A Traveller in a Floating World

PHNOM PENH CAMBODIA - CELIAS VIEW

We ended up spending most of our time staying in this cool little place called Boeng Kak Lake in Phnom Penh.

Here the guesthouses were built on stilts above the lake. They were very very basic and very cheap and we had to share them with both mosquitos and rodents but you could forget the bad stuff if you were lying in a hammock watching the sunset over the lake from your guesthouse.

We really enjoyed Phnom Penh checking out the local markets and bars. We hit up the central market for Cambodian silk and I managed to buy thirty ( thats right kids thirty!) cushions covers in about twenty minutes.....

Later on that particular night we decided we were sick of the dust and mud and rats in Boeng Kak so headed out to a expat club we had heard about on 51st st called Elsewhere.

I looooooooooved this club. Loved it. It was so cool.......It was in a big old french colonial mansion and was surrounded by trees and little alcoves. There was a beautiful little pool in the middle and so we made friends with the bartenders stayed late, curt got behind the bar to make cocktails and I jumped in the pool to drink them. Fun.

There was a more serious side to Phnom Penh

S21 AND THE KILLING FIELDS - CURTS VIEW


Our tuk tuk driver was telling us about his family while we were at the lake and he told us his father was killed during the nightmare of the Khmar Rouge, full on to have living history told to you while you sit back and have a beer over looking a lake. With this fresh in our minds, the following day we headed to the Killing Fields and S-21 (school converted to a prison), something like 20 000 people died in the prison, very strange place to be. Considering it all happened on a couple years before we were born. There is no money to maintain the Genocide museum (Toul Sleng) that is now on the same site. This is quite worrying considering the magnitude of the killings and torturing and the importance of not forgetting this history.After spending some time looking over the photos of the dead and the other various pictures, cells and torture devices we made our way 16ks out of the city to the Killing Fields.

The Klling Fields were also humbling, 196 mass graves with thousands of people buried in them, up to 300 people were killed a day, bludgeon to death with hoe handles and such to save on bullets. There is now a Stupa memorial to the people killed filled with the skulls of the dead so there spirts can be free. I felt sick and thankful, humble and overwhelmed with what i saw. Lastly we we asked if after all this we would like to go to the very popular shooting range, this however did not seem appealing so we headed back to our house bungalow on the lake.