For the third straight morning our alarm went off well before day break and we boarded a bus bound for Phnom Penh. Typically it was an hour late and that squeezed an already tight afternoon schedule even more.
First stop was Lucky Motorcycles - the best place in the city to get an expedited Vietnam visa. Literally a visa service in the back of a moto mechanic. It makes sense here, OK.
Next stop, securing a bus ticket for tomorrow morning and finally, dumping our bags at a cheap hotel.
Now came decision time as we only had time left in the afternoon for one of S21, where prisoners of the Khmer Rouge's brutal regime were held, tortured and dehumanised, or the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre, more bluntly known as the Killing Fields and a place, like roughly 300 other similar centres across Cambodia, where it's estimated that 3 out of 8 million Cambodians came to their unjust end.
We jumped in a tuk-tuk, donned a face mask at the advice of our driver and prepared ourselves for the horror that awaited at Choeung Ek.
It's the contrasts that get you at Choeung Ek where just under forty years ago Cambodians were bludgeoning fellow Cambodians to death in the name of Angka and Pol Pot's deranged regime now exists a peaceful reserve where birds chirp happily in the trees and children laugh and play at the school next door. Those sounds break through the audio commentary of a man who survived the regime and the Killing Fields and each could not be in starker contrast to the other.
For two hours we numbly floated through the Centre trying to imagine and comprehend the atrocities that were committed here.
Some of the lowlights of human existence are the memorial which houses the skulls of those who were killed,
the Magic Tree from which loud speakers hung and would blast out Khmer Rouge songs to mask the sound of people being slain at night,
the mass graves where you can still see shards of bone and human teeth if you look close enough and
the one that really stops you in your tracks, the Killing Tree, which babies skulls were smashed against and they were then unceremoniously thrown into a grave, whilst their mothers watched. As I said, lowlights of our existence.
And on that solemn note we departed Phnom Penh for something, hopefully, a lot brighter.
