This morning the Cambodian authorities boarded our boat and we all had to file past them where they checked our faces against our passport photos.  They then took our passports with them and will stamp and bring back (we understand 🙂 ).

We met our new Cambodian tour guide this morning.  A lovely young lady called Ling Er.  She talked us through our 2 tours this morning with some very personal perspectives on the genocide that occurred within our lifetime.

We first went to the killing field at Choeung Ek.  This is one of over 300 killing fields in the region with 129 mass graves at this location.  Each of these graves had between 100 and 400 bodies buried together. The photo up top is of is of the Stupa in the centre of the field. This contains the remains of many victims which are displayed on every side of the building.

The experience was extremely sobering.  Imagining the atrocities that occurred less than 50 years ago on the same land we were standing was almost impossible to comprehend.  The memorial, exhibits and commentary was so incredibly confronting.  Men, women, children and babies all subject to such terrible fates.  Ling Er explained how her grandparents were victims at this time and the efforts they went to in the villages once they were forced out of Phnom Penh to disguise that they had worked for the government previously and the efforts the Khmer Rouge went to trip them up in their questioning.  Ling’s mother lost 6 of her 7 siblings through this time as well.

We then moved on to S-21 Prison.  Prior to the evacuation of Phnom Penh this was a school, however was turned into a secret prison where false confessions were extracted from up to 17,000 detainees.  The conditions, torture and eventual removal to the killing fields took between 1 day and 2 years depending on the resolution of the prisoners and capacity to withstand the punishment being dealt out.  7 men and 4 children survived this prison.  We met 1 of the 2 surviving prisoner’s and 2 of the children today where they were selling books detailing their experiences.  No women survived and rape while in the prison was common.

The prison blocks were spread with electrified barbed wire along the verandahs to stop the prisoners from committing suicide over the edge to escape the punishment.  I have so many more thoughts about what we saw today, but I’ll leave it at that.

After lunch back at the boat we had free time this afternoon. Sandra and Glenn and Bob and I headed back out on Tuk Tuks to the Russian markets.  For anyone that knows me, shopping is not my thing so once we’d extracted ourselves from what was essentially a hot, overcrowded maze of knock off clothes, shoes and jewellery, we took an alternative route back to the boat in the Tuk Tuks.

This evening the entire tour group headed out to see the sights and sounds of Phnom Penh in 20 Tuk Tuks. It must have been a sight to see for others on the road!

We have another half a day in Phnom Penh before we move further up the river as we approach the end of the cruise.