Phnom Penh

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Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia, a country squeezed in between Vietnam Laos and Thailand. Although Phnom Penh lacks the amazing activity of neighbouring Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, it is definitly busier' than sleeping Vientiane in Laos, and is a very enjoyable town to relax. A weekend wandering in the quiet streets, strolling along the hundreds of shops, small restaurants and French colonial buildings is very relaxing, with plenty of cafe to stop by to have a cold coffee or enjoy the 'TV' show-rooms where it seems that Cambodians spend most of their after-noons away from the sun. Unfortunetly, there aren't as many things to see as other capitals in south east Asia, and apart from some pagodas and temples (surely not as impressive as Thai / Lao Temples), the main things to visit for short-term tourists are:

- The Royal Palace and the white Pagoda. A nice and lively place, full of local tourists, but not to the standards of Bangkok's royal Palace I would say.

- The National Museum. Small, but with a lot of pieces from the era of Angkor-Wat's golden age.

- The markets, plentiful, with alot of cheap items. A good stop to do the yearly refill of T-shirts and bags!

- The river-side, nice stretch along the river with plenty of bars and restaurants. For anyone interested, there is an amazing French restaurant called "le resto du coin" which serves absolutly delicious French Food! The Pint of fresh Angkor beer at 0.70 USD is another treat to look for! -especially coming from Singapore!-

Yeah this is a DC-3! I was lucky to spot one of the few last flying DC-3 at Phnom Penh airport, the Bell Geospace DC-3 used for geo-physical survey work.

On the down side, the Lake is gone! As crazy as this may seem, what seemed like a nice Lake in the north part of town has been replaced by an undescribable bare stretch of sand. Looks like the authorities decided to try to imitate Singapore by taking over the water to create more land. A notion which seems crazy considering the huge amount of land available...just across the river! Well, if you, like me, travel with old Lonely Planets... hope you get to read this first before making the strainous walk to the lake for the "amazing sunset" promessed in the holy traveler's book!

Unfortunetly, Phnom Penh's most impressive sights are linked with the terrible Genocide which occured during the PolPot years (1975-1979) where as many as 2 million Cambodians have died in terrible suffering in the hands of a few crazy Communist extremists. The places where such appalling crimes have occured are part of the main things to visit in Phnom Penh, the city being unfortunetly mainly portaited by this dreadful part of its history.

- The S-21 Prison/Torture Camp in the south of the city (right in the center of town) use to be a highschool. It was converted in a torture camp by the Kmher Rouge regime, to get "confessions" from anyone they considered unworthy of their society (namely intellectuals, monks, teachers, or simply party-opposition). The people were submitted to terrible tortures, locked in small cells and deprived of food and water until they "admitted" working for the CIA -or any other thing the excecutioners would want. A gloomy place to visit, especially considering that this happened only 40 years ago, with the whole world turning a blind eye! The museum contains pictures of tortured people, and hundreds of portraits of the victims taken by the extremists. Quite an oppresive place to visit.

- The "Killing fields" of Choeng Ek. A 45 minutes tuk-tuk ride out of town brings you to the Choeng Ek memorial site. In itself, just a field with a stupa and a few placards here and there. The visit is done in silence with an audio player which explains the whole context and relates in detail what happened in the fields. The small walk takes you from the place where the prisonners were pushed out of the truck (thinking they were just being moved to a camp), then the various places where the prisonners were, one by one, killed with blows of axes, shovels, kicks or anything that could do the job. All under the sound of loud patriotic music to cover the sounds, and to the light of projectors. Bones and clothes that regulary come out from the mass graves. The saddest place is probably a tree where the sadistics executants would grab the children by the legs and smash their skulls against a tree before throwing the corpse in the grave, under the watch of the mother who would follow seconds later. The end of the visit is at the stupa, which contains hundreds of skulls, each one of them cracked... Creepy place indeed. I guess what makes you feel really bad is the fact that a lot of the Khmer Rouge culprits never got arrested, and that only one of the leaders is being sentenced to jail for his crimes -Dutch, responsable of the S-21 prison and directly linked with the genocide- Pol Pot, died a few years ago in his bed amongst his family, after having re-married and enjoyed his grand-children. During all this time, Khmer Rouge were participating at UN congresses...