Cambodia: Phnom Penh Part II

A day trip out of Phnom Penh will take you to see buildings of extreme beauty, scenes of extreme sorrow and many other things in between.

As you head North of Phnom Penh, you leave the city for the silversmith carving village of Kampong Luong where you can see the silversmiths  toil away from sunrise to sunset  creating beautiful items like this eagle which was commissioned by a private bank for their office. Quite ironic right?

From there you head up to Udon, the ancient capital of Cambodia during the 16th - 18th century. From a distance you can see signs of the ancient capital perched upon a hill like a fairy tale castle.

Once up high, you are surrounded by breathtaking sights against the expanse of the Cambodian countryside and at this point I'm just going to let the pictures do the talking...

Once you have baked yourself wandering around the site you can meander around  the food stalls and market...

 try some Lotus flower seeds...

see the bees get to work on the honey comb...

or it you're feeling brave eat some red ant relish (as pictured in the right hand bowl below).

Then seek some shelter in a cabana or hammock and eat your pack lunch. This is a pretty heart wrenching task as you have many, many kids begging for food around you - and anything that you share  is gratefully and quickly scoffed down by them.

Heading back to Phnom Penh, we stopped at a palm leave basket weaving village at Sras Por. Whatever is weaved is sold at the market and is enough sustain life at the village...

We stop off en route at some more incredible temples...one old, one new..

And then that marks the end of the beautiful part of this day trip, as we make way for something a lot more grim - The Killing Field of Choeung Ek.

The Killing Field is a horrific reminder of the atrocities the Camdodian people had to endure during the Pol Pot regime. In just three years, between 1975 and 1979 2 million out of a population of 7 million were wiped out via torture, starvation and execution. And the Killing Field at Choeung Ek is a very real reminder of what happens when power falls into the wrong hands and people are brainwashed.

The site of a former Chinese graveyard, Choeung Ek was where thousands of people were executed and buried in mass graves under the Khmer Rouge regime. Today you can only begin to imagine what hideous acts took place at the site as you are welcomed by the memorial filled with 5,000 skulls, other bones and clothing dug up from the site. In many cases you can see where their skulls have been bashed in or shot at, often by Khmer Rouge soldiers who were merely children - sometimes only 10 years old.

And as you walk round more horrors unfold...

Past grave after grave...

And a patch of land where the bones and clothes of the victims lie embedded in the soil...

It's a truly harrowing experience and you might wonder why anyone would choose to visit such a site but for a country which has suffered so much, it's the least you can do to learn and pay your respects for a people who are haunted by the past but looking to the future.  I would go so far to say that you probably won't really understand Cambodia unless you come here.

Of course we didn't organise this all ourselves but the incredible Thary, a local tour guide organised it all for us and because she was 5 months pregnant she gave us Len instead who was a fountain of knowledge, speaking with passion and wisdom on everything we went to see.  You can contact her at Thary AT vastlandtravel DOT com.