Tuol Sleng Museum

Monday 8th October
The museum was quite difficult to find. It was badly marked on our map and we went round in circles, walking down dirty, dusty back streets, before stumbling upon a small, concentrated Western hub - with the usual cold drinks for sale, white faces, beggars and tuk-tuks.

The museum was quite interesting. There was not much to read, but it was useful just to get a feel for what went on there. Before it became the S-21 Prison, and then the museum it is today, it was a school. In the grounds there is an uneasy incongruous mix of children's climbing frames and the remains of torture tools, including a big wooden frame on which political prisoners were hoisted upside down until losing consciousness. Then afterwards they would be plunged into a big pot of manure, or something similar, to be torn back into consciousness again.
The individual torture chambers were particularly eerie, each one similar to the next: a bare room, besides an old metal bed frame with various rusty iron torture tools resting on top; a photo above the bed - bad quality, blown-up, black and white photos of torture victims - post-torture, with blood, limbs and flesh all over the place; the imagination doing most of the work.
Then upstairs there were rows and rows of badly lit, tiny individual cells. There was a seemingly randomly placed cardboard cutout of a prisoner sitting inside one of them, which because of the light, I didn't see at first and it scared the shit out of me.
There were also rows and rows of photos of prisonsers, including very young children.

In the evening we couldn't be bothered to have dinner so we just ate peanuts and chocolate instead.