Hello Cambodia!

We had a packed first day in Cambodia today. After arriving in Phnom Penh late last night, we checked into our hotel and enjoyed a very restful night in a great room.

You can get very cheap accommodation in Cambodia if you only stay in hostels, but as soon as you’re prepared to spend a little more (say 20-40 USD) the rooms and hotels become significantly nicer :-)

Our plan for today was quite full: after breakfast, we went to see the National Art Museum featuring Khmer artwork (all around 700-1600 AD). We learnt a bit about the different epochs in Cambodia and some of the beliefs surrounding Cambodian’s flavour of Buddhist religion. Plus, the building itself was very impressive. Built by the French in the 1920s, it was modeled on classic Khmer architecture and has a fantastic interior square and impressive facade.

After the Art Museum, we went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (also known as S-21). Tuol Sleng was one of more than a hundred torture and prison centres during the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. The building is a former school, converted to become a prison and torture centre, designed to coerce “confessions” from the prisoners about their anti-regime activity. The torture would only end if you named other alleged “traitors”. The confessions were of course all fake, but that didn’t stop the Khmer Rouge from torturing more than 14.000 people here and then murdering them in a killing field (mass grave) south of the city. More than 3 million died during the Khmer Rouge rule overall, 25% of the total population at the time!

The museum was a somber experience - it is incredible to learn about the types of cruelties humans are capable to inflict on each other in the name of some system of belief or system of government. We highly support these efforts to expose the atrocities of the past and hope that a significant share of Cambodians will have the opportunity to learn about them as well - currently only 5% or school children have been at the museum...

In the afternoon, we left dusty and noisy Phnom Penh behind (for now) and took a bus to Battambang, a supposedly very relaxed and scenic place :-)Read more