We took a private bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The city is one of contrasts. On the waterfront of the Mekong river there are a number of western restaurants and bars. But a little off from the main street one sees the extreme poverty of Cambodia. It still suffers from the shocking Year Zero when Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge wiped out a quarter of the population. Many of Cambodia’s intellectual & political community did not survive the genocide during the years 75 – 79. We went on a tour of Tuol Sleng a high school turned torture camp “S-21”, where it is believed that over 17, 000 Cambodians were imprisoned, tortured and then exterminated at the Choeung Ek (Killing Fields) site. We had a brilliant guide that took us through the school and told us about his experiences during this time. One could feel his raw emotion. The prison cells still had old bloodstains on the floor. Some of the group could not complete the tour as they were overcome by emotion. After lunch we were taken out to Choeung Ek (made famous by the movie The Killing Fields). Here one could walk amongst the mass graves, see the clothes still buried in the dirt and my worst site the killing tree, where soldiers used to hold babies by the leg and smack their heads against the tree to kill them. Prisoners were also made to dig their own grave before being bayoneted or hit on the head with the rifle butt. There is now a memorial at the fields which is a tower of 4000 skulls that were exhumed from some of the mass graves. It is believed that Pol Pot’s regime killed over a million people. But luckily back in the city, the sunset and cheap cold beer made the days events a little easier to forget. We went out clubbing that night and had a fun time. Everybody seemed to be well behaved, locals and tourists, although we heard later from Krista that a tourist was killed there a week before when causing trouble with a local’s girlfriend. Luckily none of us got ourselves into this situation.