Namaste

Jim Rip Leah...(goodbye in Khmer)....last Cambodia post!

The Royal Palace

The Royal Palace of Cambodian Royalty (it is essentially a monarchy, even today) has been occupied since 1866. It is a beautiful place and the majesty of the place is really phenomenal. 

Wat Phnom

Wat Phnom is a Buddhist temple on a hill in Phnom Penh built in 1373. The city is actually named for the temple and the story is kinda cool.

Legend relates that Daun Penh, a wealthy widow, found a large koki tree in the river. Inside the tree she found four bronze statues of the Buddha. Lady Penh constructed a small shrine on an artificial hill to protect the sacred statues. Eventually this became a sacred site and sanctuary where people would make blessings and pray.

Sambo

Elma, my CouchSurfing host, is good friends with Sambo a 60-year-old elephant and survivor of the Khmer Rouge. Twice a week, Elma brings baskets full of fruit to Sambo's owner. Their story is pretty miraculous. As a 10-year-old boy, her owner used to sneak into the forest and feed Sambo. In the mid-1970s, Cambodians could barely feed themselves, let alone a two ton animal, but he did. Years passed and he didn't see her. Then 20 years later he found her wandering around outside the city somewhere. They've been together ever since. Yay happy tears!

I fed Sambo, I kid you not - 200 bananas.

National Museum of Cambodia

S21 (Security Prison 21)

There were many such prisons as S21 which is now a memorial and museum. S21 was a boys high school turned maximum security prison, torture and interrogation center. While Cambodians want all but to forget their recent, catastrophic past, it is important (in my opinion) to be able to see how ruthless and selfish this group of people, known as the Khmer Rouge, were.

If you know nothing about the Khmer Rouge then you should know this: they were a "Communist" group with only one agenda - the cleansing of Cambodia to serve their ideals. Anyone who proved a threat to their cause (ie: intellectuals and anyone who wore glasses, politicians, journalists, doctors, artists, musicians, monks, priests, etc) was executed and everyone else was forced into slavery - as farmers, agriculturalists or militia. The Khmer Rouge didn't want anyone to think for themselves or contradict their ideas for what would make a "fair" society.

Current estimates of the number of deaths hover around 3 million (the population estimates just before the Khmer Rouge ruled was about 7 million). I met several Cambodians who had family members killed and the talk of it as if it was just a fact of life. On my plane ride back to Korea, I met a man and his wife who fled to Thailand (which is what many lucky Cambodians tried to do, not always succeeding).

Here are some photos from S21.

Street View from FCC + Temple at Night

Outside the Royal Palace, Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh

After five sun-filled days in Sihanoukville, I headed inland to Phnom Penh, the capital. Phnom Penh has a very recent and very sad history. A week before I arrived was the tragic bridge stampede, in which over 300 people died. But even more impressionable on the psyche of the Cambodian people (and really the world) was the Khmer Rouge regime. I won't go into a long-winded diatribe of the Khmer Rouge and Pot Pot & Co. but it was easily the most horrific and bloody genocides the world has ever seen, and it ended only a few short years ago. I highly recommend reading more about it if you are interested (I think it was something that was gravely over-looked in American history text books), but there will be more photos to come on the subject later.

Wa-whaaa. Anyway, PP was great as I had my first CouchSurfing experience with Elma, and beautiful, wonderful Filipina who had been living in PP for about 8 years. She showed me a side of Phnom Penh I would have otherwise never had a chance to see and was so generous and welcoming to a complete stranger.

Anyway...more pictures to go and then I am FINISHED! with Cambodia. It took a bit longer than I ever expected to edit but there were enough photos to edit to keep me busy for the past 6 weeks.  Here you go.