Cambodia's 'buzzing' capital

Gemma:  Waking up after our first night's stay in Phnom Penh we realised two things straight away - both the heat and the mosquitos are much more fierce in the Cambodian capital than anywhere we'd been in Vietnam.  The sun was burning outside as we applied copious amounts of tiger balm to our very bitten skin, before starting the same process all over again with high factor sun cream - it was nearly lunchtime before we left the room!

We had arrived the night before at around 7pm and after spending the evening (and very early hours of the morning) with Duane, Dion and Susan at an outdoor eatery, our mossie bite total reached 40 between the pair of us.  Admittedly most were on Alison (which meant i was forced to keep my moaning to a minimum) but needless to say we were both pretty uncomfortable for the first few days here.  As Cambodia is the least developed country we are visiting we also had to adjust to a lack of hot water, toilet paper, and at random points of the day electricity too - great.

The lakeside area where we stayed is backpacker central with probably more westerners to be seen on the streets than locals which was a new experience for us as we've become used to being in the minority over the last month (ok ok we admit we quite like the attention!).

Having acclimatised as best we could we embarked on a tuk-tuk tour of Phnom Phen's main 'sights' and i cannot really describe here how sickening most of them were.  The things we saw at the killing fields and S21 prison were just horrific.  The most awful for me was a huge case of human skulls grouped according to age - heartbreakingly the first shelf was labelled age 4-5 years and it really brought home the innocent human cost of the Khmer Rouge regime.

We then went on to visit S21 - the high school the Khmer Rouge took over and used as a torture centre and prison throughout their reign of terror on the country.  What were once classrooms here were transformed into brutal torture chambers and cells and were pretty frightening to see.  We all moved off to explore on our own for a while and i was doing well until i took a wrong set of stairs and found myself 'trapped'at the bottom with only a room to my left full of prisoners clothing taken from them at the time.  My heart started beating uncontrollably through having just a tiny appreciation of how terrifying this place must have been and i promptly legged it back up the stairs before my shaking legs gave up on me completely.

Our final stop was the Royal Palace where the Cambodian head of state King Sihanouk lives and rules.  Unfortunately i was the only tourist around dressed 'inappropriately' to enter the actual building (the fact that I knew i had to wear something to cover my shoulders beforehand and still forgot was even more frustrating!) so Alison and Dion wandered around while Duane and i sat outside reflecting on everything we'd seen that day and planning where we were all going to have dinner...

We spent our final day lying by the lake in hammocks reading books, writing diaries and drinking iced coffees - a quiet end to our stay in Phnom Penh.