The Winter Tale Part 2

The Winter Tale, incidently, is what Sapporo called their limited edition winter ale. Funny, I thought Kirin's was better. Sadly enough, though, when I returned from break you couldn't get it in the store anymore.

So after Bangkok I caught an early morning flight to Phnom Penh, which is known for its role during the Pol Pot regime--the KR emptied the capital city of all the people.

Yeah, you're supposed to have a visa for Cambodia, but you can buy them at the airport. You're also supposed to have a picture, but if you don't they fine you USD$1. Hello, apparantly these guys don't get out much. It's cheaper to give them a dollar than to bring a picture... I hope it doesn't get out so the system gets ruined for others.

So PP was quite a lovely city, a lot of French influence. I met up with two other backpackers and we sort of traveled together for a while. We hired bikes and went out to Choeung Ek, site of a large execution camp or "killing field". It's full-on there, as you're walking around near mass graves and on top of clothing fragments and bones. There's a couple places where you can actually see part of a person. They built a stupa (large monument) that's building-high with glass. Inside the stupa are skulls sorted by age, gender, etc. A guide actually picked up some of the skulls and could tell us how the person died--bullet, axe to the head, etc. He said that there were at least 8,000 skulls in the stupa, which was quite large.

--This is a photo of the walkway at Choeung Ek. If you look carefully, you'll see that the white pieces are bone fragments.--

We then visited Tuol Sleng museum. Tuol Sleng was a high school that the Pol Pot regime converted into a prison known as S-21. There are rooms and rooms of pictures, as each prisoner was photographed--either before or after being tortured. Just before the prison was liberated in 1979, 14 final prisoners were tortured to death, and you can see the rooms--complete with post mortum photos--where this occurred. Well, 'see' is rather polite. In fact, visitors can walk into any room and touch any thing they please (why you'd want to do this is beyond me) at the museum. Also very full-on.

From left to right: Pol Pot's "Ten Commandments", so to speak; one of the torture rooms (the picture on the wall on the left is the last victim); prisoner photo shots.