Intercontinental Hotels Intercontinental Phnom Penh

... and S-21, read and learned a little of the Khmer Rouge, the plight of your common Cambodian, and when Finola stumbled accross a leaflet advertising vaccancies for volunteers at a local NGO: the Save poor Children in Asia Organisation (SCAO), we decided to give them a visit and spend some time doing some good! They needed native English speakers to teach children the language, and offered us the chance to live, eat and sleep at the orphange during our stay. We contacted the manager ...

... heap if we had cycled. Going to do some cycling when we get to Vietnam so we will get a work out then!! We had another early start yesterday morning as we were catching the boat to the capital Phnom Pean. The boat travels down the Tonle Sap lake and river system and takes 6 hours. The Tonle Sap lake is the largest in SE Asia and expands to 4 times its size during the wet season. Its a UNESCO bioshere region due to the migrating bird's that use it as a ...

... more they'll take, and the more they'll expect. That's a pretty sad reality around here. I'm still happy about my decision though. There are alot of restaurants around Phnom Penh that give all of there proceeds to feeding and helping the children of Cambodia. John and I are making an effort to give them our business as long as we're here.

We plan to tour around Phnom Penh tomorrow and then ...

On the Wednesday we headed out to the Killing Fields where my camera unfortunately opted out for the second time, but not before we stopped off at a shooting range! Shot some bullets from an M16 and then Tommy pointed a bloody gun a me! Twice!
Learned a lot about the ...

... amazing story of life and death decisions if he ever resurfaces. Meanwhile, he is clubbing and indulging himself it seems.

And of course the group dynamics of the 9 house members themselves are rather interesting and at times volatile.



What do you do when bad luck seems to be your constant companion?

Organise a monk to come and bless the house and everyone in it, of course.

... Does this help? What should I do? I felt so helpless and confused about what was right and what really helps the situation. Lucky met me at the bottom of the stairs and he showed me a tree where bats were sleeping upside down. I had never seen bats during the day and it was kind of cool.

It was a wonderful week in Phnom Penh, I tried tarantulas and I saw the city. It is somehow harsher than I thought it would be, but it was not that long ago that the country lived in fear.

... around the bus stops awaiting incomers and tour companies and guesthouses on every corner. There’s a seedy side to it too, and it didn’t take long to find the brothel strip, where over the hill Western men hovering outside earned smiles from the working girls and daggers from me.

One thing you can’t escape in Cambodia is the brutality and horror of the Pol Pot Khmer Rouge regime, and there were two things in Phnom Penh that it was ...

... we had ice cream there and made our way back to the hostel. (a GIANT 3-layered ice-cream sundae!) The next day we went to the Genocide Centre (the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek) just outside of Phnom Penh. It was shocking to see the hundreds of skulls, left unidentified, and piled one upon each other in glass boxed containers. To walk around the grounds, one could see clothes, layered upon layered in the dirt, and small white bones in the path ...

... the crimes could every bring themselves to actually do it, but also how people with that ideology could ever gain sufficient numbers to become the ruling party... It happens time after time around the world though, somehow.

For me Tuol Sleng was more evocative. The hilling fields are almost incomprehensible, just due to the sheer numbers and that the evidence is a bit more 'abstract' (not really the word I want but ...

... to spruce it up a bit, although the bits me and Johannes walked through as we made our way to the museum weren't that bad as I let him lead the way. He knew where to find the place tucked away in some side street.
As S21 is 'paraded,' so to speak, for all to see, particularly Westerners, the entrance fee was all of $2. We ambled around with lots of others, making sure we didn't miss entering and viewing any rooms where the suffering took place and the cubicles where the ...