One long depressing day

It started off as a good day. We ran into Peter in an internet cafe. He travelled through the north of Thailand and into Laos with Chris. We caught up over lunch in a backpacker restaurant (which is code for: little children with books kept interrupting our conversation).

Then we took a tuk-tuk out to the Tuol Svay Prey High School better known as S21 (Security Prison 21). This was the school come largest torture prison under Pol Pot's rule in 1975. Almost everyone held at the prison was later executed at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. At it's busiest (in 1977) S21 claimed over 100 victims a day.

The prison consists of several buildings with various photographic displays. The portraits of the victims of the revolution are bone chilling. An endless display of pictures depicted them with numbers pinned through their bare chests, chains and ropes around their necks probably used to choke them before and after their pictures were taken, women with babies, men with terror in their eyes, children with bloodied faces. Many of the prisoners were children.

Among the terrified faces a picture of a woman made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. It wasn't just a portrait of a woman with a lifeless stillness in her eyes but out of the lower corner of the frame a small child's hand is reaching up tugging at her shirt as if to demand that she pull him/her up onto her lap for the photo.

The wooden cells were tiny. The prison looks like a surreal set. Entrances are cut through the walls to form one long corridor leading from one end of the building through to the other along the cell doors.

A separate building with eight large rooms left me a little confused at first. The rooms had big windows. The sunlight on the yellow walls gave it a warm glow. In the centre of the rooms are rusty bed frames with crow bars or bullet casings. A single picture hangs in each of the rooms. All the pictures were more or less the same. There is no way of rating the levels of horror depicted in the frames. Each picture was of a victim that had died in the room on that bed. The victims features were unrecognizable, they were usually sprawled on the bed and liters of blood below them. Sometimes you could tell that most of the blood gushed from severe head wounds onto the floor by the pattern of the stain below them.

The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek are 14km away from the city. The road leading to the site is variously dotted with pretty rice fields and choking banks of dust. Over 17,000 men, children and women were buried here in 129 mass graves. A white stupa filled with towers of skulls found at the site marks the beginning of the fields.

A group of four little children approached us. I wandered away and the little boy in the group gave Chris the grand tour, pointing out human bones and clothing poking through the dirt between the graves.

On the way out our driver asked if we wanted to go to the shooting range nearby. It seemed rather inappropriate to be shoot a gun near the site. The rumour in the backpacker community is that for $300 you can shoot a water buffalo with a granade launcher and for a bit more perhaps even a prisoner from a local prison. Sometimes this world disappoints me.

Unfortunately the visit to these sites wasn't all the gore I was going to encounter for the day. We met up with Andrew in the evening for dinner and decided to head out to Heart of Darkness, a club in Phnom Penh. We got royally lost and wandered the dark streets in a chaotic pattern. We turned the corner as we were getting closer to the club and noticed a hundred or so people on the street corner. I thought the club had closed down and the group was milling about before getting into cabs. As we approached I noticed that there were no cabs and people were hovering around one spot on the road looking down. A girl lay sprawled on the street. Liters of blood on the pavement around her. Someone gave Chris their t-shirt and he pressed it against the back of her head. We turned her around. He held her head. I tried to feel for a pulse on her belly and then on her neck. I couldn't feel anything. Her skin looked white in the darkness. I held her head, blood running through my fingers. Chris tried to open one of her eyes but couldn't. The side of her face had been smashed. Her skull was fractured badly. Someone pointed their motorbike light in her face. Her mouth and nose were filled with blood. Her lips were blue. She was dead. There was no one with her. A Cambodian man in the crowd recognized her and told us that she was a backpacker from Australia. Her name was Melissa. She was very young. A motorbike lay on the road. We assume she was hit by a car first.

I wiped most of the blood off on a disposable wet-towel in my bag. The little string a Lao monk had tied around my wrist in Vientiane was soaked in blood. This was the second serious motorbike accident I encountered in two weeks. Both times I was lost, circling around. I never want to be lost again. We had drinks near our hostel. The last thing I wanted to do was drink but then it became the only thing I could do to keep me from crying.

The following day was a complete write-off. I spent it in a hammock on the porch of the guesthouse experiencing various shades of alcohol induced nausea. That night we went to see a Cambodian zombie film that turned out to be a Scoobie-doo inspired Thai comedy about ghosts. Basically a TV crew travels in a van to all these haunted sites in Thailand. There were no other foreigners in the cinema and the girls screamed every time a ghost appeared on screen. I mean screamed when I write screamed. Out loud. Heads buried into folded arms, feet on the seats with knees forming an extra shield of protection against the screen. Before the film started we had to stand for the national anthem of the Kingdom of Cambodia.

The National Museum in Phnom Penh