Cambodia - first stop Phnom Penh

Skulls of victims at Choeung Ek killing fields
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Phnom Penh was by no means a relaxing stop. It's another noisy, busy Capital city and but it offers a really good look into some tragic history that helped shape Cambodia.

What we'll always remember:

• Eating breakfast, lunch and supper at the street markets - the area we were staying in has hardly been westernized which means if you don't want noodle soup for breakfast you'd better be happy with negotiating yourself a breadroll and some chopped pork
• Seeing the S21 genocide sights and reading actual accounts of the tragedy that unfolded only 30 years ago 
• Teaching some monks what an abbreviation is

The site where women and children were killed and buried
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Forgettable

• Reading in the lonely planet that it isn't worth paying to take your camera into the Royal Palace only to find that it would have made for some of the best pics in Phnom Penh

Details:

The city itself did not really impress us but we definitely wouldn't have skipped Phnom Penh as the sights we saw more than made up for it.

Spare motorbike parts in a market
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As usual every 5 meters someone is trying to sell you something or get you to ride their tuk-tuk but in general they are friendly enough and if you did need to get anywhere they certainly couldn't make it any easier. Funny enough the 1 thing we had difficulty with was trying to make a call to Siem Reap. Phoning overseas doesn't seem to be a problem but calling their neighboring city just doesn't seem possible. We eventually made our way to Siem Reap to talk to somebody in person.

Faces of victims at the Tuol Sleng prison
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Our day in Phnom Penh was extremely interesting and also very dusty. The main roads in the city centre are now paved but there are many dirt roads around and the tuk tuk's are open so best you keep your mouth closed.

Our tuk tuk driver drove us first to the Choeung Ek killing fields which is really only 1 of many such sites. It's bone chilling to learn how all these people were slaughtered. Their skulls are on display and you can clearly make out which ones had been bludgeoned to death. The luckier ones were shot but many were also buried alive and poison thrown in the grave to suffocate them.

Kim in Phnom Penh
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After lunch we visited the Tuol Sleng prison were most of the victims buried in the Killing Fields were taken first to be interrogated and tortured. Here you get to see the faces of every person that passed through. There are written records of all interrogations and every prisoner was photographed on admission. Again it was the torture that these people had to endure that really affected us. Overall it is estimated that about 3 million people lost their lives in the genocide.

On a lighter note - we visited the Royal Palace before sunset and although very beautiful we don't have any pictures on the camera as we were advised by the trusty Lonely Planet not to bother taking our camera in. When it dawned on Shawn to take pics with his phone instead I was left chatting to some monks. They were young guys who are very keen to learn English and they got me to read to them and then explain what HCMC (Ho Chi Minh City) meant. I think I did a rather good job.

Another dinner which started by ordering our food on a street corner by pointing to the raw ingredients - and again it was very good.