Phnom Penh is a compact city, just as friendly as Siem Reap, but with a slightly more international feel about it.

The Royal Palace, whilst not as grand as the one in Bangkok, is grand enough for most mortals. It’s not every day you get to walk on a solid silver floor comprising more than 5000 tiles each weighing 1kg……that makes about 5 tonnes of gleaming sliver. Sadly, a lot of the palace is unavailable for photography so memories have to come away in our heads.

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Most of you will remember the pictures on TV of the brutal regime of Pol Pot in the mid/late ‘70’s. Some of you, including our children, probably will not. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 and immediately changed the course of Cambodian history. He was a communist revolutionary who believed in an agrarian regime. He convinced the people that the USA, still involved in neighbouring Vietnam, were about to bomb Phnom Penh. The pictures we saw of the capital city where we are staying, empty, really are quite eerie. Within 3 days he had turned Phnom Penh into a ghost town with everyone forced to march to the fields to begin 3 years, 8 months and 20 days of hard labour, brutality, torture and murder. During his reign, Pol Pot murdered around 2-3 million people, starting with intellectuals, foreigners, people with glasses and basically anyone else he felt like, including his own men towards the end. He wanted only peasants who he considered pure and who were least likely to question him. The final numbers will never be known but it represented between 20-25% of the population.

We visited The Tuol Sleng Museum in central Phnom Penh, just a 20 minute walk from our hotel. As you can see from the picture it used to be a school but Pol Pot turned it into a prison. It was called S-21, where innocent men, women, children and even babies were tortured using the same abhorrent techniques used by despots over the centuries. The prison contains pictures of many of them, the children looking frightened, women looking as though they weren’t sure what was happening and men resigned to their gruesome fate. We took only one photo, of the outside, and found the taking of detailed pictures by others nothing less than macabre.

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We also visited The Killing Fields at Choeung Ek about 15 km outside Phnom Penh. This was where the inmates were brought after torture in Tuol Sleng to be given release from further suffering by brutal murder and a final resting place in a mass grave. Almost 20,000 men, women, children and babies were discovered here at the end of Pol Pot’s reign. The Memorial Stupa, which we pictured from a respectful distance, contains around 8000 skulls, bones and clothes protected by panes of glass and acts as a strong reminder of the brutality that went on. Once again, we only we could only look in amazement at the people taking close ups of the skulls of once proud Cambodians who will remain “unknown” for the rest of time.

We’’ve said before how much we like Cambodia and its people so we will be back to spend our tourist dollar in a country that so badly needs it. Some people scramble through life on as little as 2USD a day – that would buy you half of a very basic sandwich from Tesco!

Tomorrow we leave for Vietnam.