Today is a more cultural day as we would be learning more about the Cambodian genocide, We got on the bus after our breakfast and drove to the killing fields, the site of a horrible genocide that happened less than a 50 years ago in Cambodia, where the ruling group, the Khmer Rouge, would kill any opponents to their regime, including their family and friends to “extract all the roots” and ended up killing millions of people in the country in their goal of creating a society similar to that of North Korea. On the way to the killing fields, our guide told us about his own experiences during the Khmer Rouge, as well as the history of how they managed to get into power. Once at the centre we saw some of the mass graves where men, women and children had been buried, and learnt about the horrible ways that people had been killed in those fields. We saw a memorial with thousands of skulls that had been exhumed from some of the graves and saw a movie about the genocide.
After the Killing fields, our next stop was the prison in Phnom Peng where the prisoners were jailed and tortured in order to get a confession out of them, that they worked for the CIA or KGB (entities they had never heard of) in order to be able to send them off to the killing fields. There we saw the jails cells they used and learnt of some of the experiences the prisoners would have had. We also saw thousands of pictures of the prisoners that had made their way to the prison before dying, as the general kept records and photos of every prisoner. As we learnt from our guide the story, we also got to see 3 survivors who managed to be freed from the prison when it was liberated by the Vietnamese.
After the emotional visit that morning, we grabbed lunch before going to take a nap. For the afternoon we had a sunset boat cruise planned, so we took a tour tour to the river front where we boarded a wooden boat and sailed along the river, watching as the sun set over Phnom Peng.