Mittapheap Phnom Penh

... to get there before they went to the shooting range. Terry wanted to splurge and get himself an early Bday present in the form of a rocket propelled grenade.

The tuk tuk ride to the guesthouse was short. Once there we met Heather and Terry. After a brief catch up and getting settled into our room, we called it a night. The next day we were to meet the tuk tuk driver from the day before, Mr. Camera, downstairs at 9 to go out to the shooting range. We all had bfast, hopped in the ...

... d beome accostomed to. We also felt frustrated, because two weeks is long enough to know the negative sides of the place, to see something of its faulkts and failures, but really not long enough to implment any lasting changes to combat them.

With good intentions, we did what we could. We saw that a child was being left behind in the English classes - the archaic teaching methods of dictation, wrote-learning and recital failing to affect him at all. Finola and I spent time ...

... temple that most of you would recognise, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The whole area is littered with huge ancient cities & temples built by succsessive royal dynasties, some Buddhist, some Hindi, and all in various states of decay or restoration, some looking like a house of cards that could crumble into a pile of rocks at any minute, others being swallowed by enormous trees.
Whilst we were generally underwhelmed by Cambodia it's worth coming for this ...

... has lost a family member or know of someone who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.

S21 was once a school and was turned into a prison of torture. The 2 buildings are now a museum where you can see how the original classrooms were turned into cells and they pretty much remain as they were found. In some cells there are still blood stains on the floor. The walls are lined with pictures taken of the prisoners - alll were ...

... Criminal Minds, 30 Rock, Are you smarter than a 5th grader (much funnier than 'Are you smarter than a 10 year old'), Desperate Housewives, Brothers and Sisters, Prison Break, Bones, Ghost Whisperer, America's next top model and I'm a celebrity US. We watched tons of movies on HBO, Star Movies, AXN and MAX. It's going to be tough for the next few weeks, some of the places we'll stay in only have electricity for 4 hours a day !

... to "Security Prison S21". Each of the classrooms was converted into prison cells and the larger halls were divided up into lots of tiny brick cells no more than 1 metre across. Thousands of people were imprisoned here before being transferred to the killing fields. A lot people were also horrifically tortured at the old school. The place now is a museum dedicated to the people that were imprisoned or who died there, all the rooms are open to walk around and there were lots of ...

... any more".... What? I am not a fool, you bibble, I can see that in the confusion you have moved the spider from your hands to your shoulder. There is a massive hairy spider sitting on this tossers shoulder, and she is standing right in front of me. I hold my own for enough time to get one very mediocre photograph, then I flee again and Mandarin tells her to sling her hook in Cambodian unless she wants to feel the business end of a bag of spoons. All around insects are being sold in ...

... the lesson for next time. They found another driver.
We headed back to our hotel, showered, and went out for a bite to eat. Johannes photographed some of the shanty-type stores that lined some of the streets. I suppose they were interesting.
I wondered, reflecting on the day's events, if the ruthless regime and the Khmer Rouge chastened the Cambodians somewhat, making them generally friendly and gentle, etc?
Not really, I think they've always been like that.

... the crime of being city dwellers in a rural country. Cambodia is the greatest culture ever to arise in Southeast Asia, mind you, now reduced to one of the world’s thirty Least Developed Countries, an honor it shares only with Nepal in Asia, Haiti in the Americas, and most of sub-Saharan Africa.

That’s all changing. Unlike Myanmar (they should rename the country again, this time to ‘Bummer’), Cambodia is not digging the hole deeper and looking ever further ...