Phnom Penh: Much Harder to Handle than Anticipated

I don't know what I was expecting, really. Even having seen The Killing Fields years back, I think I viewed Phnom Penh mainly as a jumping off point for getting to Siem Reap. So I wasn't prepared for S-21, the high school turned detention center turned genocide museum where the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed thousands of people (including children) between 1975 and 1979. I wasn't prepared for the photographic documentation of the prisoners being tortured or the photographs of corpses. None of it makes any sense.

Afterwards, we headed to the Killing Fields, to the stupa which houses 9000 skulls found in mass graves, through the paths strewn with the bones and clothing of some of the victims of the genocide, to separate mass graves. According to our guide, Khmer Rouge soldiers killed the children whose bones were found in the mass graves by throwing them against a tree until they were dead. Bombs thrown into the mass graves ensured that there were no survivors.

I can't begin to process the things I've seen here.