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30/08/11 - Phnom Penh (Killing Fields)
Yesterday was a quite day just on a public bus travelling to Phnom Penh. It was a good experience driving through all the farmlands and seeing all the families farming the rice, fishing, and playing in the streams. We arrived in Phnom Penh in the evening and had a quick freshen up before heading out for dinner in town and I had another nice curry, but Rachel finally caved and went for the home luxury food of pizza, mmmm. We then headed back for an early night.
Today we arose and had a quick breaky then headed off on a tour of 'S21 The Genocide Museum' and the 'Killing Fields'. S21 was a very sad place, originally it was a school, however between 1975 and 1979 it was changed to a prison, where around 20,000 people were tortured into false confessions and finally killed, because of crimes against the government. These crimes included things such as being educated (eg an Engineer, a doctor, etc), or for breaking a fork while they were given the minimum food rations. Throughout Cambodia people were treated worse then animals and weren't even allowed to cook for themselves, if they were caught eating fruit fallen from a tree they were shot. At the end we walked passed a person selling a autobiography book and then we realised his picture was on the cover, he was one of the only 7 survivors of the camp. He must have only been in his 50's which just shows how recent this all was. We then got taken to the killing fields to see all the mass graves where people were buried, many killed on the same spot. So please take a few moments of silence just to think about how lucky we all are.
After this we got dropped off in town and went for some western food pizza and chips to give us the home food feeling. After looking round the central market we headed back to the hotel to get a cylco ride tour. This was good fun where a man from the paddy fields comes to town and cycles you round to the main tourist sites. It was set up to help poverty farmers make some extra money and was good fun. My rider had the most wonderful smile as he was missing a couple of teeth. We finally got dropped off at a bar for a couple of drink, lovely banana, coconut and vanilla ice cream smoothie mmmmmm, before we went to another local house for another meal.
The man who's house it was ran a school for learning English for the locals, so before eating we went down to meet some of the kids. We had a chat with them and then they taught us a game - some kind of hand slap game (violent kids)- and then we played hangman with English words. The last word the kids got us to guess we had no idea what it was, but in true teacher style just nodded and smiled and said ah well done! We then went upstairs to have the traditional meal of curries and noodles.
After dinner the man brought out a 'special' drink for all of us - tequila with marinated tarantulas at the bottom! We were all given a shot to down. We all said cheers and downed the shot (which was actually quite nice) and then realised the one person who didn't drink it was the man pouring it…. Hee hee we'll see how we feel tomorrow… The spiders were also taken out of the bottle to show they were real (but dead) eww Graeme had a hold. We then headed back to the hotel in a tuk tuk for bed.
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