Phnom Penh to Siem Reap

Sobering. That is the one word that describes well one of my days in Phnom Penh. In a full day of incredibly somber sightseeing, I toured The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek and then the Tuol Sleng Prison. Thousands were killed at Choeung Ek in the most brutal manner, and while many of the eighty-some mass graves have been exhumed, there are still numerous graves that have been left. A graphic reminder of the lives lost under Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge regime is a seventeen-level stupa; a large square tower, that contains approximately five thousand skulls of those murdered. After standing quietly alongside other tourists in the museum at Choeung Ek and taking in a short documentary that detailed how even children were executed by the Khmer Rouge, my next stop was Tuol Sleng Prison. This prison was the main holding-area for dissidents, members of the middle-class and anyone who ran afoul of Pol Pot during his time in power in the 70s. The cells have been left exactly as they were when the prison was shut down, and pictures on the walls of the room show how bodies were found chained and rotting to steel bed frames when the Khmer Rouge was overthrown. If prisoners were not killed during months of torture in Tuol Sleng, they were sent to Choeung Ek just a few kilometers away to be executed.

After that full day, my hostel showed "The Killing Fields," a 1984 British drama that details well what the Cambodian people went through during the rule of Democratic Kampuchea and the role the American military played in exacerbating the situation. While the day was educational and informative, it wasn't an experience that was easily digested, and my reaction was mirrored by most of my fellow travelers quietly taking in the same history.

Siem Reap, where I am now, is west of Phnom Penh, and its main function is as a gateway to the ruins of Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat, brought to the attention of the west by a French explorer in the mid 1800s, is a vast city of temples, all of them in various states of disrepair, with some more decrepit than others. Angkor Wat, which in english means City Temple, is the largest of the temples and the one that is best preserved, though the Angkor Wat Archaeological Reserve includes over a thousand other temples. I spent a day climbing over and through walls and scultures of various temples, marveling at the effort it would have taken to construct the buildings with nothing but man-power. While Angkor Wat is the biggest of all the temples, I enjoyed exploring the other lesser-known sites more; climbing hundreds of feet up a ziggurat or picking my way through the ruins of enormous walls with buddha after buddha looking out through the root systems of trees hundreds of years old. It was a warm day, near forty degrees, and by the end of it Alex, Otwin and I, guys who I met in my hostel and went to Angkor with, were soaked in sweat but unanimous in the opinion that it was well worth it.

Tomorrow I spend the day relaxing here in Siem Reap and then catch a bus the next morning for the long eight-and-a-half bus ride across the Cambodia-Thai border back to Bangkok. Right now I am trying to decide between either heading south to the Gulf of Thailand to spend some time diving and to take in the Full Moon Celebration, or heading north to Chiang Mai. Life is full of such tough decisions.