Royal Phnom Penh Hotel

... Erica and I so back to bed we went. After we kissed and made up we headed out by tuk-tuk to see what can only be described as breath taking! Giant ruins of temples adorn this area sticking out of the jungle and the jungle has reclaimed some with trees growing out of walls and on top of roofs. It was a wet but incredible day. <br><br>Next stop was Phnom Penh. As the Lonely Planet describes it it is a place of juxtapositions! We have spent the days exploring ...

... country and one that has been through hell and back. The grounds are luscious and meticulously maintained, the buildings are beautifully and ornaely decorated and the locals came in droves to see how the rich live. There are 5 tons of silver in the floor of the Silver Pagoda inside the Palace, how many orphans would this silver have fed? Not a bad fate for royals in a communist country...<br><br>Tomorrow, we leave early for Siem Reap to see the magnificent temples of Angkor.

... example, the skirt I wore was about 60 dollars and a typical Khmer English teacher here makes between 30-60 dollars a month. So you can imagine how overwhelmed I was when my host family in Tramkak gave me the skirt and two white blouses to go with it before I left, hand-me-downs but incredibly generous of them. So feeling kind of pretty though a tad ridiculous, I raised my right hand along with the other 42 recruits on stage and promised the next two years ...

... the border broke down. That after 90 mins of chucking water over the engine gave up. That was continued on another bus headed for Siem Reap. That the drivers had to bribe to go to Poi Pet. That I hit the second Valium on. That I was rocked awake by the bus attendant to expose me as the only passenger still aboard after sleeping the whole way there. That I left my book on. That I cursed my mashed potato brain on.<br><br>Back at Poi Pet and my last minutes on Cambodian ...

... had been suggested to us that we see the museum first before going to the fields but I wasn't sure I would be able to handle the museum so we saw the fields first. It still blows my mind that so many atrocities were going on in this country and no one else in the world seemed to know about it. <br><br>When you first arrive you see a very tall memorial building with thousands of skulls that are just a fraction of what was excavated from the mass grave sites nearby. I'm not ...

... Brilliant, although he didn&#8217;t think so, he didn&#8217;t buy any.<br><br>2nd &#8211; 6th August:<br><br>Our first couple of days in Siem Reap were spent wandering around exploring the town. To be honest there wasn&#8217;t a lot to be discovered but there wasn&#8217;t much else to do. Nearby are the Temples of Angkor Wat, trips here can be for 1, 3 or 5 days. We decided 1 day would be plenty for us. We set off around 8, we didn&#8217;t ...

... was he could not speak English or read numbers so a lot of hand signals were needed, but got there in the end. Bumped into some English people who had just finished uni from Manchester so shared a room with them on first night, they were cool, but they were more looking to be closer to the tourist area by the riverside so they left the next day. anyway that night went out with some really cool dude called jimmy (cool American dude) who was leaving after spending 9 months in south east ...

... around the bus stops awaiting incomers and tour companies and guesthouses on every corner. There&#8217;s a seedy side to it too, and it didn&#8217;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. <br><br>One thing you can&#8217;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 ...

... 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&#8217;s thirty Least Developed Countries, an honor it shares only with Nepal in Asia, Haiti in the Americas, and most of sub-Saharan Africa.<br><br>That&#8217;s all changing. Unlike Myanmar (they should rename the country again, this time to &#8216;Bummer&#8217;), Cambodia is not digging the hole deeper and looking ever further ...

... Prison 21) as it was known. This was once a school near the centre of Phnom Penh but was taken over by the KR and turned into a prison and torture centre. We had been warned that this place was both grisly and heart-rending; an understatement. S21 was the largest detention centre in Cambodia and, by the time it was liberated by the Vietnamese in 1979, most of the 17,000 people to be executed at Choeung Ek had passed through here. Many more people were tortured to ...