As we pulled into Phnom Penh, after spending the day on the bus, we were immediately greeted by a tuk tuk driver waving enthusiastically at us through the window. I smiled and causiously waved back, this was followed by a lot of large arm gestures and pointing. Before we'd even got down the steps of the bus he was shouting up at us "tuk tuk, tuk tuk!!". He was obviously on a mission to get us in his tuk tuk, so we took advantage and bargained hard for a cheap trip. 8000 Riel and a bumpy ride later we were dropped at our hostel (accomodation that would later be described to us a rabbit hole). It was extremely warm and our room had no air con. They had provided us with 2 electric fans, but moving warm air around the sauna of a room didn't ease our suffocation much.

On our first evening we headed to the nearby night market where little stalls were serving up fresh noodles, fried spring rolls, fried rice, soups, curries, papaya salad, pickled ginger, fresh fruits, waffles etc. We added a selection of foods to a basket and handed it over to be cooked. We sat in the middle of the market on mats underneath large plastic covers. After we headed to the nearby bars for 50p beers.

The next day we hired a tuk tuk driver for the day to take us to the Tuol Sleng Genoside Museum (originally a school and then later the S-21 prison under the Khmer Rouge) and then the Cheoung Ek Killing Field one of 300 sites where thousands were brutally slaughtered during the reign of Pol Pot between 1975 and 1979 (although he maintained, all the way up to his peaceful death in 1998, that he was unaware of the fields). To say we were subdued by the end of the day is an understatement. Both the musuem and the Killing Fields do a good job of bringing to life the events that happened only 40 years ago and the images, writings, displays and glass cases full of skulls reflect the true horror that many innocent Cambodians (including women, children and babies) had to face. Whilst at the S-21 museum we were able to meet one of the prison survivors. When the prison was liberated by the Vietnamese in January 1979 only 7 people were found alive out of 14,000. 3 of these are alive today one being Bou Meng, a small frail elderly gentleman who was sitting in the courtyard of the Museum selling his book. We bought his book, but after having just seen the horrors of the prison and the way people were treated and tortured we had no words and could only shake his hand.

The Killing Field was extremely creepy and the audio tour intensified this by playing the weird music that that was often put out over large speakers to hide the sounds of people being bludgeoned to death. Large pits are all around the area and act as scars to mark out where the mass graves were and still are. The ground is very unstable and we were told that during bad weather bones, teeth and rags of clothing still appear on the surface. A constant reminder of all those that perished there. We finished off in a bar watching the football which finished Ben off....all in all quite an exhausting day.

The plan for the following day was to visit the Phnom Penh Palace. However, we found ourselves sheltering in a cafe as we witnessed our largest tropical storm yet. The sky went dark grey, the other side of the river disappeared, lightning bolts zig zagged through the clouds and the streets filled up with so much water that we found ourselves paddling up to our kness to get across roads. We stayed in the cafe for most of the storm where 2 local children decided they would sit with us, at first trying to sell us bracelets and later performing magic tricks:-)

We left Phnom Penh the next day to head south for the beach, with plans to pass back through the capital and to try for a second time to see the palace.

[Southern Cambodia blog to follow]

A few days later we returned to Phnom Penh and got a hot sunny day to walk around the spectacular palace. The colourful buildings reflected the sun and monks in orange robes wandered around the courtyards. Well worth a stop off on our way to Siem Reap.