So last night Lily, Ellen, Clem and I arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Its crazy here, crazier than Ho Chi Minh, and we have had to get our heads around another weird currency when we had only just got used to the Vietnamese Dong. We went for some really yummy food yesterday at a place called Malis, which served traditional Khmer food. Lil and I shared an fish amok curry, I think she is now addicted to it. Today we took a little tuk tuk out to the Chong-El Chouek Killing Fields. Its striking how crude the site is, rags of someone's clothing or human bone still protrude from the ground. As you enter the killing fields you are given a headset which provides an audio feed as you follow a path around. None of the original buildings, where the truckloads of people would be dropped off and used to store chemicals, stand anymore. The audio guide explains how the people brought to be killed were not even worth the cost of a bullet. Instead the soldiers working for the regime would use tools such as machetes, spades and even the serrated edges of sugar plants which grew around the fields. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge came to rule Cambodia in 1975 and declared it was "year zero". His aim was to create a utopia based on a simplified agricultural lifestyle. Millions of Cambodian people were ousted from their homes in the cities and forced into working the land. Essentially, the regime had bought weapons off the Chinese and were paying them back through food produce, such as rice. Food was rationed to the point of mass starvation and thousands of people died from malnourishment. Furthermore, the Khmer Rouge, directly through murder or indirectly through disease and starvation, were responsible for the death of almost half the population at the time (over 3 million people). The way the Fields are set up, with the audio guide etc, was amazingly informative and you were able to understand the brutality of the regime. But at the same time, it maintained an incredibly respectful and quiet atmosphere, which made the whole experience far more harrowing and it was almost impossible to imagine that such horrific events occurred there only 40 years ago. I think the part which got to me the most was the mass grave where women and their babies were buried, with the killing tree beside it. It is hard to imagine that humans can be so brutal. Pol Pot tried to justify the murder of millions of innocent people by saying that "when you dig up the grass, you must remove even the roots" and "it is better to kill an innocent man than let a rebel escape". As soon as he came into power, he removed anyone who he believed to be a threat to his regime. Linguists, teachers, doctors and anyone with an education were immediately sought out and murdered.
Our rather luxurious lunch
Ellen and some of her uni friends
Two of the lankiest people in the whole of Cambodia