2012 - Greg's Cycle Tour of Indochina: Bangkok to HCM City: Day 12: Mon 19 Nov

DAY 10: PHNOM PENH (35 km)
Breakfast at the hotel. Today be guided through this bustling city to explore the main sights by bike, including Wat Phnom and Cheung Ek killing field. Phnom Penh has got more than 1 million population and the traffic has become very busy now. There is another option to visit the city by van. In the afternoon, visit the Independence Monument, Tuol Sleng Museum and Russian Market. Overnight in Phnom Penh. (B,L,D)

Nice breaky on the sixth floor terrace of the motel. We watched a troop of monkeys climbing up and down the drainpipes of another motel a block away. The staff ended up on the roof chasing them with brooms which sent them on their way quickly.

Late start, 9am, and it was onto the bus again as the guides feel it's too busy to cycle in PP. First stop Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda in the same complex. Built in 1892, the whole thing is stunningly beautiful and well maintained. The solid gold statues, some weighing up to 23kg must be worth 100s of millions of dollars, just on the price of gold. However the Royal Palace was closed due to death of the old king about a month ago. His body is still there. He had passed the throne to his son about 10 years ago.

We then started a very sobering tour of the Genocide Museum, which was the old Khmer Rouge Security Office 21. Over 20,000 were tortured, killed or sent to the Killing Fields for execution from this office. Only seven people survived the ordeal. I could not look at the entire place as it was too sad. The KR were like the Nazis, meticulous record keepers so there's all these photos of men, women, boys and girls they killed. Some of the KR are still alive and free!

By way of total contrast, from S21 we went to a lovely buffet lunch upstairs in a fairly flash restaurant. Every imaginable Asian food was on offer and it was tasty. The mood was very subdued. After lunch as we went to leave for our next attraction we discovered that we had left one of the small tour group at the S21 office. No one had noticed that he was missing, even his room-mate! This was one of the people who often wandered off and had trouble being on time. As it turned out he did not know where we were having lunch but knew where we were heading to after lunch so he went directly there via a motor-scooter taxi. It was one of the Killing Fields outside PP. There were 300 killing fields and 175 prisons throughout the country during the KR years, 1975-79. We saw the actual tree the executioners used to smash babies up against to kill them, so all very tragic. Many gruesome killing implements were also on display. The international community had erected a memorial on the grounds and it had been loaded with 1000s of human skulls recovered from the mass graves at this site.

Estimations for the total number of Cambodian people killed by the Khmer Rouge (Pol Pot) is between 1.5 and 2 million. But it could be as high as 3 million. A staggering number out of a population of 5 to 8 million. I was glad to leave the place and we were all very subdued for a while.

On the way back to the motel we stopped off at the Russian Market for a wander. It was packed to rafters inside with all sorts of odds and ends, hardware, clothes, food etc. So called because in the 1980s it was a foreigners (mainly Russians) market. The normally busy traffic situation in PP during our stay had been made even worse by the ASEAN Summit that was being held there. The police just closed vast stretches of busy roads for hours on end for a couple of VIP cars to motor down turning busy streets into chaos!

That night we were picked up at 7pm and driven to dinner at a lovely restaurant a few km out of the city. There’s a lot more in PP that we didn’t get the time to look at and given the opportunity I would revisit there one day.