After Siem Reap I knew it would be difficult to warm to the next destination on the agenda, so my views of Phnom Penh are probably a little biased. The city is too spread out for my liking, which is a weird thing to say considering my life at home is based in London on the majority. The city itself is nice enough, I just found it lacked the charm of Siem Reap.

The main attraction (which seems to be a highly inappropriate use of the word) of Phnom Penh is the opportunity to learn more about the Khmer Rouge and the tragic consequences their rule had on the Cambodian people. Therefore this post will probably be fairly depressing.

We visited the S21 prison, which was the location of imprisonment, mass torture and murder of thousands of people, many of them highly educated people that could pose a threat to the Khmer Rouge's regime. The Khmer Rouge's objective was to bring the country back to basics and create everyone as equal, which was publicized as being about bridging the divide between rich and poor, but in fact took things to the extreme by wanting to demolish education on the whole and exterminate those who had already been highly educated. The museum of S21 was pretty horrific but really interesting to learn more about Cambodia's past. S21 used to be a school before it was turned into a prison, which of course just makes the place extra creepy; the old exercise equipment in the school playground had been modified to use as a torture tool.

We later went to the Killing Fields, which sort of comes as a package deal with S21; you rarely visit one without seeing the other. The Killing Fields is the site of mass graves that were discovered a few years after the reign of Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, ended. Some of the graves have had a roof built over them to mark them out as the particularly significant ones, and due to this it took me awhile to realise that all of the shallow pits I was walking between were also graves. They were just so shallow (about 2-3 foot) it didn't even register with me that they could also be graves. Probably the most morbid part of the Killing Fields for the majority of visitors is the memorial that has been built there to honour the dead - it is filled with the actual skulls of victims found at the Killing Fields, divided up by age and sex. However I found the most morbid part to be the rags of clothing that were still half buried amongst the grave sites and hadn't been dug up yet.

After all this in one day we decided we needed to cheer ourselves up and went for a night out in Phnom Penh after some drinking games at our guest house. We went to a little dive bar and made a very bad error in judgement by knocking back the tequila in full force. There were four ladies of varying ages working the bar at this place; one of the ladies had two jobs, one in the day, one at night. I will do my utmost never to complain about working long hours again! One 20 year old girl was in Phnom Penh studying at university. I asked her what she wanted to be once she left and she shrugged before admitting she'd like to be a doctor. Asking her more about it, it turns out it takes nine years of studying in Cambodia to become a doctor, but her family could only afford to send her to university for seven months. I'd previously been told at the landmine museum that it costs a mere $500 PER YEAR to go to university in Cambodia. And this girl could only afford to go for seven months. Imagine if there was a sponsoring programme for young people in Cambodia to go to university. $4500 would pay to educate someone to become a doctor, and would help to turn the poverty in Cambodia around. Something to think about.

Sadly the whole story wasn't sobering enough for yours truly, and I woke up the next day with a huge hangover that was partially helped by actually watching The Hangover. That movie really does go a long way to curing your pain; as long as you don't wake up in possession of a stranger's baby, a missing tooth, a tiger in the bathroom, a bunch of Chinese guys hunting you down, not to mention a missing friend, you're all good.

Off to Sihanoukville on the coast of Cambodia next - looking forward to finally getting my tan on as I'm pretty much as pasty as when I actually got on the plane at Heathrow back in January. So much for olive skin eh? x