Since our last postcard we have spent many lazy hours (make that days) on the beaches of Vietnam (waiting for Pete to get over bronchitus!) and then wandered the streets of Saigon, before taking a 3 day tour of the Mekong Delta on a variety of boats as we meandered into Cambodia. All very exotic and exciting. As we only have 5 more weeks, less now, it feels a bit more like a normal holiday i.e. one with a nearby end point, and so we are getting into the holiday spirit. Complete with nightly cocktails by the riverside etc.. We have had 2 days in Phnom Penh now, and have visited the Royal Palace which is very near our guest house - it is a stunning place, if I had to live in a palace I would choose one like it! Very fairly tale grounds and peacefully exotic surroundings to exquisitely over the top buildings. Today, however, we went to a museum called S-21 which was first a school and then was the main prison of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge in the late 1970's. It is still set out as it was then with classrooms split into tiny cells less than a metre long. They have filled many of the torture chambers with photos that the Khmer Rouge took of the 20,000 prisoners that came through the place and died (all but 7). It has a very ghostly feel to it. But no matter what you read and see it is simply impossible to relate to or even vaguely understand what went on in there. Everybody we meet has some connection to it. Either their father and sister were murdered, or they have lost limbs or family members to the countless land mines that still cover the country. I'm sure that this is a beautiful country, and in fact on the drive from the Mekong Delta to Phnom Penh we saw some fabulous scenery with amazing temples dotted around, but the devastation wreaked on the place by such recent atrocities (the last killings were in 1998!) is still very much at the forefront of what you see. Not very exotic at all. We have decided that Peter's motorbike driving skills can wait awhile before we put them back to the test, maybe we'll leave the big city and wait until a nice quiet town is reached. Not that I don't trust him but...