An emotional roller coaster in Phnom Penh

Up Wednesday at 5:30 to clean up, talk to Rebecca on FaceTime, have breakfast and meet our guide at 7:50.  Our first stop was at S-21, the former school the Khmer Rouge used as one of their prison, torture, and interrogation centers. 

The museum is chilling. The setting is so ordinary. Apart from the barbed wire covering the porticos, the buildings look like any other school set down in an urban neighborhood. 

The jailers, like the Nazis, photographed each of their victims (20,000 at this center), which included intellectuals, merchants, monks, soldiers from the Lon Nol regime, foreigners, and towards the end, even senior Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen out with the leadership. 

A few individuals survived the prison and later wrote about and painted vivid scenes of the torture and cruelty they observed. 

Kathy and I had our photo taken with one of the survivors and purchased a copy of his book.

The killing fields themselves are disturbing in a different way.  The setting, in an abandoned Chinese graveyard close to a lake, is almost peaceful.  The mass graves where the murdered victims from S-21 were buried are shallow overgrown depressions in the grass. The remains of the victims, however, are a constant reminder of the not so long ago horrors that occurred there. In the rainy season (which is just ending now) bones, clothing fragments and teeth work their way to the surface.  I haven't travelled to Auschwitz, but I suspect the feeling surrounding the places is similar.  The scale of the savagery seems comparable - of a wartime Cambodian population of 8 million, around 2 million died in the purges, forced labor and combat that occurred in the late '70's.

The afternoon tour served as a partial antidote to the grim morning stops.  After shopping for 45 minutes at the "Russian Market," we had a great lunch in a small boutique hotel/restaurant before touring the city's founding namesake's temple 

and  the National Palace and adjacent Silver Pagoda.  The buildings, especially the pagoda, are fabulously decorated and beautiful set off against the afternoon skies.

Our flight to Siem Reap left at 6:00 PM, so we had to wrap up the sightseeing early and get to the airport.  After a short and uneventful flight we landed in Siem Reap, the final stop on our tour.  Our new guide met us at the airport and drove us to another beautiful hotel.  Thursday, we start our tour through the Angkor sites early, so we'll turn in now and write more tomorrow.