Cambodia.

Our mini bus trip to Phnom Penn was cramped, hot and uncomfortable. The countryside was dry and dusty. We went through some very poor looking villages with children playing in the dirt and running around with no shoes and matted hair. There is a lot of litter and everywhere looked, felt and tasted dirty. Cambodia has recently suffered terribly at the hands of the Khmer Rouge movement, the population had to endure genocide in the 70's then a guerrilla war which only ended in 1998. Most of the people here are very poor. Though the country is now at peace, the lack of infrastructure is sorely evident. Many of the roads are unmade and those that are, are mostly potholed apart from main roads and some in the cities.

First stop Phnom Penn. We had a good room in a nice hotel with the breakfast room on the top floor so we had a great view from the window. We visited the bar over the road run by a cute Rastafarian from Jamaica. 'Dave the Rave' soon got chatting to him and as we left we were told, its 'appy 'ower any time for you maaaan' we took him up on his kind invitation a few times.

We booked a trip and set out next day to see 7 different sites in Phnom Penn. We shared our mini bus with a young guy from Argentina and 2 very large, loud older Americans. First stop, 'The 'Killing Fields' The main extermination camp for Phnom Penn. The fields contain 129 communal graves 86 of which have been exhumed revealing the remains of 8985 people, many bludgeoned or stabbed to death to save precious bullets. One of the saddest sights was a tree where they used to fling children and babies to smash their sculls. Over 8000 sculls are arranged in a memorial stupa. This was all happening during the Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge regimes in the late 70's and early 80's, not that long ago, it's so hard to believe. We were given 40 minutes to look around, blatantly not long enough, we had to leave half way through a very interesting video which annoyed us and the guy from Argentina and we arrived at the mini bus 10 minutes late, all hot and bothered. The fat, sweaty American guy tut-tutted and tapped his watch and shouted we have six more sights to see you know. I mumbled something quite ungracious and resigned to give them a wide berth. We were then deposited at a Russian market for an hour! We couldn't believe it, we have been to so many markets selling all the same stuff and could have spent so much longer in the Killing fields museum. The Americans sat themselves in the market cafe and we set off to a chorus of 'wanna buy this, wanna buy that' and we 'no thank you'd' until we were blue in the face.

Next stop the Tuoi Sieng Museum.This gloomy, forbidding building was a high school prior to the arrival of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 when it became S-21 [Security Prison 21]. It was the largest detention centre in the country between ''75 and 78, during which time over 17,000 people were detained and tortured here before being taken to the extermination camp at Choeung Ek [Killing fields]

The building now houses the torture equipment used, graphic torture photographs and thousands of photographs of the adults and children detained and tortured here. The types of torture are way beyond imagination, it was all very sickening but so important that these poor souls have not been forgotten and live on in their photographs and their families who are lucky to be alive today; friendly resilient, hardworking, forward thinking people. There were also testimonies from brain-washed youths who were forced to carry out the torture, many of whom were tortured and killed themselves once they knew too much.

Back on the bus and next stop lunch. Would you believe, one and a half hours!!!!!The Americans loved it and sat and stuffed their faces the whole of the time.

Our forward thinking driver then deposited us at the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda at 2 O'clock just as the palace re-opened after lunch. There was a long queue which snaked its way out of the gate. The sun was bearing down and it took us 20 minutes to get a ticket, we had been given just 40 minutes to look around. We and Argentina man passed through the turnstiles to see the Americans sitting under a tree. This is when it dawned on us they hadn't been to look at any of the sites we had been to, including the killing fields where they had tut tutted when we were late back on the bus! We hadn't seen them wandering around anywhere, they just sat in the cafes!

After a hot and stressful wiz around the palace and pagoda we decided we couldn't stand any more of the on and off the bus and time limits, we had seen what we really wanted to see and we made our way, with Argentina man, to the river-side where we knew 'Happy Hour' was about to commence on the terrace of the delightful Foreign Correspondents Club. We whiled away a pleasant couple of hours in the company of some great young travellers and remarked the dour driver and American couple deserved to be stuck with each other.

One of the things we have greatly enjoyed about this trip is the people we have met. All ages, shapes, sizes and nationalities, gap year students, retired people, people taking sabbaticals from work, all living their dream of travelling to far-away places. Everybody is in the same boat, most on a strict budget, creases in their washed out clothes stubbly chins [especially the men] wayward hair, tales to tell and adventures to look forward to. Very often we bump into people we met days or weeks ago in various places and we can catch up on each other's news. One such young couple from Australia always makes a beeline for us if they see us and we have a few beers and chin wags, we left each other yesterday hoping we all meet up again in Thailand over the next few weeks.