According to our lonely planet, a 2008 TI corruption perceptions index ranked Cambodia as 166th out of 180 countries, i.e. very corrupt. We experienced our first taste of this before we even made it across the border when, despite the tourist visa being just $20, we were made to pay $25 to the official. Since then we have spoken to locals who have told us that Cambodians have to bribe staff at the supposedly 'free' hospitals to treat them or they won't be seen to; the going rate for medics to carry out a straightforward delivery of a baby (without injections!) is $100, a small fortune over here. We have seen a driver being pulled over by police and simply paying the police officer off, children who should be at school selling photocopied books on the streets and Western men casually buying w****s for the week over the lunch - then getting stolen from by them. We had seven people beg us for money during dinner today. One boy stood next to us for ten minutes saying 'give me a dollar, give me a dollar, give me a dollar' over and over again. It's hard but we have been told repeatedly not to give money to anyone as it encourages them to become career beggars and to not bother with school. And we simply couldn't afford to give money to everyone who approaches us :-(

Yet, despite the slight culture shock, we are really liking Cambodia. The people are so friendly! Okay, so I keep saying that about every country we go to but they are especially friendly here. I almost don't mind being ripped off a bit when it's done with such a beaming smile. Today we hired a tuk-tuk driver to take us to the S-21 museum and the killing fields of Choeung Ek, and he was so lovely that we ended up taking him out to lunch. I can't imagine doing that in Thailand. I think that perhaps they are slightly less disillusioned with tourists out here so they are less abrupt and more smiley with us.

But I digress. Back to the border. After losing my passport at immigration then realising a man had somehow gone through on it and I had his (panic panic panic!) we made it through the border crossing safely and were promptly dropped off at a restaurant by our bus. We had no money whatsoever as we had expected the visas to cost $40, not $50. We found the equivalent of 15p at the bottom of a bag and attempted to buy a plate of plain rice between us but sadly we didn't have enough :-( I felt too pikey to ask if we could buy half a plate. Thus it was that we were STARVING by the time we got to Phnom Penh, at around 4pm. We dropped our bags off in our (pretty decent) guesthouse and ran for food. Shortly afterwards we bumped into someone we met in Australia and went for a few drinks. We ended up dancing until the wee hours in a nearby nightclub, Pontoon. I was a little worse for wear by the time we left and had to sleep with the bin next to the bed. Never again! I say again.

Yesterday we slept in until gone midday and had a lazy day ambling round town. We found hundreds of pigeons outside the Royal Palace and bought bird seed, thinking that we would recreate our childhood Trafalgar Square experiences and put food on our heads and along our arms for the birds. They were too scared to come close though so we had to settle with throwing the seeds at them. Jak's one pair of flip flops broke last night (overenthusiastic dance moves haha) so we visited the Central Market to buy some new ones. There wasn't much choice and he ended up with some classy ones with 'Facebook' printed all over them :-)

Today, as I said earlier, we visited the S-21 museum and Choeung Ek, the most famous of Cambodia's killing fields. During the late 1970s, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured thousands of people in the S-21 prison, formally a school, and regularly drove truckloads out to the killing field where they would bludgeon them to death and throw them into mass graves. As many as 3 million Cambodians died during Pol Pot's violent attempts to build a communist society and it is estimated that about 20,000 of them were murdered at Choeung Ek. In fact, just 7 people survived imprisonment at the S-21 museum. Every person who entered was photographed and today there are rooms in S-21 literally filled with thousands of faces of the victims, some of them women and children. There's barbed wire still wrapped around one of the buildings, put there to stop prisoners committing suicide, and the tiny wooden cells have been left as they were. It's awful. The killing fields are worse though; there's a memorial stupa in the middle filled with skulls and bones and there's lots of square sunken areas of grass where the mass graves are. There were butterflies flying about and birds singing as we were walking around and it felt so horrible to think that this peaceful place was home to such atrocities. I defy anyone to visit and not cry once. There was an audio tour that provided commentary on various areas of the site. We wouldn't have realised that the rags here and there on the floor were actually clothes of the victims that have worked their way up through the ground during heavy rains without it. Chilling. But, like Nazi Germany, the crimes committed should never be forgotten; it can't be allowed to happen again.

After leaving Choeung Ek we were asked by our tuk-tuk driver if we wanted to visit the nearby shooting range and have a go at shooting machine guns or an AK47. Normally this might have interested us but I have to say that we have never felt less inclined to handle weapons after visiting the places we had. We declined politely.

Tomorrow we are heading off to the beaches in Sihanoukville for a few nights where we plan to just rest and recharge and do absolutely nothing...