Temples and torture chambers

Mekong Delta
see all photos »

Hi all

The journey from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh was nothing short of spectacular - a three day boat ride up the mekong delta.Travelling along on a small wooden boat with 12 fellow tourists we floated along a maze of canals and narrow waterways lined with rickety wooden houses and old wooden bridges. En-route we stopped off at the Cai Rang floating market - an area of the delta where traders from around the region came and sold their produce on their boat. Obviously every boat looks the same at water level so to distinguish whats's being sold the sellers placed an item of what they were selling on a long stick so you could see from a far what was being sold. Brilliant!  The markets back on dry land along the delta were like nothing else we'd seen: piles of chicken and duck heads, pigs walking around their pen waiting to be bought, fish so fresh they were still flapping around in a shallow dish of water and frogs being skinned alive.

Angkor Wat
see all photos »

After 3 days on the boat , sleeping one night in a hotel on dry land and another night in a floating hotel on the Mekong itself we finally arrived in Phnom Penh. Now, because we had spent so much time in Thailand and longer than planned in Vietnam we only had 6 days for poor old Cambodia :-(. Given that 2 of these days were spent travelling around on the slow bumpy roads that only left 4 full days.  So our brief visit to Cambodia started off in the capital, Phnom Penh. Along with a couple we met on our boat trip we headed to the Tuol Sleung museum. Roughly this translates to the Museum of Genocide. This former school was the main torture centre of Pol Pots regieme and of the 20,000 or so people detained only 7 survived. The treatment of people here in the 1970s was horrific - chained up in tiny cells with daily 'interregation'. This 'museum' has been kept the way it was found so you can still see the blood stains on the floors amd bullet holes in walls that were once classrooms.  Most of those who didn't survive were taken to Choeung Ek - more commonly known as 'The Killing Fields' . Once again this area had been kept as it was found; meaning that when you look down and see the mass graves you also see old rags of clothing and even teeth and bones stuck in the mud. Haunting is the only way to describe it. Despite only having one day in Phnom Penh after that we couldn't face any more traditional 'sights' so we just spent the afternoon in a great coffee shop run by an NGO helping street kids.

Bayon heads
see all photos »

A bumpy 8 hour ride north of Phnom Penh is the city of Siem Reap, home to the famous Angkor temples. The whole site spreads over some 25Km and comprises of over 100 temples, unsurprisingly we only saw a tiny fraction, but with the aid of our friendly tuc-tic driver what we did see was increadible. Our day began at 5 am to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat - the largest religious monument in the world- and ended  back at the same spot for a beautiful pink sunset. The Angkor Wat temple adornes the Cambodian flag and if i try to describe this huge 5 towered temple I'll do it a terrible injustice. The amount of bas reliefs and carvings are mind blowing. But our favourite temples were the Ta Prom temple (still surrounded by trees and with creepers climbing up the walls it had an Indiana Jones feel about it ) and the Bayon (a three tiered pyramid temple with loads of giant heads staring out in every direction) were more  . Seeing the Bayon really felt like you were seeing one of the architectual wonders of the world.

Bangkok sunset
see all photos »

As well as the temples we also managed to squeeze in some more cultural activities.  The first was a concert by Dr Beat Richner aka 'Beatcello'. An inspirational man, he has dedicated his life to saving the lives of Cambodian children by building hospitals and paying for doctors and nurse, all paid for by the money he raises through concerts like the one we went to. The second was a massage, but no ordianary one- here the massagers were blind. Like a Thai massage I wouldn't call it relaxing - more of a bodily workout as they kneaded us like balls of dough!

And that, sadly, was pretty much all we had time for in Cambodia. From Siem Reap we headed back by bus to Bangkok staying just long enough there to see a beautiful urban suset from a bar on the 61st floor of one of Bangkoks tallest buildings and eat at a fabulous restaurant called 'Cabbages and Condoms'! The reason for this rush is we had a plan to catch, a plane to take us to our last country of our travels: India!!!

Hope everyone is well and look forward to seeing you all soon

Andy and Char