We set off for Phnom Penh from Siem Reap early this morning. The trip started out well. The bus to pick us up and take us to the dock arrived an hour late and then proceeded to cram 15 people into a 10 seater! One lady got out a little fold up chair and managed to squeeze in the aisle!

We decided to catch the boat even though it was a bit more expensive than the bus as we thought it would be more comfortable and we'd be able to see the Floating Village which we hadn't had chance to see. The boat seemed nice, a lot different to the slow boat that we'd been on to Luang Prabang! There was air conditioning and a tv, and there were plenty of seats to spare! We now think that may have been because it is the dry season and people know better than to travel by boat at this time! I guess we should have already known this as the slow boat to Luang Prabang that left the day after us crashed on the beach and everyone had to sleep on the beach until they were rescued the next day, and then the boat the following day actually crashed and sank! Everyone was ok but they lost their luggage! It was only then that the Laos company decided to stop running the boats for a while! The scary thing is that they're still running the speed boats up the same river, which manage to kill at least one person a year!

Anyway, the trip to Phnom Penh was on a different river than the Mekong so we thought it would be ok. Around about 5 minutes into the journey (after we'd seen the quaint floating village) the boat lurched and tilted and we hit the bank!!! Beth and me were inside at this point and I was ready to go outside and jump onto the bank! It was not a pleasant start to the journey but they seemed to get the boat moving again and we thought things were ok. About 15 minutes later we came to a complete stop! The boat had become lodged on something!! The people working on the boat jumped into the river and began hacking at something with a knife!! I think the propellors were caught in a net or some weed or something! But by this point we were miles from anywhere! Beth and I thought they might have abandoned the trip there and arranged a bus for us instead but we carried on!! We made contingency plans and put all of our money and passports and memory cards in a waterproof bag as we were convinced we were going to have to swim!! Luckily the rest of the journey went without a hitch and only took 6 hours.

When we got off of the boat we were harrassed straight away by about amillion tuktuk drivers wanting to take us to our guesthouse (we already had one in mind as a friend had gone ahead a day early and found a good one! - good planning and less effort for us!!). We chose one and I have never seen such a mad bunch of drivers! It was worse than Siem Reap! I had to take video footage cos it was so funny! The cars come from everywhere! The go on pavements, they turn around in the middle of the road! Then, to add to that the pedestrians just have to walk out into this chaos and hope that the cars and mopeds avoid them! There is a skill to this as we have found out! Apparently if you run there's more chance of being hit so you just have to walk out calmly and they're so used to people doing this that they know you're there and avoid you!

The sun is so hot here, you feel like you're burning the moment you leave your hostel! It's completely different to Siem Reap which was extremely humid!

We've been to the killing fields today and S21, which are both places where the Khmer Rouge headed by Pol Pot tortured and killed thousands of innocent people. I'm glad we went along, it was an interesting piece of history and I was shocked at how recently it had happened. It was very moving walking through the fields of mass graves. They've even left some parts unexcavated and you can see bones poking through the ground, which was horrible. They also have a 'Killing Tree' where the soldiers would literally smack babies against to kill them. I can't imagine the amount of pain and suffereing these people went through. We were a bit depressed after visiting both of these places so we went to the Royal Palace to have a look around. We're going to be leaving Cambodia tomorrow on a bus to Vietnam.