20/10/08 Today was taken up with driving from Siem Reap to the capital, Phnom Penh, though we did go out in the evening to a tapas bar run by a charity that rehabilitates Khmer street children and trains them up as waiters, chefs etc. The food was really tasty (mushroom & leek spring rolls, herb & garlic bread, fried beef & oyster mushrooms, and fried rice with vegetables and either beef or chicken), though Dave didn't like the spring rolls or the oyster mushrooms. We ate outside, but we could see that inside was decorated with paintings and drawings the children had done - very colourful and well executed in my opinion.

21/10/08 We only had one full day in Phnom Penh, so we went to just two places; the 'Tuol Sleng' Museum of Genocidal Crime, and the Choeung Ek memorial in one of the infamous Killing Fields. Well, they were horrifying. The museum was in a former high school used by the Khmer Rouge as a prison, with the classrooms converted into cells, interrogation rooms and torture chambers, and all the windows covered by barbed wire or iron bars. The first building we went into had cells with an iron bedstead and shackles in each one, each with a photo of the maimed and dead prisoner held within (which the Vietnamese soldiers found when they first entered the prison.) The second had hundreds of the official photos of the prisoners; these were taken on their arrival. It was unbearably sad to look at them and see their expressions and the physical state they were already in, and knowing what happened to them after the photos were taken. Out of roughly 17,000 prisoners held here, only 12 people were known to have survived. The upstairs of this building contained descriptions and explanations of the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. The other buildings had the original instruments of torture, paintings of torture by a former inmate, written accounts of former Khmer Rouge members and people forced to work under them, tiny brick and wooden cells, and skulls showing fractures and gunshot holes. It was quite affecting - I saw one woman wiping her eyes after coming out of one room. It's hard to imagine just how much pain and horror the prisoners endured here, and visiting this place is something we'll never forget.

The Choeung Ek memorial is in what was an Khmer Rouge extermination site. The memorial itself is filled with shelves of the victims' skulls, and you have to remove your shoes as a mark of respect before you enter it. The grounds surrounding it are covered with water-filled holes which were mass graves, and places where vans of prisoners arrived etc. 22/10/08 We were driven back to Siem Reap today. We stopped somewhere on the way for 25 minutes; the moment the coach stopped the doors were mobbed by people all ages selling bags of pineapple pieces, trays of what looked like massive peeled oranges the size of melons, and other stuff, and beggars crowded round too. We walked away from all the hassle, and then Dave pointed something out; some of the people were walking past with large spiders attached to their fronts! They looked the same size as tarantulas. They were definitely real, but I think they were dead (I didn't see them moving, at any rate.) There was a small market, with baskets of black objects as well as stalls of roast chickens, exotic fruits etc. I had a quick look at this, and then Dave did; when he came back he said that the black objects were big cooked spiders! I couldn't believe my ears, so I went to have a closer look, and he was right! I'd heard that they ate things like crickets and grasshoppers here, but not spiders. Before we got back on the coach, Dave asked one of the guides about it; he said that he himself ate them and that they were supposed to give you strength! 23/10/08 Back to Bangkok today - the journey took all day, including the 2 hours we had to spend at the border waiting for our minibus to leave.