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Our final day in Phnom Penh. We had organised to meet our driver from yesterday at 10am so had time for breaky down by the river. We met up on time & climbed in the back to be taken 15 km's out of town through the dust & crazy traffic to one of the notorious killing fields. During the reign of the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975-1979 thousands of innocent civilians were killed around the country in a horrific display of genocide. Choeung Ek, where we were, was a place of brutal executions for over 17000 people. Men, women, babies, it didn't matter. The regime would transport the victims there then make them kneel beside the pits before using simple farm tools to execute them. What shocked us was just how small the field was, only a couple of acres. What's worse is that Pol Pott, the leader of the regime, lived out his life in luxury & under house arrest. We can only prey that there is a hell. After a few hours we found our Tuk driver who took us back into town to Toul Sleng prison, known as S-21. During the horror years the cities were evacuated with only the Khmer soldiers allowed to live there. In Phnom Penh the prison was a converted school which was use to interrogate & torture anyone the regime didn't like, which was everyone. They would torture these poor innocent people until they died or signed fake confessions, before they shipped them off to the killing fields. How something like this can still happen after WW2 is beyond us, & yet it still continues to happen again & again. We left early afternoon & got our driver to drop us at restaurant we had been recommended. Unfortunately it was closed as a result of the election so we went to a cafe next door. We started to make our way back to the hotel when I noticed a barber on the street. He convinced me to get a cut, all for $2, then proceeded to to give me something close to a bouffant. Realizing his expertise was probably not in hairdressing I told him to just buzz cut me. I then agreed to a cutthroat raiser shave for $1, because I didn't learn my lesson from the haircut. I feel I may have definately overpaid for all this. So we returned to the hotel so I could shave & trim the hairs he didn't get (how can you mess up a buzz cut), before showering & relaxing for an hour. In the evening we headed to the night market for a feed before returning to the hotel to prepare for the 7am bus ride tomorrow to Siem Reap, our final stop on this long journey home.
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