Landmine Museum

The Cambodia Landmine Museum is the most powerful museum in Siem Reap — a small institution founded by Aki Ra, a former child soldier who was forced to lay landmines as a boy and has spent his adult life removing them by hand. The museum, located on the road between Siem Reap and Banteay Srei, displays defused mines, UXO (unexploded ordnance), and the tools Aki Ra uses — sometimes nothing more than a knife and a stick — to clear the mines that still kill and maim Cambodians decades after the wars ended.

Cambodia is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world — an estimated 4-6 million landmines and items of UXO remain in the soil, the legacy of the Vietnam War (when the US dropped more bombs on Cambodia than on Japan in WWII), the Khmer Rouge period, and the civil war that followed. The museum provides the context for these statistics through Aki Ra's personal story and the stories of the children he shelters — many of them mine victims — in the orphanage attached to the museum.

The museum is unflinching but not sensationalist — the emphasis is on the ongoing danger, the demining process, and the lives of the survivors rather than on graphic injury. The experience is emotionally challenging and provides the historical dimension that the temple visits alone can't: the temples represent Cambodia's past glory; the Landmine Museum represents the trauma that followed.