Cambodia and Killing Fields

May 4-5, Monday & Tuesday Siem Reap, Cambodia

   Well as bad as the train trip was yesterday, we all slept so well last night!  So glad to get some water in us, a little food and a cool shower.  Breakfast buffet this morning is heaven!!  So many types of fruit, homemade yogurt, more fruit, the best coffee ever and Lin is enjoying all the omelets the make right at the corner of the room.  We go back a few times for more before we are to meet our taxi driver.  His English and knowledge of the area, history of Cambodia is all wonderful and we are blessed to have him take us around today.  We head out to Anchor Wot, the temple that is so well known.   

He takes us to a few other of the temples but by the time we have done a few, I am spent with the heat.  We are learning to dress a bit cooler, but by noon, there is just no release from the humidity.  100 degrees with 98% humidity is just too much!!  We need to head to some A/C for fruit juice with ice, almost too hot to eat anything, just looking for fresh juice.  We did a bit of shopping at the Wot area. You can see that the boys are having a great time with all the female attention!  We head to dinner tonight, found a quilt shop!! Imagine that!!

The city is beautiful and the driver takes us around to see the outlying area and some houses, land around the outer parts of the city.  We also investigate a silk farm, so interesting how these are done. 

Jose, friend traveling with us is very interested in maybe moving to this country instead of the Philippines.  The people are so nice, the weather is similar and he is used to the heat.  This city is very clean and safe, but no one knows how the political climate will be.  We spend another day here just exploring the city in A/C comfort while driving around!!  Lunch out near the temples, the coconut shakes are so good we have to get another.  Our driver goes with us to lunch, he knows a Tuk-Tuk driver in our next city, so we can be assured of someone not out to gouge us when we get there.  He will also pick us up at the bus station, so we can make sure we get to our hotel.  I have done the research on the hotels, so feel pretty good about that, but we still want to check them out before making a decision.  This is not their high season, so we are actually able to bargain down the price when we get to the hotels.  Lots of empty rooms, we were able to get this hotel for only $50/night, down from $60.

May 7, 2015, Thursday,  Phnum Penh, Cambodia- The Killing Fields 

 Today,  Lin had wanted to go see the Killing Fields where Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 thru 1979. Today we toured the site and listened to those that survived as well as talked to people here that lived thru this time period. I was a teenager just graduating high school that year and to this day had not heard anything of this Genocide. Not sure if any of you have heard of it, but this should be taught to all our children and adults. This person came to power by pulling together the people that had little education, promising them power over those that were more educated and making more money. Promising them, free help from the powers in control. He came in and within 48 hours arrested those in religious powers, teachers, those in any educational and medical fields. In a country of 8 million, over 2.5 were killed and still to this day those that beat, stabbed and militated women, children and men have not been tried except for a handful. I didn't even know that this had occurred, where were we when this was happening?? Can this happen in our country? When you read about how he took over so quickly and how he wanted the country to be uneducated and what he promised the people, it sounds so like what could happen to our children or grandchildren if we don't teach them history, will history repeat itself??

  The Killing Fields are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War  (1970–1975). The mass killings are widely regarded as part of a broad state sponsored genocide.

Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites calculate at least 1,386,734 victims of execution.  Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million.

  In 1979, Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime.

Cambodian journalist Dith Pran coined the term "killing fields" after his escape from the regime.

  The Khmer Rouge regime arrested and eventually executed almost everyone suspected of connections with the former government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals and intellectuals. Ethnic Vietnamese, ethnic Thai, ethnic Chinese, ethnic Cham, Cambodian Christians, and the Buddhist monkhood were the demographic targets of persecution. As a result, Pol Pot is sometimes described as "the Hitler of Cambodia" and "a genocidal tyrant." Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era."   

  This information on the Killing Fields, I took from the internet, so I would be accurate in my information. I don’t want to forget this information or gloss over the loss of these people. 

We only saw the one field today, but tomorrow are going back to where the prisoners were taken on arrest, P-21.  It was originally a high school that was used for imprisonment, interrogation and torture.  Now they have turned it into a museum, so no one forgets this time period.

May 8, Friday, Phnum Penh

      Today we went back to the Cambodian Museum of Genocide, They also called this Prison S-21 as a code. The atrocities that were shown to these people, 1 out of 4 were killed either by their own countryman or starvation.  There were only 7 survivors of the prisons here.  We met this gentleman and had our pictures taken, a book signed and our thank you to him

Our Tuk-Tuk driver told us that his father was killed by the Khmur when he was 3.  He was raised by his mother after they had to hide in the jungle for several years until the Khmur was overthrown. He went to pick up his son while we were eating dinner tonight and brought his son back to the restaurant.  So we all had ice cream!!  Coconut ice cream!

   After the Museum, we headed to something a bit more upbeat!  National Palace and it is beautiful, then for a cup of iced coffee as the heat has hit us hard when the sun is high.  We head back to the hotel to rest for a few hours until it cools off as this is our last night here. 

  Our driver picks us back up this afternoon and we head to Central Market for some fresh fruits, rombuton and longon.  We eat this while riding the Tuk-Tuk around the riverroad looking at all the sites, note our masks while driving!!, head to the pick up the driver’s son and then on to dinner on the river and ice cream.  Made great friends with the driver and he and his son eat dinner with us.  We did realize that we are in Communist country when you see police on the corners with machine guns. 

  Up early in the am for breakfast and the bus to pick us up at 7am to Saigon.  We are hoping to get as good a driver in Saigon as we’re had in Cambodia.  So far we have been looked after.