Day Four; Siem Reap to Phmon Penh

Today was largely set aside for travelling; we made the 6-7 hour journey from Siem Reap to the capital Phmon Penh on a local bus.
I used the time to read a book called Bophana about a girl who lived under the Khmer rouge regime and was killed after being detained in the infamous s-21 prison. The next day we were set to visit both the s-21 prison followed by the biggest killing field found so far, where some 20,000 people were killed by the Khmer rouge; mostly in brutal ways, and where 8000 skulls are now housed in a large memorial.
The Khmer rouge were a communist group headed by a man called Pol Pot. After a civil war with backing from the Vietnamese the Khmer rouge took over in 1975, and quickly engaged in one of the most brutal regimes the world has known. Anyone educated; teachers, doctors, scholars, etc was killed. Anyone who opposed the regime was killed. Everyone was forced to write biographies of their lives and anyone dubbed to have enough intelligence to oppose the insane regime was killed. The population were forced out of cities and into the farms where they were forced to work gruelling shifts and fed meagre rations; there were no exceptions. If you were a fit young man, an old woman, or even a pregnant lady your treatment was the same. Protestors were taken to jail and never seen again. The world was shut out and the borders were closed. In Phmon Penh the Khmer rouge had their most brutal prison; s-21, and the biggest killing field, where people were hacked to death to save on bullets nightly. In 1979, the Vietnamese came in to overthrow the Khmer rouge and were shocked at what they found. One forth of the population at that time had been wiped out; over 2 million Cambodians were massacred by the Khmer rouge, whose soldiers often had to hit targets of 50 murders a day each. Bophana is much like the Cambodian Anne Frank and her story made the whole thing seem more real, and I would recommend it to be read as a good insight into Cambodia’s heartbreakingly brutal recent past.
We arrived in Phmon Penh in the evening and took tuk tuks down the river where we had dinner together (I decided to go ahead and try a local delicacy that was passed around-deep fried spider; I ate one leg and it freaked me right out so I opted against trying the snake as well), and then headed home for a sleep.

Image taken from Google (I forgot my camera this night)