Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Wat Langka
Cnr Sihanouk Blvd & Street 51 • Public meditation classes are held four times a week (see p.78)
Sprawling
Wat Langka
, one of the five pagodas founded in the city by Ponhea Yat in
1442, gets its name from its historic ties with monks in Sri Lanka. The pagoda vies
with Wat Ounalom for importance, and many of the monks here are highly regarded
teachers. Within the vihara scenes from the Buddha's life feature an idiosyncratic local
touch - one shows Angkor Wat, while another depicts tourists climbing Wat Phnom.
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Toul Sleng Genocide Museum
Entrance off Street 113 • Daily 7.30am-5.30pm; Bophana docudrama screened at 10am & 3pm • $2; English-speaking guide $6 • A short
moto ride from the centre
Originally the Toul Svay High School, from 1975 to 1979 the disturbing
Toul Sleng
Genocide Museum
was the notorious Khmer Rouge prison known as
S-21
, through
whose gates more than thirteen thousand people (up to twenty thousand according to
some estimates) passed to their deaths. S-21 was an interrogation centre designed for
the educated and elite: doctors, teachers, military personnel and government o
cials.
The regime was indiscriminate in its choice of victims; even babies and children were
among those detained, and subsequently slaughtered, to eliminate the possibility of
them one day seeking to avenge their parents' deaths.
Beyond the gates, still surrounded by high walls and ringed by barbed wire, an eerie
silence descends on the complex of four buildings, juxtaposing harshly against the palm
and frangipani trees in the former school playground. Up to 1500 prisoners were
housed here at any time, either confined in tiny cells or chained to the floor or each
other in the former classrooms.
Block A
The southernmost block,
Block A
(to the left of the ticket booth), comprises three floors
of cells that still contain
iron bedsteads
and the shackles used to chain the prisoners to
the beds. Chilling, grainy photos in each room depict the unrecognizable corpse of the
bed's final inhabitant.
Block B
Walking across the garden past school gym apparatus used by the Khmer Rouge as a
grotesque torture device, you come to
Block B
. On the ground floor you can see
hundreds of black-and-white
photographs
of the victims, their eyes expressing a variety
of emotions, from fear through defiance to emptiness. Each one holds a number; the
Khmer Rouge were meticulous in documenting their prisoners and sometimes
photographed victims following torture (also on display). The guides can tell you
stories of some of the photographed victims.
Block C
he terrace and upper-storey
balconies
of
Block C
are still enclosed with the barbed-
wire mesh that prevented the prisoners attempting escape or jumping to a premature
death. The partition cells on each floor, of wood or brick, are so small that there is
hardly room to lie down. When the Vietnamese army entered the prison in January
1979, they found just seven prisoners alive; the corpses of fourteen prisoners who had
died shortly before were discovered in the cells and buried in graves in the courtyard.
Although the majority murdered here were Cambodian, including scores of Khmer
