That probably could be the ideal marketing slogan for this city . The centre is just a couple of kilometres away from THE attraction of South-East Asia, so it’s neither very surprising nor not understandable that the whole city is catering to, surviving from and dealing with tourism. We arrived in this otherwise pretty nice town in the evening on the 30th of february and should have the honour to celebrate the upcoming year 2010 with masses of tourists before we would take a look at the famous ancient temples of Angkor, too. Actually, all that was not really bad, in the city were a lot of people that were pretty relaxed and easy-going, there was a Couchsurfing New Years party called out and in general no shortage of happy pizza restaurants and bars that serve beer for 0,50$ per mug. So, what’s there that ones liver could want more for a New Years celebration? The Couchsurfing party where we decided to go to took place in a terrace restaurant that overlooks the Pub Street from where we had a gorgeous view over the masses and the big street party that was going on under us. The prize we paid for that that privilege location was that our own party suffered a little bit from it because everybody was just standing on the terrace and watching the party beneath. But it didn’t really matter, the beer was flowing and we had some nice chats before we counted down to midnight and then started to stroll around town to join the party a bit instead of just watching it, too. It was nice with live bands in the streets, foreigners and locals dancing the night away together and a never ending stream of draught beer but it was nothing really special, I guess that’s the problem that all public New Years parties have somehow. Anyway, it was one of the best New Years Eves we ever had but we can just give credits for that to ourselves, because simply we two really made the best out of that night and had a lot of fun
As every year, the first of january is just there to chill out and to get rid of these huge hangovers the new year brings with it as a first gift but at the 2nd we slowly made our way to the ruins. We usually wanted to explore this side for three days but the Myanmar visa problems left us no other choice to rush through in just one and a half days. The ticket, by the way with 20$ for one day, 40$ for three days or 60$ for a week not really cheap, is valid from pm the day before the real starting day so we already went there in this evening to see the sunset together with another thousand tourists at the main big temple Angkor Wat which gives the name to the whole area. Always again it’s the same disgusting thing with this silly tourists: the sun sets and the people start to run away back to the guesthouse and abandon the sites for the smarter persons who stay a little bit longer within seconds. So we stayed a little bit longer and had this main temple almost for ourselves what gave us a totally different picture. We had to cycle back in the dark now, but that was worth it, definitely. The next day we started out for some further explorations with our rented yellow 1$ bikes and found temple ruins in very different conditions, some look like almost new, some really are just ruins but all combine the fascinating idea that this are the remainings of an old former capital city that had it’s best times 700-1000 years ago with a population of one million when London just had 70000 inhabitants and Berlin was not even founded. I think beside the Inka ruins of Macchu Picchu in Peru, the mayan ruins of Merida in Mexico and the Pyramids of Gizeh in Egypt this is really one of the big places in the world to dream yourself back into past centuries and lost civilisations. We, with just one whole day at the ruins maybe were a little bit tooo motivated and in the afternoon we slightly felt overdosed and exhausted by this great ancient site. I guess if you go to Angkor you should bring a little bit more time, do it slowly and take your time to wander around and explore, after this hurried one and a half days we were actually happy that there weren’t two more to come. We already had to leave Cambodia to organise my Myanmar visa.

Cambodia is a country with one of the cruellest newer histories on planet earth, a country that is still suffering from the three and a half year regime of the stone-age communists around Pol Pot and his “Khmer Rouge” who were determined to bring a “pure revolution” to Cambodia. Not one of these untainted revolutions the neighbouring countries China, Laos and Vietnam came up with a little bit earlier. Their attemp was to transform Cambodia in a peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative. For the vast majority of Cambodians this “pure revolution” meant to abandon their family, their friends, their houses and their cities to march out into the countryside to work as slaves for 12-15 hours a day. Disobedience or the slightest dissident opinion (or just being suspicious to have them), was prosecuted with immediate execution.
When Phnom Penh, the city that was known as the “Pearl of Asia”, fell at the 17th of April 1975, the majority of the citizens welcomed the Khmer Rouge, not knowing that their capital would be just a ghost town only a couple of days later. Phnom Penh had a populationof around 2 million inhabitants on that day when the Khmer Rouge forced the citizens to leave. Different factions of the Khmer Rouge were responsible for “evacuating” different zones of the city, people who lived in the east were send to the east, people who lived in the north were sent to the north and so on. Families splitted up and for the most of the Phnom Penhois the future depended on which area of the city they have been in that day. In the 3,5 years regime of the Khmer Rouge not more than 50000 people lived in PP. The regime left uncounted destroyed families behind, which lost nearly two million relatives (out of an 8 million population) and a country, that was closer to the middle age than to today. I think it’s very important to know about that to understand Cambodia’s national psyche and I’d like to recommend to everyone to read more about that topic.
That’s a really brief introduction, how the Khmer Rouge regime began in 1975 and Phnom Penh is the city, where the results of this years of terror, torture and murder are still most visible in Cambodia.

But let’s start a little bit different. When we arrived in the Capital we had to find the place of our Couchsurfing host, which was not very difficult. Her apartment is a direct neighbour to the Royal Palace and the National Museum… Couchsurfing is really just an amazing thing… how else you could have the possibility to stay in place, where the country’s monarch palace is just across the street? This place, with a great rooftop terrace belonged to Mariam, a woman originally from the USA, who works in PP since some time but who was, at the time of our visit, not in Cambodia. She went for a home holiday back to the States. Via CS she found a house and cat sitter named Samina from Great Britain with pakistani/finnish roots and invited some more guests. Beside Annika and me there were Astrid from France, Steve from the USA and Daniel and Iva from Czech Republic. So her apartment was always fully booked and it was a really cool time we spent there. The city itself, beside of the history lessons was not very appealing for me, but maybe that was because we really had some stuff to do again after the relaxed weeks in Freedomland. We had to find a good tailor and a shoemaker, I wanted to apply for my Myanmar/Burma visa, we had to find a new charger that fits for my small laptop and one for Annikas mobile and we still needed time in the evenings to drink beer. In Germany or another “western” country you can usually organise things like that in one day, but in South-East Asia it’s a task that takes a little bit longer, especially finding that special chargers. I wasn’t successful in obtaining my Myanmar visa either in the embassy they told me that it takes five working days in Cambodia and that I’m better done to apply for the visa in Bangkok where they have express services. That was not very cool, because it mixed up our plans a little bit and we would have to shorten our Angkor Wat visit, but there was no other way to do so. Anyway, we found some time for some sightseeing, too. Unfortunately the most “famous” sights in Phnom Penh are the Killing Fields outside the city and the former High School “Tuol Sleng” that was used as a torture prison in the Khmer Rouge Regime. Especially the Tuol Sleng museum just simply knocks you out. It is unbelievable to what cruelties humans can commit to other humans, it’s insane and not imaginable. The High School is more or less untouched since Phnom Penh was freed by the approaching Vietnamese army and most of the interior remains just as the Khmer Rouge left this place hurriedly. Eight prisoners were found dead in the old classrooms that were transformed to and used as torture chambers. In this rooms you still find the “bed” and the other equipment where the eight people were found on, including pictures how the people where found. To see this bed in the middle of this empty room with nothing else in there except some torture instruments and to imagine how much people suffered at this place, with the photograph of the last prisoner in the room on the wall leaves you just speechless. We hired a guide through the museum for a few Dollar who had a depressing story about her family to tell, too. She almost lost her whole family and her parents were both inprisoned in this High School. Another shocking detail is, that the Khmer Rouge, exactly like the Nazis, documented their cruelties very well. In one of the four buildings you find pictures of all victims and it feels as if you could look them straight into their innocent eyes, not knowing or maybe perfectly well knowing what they have to face. During the three years fourteen thousand people were brought, investigated, tortured and questioned at the “S21″, as it was known under the Khmer Rouge, just seven people survived, they flew not from the prison but from the Killing Fields were the people were brought to kill them …
That was our next stop, too. After the prison we drove the same way as these couple of thousands victims drove just a little more than 30 years ago, too. We weren’t pushed into overloaded trucks off course and had our own tuk tuk driver but to imagine that this way was the road to death for so many innocent women, men and children was still very depressing. At the Killing Fields we were already a little bit suffering by this boundlessness of misery that we saw before and now we had to go through fields off mass graves, seeing bones coming out of the earth, getting explained that this nice tree you just pass was used to smash infants against it and kill it that way, approaching a pagoda that was filled with skulls and bones of the victims from the bottom to the top and seeing a movie that shows how the site was excavated and found was really enough horror for one day. We fell pretty silent after that for the rest of the day and went on to Siem Reap the next noon…