Hello everyone. Hope you're all OK. Thanks once again for all of your messages - they really are appreciated. Sorry we're so behind on the blogs - we will hopefully have a bit more time next week so should be able to get up to date finally. We're in Australia at the moment, as you know, just about to start a sailing trip around the Whitsundays. Anyway, onto the task in hand, Phnom Penh... After a very interesting time in Vietnam it was time to move onto country number 6, Cambodia. We left Chau Doc early to board a slow boat which would take us to the Cambodian border, ironically via a fish farm; the same one we had vehemently avoided going to the day before!. We also stopped at one of the little water villages which was made up of wooden houses on stilts that rose out of the river. This presented us with yet another opportunity to buy "locally-made, authentic Vietnamese scarves" and smile politely whilst shaking our heads and saying "no thank you" - we are old hats at this now! Anyway, after a lovely, relaxing boat journey and a rather arduous border crossing - getting off the boat on the Vietnamese side in order to get our exit cards stamped and then getting back on the boat to sail about 100 metres to the Cambodian side and their immigration office - we did the last leg of the journey by bus and arrived in Phnom Penh about 11 hours after we had left Chau Doc. According to our trusty guidebook there are two main backpacker areas in Phnom Penh, one being around the lake where the bus dumped us, and one being on the opposite side of the city. Never being a couple to take the easy option we opted for the area miles away on the sole basis that there may have been rats in some of the hostels near the lake - not for us thank you very much. Unfortunately the hostels we had picked out were all fully booked so we ended up in some rather crap room which we took just for the one night before we could find somewhere better the next morning. And thankfully we did without too much bother, in a "flash-packer" area on the riverfront. The next afternoon we met the tuk-tuk driver who had driven us around the night before as he had promised to take us to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng for the bargain price of 10 USD. Stuart had already read quite a bit on Cambodian modern history and I was in the process of reading 'Surviving the Killing Fields' by the guy who starred as the Cambodian assistant to the American correspondant in the film 'The Killing Fields' (which is so sad it had already made me cry twice), so it was with some trepidation that we went to Choeung Ek. This is the biggest and most well known killing field and we had to pay to get in as the site has been privatised by a Japanese corporation, much to the disgust of the victim's families who apparently tried to stop this from happening. The first thing you come to is the memorial stupa which has been built to honour those who died there. Behind glass it houses over 5,000 skulls which have been dug up since the effort to find all of the mass graves and recover the bodies started. The image is pretty haunting and one that will be hard to forget. The grassy area around this memorial is the site of the actual killing field and is now laden with craters which mark each mass grave that has been excavated, some with markers which tell you how many people had been buried in there (up to 500 in one alone!) and whether they had been men, women or children. As you walk between them the ground is littered with small bones and bits of clothing that have gradually come to the surface over the years but which are too small and of which there are too many to be dug up. It's a really emotional place to visit - the sadness is almost stifling. I think the fact that it all happened so recently (in the last 30 years) makes it hard to comprehend. When we left Choeung Ek we almost didn't go to Tuol Sleng (or S-21 as it's \ famously known) as we felt like we'd seen enough for one day, but we changed our minds on the basis that it wouldn't be any easier the next morning. This genocide museum is the prison the Khmer Rouge took their victims to for interrogation before taking them to the killing fields - out of the 17,000 people who were thought to have been taken there only 12 survived. The prison has pretty much been left how it was found and therefore has a really eerie feel to it. The old torture cells still have the equipment and beds in them, with horribly graphic photos on the walls of how prisoners were found dead by the invading Vietnamese. It has rooms dedicated to the photographs taken of the prisoners as they were brought in, and other rooms full of photographic evidence of how badly they were treated. It's unbelievable, really, that the people responsible for this prison are even now trying to deny that it exists! By the time we left the museum we were exhausted by the emotional weight of it all. And so when our tuk-tuk driver asked us if we wanted to go to a shooting range we decided we didn't really feel like it. Especially seeing as though the targets ranged from the standard to the utterly ridiculous; apparently you could pay extra for a live target in the form of a cow, with, get this, a buy-back option! Oh yes ladies and gentleman - if you don't kill the cow with your over-the-shoulder rocket launcher the farmer will buy it back off you for half the price you paid for it!!!! Only in Cambodia. We spent our last day in Phnom Penh looking around some markets where Stuart was promised people selling fried spiders..... they were lying - it was just more stalls selling cheap shoes and fish heads. We also dragged ourselves to the allegedly rat-infested lake area for some lunch as I had read in the guidebook the words, "this bar sell houmous like your mamma makes in Greece" and HAD to have it... rice was once again getting a bit boring and thankfully the houmous didn't disappoint. We then visited the Grand Palace which was impressive, but to be honest, we had seen so many temples and ornate buildings by this point (and would be having a whole 3-days of temples in Siem Reap) that we did just snap it before getting out.... to the pub, where we had a few beers and bought copies of two books we didn't want from some children who made us feel sufficiently guilty about being English and "rich", which seems laughable to us but we really are by their standards. And that was Phnom Penh... onto Siem Reap tomorrow. Stu, update please?! xxx