Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek: What to Expect, and How to Visit Properly

These are not attractions and this page is not going to describe them as a highlight.

Tuol Sleng was an ordinary Phnom Penh secondary school. In 1975 the Khmer Rouge turned it into Security Prison 21, the central interrogation centre of a regime that killed somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians in under four years. Between roughly 12,000 and 20,000 people were held there. Around a dozen survived.

The buildings were barely converted, which is a large part of what makes the site what it is. The classrooms still have blackboards, tiled floors and the iron bed frames. The regime photographed every prisoner on arrival and kept meticulous files, and those photographs now fill room after room: faces looking directly at the camera, numbered.

Choeung Ek, about fifteen kilometres out of the city, is where most of the people held at S-21 were taken to be killed. It was an orchard and a Chinese cemetery before it became one of several hundred such sites across the country. Mass graves have been excavated; others were left. The memorial stupa at the centre holds some 5,000 skulls, arranged and labelled by age and by the injuries that killed them.

More than two million Cambodians died between 1975 and 1979. Almost every Cambodian over fifty lost family. That is the context for how the country you are travelling in now came to look the way it does.

Do them in that order - Tuol Sleng first, Choeung Ek second. S-21 gives you the machinery and the faces; Choeung Ek is the end of the same sentence. Reversing it makes the second half abstract.

Allow about an hour and a half at each, plus the fifteen kilometres between, so half a day for the pair. Most people come back needing the rest of the day to be quiet, which is the real reason not to book anything demanding afterwards.

Take the audio guide at Choeung Ek. It is the single best piece of advice on this page. It is narrated in part by a survivor, it paces you around the site properly, and it lets you stand still and listen rather than read panels in the sun. There is an audio guide at Tuol Sleng too and it is also good, though the site carries more of its own weight.

Go in the morning or the early afternoon. Both sites close in the late afternoon and you do not want to be rushing the second one. Check current hours locally; they have shifted over the years and both observe Cambodian public holidays.

Photography is permitted in most areas and prohibited inside some of the cell blocks and at the stupa, and the signs are clear. The obvious point still needs making: people come here to visit family. Behave accordingly.

Children - not suitable for young ones. Teenagers who have been prepared for it generally manage, and often get a great deal out of it.

With a guide is what most people should do, and specifically a Cambodian guide. The history is within living memory and guides here frequently have a direct family connection to it. That changes the visit from a museum trip into something else, and it is worth paying for.

A private half-day costs more and buys you control of the pace. If you think you may want to sit down for twenty minutes, or leave early, this is the version to book.

On your own is entirely workable - a tuk-tuk will take you to both and wait, and the audio guides carry the visit. This is the cheapest route and there is no shame in it.

What to avoid: the combined tours that stack S-21 and Choeung Ek into the same day as the Royal Palace, the Russian Market and a sunset cruise. They exist and they sell, and the whiplash does no favours to any part of the day. Give these two sites their own half-day and see the palace and the museum on a different one.

Cost: entry at each site is modest and the audio guide is a small extra; the practical cost is transport and a guide. Budget roughly USD 25-40 for a shared guided half-day, USD 80-160 for a private one with a car.

Plan the rest of the day before you go, because you will not want to make decisions afterwards. The riverfront along Sisowath Quay in the early evening is about the right weight - the city walks there, families, kids, food carts, and the fact that Phnom Penh is a loud and functioning capital is genuinely part of what you have come to understand.

What not to do is the rooftop bar at seven. It is not disrespect exactly, it is just that it does not work.

If you want to read one thing first, Loung Ung's *First They Killed My Father* is a child's account of the same years and is the book most Cambodian guides will name. Rithy Panh's documentary *S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine* puts former guards and a survivor in the same rooms.

On the trials: the UN-backed tribunal ran from 2006 and convicted a small number of senior figures, including the commandant of S-21. It closed in 2022. Ask your guide what Cambodians thought of it - the answers are more varied and more interesting than the summary.

A note on donations: both sites have official channels and both are worth supporting. The organisations working with survivors and on documentation are the ones to give to; be wary of anyone collecting at the gate.

Building a longer trip? The 5-day Cambodia itinerary puts these sites on the afternoon of the arrival day in Phnom Penh, deliberately, so the evening after them is free.