Pnom Penh

A chaotic assault on the senses is the best way to describe the capital of Cambodia, sights and smells and not to forget the unrelenting heat which is ever present even when dark.



Pit our tuk-tuk guide for the day turns up as arranged and we set off to discover what Pnom Penh has to offer.

We feel that we couldn’t come to Cambodia without seeing some of the khmer Rouge genocide sites that we had heard about from our teenage years on the TV, and here at the capital are probably some of the biggest. This makes for some pretty grim reading so be warned.


We start with the Tuol Sleng prison or S.O. (security office) 21 which has now been turned into a genocide museum.
 S.O.21 was created by Pol Pot on April 17 1975 and it was designed for the detention, interrogation, torture and killing after confession of thousands of Cambodians and foreigners, all of which were documented. Prior to being a prison the buildings were a primary school

 and all the buildings were adapted to make up smaller cells where each prisoner was kept during his ordeal,

it’s a gruesome place with chains still attached to the blood stained floor.

Parts of the upper floors were covered in a fishnet of barbed wire to prevent the prisoners from committing suicide by jumping off.

 In the three years that the “office” operated nearly 10,000 prisoners past through, most prisoners lasted 3-4 months of daily torture and electrocution before confessing to being part of the up-rising against Pol Pot, following this they were executed.
Pictures of the victims taken from the preserved records line the rooms where they were kept.

Something else we noticed whilst there, was a man sitting under a tree selling books and photos, next to him was a sign saying that he had been a prisoner here and for some reason had survived the ordeal, it was sad to think of him having to be there every day to earn a living after what he had been through at the place.


Next we move on to an area known as the killing fields which as the name describes is an area of fields 15km outside the capital where prisoners from across the region were brought to be executed, and what was left of their bodies put into mass graves. The area is now a quiet orchard with a monument to the victims

which houses 17 tiers of decapitated skulls of men women and children.

It’s another gruesome reminder of the atrocities that occurred here not so long ago.

On the site is a tree which was used by the guards to kill children, they held them by the legs and then smashed their heads onto the trunk of the tree until they were dead. (this was done to prevent any reprisal from future generations of families who had had somebody killed by the regime).

 Most of the people killed here were shipped in by truck handcuffed and blindfolded before being bludgeoned to death with iron bars (to save valuable bullets) and then their heads severed with machetes before being dumped into the multitude of mass graves. Numbers killed averaged 300 a day.

 In complete contrast to this our next thing to visit is the royal palace which although flashy it is a little bit disappointing as not much of it is on show to the public.