Phnom Penh and the Killing Fields

Phnom Penh, the capital city, is a microcosm of Cambodia as a whole - reflecting the contrasts of the remnants of the glorious ancient Khmer empire and the colonial beauty, which the French brought (wanting to make this the capital of their Indochina empire - Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) against the horrors and tragedies of the relatively recent Pol Pot regime. I visited first the Tuol Sleng prison, where the enemies and 'traitors' of the 1975-79 regime were imprisoned and tortured in inhumane conditions and followed this with a trip out to the local Killing Fields, where 17,000 prisoners were subsequently executed and buried in mass graves - across Cambodia they estimate that nearly 2 million people perished during those 4 years of terror. Following the moving experience of those visits, I spent this afternoon learning more about Angkor and Khmer history at the National Museum and then visited the grand colonial style Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda......quite a contrast.