Greetings everyone,
We finished our time in Cambodia with a few days in the Capital Phnom Penh and a visit to the coastal towns of Kampot and Kep.
The bus from Ban Lung to Phnom Penh was 10 hours and ridiculously bumpy. The lack of decent roads in Cambodia has made bus travel a truly horrific experience! After a stomach churning journey, we arrived and found a hotel just before it started to pour down.
Our first full day in Phnom Penh, we explored the central market and a massive shopping centre. The market was full of souvenirs, knock off goods and an interesting array of fresh fruits, flowers and meat. The shopping centre was air con heaven and also featured a 'BBworld' which is Cambodia's answer to McDonalds which we decided we had to try! We played it safe with just a beef burger and it was - interesting. Whether it was actually beef was questionable and the cheese seemed to be in liquid form. They did nice chips though!
We rounded off the day with some more ice coffee by the river and discovering our favourite restaurant in Cambodia were max tried the lovely loc lac!
The next day was time for our visit to the killing fields and s-21. We climbed aboard our tuk-tuk with our overly friendly driver who spent about 20 minutes finding us glasses to protect us from the dust, and headed off a few kilometres out of town.
The killing fields (Choeung Ek) was one of the massacre sites of the Khmer Rouge. It featured several mass graves, exumed skulls and clothes and farm tools used as murder weapons. It was a shocking thing to see, although had a kind of feel that it was more of a way to try and make money from tourists. It seemed as though little effort had gone into preserving things, bones that were found after the initial excavation were left lying on top of the cabinet rather than in it and there was a lot of signs saying things like, 'a very dark and gloomy prison used to be here but we lost it' as was the trucks, the weapon room and several other empty sites that had signs telling us what used to be there but had been lost. Several women had also set up shops along the fence which they were trying to sell things through!!
The small museum on site was informative and it is still a place you have to visit in order to try and understand the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime.
S-21 is much more harrowing. An old school that was turned into a torture chamber and is still pretty much in the se condition today as it was when it was liberated. It was a weird experience seeing thousands of faces starting back at us from photographs taken before prisoners were executed. Walking around the tiny tiny makeshift cells where people were kept and seeing the rooms that the last people died in, with their beds and execution weapons still lying there next to a picture of how the body was found was truly shocking It was a depressing experience however we couldn't help but shake this feeling of the people running the attraction not actually preserving it. There was no information or actual artifices so was a little bit of an anticlimax. Anyway! We decided to cheer ourselves up by heading home, having a wash and hitting the street for food. We ate in the same restaurant (fish I think we had) then headed to a bar for $1 whiskeys! We only planned on having one but we had met some people the night before who changed to stay in our much cheaper hotel! We ended up drinking far too many whiskey and gins and thought it was a good time to head to another lively bar. Here, we drank some more until Hayley had to call it a night! So we walked her home and checked out the nightclub opposite. It was terrible. Max came home 45 minutes later to find Hayley had locked the door and wasn't waking up! Max crashed in George and Sybills room to find the next morning a confused and delicate Hayley opening the door finally. Nice one Hayley!
The next day Hayley and I lay in bed feeling the whiskey for a while before heading out for some sour soup (a lot nicer than it sounds) This felt like the real first day we were written off because of our hangovers.
We decided to stay one more night to book a bus, get visas for Vietnam and do some walking. We tried more weird dishes, walked round the markets and had a nice evening eating loads of food, trying the national dish Amok, and chilling out.
Phnom Penh had been a real blast, but it was time to head to sleepy Kampot and try this seafood everyone was raving about!!

The bus to Kampot was rough and cheap as always but it was an awesome little place. We stayed in this tiny building run by two French guys next to a river and with the elephant mountains of the Bokor range in the distance. We relaxed for 2 nights, eating food and discovering Cambodian deserts! It's a bowl of crushed ice, condensed milk and then a huge amount of eggy soft sweets and toffees, all served at the side of the road. Yummy. We hired bikes in Kampot and cycled along the river and ate mangos while a Cambodian family tried to show off their boat to us. We also cycled onto the country side, through rice paddies, salt fields and fish farms. It was really cool apart from the fact the road was a red dust bowl and it started to rain on the way back so by time we got home we looked like we had had some terrible fake tan! We also tried the famous 'Red Soup' - slow cooked beef in a thin red spicy soup. Delicious and the first decent meat we have had in a long time!!
The next day we headed down the road to Kep, the St Tropez of Cambodia in its hayday but left desolate after the Khmer Rouge regime. It was still a beautiful seaside town full of relics of old villas. We hired bikes again and cycled along the seafront before heading to the crab market to taste the famous dish of grilled crab with Kampot pepper. The market is full of a huge variety of fresh seafood from tiny shrimp to huge fins. The sea was full of cages where the crabs are kept when they're caught until someone orders them and they are then brought in fresh. So for 5$ we got a massive plate of crabs in pepper sauce with rice. It was extremely messy but delicious - definitely one of the best meals we have had travelling! We rounded it off with an ice coffee and a beautiful sunset across the crab market with the Bokor mountains in the background. A beautiful end to a beautiful country. Cambodia you have been amazing! Except for the tarantulas in our hotel corridor.