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Piles of skulls from the thousands of victims buried at The Killing Fields

Ten miles outside of Phnom Penh lies Choeng Ek, also known as the Killing Fields. Today it’s a memorial commemorating the suffering and lives lost under the Khmer Rouge. Yesterday, it was the place where men, women and children were brought by the truckload before being executed and dumped in mass graves in the ground.

A sign marks the spot of a mass grave of 450 victims

I was overcome with such emotion walking the grassy fields of a place where the bodies of thousands of victims lay. A sign marks the spot where the truck arrived, full of blindfolded prisoners. A sign marks the spot where more than 450 bodies were found in a mass grave. No sign is needed to mark the spot where piles of children’s clothing were found. The miniature t-shirts and pants tell the story.

The 'Killing Tree,' against which babies' skulls were crushed

One memory that I can’t get out of my mind is the site of the ‘killing tree,’ against which young babies were swung and skulls smashed. They were then dumped in the hole in the ground that stands before it.

A Buddhist pagoda houses thousands of bones of the victims

They’ve built a Buddhist pagoda at the center of the memorial to house the thousands of skulls uncovered here. Most of the skulls have a crack down the middle or dents in the side. Prison guards rarely wasted a bullet on these prisoners and often beat them to death instead.

Curious Cambodian children peak through the fences of The Killing Fields

We walked in silence around the perimeter of the grounds, lined with a wire fence and children begging for small change. Just feet away from us lied the unearthed mass graves of countless others. I began to wonder where was the talk of this genocide in my history lessons? Why don’t more Americans know more about what went on here – that three million people died in Cambodia and the United States, in a roundabout way, was involved in the crisis that lead to the Khmer Rouge takeover? Why hasn’t more been done to bring the perpetrators to justice? Many still walk freely. Only now are some finally being prosecuted for their horrific crimes against humanity.

I couldn’t help but leave The Killing Fields silent, solemn and deeply-affected by images that will stay with me forever.

If you’ve been inspired like I have been, I can’t recommend enough reading the memoir First They Killed My Father and watching the film The Killing Fields.

Young girl stands with her mother in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Leaving Angkor Wat and the temples in Siem Reap behind, we were up bright and early to catch an early morning bus to Phnom Penh. The city is the largest in Cambodia and the capital of the country since the French colonized it in the 19th century. As one of the most beautiful cities built under French rule in Indochina, it was once called the “Pearl of Asia.” Where grand boulevards studded with French colonial buildings hug the banks of the Mekong River, a pearl it may have once been. But long gone are those days.

On my travels, I’ve been trying to do as much reading as possible on the places we’re visiting. Getting a better understanding of the history, land, politics and people has helped me go a bit deeper and make the experiences even more rewarding. Pulling into Phnom Penh after reading a few memoirs on what had recently gone on here, the pages came alive.

Street scene in Phnom Penh

Cambodia suffered a bloody genocide from 1975 to 1979. Nearly three million Cambodians – in a country of eight million people, that’s roughly one out of every three – were tortured and killed under the rule of the socialist ruling party called the Khmer Rouge. In one of the most brutal racial cleansings, the Khmer Rouge executed monks, students, engineers, factory workers, doctors, librarians, teachers, lawyers or anyone suspected of being educated. They murdered aunts, uncles, mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers and young, innocent children. The put an entire nation in labor camps and destroyed a beautiful country.

The country is still recovering from the bloodbath and nowhere is it more apparent than in Phnom Penh. Paying a visit to the S21 Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and The Killing Fields made my blood curdle and brought to life all the suffering.

S21: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

Inside the walls of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, or S-21 as it is otherwise known, is a former high school in a suburb of Phnom Penh. Today it’s a museum and a testament to the 20,000 lives that were tortured here.

The walls of the once classrom are lined with tiny prison cells

Four months after the Khmer Rouge took power, they converted this high school into a prison and interrogation center. The classrooms became torture chambers and small prison cells. The windows were barred with barb-wire and iron bars. Those that passed through these doors were repeatedly tortured and forced into naming family members and friends against the regime, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed. Of all 20,000 Cambodians that entered these doors, only seven survived.

Female prisoners look helpless in the photos as they await execution

Upon arrival, prisoners were photographed and interrogated, and then the torture began.The torture system here was designed to make prisoners confess to the crimes the captors were accusing them of. The prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, scalding metal instruments and hanging. Other prisoners were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Instances of people having their fingernails pulled out while pouring alcohol on the wounds and holding a prisoner’s head under water were not uncommon.

A high school classrom-turned-torture chamber at S21 Prison Camp

Today the prison has been left just as it was found when the Khmer Rouge was defeated. Haunting empty classrooms house small prison cells. Blood stains soak the floor among piles of prisoners’ clothing. Torture chambers are still intact and the barbaric tools used to torture are on display. And in the cabinets where, perhaps, high school trophies were once displayed, lie piles of human skulls.

Thousands of prisoners' heads were held under water in this wooden box

It’s hard to describe the feeling you get walking the grounds of a place where such horrific events took place not too long ago. What made the experience so powerful, so raw and so real, were the thousands of faces staring at you. The photos the Khmer Rouge took of the prisoners are on display here. Blank, tormented faces gaze into the camera, seemingly pleading for help. The suffering becomes real and personal.

Haunting photos of male prisoners prior to execution at S21

I can’t get these faces out of my mind. Can you?

One of the greatest challenges with long-term travel is allocating time. With more than a year to traverse the globe, it would seem we have all the time in the world. The problem lies, however, in figuring out how best to use that time. We’re constantly struggling to find that balance of really getting to feel and experience the places we visit while fitting in all we want to see. Moving at a more mellow, relaxed speed throughout Asia, it was time to pick up the pace (begrudgingly) to explore Southeast Asia.

After lingering in Laos, we were on to the Kingdom of Cambodia. There is an aura about Cambodia that really grabs you. Perhaps it’s the convergence of its powerful past, tumultuous present and uncertain future. We were about to experience all three.

It was a full day of traveling to reach Cambodia from Bangkok, Thailand. The day of trains, planes and tuk-tuks (the name given to the smoke-bellowing auto-rickshaws throughout Asia) culminated with a cramped four-hour taxi ride from the Thai-Cambodian border. Accompanied by two gregarious Brazilians drowning their sorrows in Angkor Beer from their premature World Cup exit, we were all on our way to Siem Reap, the home of the great temples of Angkor Wat.

Cambodia was once the center of the Khmer Empire, which once ruled much of what is now Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. At the heart of the influential kingdom, stood the temples of Angkor Wat. Built between the 9th and 13th centuries, the temples were constructed to serve as a center of spiritual devotion, but perhaps more importantly, to outshine the ancestors of the Khmer Empire. With the hundreds of temples standing for more than a thousand years, the Khmer Empire displayed their outstanding creative ambition and architectural genius.

Our first taste of Cambodia, was discovering the charming town of Siem Reap. The town straddles a tree-lined river and is dotted with colorful, old French shophouses. Narrow cobblestone alleyways offer innovative and sophisticated dinging options and welcoming watering holes where we watched many a World Cup matches.

We spent a day exploring the temples of Angkor, which are today the pride of all Cambodians. An early morning wakeup call proved well-deserved as we watched the sun rise above the temple of Angkor Wat. The sky lit up in 10 different shades of red as the sun rose out of the jungle. Soaring into the sky like a stone castle and surrounded by a moat of still water, we experienced one of the most inspiring monuments of mankind.

After sunrise over Cambodia’s crowned jewel, we explored some of the smaller, nearby temples. A visit to the temple of Bayon revealed 216 massive stone faces staring at us and we closed the memorable day wandering through Ta Prohm temple, a mystical temple devoured by the surrounding jungle.

We enjoyed a few more days wandering the streets of Siem Reap and escaping the sweltering heat under the canopies of French-inspired cafes. During this time we were also introduced to another side of Cambodia. Here, we witnessed invalids and children begging on the streets and countless men and women hawking books and sunglasses. This was a foreshadowing for what we were about to experience in Phnom Penh.