We have both fallen in love. With Phnom Penh.

We got there after a horrible bus journey with no leg room and went for a drink. Sat outside the cafe an elephant walked up and was eating fruit from the waiter. Crazy!

Phnom Penh is a very very poor city. There are street kids everywhere running about naked in the streets begging. Its heartbreaking. And you're told not to give to them because it encourages them. But its hard not to.

We spent our first full day doing abizarre mix of things. We paid our tuktuk driver 20 dollars for the day (thats what the average Cambodian earns in a week). And our first stop was the shooting range where we both fired 30 rounds off an AK47. Crazy. You could fire rocket launchers and hand grenades and all sorts of guns (some stupid Americans paid to kill a duck).

After that we went to The Killing Fields. I don't know how much you readers know about The Khymer Rouge and Pol Pot but it was an act of genocide that happened from 1975 - 1982. So recent. The Government basically took anyone who showed any sign of intellect and made them work in the fields then killed them. The Killing Fields we visited were just out of the city and I think they found 17,000 bodies in mass graves there. There is a tower we went in where many of the skulls wer. Many of them were children, its impossible to get your head around it.

In the afternoon we went to S21, the genocidal museum. S21 is a building that used to be a high school. During the Khymer Rouge regime it was turned into a torture prison. Over the 5 years it was open, of the 20,000 people that passed through it 7 survived. There were rooms and rooms full of photo portraits of the people kept there, so many of them were children and the things they did to them were incomprehensible. They say The Khymer Rouge had the bodies of humans but the hearts and souls of demons.

That night we were having a chilled out beer when we were befriended by James - an Ozzie teaching English in Hanoi. He persuaded us to go to the only nightclub in Cambodia - The Heart of Darkness. That was fun but the bouncers didn't seem keen on foreigners and we were searched for guns on the way in. Oh yeah when we were having our beer in the bar first someone threw firecrackers at us, they hit me and Ruth on the feet and we had ringing ears (it was Chinese New YR so there was a lot of that about).

Our next day our same tuktuk driver took us to The Lighthouse Orphanage just out of the city. We had the best day. We took a 50KG sack of rice each and when we drove in all the kids were running after us. We then spent the day teaching the kids English and playing with them. A 15 yr old boy came upto me straight away and just sat down with a Noddy book and spent an hour reading it. He was so keen to learn.

The little kids were ace and just came jumping on us. One would latch onto me and then when I gave another kid attention they just wandered off because they knew they couldn't keep you, it was quite sad. The living conditions weren't amazing but it was clean and it was a happy environment. The children learn English French and Japanese on the weekend! We had such a good day and were sad to leave.

On the last night to use up all my Cambodian Reils I went on a motorbike ride round the city - superb. Ruth is scared of motorbikes. To be fair the road laws don't seem to be practiced over here - if you thought France was bad come over here (Mum don't worry, my motorbike days over here are behind me and they have helmets in Vietnam)!

This brings us to Saturday and onto Ho Chi Minh (Saigon), Vietnam. Where we are now! Will write about that in another blog. Ruth is in bed and we have an early start. If this hasn't made sense its because an older Australian chap has been talking to me the whole way through writing this and I've been pretending to listen! hehe

Less than 3 weeks left, woo!

Love Cazz and Ruth xx