We hope everybody had a great Xmas, we are in the nation's capital Phnom Penh. It was a 6 hour bus ride from Siem Reap yesterday and thankfully the road was much better than the one from Poipet, it had tarmac on it!!!!!

The Mekong Express Limousine bus (if limousine means "old" in Cambodian) delivered us at 2pm and the moto drivers descended on us looking for a fare.

The Khmer Royal hotel is in a really good location right on the Tonle Sap river and where all the activity is happening. I think yesterday the last few early starts had caught up with us as both of us were exhausted and ended up in bed early to start fresh again the following day.

Friday 28th December

We travelled in a bit of luxury today and hired a driver for the day to take us around the grim sights of Phnom Penh.To get an idea of the atrocities we started at Tong Sleung Museum. This place was converted from a school to a prison by the Pol Pot regime and used to torture and exterminate Cambodians and also some europeans during the regime. Victims had allsorts of nasty things done including pulling their finger nails off and water boarding plus whipped with electrical wires before being left to die. You must remember that all this took place only 30 years ago and there are still people alive that lived through the ordeal.

It was really sobering to visit Tong Sleung or S21 as it was known and the next stop for the day was going to be even worse. Choung Ek or The Killing Fields as it is better known is situated around 14km out of the city and is the site of 20,000 executions and over 100 mass graves of men, women and children. At the entrance there is a Memorial Charnel building that is full of skulls from people that died here.

People were sent here in trucks and led to big pits where they were shot or bludgeoned to death by Khmer Rouge soldiers then left in the pit.They played music on a loud speaker to drown out the cries of the victims, and children were smashed against trees then thrown into the pits as well.

The whole story is horrific and still so fresh, some people even got buried alive and they used the chemical DDT to stop the stench. We finished our day at Wat Phrom temple to reflect on everything that we had seen and been told as it made us feel very lucky and hope that we never have to live through anything like it.

We will spend the rest of the evening relaxing before hitting the sightseeing trail tomorrow.

Lots of Love

M & M

xx