I am sitting at the back of a very bumpy bus in Cambodia with Lee and Richard. There is more leg room but we are next to the loo - pros and cons. Mr Bean is on a TV at the front of the bus, I am straining to watch it but Lee seems to be able to. Richard is listening to Alan Partridge which I am jealous of as I don't have it on my Idop yet and so I am typing a blog and practicing typing without looking at the screen as that is making me feel a little sick.
Two hours of six down though (or so we are told) so that is 33 per cent. The buses seem to take a little longer than scheduled. We have just left the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh (PP) and are on our way to Siem Reap to visit the Angkor temples, the largest of which is Angkor Wat, I believe the largest religious structure in the world. Best check wiki for that.

We entered Cambodia via a rather tedious journey from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Richard visited six years ago and was able to take a leisurely slow boat from Saigon to the border with Cambodia, stay a night and then take a fast boat the next day to PP. All via the Mekong river and all very nice. But no, not now, ha ha, laughed the woman in the travel agency. To be clearer, the trip could still be made but not in the lovely lounging on a boat, watch the world go by way that Richard experienced. Now we had to take the majority of the trip by bus, jump on a boat for a couple of hours, jump off and be herded in to a shop to be pushed tourist wares, quick lunch, back on and then bus again. We stayed on a floating hotel at the boarder town again which was nice but the day trip was tedious and we were treated like cash cows, the joys of large tour groups. The next day we were up really early to get the 'fast' boat to the boarder and over to PP. Another stop to sell us s*** and we made the border which was much more efficient and scam free than I thought it would be. We left our Vietnamese guide there and joined our Cambodian guide for the day on the boat. Actually he didn't do that much but he did jump off to buy more beer when the bored tourists had drunk it all. 'What time are we getting to PP'? asked Richard, five was the reply, two was what we had been told in Vietnam, they lie he said, urghhh. Not the end of the world but it was really hot on the boat and at one point water started spilling over from the toilet, luckily from the sink. The saving grace was that we could sit or lay on the top of the boat (which was clearly not 'fast') which was much more breezy. For a few hours we waved to the children who live on the banks of the Mekong; they were screaming and dancing and jumping up and down and waving, shouting 'hello' in Cambodian accents. This alone made up for the annoyance of the rest of the trip.

Into PP we jumped on to a tuk tuk, our first ride on one. There were a few things we wanted to see in the capital and we needed to chill a bit too so we stayed for three nights. Most people had turned their nose up at it and Richards last experience was far from good but it turned out to be OK. The Cambodian population suffered a genocide in the hands of their leaders the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Under the banner of communism and a crazy vision of a peasant dominated agrarian society they marched into the cities and dispelled people, sending them to work in the fields to increase rice and food production for the greater good. Everyone was sent to labour, families were literally torn apart there and then, people had to leave everything and obey the order or they were killed. Between two and three million people died under the Khmer Rouge, around 1/4 of the population. Some died in the fields where they were given little to eat or drink, they starved, others died of disease. More were murdered. The Khmer Rouge (led by Pol Pot) were suspicious of everyone and they rounded up anyone who they felt would be 'traitors' to the cause: intellectuals, teachers, artists (it is all sounding so familiar), business men and women, anyone who represented a supposed threat to the regime and were not viewed as the 'base' people, rural peasants and farmers. Although they were not totally safe either. The 'traitors' were taken to detention centres and questioned, tortured and imprisoned. Many admitted to the fictitious crimes (from being a party enemy to stealing communal rice) due to the torture they received. We visited Tuol Sleng (S-21) prison, the most infamous of these places in PP. The prison was once a school and you can see this. The classrooms were converted to cells and torture rooms and the Khmer Rouge documented everyone who came through the prison. I say came through as only seven people out of 17,000 who were in the prison survived, some were taken to a former orchard and Chinese graveyard 15KMs out of PP and liquidated, others killed in the prison. So they have pictures of everyone who they captured, as they came in and as they were killed them in the prison.

A visit to Cheung Ek (known as the 'killing fields' locally, nice) increased our understanding of the horror even further. Tastefully done we quietly wandered through the now peaceful former orchard listening to an audio guide. The information explained exactly what happened in the fields, the worst stories you can imagine. In the centre there is a memorial stupa that houses the skulls and bones of 8,000 people murdered there. The fields are littered with large holes which were mass graves and pieces of bone and clothing still surface all the time even though the graves were excavated, such was the scale of the destruction. Staff collect the pieces every few weeks. You can see the pieces throughout the fields, a reminder of how recent a tragedy it was. The genocide ended with the invasion of the Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge fled into the Thai bordering mountains and there they stayed, fighting as guerrillas for years. The fields, of which there were many across the country were just discovered by normal people returning home from wherever they had been sent, the ones who survived. I could go on about it for ages but that is what 'tinternet is there for to learn more. Either way one of the craziest things is that the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were not put on trail for the genocide until 2007. Pol Pot died before he could be trailed.

What a lot to take in. I felt was too recent a history to be talking to Cambodians about and the population is distinctly young due to it. But it was on my mind a lot while we were there.

From PP we headed out South-West to the coast to a place called Sihanoukville. Lonely Planet had given a small overview of the different beach areas in the the town so we pitched towards the backpacker place (vs Russian mafia, totally over-developed) but were disappointed. Maybe in places like this the guide books never quite keep up but it was packed with tourists, bars, beggars and people selling stuff no one wants. The beach was cluttered with chairs from the bars, not the most relaxing view. So Richard jumped on the back of a bike to explore another beach a couple of KMs away and came back happy. We jumped back on and landed at a set of bungalows right on the beach with simple, clean rooms, a mosquito net, cold shower and fan. A bloke asked Richard (while we were sitting on the beach) if they had air con and a TV and a hot shower and on learning that they didn't, turned his nose up - but that is the point, basic and on the beach and not much else, enjoy. If you want a TV go to a hotel. We stayed for five nights and enjoyed four days of nothing much on the beach - breakfast, book, swim, sunbathe, swim, snooze, book, beer, sunset, seafood BBQ dinner, beer, beer, bed. Not much more to say about it really, it was just lovely and relaxing, something we hadn't done for ages. It is likely that if we ever returned to this beach, it would be just like the first one we stopped at and we'd have to take that bike a few KMs further.

Back to PP for an afternoon and one night since we had to come back to head on up to Siem Reap. The journey can be taken in one day but sod that. I am feeling a little sick now and definitely sweaty. I am hoping that it stops soon so that we can have a snack and peel the shorts from our thighs. The battery is just about to run out on the computer.

It did stop, well needed and then only another couple of hours more. Siem Reap was really busy and we had to visit a few places to find a room and deal with out first really annoying tuk tuk driver who took us where he wanted and not where we asked and then asked for money even though it was included with the bus ticket. Time for a beer or two. Four nights and three days in the town meant two days to explore the temples and one to mooch around.

The Angkor temples were something else. Just overwhelming in size, design and number. We visited about eight different places. Built by the kings of the Khmer empire who reigned between the ninth and 15th centuries, representing different beliefs and worshiped gods. We left the hotel at five AM to visit Angkor Wat (the most famous - the Cambodian national symbol) for sunrise with lots of other tourists, more than I thought would go at that time, but it was worth it. The sun rose behind the temple creating a perfect silouhette on the lake in front. The size of the temple once in was really unimaginable, especially since it was built between 1113-50. And a lot of people had just come for the sunrise so it was so quiet and peaceful. The pictures should show something of the beauty and scale. Another (Bayon) was many towers with huge smiling faces facing every direction, representing Buddhist gods . Another (East Mebon) was built from many tiny bricks. Another (Ta Prohm) has been taken over by trees, growing on top, the huge roots stretching down - how is that possible? Etc etc. A trip to Cambodia without seeing some of these temples would be wasted, in my opinion.

And then we left, Richard on this way to Bangkok and us flying to northern Laos. We visited probably the three main places that people visit in Cambodia. There are less tourist laden places to see but not for this trip, they can be banked for another time. In the time we had these were the key choices. Cambodia is catching up to its neighbours with the tourist opportunities and sometimes it could be a little frenzied in the last two places we visited, with people offering you things to buy all the time. But that is part of the deal and it is worth the price to see what we saw.