Day 3 – Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The third and final morning in Phnom Penh started with my small team meeting with Kevin from NagaCorp to talk about high end luxury items in Cambodia. He explained that the high end luxury goods sold in the casino were almost entirely for Chinese tourists. It was interesting to hear him describe how the items in the stores purposely had the prices on them and that Cambodians would see these amounts and not even be able to fathom how much money the price tags actually meant. In addition, he told us that every store had at least one salesperson that could speak Chinese in the store at all times to ensure that a language barrier would not stop a sale.

After our meeting, the few of us that went to the last minute plenary meeting on Day 2 got to go to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum today. We started with the Killing Fields, and it was here our tour guide Red explained how he was 10-11 years old at the start of the Khmer Rouge regime and that he was actually taken from his family and worked on irrigation systems for four years. In addition, he was trained to build hole-traps in the ground to kill the enemies of the Khmer Rouge. He explained how most people he knew were separated and killed during the Khmer Rouge’s reign and that he was essentially brain-washed with everyone else that was young to believe that communism and the Khmer Rouge was the only way of life. Interestingly, he said during this reign many people starved or were always hungry and the reason he started to believe that the Vietnamese weren’t the enemy was because they happily shared their food with the Cambodians.

Below is a close-up picture of the Memorial Stupa which is located at the Killing Fields (also called Choeung Ek Genocide Museum). The Killing Fields is where mass graves containing almost 9,000 bodies were found. The monument contains over 5,000 human skulls. During the Khmer Rouge reign, political prisoners (mostly Cambodians) would be brought here and killed, including women and children/babies.

Additional pictures from the Killing Fields:

After the Killing Fields we went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (also called S-21). One of the below pictures describes the museum better than I can, but essentially it was a prison where horrendous torture took place, led by the Khmer Rouge. The complex is made up of four buildings (A, B, C, and D).  Prisoners would usually be sent here for torture and then sent to the Killing Fields to be killed. When the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia, they found this site by following the terrible stench of rotting corpses to uncover the prison. Below is an aerial shot of the fourteen caskets for the last fourteen victims killed and found at Tuol Sleng with Building B pictured in the top-left corner.

Additional pictures from Tuol Sleng:

After spending the day at The Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, we headed back to the hotel, got our things, and went to the airport to fly to Siem Reap. After three very busy days in Phnom Penh that ended on a very heavy note, I was ready to head on to our next location.

Click here to continue on to our first day in Siem Reap.