Phnom Penh (Cambodia)

Little Monkey

I left Vietnam and headed to the Capital of Cambodia - Phnom Penh. The distance between the two cities actually isn't that far, and thus my journey was far more pleasant than others i'v experienced in recent weeks. Once through the border - I breathed a sigh of relief. Instantly you can tell that entering Cambodia is going back to a relaxed way of life again and I knew straight away that I was going to like it here.

All travellers you meet tend to give you advise - all the time. Most have said that Phnom Penh is just another big city and not worth staying longer than a day. While in the end, I didn't stay that long here, I found the city really good fun. Yes it is a bit dodgy at night. Armed robberies on tourists are common - but then you can find plenty of trouble walking through the streets of London when the sun goes down. You just have to be a little street-wise.

I traveled Phnom Penh with a group of 4 others. Peter from Holland - who I had shared a room with in Hanoi (and decided to meet up again), Siobhan from southend who we had met at the Cu Chi Tunnels, and Phoebe and Daniella from Bristol who someone had met on some bus - I think!!! We would ultimately travel the whole country togther and were soon renamed - "Team Cambodia".

The city of Phonm Penh has quite a few attractions - including the spectacular palace and river views, and Wat Phnom where monkeys roam free around the surrounding park. Yet everyone who comes here - wants to and I believe should see the darker side of the Phnom Penh. A trip to Tuol Sleng Museum is a must. Well, it is a museum - now. It was once a school but during the 1970's during a brutal Khemer Rogue regime by Pol Pot it was converted into the S-21 prison, the largest detention centre in the country, where many Cambodian people were tortured and killed. The Prison / museum is shocking - you walk the cells, see the torture devises and many pictures of the exterminated victims. It reminds me of the film Hostel - but worse because you know that it was actually happening and only 30 years ago!!! Everyone came out of that chilling place - silent.

Then, to complete our day of depression, we took a Tuk Tuk to the Killing Fields, where the prisoners were sent to be exterminated in the most horrific ways. To the untrained eye - it may at first seem like just a field - but you soon see bits of skull and bones coming out from the ground - as groundwater over the years has forced the body parts up through the soil.

While the girls were less willing, Peter and I also took a trip to the shooting range. You simply jump in a tuk tuk and call out for the place and with the speediest of haste the drivers all seem to know exactly where you want to go. It's quite far to reach from the centre of the city, along a distant dirt track and past some stunning farmland views. The place is sort of run by the army but the whole thing must be illegal in many ways. You have to pay an armed guard a bit of cash or as we did - with cigarettes just to get into the place. When your there however, there are a mass of all sorts of weapons - guns of all shapes and sizes. Hand guns, automatic weapons, rocket launchers and even hand grenades. You then recieve a menu with prices for each at which you can choose to fire one of the deadly machines. I couldn't believe that you could actually pay to throw a real hand grenade and watch it explode before your very eyes. More disturbing and quite sickening was the fact that you could also purchase an animal from the nearby farm, a chicken or a cow - and then blow the poor thing up. It's wrong on so many levels that need no mention here!!! Peter and myself put money in for a round of shooting an MK47 machine gun and only at a non-living target. I guess after everything we had seen in this city shooting a weapon was not the most morally correct thing to do, but I had to try it once, just to see what firing this powerful weapon was like. I'm not a man of violence. I find it a cowardly way to finish a dispute - and I doubt that I will ever fire a weapon of that nature again, at least not willingly, but traveling is best enjoyed when you can experience things that you would never do, and this was just another to add to my list.

I spent my time in Phnom Penh in a guesthouse on the Lake and enjoyed a few really good days here. Eventually though we decided to move on - to the beachy paradise of Sihanoukville.