phnom Penh is built where the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers meet.  Interestingly, on the western side of the rivers was a crowded city, which was in part full of fancy buildings, and in part hovel.  Strangely, there is no bridge crossing the Mekong River here, so everything on the other side of the river is either wilderness or stilt houses built with skinny tree trunks and metal sheets for walls and roofs. It looked like the houses have electricity, but no running water.  Here is an example of some of the poverty on the opposite side of the Mekong River:

The below bridge crosses the Bassac River.  The suspension cables light up to show the Cambodian flag featuring Angkor Wat.  Cambodia is definitely a country rich in natural resources (forest and fresh water) and if the government could get its act together and run things properly, the country could flourish.  

The next morning, we toured the royal palace.  The architecture was pretty, and some of the landscaping was nice, but mostly it felt underwhelming.  

Below is the Silver Pagoda, the most famous structure in the complex.  No photos were allowed inside. It is known for the Emerald Buddha inside that is made of jade, and for real silver flooring.  The flooring was in really poor shape and the laminate flooring on top of the silver, where tourists walk, was falling apart everywhere.  We kept wondering why the many priceless artifacts inside the buildings were stored there without any air conditioning in the building, especially given the exorbitant fee ($20 pp) all the tourists paid to go there.  

The palace seemed to be a popular spot for children on field trips.

We got around Cambodia using tuk-tuks and an Uber-like app.  We had booked a tuk-tuk to take us from the Royal Palace back to our hotel, but when the tuk-tuk driver came to pick us up, he refused to honor the price we booked for in the app - he claimed five people were too many and he needed more money (this was the only time we had a problem with the app).  We weren't that far, so we took a walk instead which we wound up enjoying other than the heat.  After walking back to our hotel through a local fish and fruit market, we checked out of our hotel and went to the pier where we would get on a boat to Vietnam.