Cambodia in 4 days

An iccle palace

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After an early morning 6 hour bus ride we arrived in the capital of Cambodia, Phnom Penh.  On the journey in, we noticed how much poorer this country was and scenically not as beautiful as Laos or Vietnam.  We arrived at the Okay guesthouse, where our friends Ollie and Maread were staying.     After chatting with them, we went to visit the King's Royal Palace.  Again, this wasn't as impressive as the Royal Palace in Bangkok, but still nice to walk around.  On the way to meeting Ollie and Maread for a drink in the FCC, we past some street sellers selling what we thought was food.  However, on closer inspection it was bugs!  They were selling charcoaled spiders, beetles, cockroaches, grasshoppers, maggots, silkworm embryos and baby birds!  Did we try any i hear you ask?  Well a big fat NO is the answer to that question!  My stomach hasn't been right since i left home! 

The Palace grounds

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Later that night Dave (Rob's brother) arrived from Bangkok.  He is going to be travelling with us until February.  The 5 of us hit the town that night and ended up in a club called the Heart of Darkness where we saw some dodgy things!  There were lots of western men with very young girls, about the age of 15/16.  It was quite sick to see.  Dave got propositioned but declined!  We ended up crawling to bed at about 6am after more drinks back at the hostel!

After a late breakfast we cuaght a Tuk-Tuk to the Killing fields.  This was the place where all the exections of 4 million Cambodians, carried out by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime took place between 1975-79.  It was harrowing to see.  The mass graves had been excavated in 1980/81 to find the skeletons and skulls bearing bullet holes or machete marks.  The clothes of the victims were still embedded in the ground and hadn't been dug up.  This for me made it all seem too real, as we were stepping around them.

And again

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We continued on to the S-21 prison where thousands of Cambodians were taken hostage and tortured for names of intellectuals, who they deemed were a threat to the Angkor.  The prison used to be a school and they had turned the classrooms into cells. Over time about 6000 people were held captive in the prison.  Most prisoners were then sent to the killing fields where they were executed and dumped in a mass grave.  It was all quite upsetting to see and as i was reading a book based on a family's tragic time during Pol Pot's reign, it was harrowing to think it only happened 30 years ago.