The Killing Fields are a series of mass graves where over 8,000 people were ruthlessly killed and buried as if they weren't human beings at all. Many killed here were former prisoners of the S-21 prison we visited yesterday.As we walked around the graves that lie shaded by such beautiful forested land, it hard to imagine such horrors taking place here.
Some bones and clothes lay in tatters across the ground, and all skulls are displayed in a memorial stupa as a sign that such pointless deaths won't be forgotten. 
We jumped back on our tuk-tuk passing robed monks mounted on the back of motos, and were deposited at the Royal Palace where the ticket price had risen 3 times in the last 2 years so we couldn't really afford it. 
It's such a shame that such beautiful monuments are hidden from budget travellers because of a greed for money. Instead we had a delicious Indonesian lunch, which made us excited about coming to Indonesia in a few months!!
We then wandered along the river front, watching as pajama-clad Cambodians went about their daily life (generally hiding out from the heat!), and went into Wat Ounalom. Although this temple was founded in 1443, it was destroyed during the Pol Pot era (this guy didn't just kill 1/4 of his fellow country-people but also destroyed a lot of cultural sites), and therefore the temple is a brand new, concrete structure like the majority of Cambodian temples we've seen.We briefly stopped off at Wat Phnom, a temple notable for the fact it's built on the only hill in town, and that it's home to the fattest monkeys in the world!
In the evening we met up at a riverside bar to enjoy happy hour with some friends of Nicole and Sam before we took them back to the Indonesian place for dinner - after declaring their "cheap" choice too expensive for our budget!!
Adlibing the killing fields.
No comments:
Post a Comment