Most of us in the West ~ particularly Americans, think of Cambodia through the lens of the Vietnam War and the 1984 movie “The Killing Fields”. We found Cambodia to be much more than this recent history.
When you don’t know anything about a country a day-long tour of its capital city can be very helpful.
Before lunch, our guide Sam chauffeured us to;
- The Independence Monument built in 1958 to commemorate Cambodia’s independence from France ~ a reminder that Cambodia was colonized not so long ago.
- The Royal Palace/Temple complex, finished in the late 1900s when the current ruling family decided to move their palace to this location.
- Wat Phnom Daun Penh, built on the only hill in Phnom Penh is the original namesake of the city. This temple is dedicated to four bronze Buddha statues caught in the roots of a tree that floated past this site. A woman name Daun Penh spied the tree and discovered the statues when they hauled it up out of the river. Eventually there was a temple built around these statues and today this temple is the site of much praying and praise of grandmothers, where a ripe banana is eaten for good luck.
- A brief visit to the small but highly educational National Museum of Cambodia. The museum has a lot of artifacts in it’s collections, but not enough room to display more than 10% at any given time. A 30 minute tour of statues and art was enough to cover their current display.
After lunch came the hard part ~ a truly heart wrenching visit to the actual Khmer Rouge killing fields at Choeung Ek with a museum and memorial, then finally to the Tuol Sleng detention center in Phnom Penh city. People were arrested and tortured for real or made up confessions at the detention center around the corner from our hotel. If you were arrested and sent to the detention center you were eventually transferred to Choeung Ek to be “eliminated”. The former orchard, rice fields and detention center have gruesome reminders of the more than 3 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. Graphic photos hang in the detention cells, while there are still bones coming to the surface at mass grave sites. The museum on the grounds of the killing fields “camp” does not sugarcoat the numerous ways people were murdered by the Pol Pot regime.
Touring the killing fields sites were sobering to say the least, but helped us get a small sense of the experience of the Cambodian civil war and its aftermath in Phnom Penh.
We didn’t feel comfortable taking pictures of these places, so all of our pictures from PP are either from our tour guide. We’ll just put a music video here to round out our media in this post.
Our experience in Phnom Penh gave us a good intro to Cambodia, but we were honestly glad to go when it was time. Phnom Penh felt like a city with loads of influences from its many lives as a disputed city but one without a clear identity. Phnom Penh is definitely a city with some growing pains ~ traffic, overcrowding and a smelly ditch in front of our hotel that even made this country girl wrinkle her nose.
Would we live here ~ no. Would visit again ~ as a transit hub to another place yes but otherwise nope.
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