When I came from Australia to Vietnam it was a huge culture shock and from Vietnam to Cambodia it felt like another massive change again. This country has gone through an awful lot after civil war, famine and genocide and you can still tell that 35 years on the country is still recovering in different ways.

The poverty is clear to see and there are a lot more beggars, just after we got past the border and stopped for lunch a child was hanging next to our bus with bruises on his face begging for money, and also in the city there are disabled men walking around with missing limbs asking for money which is really sad to see.

I even heard instances where an 8 year old girl was holding a baby demanding that the person she was asking would give her money or food who is clearly doing this on behalf of her parents but trying to guilt trip you. You can also see how much more slim they are, even when your eating meals the portions are sometimes a lot more smaller than normal.

It's also really weird when you realise how few older people there are when your walking around the city, a lot more younger people, not necessarily children but young adults too, since apparently 1 in 4 people were killed during the genocide.

Another thing I noticed was the smell in the city too, the smell of sewage, made worse in the boiling heat, clearly it's a worse quality of life and such a poor country but the one thing that struck me was the optimism of the locals.

They are such friendly people and always have a smile on their face, and even have banter with you most of the time, obviously most of them just want to make a deal to get money but they don't push it in your face like a lot of Vietnamese would, their good nature was infectious and made it a lot easier to adjust to being in the country when I first arrived.

What I liked about the city was that it had a great mixture of things to do, obviously the grim stuff like S-21 and the killing fields, but then also there was the royal palace and some really cool monuments and sights to see, because of what happened in the 70s the country almost sort of lost its identity so there's an interesting mix of different cultures. You have the cool historic buildings with the lush architecture, but then also have the western feel in some areas, which boasts a good nightlife, then also the poverty stricken areas and when it comes to food they don't really have any traditional dishes its a mix of Vietnamese, Thai and western.

On my first full day I went to check out the S-21 prison, soon as I got to the font of the building, before I even got my ticket, there was an old man with lost limbs with a walking stick begging for money which breaks your heart to see and I knew I was in for a tough trip.

This building was formerly a high school called tuol sleng, but back in 1975 when pol pot and the Khmer Rouge took over they turned it into a prison. Over the next 4 years 14,000 people died here, even though the people they wanted to actually kill we're sent to the killing field so you can imagine how tough it was to live in there.

The prison itself still looks the same as it was the day in which it was liberated and has been preserved to show the atrocities and when you turn up at the gate it is such an eerie feeling looking at the front of the prison, as its situated in the middle of a neighbourhood and sticks out like a sore thumb.

In 1979 when it was taken back from the Khmer Rouge there were only seven survivors left, only still there because they had skills like photography or painting so they were made to make art instead of being tortured. 14 people were found inside the first building which was used for torture and interrogation, but the 14 people were dead and had been decomposed for so long that nobody knows who they are, their bodies have been buried in the garden of s-21. Even more disgusting is that in each torture room is the metal bed and some of the torture tools used on the poor dead bodies with a massive picture on the wall of how the dead body was found which is pretty disgusting.

The second building showed how meticulous the Khmer Rouge were with echoes to what the nazis did which they would take pictures of every single person that arrived in the prison, all these pictures were put onto billboard type stands inside some of the rooms and its very eerie to see these haunting faces that know they will probably die in this place and its even more chilling that when the prisoner dies they would also take pictures of the deceased that have either died of starvation, torture or being gassed on some occasions.

The third building was where the prisoners were held, and the building is surrounded by barbed wire so none of the prisoners could try to escape or commit suicide, its crazy to see how much of a small space these people had to live inside, each cell with nothing but 4 walls barely long enough to lie down inside, even more chilling that there are still blood stains on the floor every so often and people have carved writing into the wall. One that caught my attention the most was somebody that etched on "will we ever learn?".

I'm not so sure what the final building was used for exactly but in one room was a bunch of memoirs and accounts from the survivors who explained how tough it was. Basically when pol pot started to get more and more paranoid it became worse that random people and families were picked up and stuck in a truck and were taken to the prison, any family members were separated and that you were tortured for no reason except they thought you might work for CIA or KGB and are against the revolution and were fed just a few grains of rice a day, showered once a month and how ruthless the Khmer were.

Also in that building were the bones and remains of some of the victims and the torture tools used during the years there. You just can't imagine what these people had gone through and it was definitely worth a visit, especially for two bucks and as gruesome as it was, its a place ill never forget.