Hello Ha!

We are currently in Bangkok for the day in transit to the Thai Islands! Thought i'd fill you all in on the happenings in Cambodia! We arrived in Phnom Penh, the capital from Saigon! We were surrounded and hassled by taxi men to take us to their hostel....tortured we were. A bad first impression! We finally got a lovely hotel for cheap as chips! We just settled in that night and decided to leave the sight seeing until the following day!

And what a sight it was. We got a tuk tuk out to the killing fields and it literally knocked us for six! 18,000 people were buried here and have been excavated since with all the skulls on show in this temple like building.We were walking over bones and torn clothes of people who were killed and buried in mass graves for no other reason than they were educatedor just killed for no reason at all. It was crazy and hard to take in! The part that hit us the most was the fact that this only happened in the 1970's. We also went to S-21 prison which during the genocide changed from being the only secondary school in cambodia to a prison for people who were taking from their homes to be killed. It was all very real and there were videos of people talking about loosing their family. We decided that we didnt want to see much more on the killings that took place so we took a walk around some temples, had a few beers and booked our bus to Siem Reap for the next day! Phnom Penh was a weird place to say the least. There was people begging everywhere yet there was also so much wealth evident in the city. We lost count of the amount of hummers we seen driving past women with their naked children begging along the street. The thing that struck us most about the poeple is that they were happy with what they had. One thing stands out so much more than others, there was a homelss family having a game of cards, laughing and joking by the side of the road asif they were the most privledged people there. Phon Penh defintaly not a place for the faint hearted!

A 6 hour bus journey later and we arrived in Siem Reap to explore the famous temples of Angkor Wat! And the intrepid travellers that we are we got up at 4:30am to watch the sunrise over Angkor Wat temples. There we were in the pitch dark trying to decide if we still have our sanity as we freeze on the back of a tuk tuk. Then we realised we were one of the more sane people....there was Ivan Lavery from Lurgan beside us on the road ON A BIKE! I'd hardly seen the man sober in Belfast never mind on a bike to watch the sunrise at 4:30 in the morning! It was hilarious and it just proved that we had'nt lost the plot altogether! The temples were great to see, especially at that time of the morning. I don't think the photos really do it the just tice they deserve. After a long day at Angkor there was only one thing we needed, a trip down pub street for a few buckets! It was a late night and an even more depressing morning after! We were up at 7 for our 14 hour bus journey to Bangkok! We are getting used to this type of journey...piece of cake (especially with sore heads)!