Favour Hotel Phnom Penh

... while. There were no night markets only day markets so we went to the Sorya shopping mall as I wanted to pick up some cheap clothes but it was the most depressing mall. There were no western shops and only fake stuff with totally over inflated prices. It was really clinical in there and we felt that the people didn't seem that warm at all. I can totally see why people don't like the place but then we only came there to see the Killing Fields and the Tuol Sleng Museum.

We booked ...

... and wild chickens running around, made it quite difficult to relate to the atrocities that had so clearly happened only 30 years ago.

We then headed back into Phnom Penh to go to Tuol Sleng Museum (Security Prison 21 or S-21). A former high school, this is where people were brought to be tortured prior to being moved to the killing fields for execution. It was run by Comrade Duch, who is as I type this, is on trial as the most senior of Pol Pots staff still alive. Most ...

... There were rooms with a metal bed and this was where the torture took place. There were much larger rooms which were dormatories for other prisoners.

In the yard outside was an rectuangular exercise frame which the school children used to use and this was used by the interrogators to gain information. People had their hands tied behind their backs anten inverted and if they lost consciouness they heads ...

... on the waterfront. Everything seems to shut down between noon and two, mainly because it's too hot (around 97 degrees these days) and most people in town go home to eat lunch and sleep. At 2 o'clock I have my Khmer lesson with Sam Aang, a kind elderly man with strange blue eyes that teaches English at the EU Vocational School. Scott told me about him and it seems that he has given Khmer lessons to every foreigner that has lived in Prey Veng in the past ...

... normally sit 5 people at a push - inside I counted 9 people. 4 in the front and 5 in the back! But that was nothing, behind it was a people carrier, 7 seater. 16 people inside that one! Whereas in Vietnam and Thailand they see how many they can fit onto a bike, here it seems it's how many you can fit into a car! The rest of the journey was a blur as I fell asleep, and before I knew it we'd arrived in Phnom Penh.

I hadn't even got out of my seat when I had 3 Tuk ...

... but soon it drops maybe because we don't know what to say, maybe from a kind of shame about knowing for a split second what we as human beings are capable of at our worst.

The reason the Khmer Rouge killed entire families is because they feared retaliation in the future by the grown up children of those they murdered and threw into the dirt. How the mind twists...To understand the "need" to kill the babies before they retaliated, they must have known that ...

We have traveled through Laos, Vietnam and now Cambodia but we have been quite absent in our blog. So here we are again, back to you after some weeks in the shadow. We have uploaded some pictures from most places we have been to (check out the little google map!), so take a look at the different entries to follow our adventures of the past weeks.

Now lets go a little back in time...

After five days chilling in Chiang Mai, we headed east ...

... whole thing was televised. Whilst not the kind of thing we would normally think of doing, the atmosphere was great, the fights where very exciting (& very professional) and it was all for free! On the flip side of that, a day spent at the old Khmer Rouge S-1 prison, now a museum, was harrowing, disturbing, sad & eye-opening. We left looking at the country in a whole new light, as well as a whole new understanding of how terribly the West dealt with the whole ...

... image at all...I spent maybe an hour or so walking around, trying to avoid stepping on bones and clothing but it was a lost cause. Before it became 'the killing fields' it used to be a Chinese cemetary and an orchard. I took a couple acorns and hopefully will be able to plant them as a remembrance to all of those people.

After that, the ride in the tuk tuk back into town with the air cooling me down felt quite good. He dropped me off in front of Tuol Sleng but ...

... who have been living and teaching English in Japan, so we chatted to them and the time passed quickly.

While in Phhnom Pehn we visited a shooting range and both of us got to fire M16 Rifle's on single fire and rapid fire. Crazy!! We have video's of this, but can't seem to get them onto the computer. Bugger. Anyway, this gun was incredible to shoot, really powerful.

We then went to visit the Killing Fields where many thousands of people where ...