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| The Royal Palace Victory Gate, Phnom Penh |
1-3 Jan 2018 : Otres 2 Beach, Sihanoukville
It was four hour drive to Ren Resort - thankfully at the far end of the quietest beach in the rapidly expanding city of Sihanoukville. This was planned to be the quietest two days our whole Cambodian trip - and it thankfully lived up to expectation. The hotel café was on the beach, and the sunbeds almost in the sea – so that’s where we stayed all day! Jess and I popped across to Otres 1 to meet the Tamsin, sister of one of Jess’s fellow Granville teachers, who runs a café there.
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| Sunset, Otres 2 |
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| Breakfast |
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| Dawn on the last morning |
3-6 January: Phnom Penh
On Wednesday we made the four hour car journey back to Phnom Penh, completing our 3-week travels around Cambodia. That afternoon Jake, Ben, Annie and I went to the Royal Palace, whilst Jess and Tom went in hunt of a tailor to get a suit made for Tom!
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| Throne Palace |
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| Silver Pagoda (floor is solid silver tiles!) |
We all met up for a drink in the Foreign Correspondents Club overlooking the Mekong, and then wandered in search of supper.
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| Chilli Martini! |
Thursday
Today was always going to be a tough one, visiting the Khmer Rouge prison Tuol Seng (“S-21”) and the Killing Fields site at Choeung Ek back to back.
We entered S-21 at 08.30 before the crowds, and found a little Cambodian lady for our guide. Her family had been marched out of Phnom Penh in April 1975 into the countryside when she was 9 years old, and she lost her father & sister. She managed to cross the border into a Vietnamese refugee camp a year later with her mother, and returned to Phnom Penh after the fall of the Khmer Rouge.
I’m not going to dwell on the details of S-21, and it isn’t somewhere I wanted to take photographs, albeit some other tourists didn’t seem so bothered. In brief - this is where the Khmer Rouge took 17,000 men, women and children in 1975-1979, tortured them to extract ‘confessions’ and then sent them to Choeung Ek for execution. The black & white photographs of each prisoner on arrival at S-21 are haunting, the stories gleaned from the seven survivors and photos of what the Vietnamese troops found when they discovered S-21 in January 1979, plus the film interviewing some of the guards years later, are explicit and terrifying. And all this happened in a school building in the centre of the city - and somehow remained a secret from the outside world.
Our guide was excellent, and ended the tour by introducing us to Chum Mey, one of only seven survivors of S-21, whose book we purchased. She also had an infectious way of pronouncing Phnom Penh – which we’ve since adopted.
[Photo Chum Mey]
We then drove 17km out to the Genocide Museum at Cheoung Ek.
They have an excellent, detailed audio tour at this Killing Fields site that takes about an hour. The facts are horrific, yet the site is now eerily calm – with birdsong above the shallow mass grave depressions (originally much deeper). The majority of the 129 mass graves were exhumed in 1980 discovering the remains of 8,895 people, and 41 graves have been left untouched. This site is just one of over 300 Killing Field sites across Cambodia, with between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge during their gruesome 1975-1979 rule.
The site is now the memorial for all those who died in this tragic and very recent period of history. The shocking but architecturally beautiful Buddihst memorial stupa was built in 1989 and contains 5,000 skulls arranged on sealed shelves forming a central column.
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| Memorial stupa, Cheoung Ek |
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| Inside the stupa |
It was an emotional, shocking and grim morning - but it is absolutely worth visiting both of these sites if you come to Phnom Penh in order to help comprehend what happened to this beautiful country and friendly people. Staggering to think that this happened when I was 11 years old, and it took 20 years before the trials of the Khmer Rouge leaders began - and the tribunals are still ongoing.
We returned to the city and visited the Russian market to unwind, a few beers back at Mad Monkey, then out to Sovanna for our best meal in PP: Khmer barbecue, including amazingly tasty pork and grilled eel. Then we had coffee at Mad Monkey, then out to the upcoming trendy bar alley “Bassac Lane” for cocktails and cards. It was our last night after all...
Friday 5 Jan
Our last day all together :(
So up early for breakfast with the locals in the centre of the Russian Market: fried rice and pork is the standard offering, with iced coffee or tea. Jess & Annie opted for soup. All delicious and of course a bargain.
We then shopped for a bit more in this warren of a market which sells everything from tourist tat to chicken (cooked on the corrugated roof in the sun: not brave enough to taste that!) to fake Rolex to motorbike spares.
A pair of tuk-tuks through congested traffic up to north riverside and checked out a few more temples. It’s hard to capture the craziness of the traffic in PP by photos; the myriad scooter and tuk-tuks vie with trucks, cars and pedestrians. Here’s a short clip Jess took at a busy junction as two school girls walk nonchantly through the traffic holding their afternoon snack...
Lunch at Friends – a popular restaurant that trains disadvantaged kids for work in the hospitality industry – then tuk-tuk back to the hostel to pack. Tom and I opted to walk, and popped into the Botumvatey Buddhist temple where we we ushered to the ‘altar’ by an attendant, as the only people in the huge space, and given prayers and perfumed, braided bracelets.
We headed back to the hostel feeling suitably blessed on a cracking hot (35deg) and humid afternoon. Dip in tiny Mad Monkey pool, Tom collected his new suit,
then taxis to the airport for the kids flight to Bangkok then London.
We have all had an amazing three weeks in Cambodia, and loved it all; wonderful people, amazing sights, great wildlife, delicious food. The whole itinerary was impeccably researched and planned by Jess – and it all worked perfectly. It’s always hard to decide the pace of big trips like this, and keep the whole family happy. But it allow worked out brilliantly.
Very sad too wave goodbye to the gang – but exciting to be heading to Vietnam tomorrow, which I’ve never visited. Going to be very odd to revert to just the two of us again! We’re next together as a family at the end of February.
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| Goodby Phnom Penh - taken outside Mad Monkey hostel L-R: Chris, Ben, Jess, Tom, Annie & Jake |
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