Hey, thought I would do a quick update on our weekend. We had a day trip to Kulen mountains with the local guide via minibus, which made a nice change from a tuk tuk as there was air conditioning and the bumpy roads were slightly less annoying. There was a lovely huge waterfall and it was fun watching the locals swim - noticed they are very conservative and they even swim with a t-shirt over their bikinis. Got home for a short rest then we had drinks and nibbles on the veranda with the rest of the volunteers, which was great fun although I only joined them near the end as I was pretty tired. Then it was off on the night bus to Phnom Penh - we were expecting the VIP bus but started to get a bit worried when the other volunteers asked how much we paid and it was around $3 less than the real VIP bus, so that gave us the first sign that all would not be as we had hoped. Apparently its really common to get things stolen there, so between worrying about that and no air con = no sleep! Anyway, we arrived at 630am and were quickly picked up by a couple of tuk tuk drivers, who promised us they would find a cafe and take us to the killing fields and S21 - they drove us to their pal's cafe and got them all up to feed us, but it was okay. Went to S21 first, which was pretty depressing - Pol Pot cleared out the whole of Siem Reap in 1975 and took over a primary school which he used as a place of detention but mainly torture, it was pretty nasty and was funny how obsessive they were about photographing and documenting everyone they tortured. The photographs were very graphic and some of them were just children - what a shame. If we thought that was bad, the Killing Fields were worse - there are hundreds of them all over Cambodia, but this was one of the larger one - 2 million people were murdered by the Khymer Rouge just because they were educated or said the wrong thing. They murdered whole families too, it was pretty awful - it was weird to think that I was a teenager at that time and all I had to worry about was what Top 20 single I would buy with my paper-round money - makes you think how lucky you are and how niaive you are about whats going on the world at the time when you are that age (by the way, for those under 40, a 'single' or 'record'' is a 7 inch piece of vinyl with music on it - used to cost me 49p :). There were only 7 survivors of S21 prison and one of them had written a book about his experiences - he was there and I bought his book and got him to sign it so that we pretty cool. The profits go to a support group and their families. Was glad I had seen it, but wont be rushing back to thats for sure. Had a slightly better bus back, but obviously the Cambodian idea of VIP and mine are two different things :) Hope all is well with everyone and thanks for all the lovely messages - they are really appreciated! xxxx