Phnom Penh----- day #2

        Phnom Penh (PP), Cambodia's capital city, is a distillation of perhaps everything that one might

The Royal Palace

have fantasized & imagined that a big South East Asian city might be. It pulsates and offers a sense of vibrant energy, crowded and chaotic streets, an overlay of a European colonial past, gold gilt temples and palaces and straddling the mighty Mekong River. Most of the tourist sites are contained in the central district  on the south shore which offers up plentifully the kind of services most required by western tourists--decent hotels, plenty of restaurants, night life and an effective informal if disorganized transportation system. PP has not yet joined some many other regional cities namely, Singapore, Bangkok, Taipei and Shanghai that have effectively lost their souls to the onward march of modernisation. I am sure that if I were to come back to PP in 5-8 years from now, much will have changed. Hopefully the people, or at least those that I have encountered in the tourist sector, will have retained the friendliness they presently exhibit.
              My tourist objective today was to make a visit to the infamous prison, code named C-21. Built in 1965 and operated as a secondary school until 1974 when it was converted by the Khmer

Infamous C-21 jail......

Rouge (extreme--shades of ISIS in 2016) communist revolutionary government into a holding jail. Through this location, 10's of thousands of citizens were tortured, beaten & sentenced to death before being passed to other camps in the country-side for extermination. The jail is hidden away on non-descript central PP side street #330 and functions now as the Genocide Museum for the period 1975-79, during which the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, liquidated over 2 million Cambodian citizens and actually emptied the entire capital of its population, banishing them to severe & mostly fatal manual labour in the country-side. Even currency during this cruel period was discontinued (only barter

Boy band outside the temple....

permitted) and destroyed, & as a private asset, was viewed as representing bourgeois and reactionary values. The walk from my hotel was perhaps about 5 kms to C-21 and with time to cover off my frequent disorientation in the maze of streets, took about 2 1/2 hours. Not the most pleasant walk to make, but a great opportunity to see areas of the city that I would not otherwise see. The return journey courtesy of a motor bike taxi, cost $2 and took no more than 10 minutes.
               To walk the streets of Phnom Penh, as with many other places in Asia, including India, one cannot help noticing the acute under-employment of much of its population who are involved in all types of precarious employment----watchmen, porters, barrow pushers, messengers, guards, etc., etc.
Massive education programs are needed along with investment to develop infrastructure so as to sop up the massive pools of under-utilized labour. Tourism is important, but in itself does not seem to be sufficient to catapult this nation towards economic take-off.