Currency:
Cambodian Riel

Highlights:
Delving into the scary past of Cambodia, the greatest comeback of all time!

Our Adventure:

After waking up at 05h20 and heading back to Angkor Wat to watch the sun rise we jumped on a Capital Tour bus and 6 hours later we arrived in Phnom Penh.

Phnom Penh is the capital and largest city of Cambodia, located at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap rivers.

For western visitors, Phnom Penh can be a rough change. The city is characterised by very warm and humid temperatures, infrastructure is largely lacking, rubbish and dust in the streets, risky traffic, blocked sidewalks, prowling tuk tuks and moto-drivers, and touts and beggars. The Ministry of Land Management still allows many architectural horrors to be built, though a determined group of Khmer architects is fighting the trend. Unhappily there are few green spaces as yet.

All that said, the city is improving. It is striving to become more architecturally-developed, with high rise buildings, while still retaining much of the beauty that made it a Paris of the East before 1970. The city's French colonial buildings are beautiful, so its streetscapes make for a pleasant walk. Beautiful wide boulevards, fine colonial architecture and a park like riverfront with cafés and restaurants aplenty help make Phnom Penh a worthwhile destination for some. The standard tourist sights are few. But as a place to relax, watch the street life and absorb local color, Phnom Penh rates very high among Asian cities.

After arriving in the craziness of Phnom Penh we realised that we were only 5 blocks down from our hotel so hit the streets, after squeezing through the craziness of the tuk tuk drivers and checked into our hotel, Town View Hotel.

As it was already quite late we jumped in a shower and then hit the streets of Phnom Penh and landed up at the Herb Restaurant for dinner before returning to the hotel to watch a movie called The Killing Fields in preparation for our day of site seeing in Phnom Penh.

You can see our photos here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=384439&id=713415257&l=91a92c09d3

Day 2:

We woke up early for our one day of site seeing in Phnom Penh and started things off with flat whites and a full English breakfast at a café called Penny Lane. Delicious.

We knew the rest of the day would be filled with visiting two very somber museums: Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek.

We organised two tuk tuk drivers for the day and headed off on our outing. To summarise the atrocities of what happened in Cambodia is extremely hard and these museums showed just how terrible the things that happened in Cambodia were. The museums can be summarised as follows:

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is a former high school which was used as the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21) by the Khmer Rouge regime from its rise to power in 1975 to its fall in 1979. Tuol Sleng in Khmer; means "Hill of the Poisonous Trees" or "Strychnine Hill".

The buildings at Tuol Sleng are preserved as they were left when the Khmer Rouge were driven out in 1979. The regime kept extensive records, including thousands of photographs. Several rooms of the museum are now lined, floor to ceiling, with black and white photographs of some of the estimated 20,000 prisoners who passed through the prison.

Other rooms contain only a rusting iron bed frame, beneath a black and white photograph showing the room as it was found by the Vietnamese. In each photograph, the mutilated body of a prisoner is chained to the bed, killed by his fleeing captors only hours before the prison was captured. Other rooms preserve leg-irons and instruments of torture. They are accompanied by paintings by former inmate Vann Nath showing people being tortured, which were added by the post-Khmer Rouge regime installed by the Vietnamese in 1979.

The museum is perhaps best known for having housed the "skull map", a huge map of Cambodia composed of 300 skulls and other bones found by the Vietnamese during their occupation of Cambodia, to serve as a reminder of what happened at the prison. The map was dismantled in 2002, but the skulls of some victims are still on display in shelves in the museum.

You can see our photos here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=384447&id=713415257&l=918b643d5f

The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek

Choeung Ek is the site of a former orchard and Chinese graveyard about 17 km south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and is best known as The Killing Fields, where the Khmer Rouge regime executed about 17,000 people between 1975 and 1979. Mass graves containing 8,895 bodies were discovered at Choeung Ek after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. Many of the dead were former inmates in the Tuol Sleng prison.

Today, Choeung Ek is a memorial, marked by a Buddhist stupa. The stupa has acrylic glass sides and is filled with more than 5,000 human skulls. Some of the lower levels are opened during the day so that the skulls can be seen directly. Many have been shattered or smashed in. Apart from the stupa, there are pits from which the bodies were exhumed. Human bones still litter the site.

The film The Killing Fields is a dramatized portrayal of events like those that took place at Choeung Ek and is definitely worth a watch to see some of the atrocities that happened in Cambodia.

The Rest of the Day

After seeing these two hectic sites we definitely needed some pick me ups so we jumped back on our tuk tuks and headed for the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. After marveling at the Royal Palace from the outside we strolled down the river front on the Tonle Sap River admiring the views and then stopping in for a late lunch at Touk which looked out over the river.

Later that evening - on Craig's recommendation - we headed to The Gym Sports Bar which according to Craig was the best sports bar he had ever been to. With the team having had a serious lack of sporting action we were all game and spent the rest of the evening playing some serious pool games and watching some football (Manchester United beat Hull 4 - 0 with Wayne Rooney scoring all 4 goals).

Greg and Clyde were playing against Al and me in the pool and they stormed to a 4 - 1 lead. Many hours later and many pool games later (with multiple beers and tequila in between) the excitement was too much for my wife and she could no longer bare to watch - you will need to look at the photos to see what I mean.

Finally, 6 hours later at 02h00 with what has been dubbed as the greatest comeback of all time Al and I won 5 - 4. Superb and nope, we still not have let them live that one down!

You can see our photos here:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=384457&id=713415257&l=5b672c31cb

The next morning we were awoken by a Cambodian wedding that was happening next door to the hotel with music blaring at 05h30. So with very sore heads and minimal sleep we made our way to the bus station headed for our next destination for some chill time on the beach: Sihanoukville, Cambodia.

See you on the beach!
Leise + Lara