Cambodia has king.... but he doesn't live here.

Do you think there will be cake and ice cream?

The King of Cambodia has a wonderful royal  palace... which he doesn't live in. Like most sacred places in Cambodia if you go have your knees and shoulders covered, but considering the mosquitoes you might wanna cover everything. 

 Everyone who walks into the palace, gets one of these. The king has no hairs and his wife has unfortunately passed. He will not remarry or produce an heir due to a Buddhist oath he took. After his wife passed he built hospitals for children in her memory. Who would have thought such a nice guy would have fliers given out saying there was a birthday party...that you aren't invited to. 

Its like Disneyland , just without the rides and with
way more monks...but no lines.

No this is not the set of
"The King and I"....I checked.

The royal palace isn't just some big building, it's like a whole lotta big buildings. Walking around the whole place is the kinda exercise that can get you ready to be Moses. Being Jewish myself I decided to walk the forty years and see all of it. 

One of these things is not like the others....

There are three things you will see a lot of here in the palace. Really big buildings, beautiful gardens, and monks. Sometimes you will see all three at the same time. A minute before all these guys had their smart phones out, which was awesome but I didn't have one and they wouldn't bring theirs out to be polite. Fun fact though, many monks were previously petty criminals. They let them take the monk vows, educate them, and give them work at the monastery. I think they might be better off crowding their prisons and allowing them to become career criminals, because these guys look miserable. Its just hard to notice because of their happy, peaceful, and friendly demeanor. 

Only through the pinwheel of death can mac
users find inner peace. 

With so many Buddhas around you would think there was a lot of Buddhism going on, and there is... good guess. The statues here are amazing. Also really big. These are only a few of them but they are everywhere. It is not allowed to take pictures of some of them so if you go, definitely ask "photo?". Because if you take one then they tell you no, they look at you with enough disapproval to make a movie critic second guess their existence. Plus it's really rude and if you're passing yourself off as Canadian your cover is blown. 

I might sell this to Microsoft as a default wallpaper.

There are a lot of other amazing things here at the palace. There are quite a few of these basins of water. I wouldn't drink out of them though.

What can I say, if I
could make every post
about monkeys I
probably would.

There are also big elephants made out of wood and stone, but I opted to show the picture of the stone monkey about to eat a dragon fruit. It was one of the few painted statues, all of which were red, so I assume the director of "The Six Sense" had something to do with it. 

Never mind, here's one of an elephant.

The elephant behind me is not made out of ivory, its made out of wood. It still has one of the traditional ancient saddles on it as well. The altar in front of it, has many offerings people have left there. A lot of times people will leave money on the alter. The big golden things are money trees. They are good luck and fortune. A little conspicuous, makes me think twice about planting one in my yard. 

Move over Da Vinci!

There is a room filled with murals that tell the story of the Khmer and the elephants. It takes up a lot of space but is amazing. There are two men in the back who play the music and sing the tale that is painted on the walls. The guys are really cool too and will talk with you in English as much as they are able too. I have no ideas what to call their instruments though, I have never seen anything like them.

I'm fairly sure I owe the makers of "The Never Ending Story"
a royalty for this picture. 

Outside of the Royal Palace are these two really cool monuments. The encourage you to stand on the giant stone dragon, and its awesome. Though it is crazy dangerous.

The other is the Vietnam - Cambodia friendship monument. It reaches up to a giant clock tower. You would think after Pol Pot and his communist takeover you would think that the Khmer would not like the communists. But the Vietnamese liberated Cambodia and brought the regime to an end so the feeling is mixed.

Next time, the temples of Angkor Wat!

What is Wat Phnom?

So even though Cambodia has a king it's a lot like england, constitutional monarchy. It is also the capital and centered around a huge man made hill with a temple named after the priestess who founded Phenom Phen

Indiana Jones and the temple of the small hill

This is Wat Phnom The center of the city of Phnom Penh. This is where Lady Phnom found four golden buddha statues inside of the tree. Actually a much more believable story than the one of Joseph Smith, so I'm inclined to believe it. Crazier things have happened, evidence: El Ron Hubbart's religion. It is covered in nagas and inside are like a thousand buddhas and a lot of candles.

I call this one "The Lazy Rocky"

Yes the giant smiling dogs have penises

These are nagas. The khmer people believed they were magic beings that they descended from thousands and thousands of years ago. From an evolutionary standpoint if they came from the ocean they might be kinda right. These ones are really really big. There are also woefully under endowed giant stone dogs at the very top. They have really nice teeth, but then again walking around in cambodia you will see literally hundreds of dentist shops... and no one was able to tell me why.

It's probably for the best that I'm not in one of these

There are engravings everywhere, most of them are a lot like this one. For being hundreds of years old they have taken very very good care of them. I stopped counting after the 8th one. most of them depict these topless priestesses and the lady Phnom.

This Buddha seemed kinda judgey 

This is the inside of the temple, not a level from Soul Caliber, but almost. It is very beautiful, and there are still monks who take care of it night and day. There are over fifty candles, and the Buddha at the back is incredibly tall. The candles are pretty tall too. All the walls have beautiful paintings of khmer ancient history on them. basically the whole place is super nice, historical, and almost looks like it could be a movie scene.

There are quite a few monkeys just hanging around outside the temple. The little leashed one was really cool, we monkeyed around for quite a bit. I tried to take a selfie with the big one and he just got really mad, showed me his "crap your pants big" teeth and chased me around trying to bite me. So I have come to the conclusion that niceness and size run on an inverted scale with monkeys.

Last But not least, is what looks to be a giant homage to the evil cobra from Rikki-Tikki Tavi. It's not, I checked. Also, kudos to anyone who caught that reference. This thing is probably the biggest snake anything I have ever seen before. It's even wrapped around a giant clock and the tail runs up past the temple. It is completely made out of a wicker  type substance, I'll spare everyone a "My Side of the Mountain" joke. I think this was one of the most amazing things I have seen so far on this trip.

There is much more to come, next up, the Royal Palace!

The Killing Fields

One of the more solemn visits so far on my trip has been to The Killing Fields.  The Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia under Pol Pot in 1968. They proceeded to empty the cities completely of people and reorganize the country into work camps. All personal possessions were stolen, and all intellectuals were executed. Doctors, lawyers, historians, and anyone else who possessed higher learning were all killed. People with glasses, or any kind of genetic defect were killed, and when one person was executed their whole family was also executed to avoid creating enemies of the state.

   


           The genocidal center is not what you would first expect.  The majority of it is open air and there aren't many original structures left. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge most of them were torn down out of anger or necessity to rebuild. Every part of the Khmer culture was decimated. Estimates range from one out of every three or four people in the country were killed during that time. It was less than fifty years ago since they were forced out of the country. It's possible to still see the effects of the genocide. Most Khmer recipes were even lost  and it is hard to find most of the amazing cuisine that existed before the devastation.

The front of the museum, unfortunately photography is not allowed inside

             The museum itself is not that large, only a few spacious rooms that house artifacts and biographies of victims and the despots that controlled the Khmer Rouge. Inside are the single outfits given to men and women as they could own nothing else; A single black light cotton set of pants and shirts with a red checkered scarf. Inside are also the field implements that were used by the people forced to work in the fields, and those used to murder them when bullets became too expensive.

       This is a mass grave that housed the remains of over four hundred and fifty victims. The monsoons still to this day wash up bones and teeth and even cloth from the victims. People leave bracelets on the posts to honor the dead who were  buried there. The remains have since been removed as much as possible and given proper burials. This is only one of over fifteen mass graves at this killing field alone, there were maybe even hundreds scattered around Cambodia. Some have been forever lost to the jungles.

 

     This is probably one of the most somber and chilling parts of the genocide museum. This is the killing tree. The Khmer Rouge smashed babies and very young children into this tree in front of their parents eyes. Sometimes this was even done by children who has been brainwashed by the Khmer Rouge. To this day you can still see evidence of the brutality on the tree. It is one of the most horrific things imaginable, right next to it is a mass grave the children were thrown into. If their parents showed any emotion they were also killed, usually on the spot. Pol Pot had the policy that it was better to kill a friend accidently than to miss killing an enemy. Killing whole families was best so no one would be left to rise up and seek revenge. The tree is also covered in bracelets left by those who wish to pay their respects and honor the dead.

     This tower is many stories tall and houses the skulls of the dead who were left here. They have all been cleaned and analyzed by foreign forensics experts from around the world, significantly from germany.  If you look inside the glass you can see the fractures and bullet holes in the skulls. This place is considered one of veneration. Khmer culture requires that one cover their knees, shoulders, and remove their shoes before entering. The design of the temple was carefully chosen and is decorated in Buddhist fashion with nagas on the sides and roofs. Nagas are magical hydra headed snakes who the Khmer people believe they descended from.

    The experience of the killing fields is very somber, at first it is very hard to identify inside oneself. Some things are so unbelievable, it is very hard to imagine that this could happen, but it did.