Phnom Penh is not like any other capital city I've ever visited. Our hotel was near the centre of town yet it was located on a stony track, not a tarmac road. The main roads are tarmac but large portions of the rest of town are still bumpy, stony, dirt tracks. This is all a legacy of the horrors inflicted under the Pol Pot regime which ruled the country between 1975 and 1979. During this time the Khymer Rouge tried to reduce the country to a peasant state. This involved killing most of the intelligentsia - doctors, lawyers, teachers, monks, accountants, pretty much anyone trained in a profession outside of farming. People were killed for trivial details such as wearing glasses. Most industrial developments were destroyed including cars and factories - people weren't supposed to need them anymore. The country was essentially taken back in time to the stone age. Around two million people were killed during those four years, about a quarter of the population at the time. The Tuol Sleng Holocaust Museum (also known as the S-21 prison) is a former school which was used as a detention centre by the Khymer Rouge - classrooms were turned into holding cells and offices were used to torture both prisoners, and at the end of the war, officers of the Pol Pot regime. Many of the rooms have been left untouched and uncleaned, bloodstains still on the walls and ceilings. The remainder has been turned into a museum with information about the torture methods and the people who died there. The killing fields of Choung Ek is a site half an hour out of town where mass graves were found. Around 9000 bodies were found at this site alone, with many of the people having come from the S-21 detention centre. A memorial has been set up with a grisly centrepiece consisting of skulls found at the site grouped into age groups, foreigners, male and female. There is some background information about the site and the excavations, but not much. The film 'The Killing Fields' is reputed to be one of the most accurate films ever made - this film was showing at our hotel the night we arrived. It's shocking.
