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We left Bangkok with our group of 12 people and our crazy guide Mara and got on the bus to Siem Reap which took about 7 hours along some seriously bumpy roads! Went for dinner that evening in a restaurant that had traditional Cambodian dancers giving a performance which was really good and we felt like we were in the King and I! The next day we went to see Angkor Wat, one of the modern wonders of the world. It is pretty amazing and covers such a huge area and took 40 years to build. The detail in the carvings is magnificent and it is very hard to explain it all having not been there yourself. One of the temples we visited had hundreds of Buddha faces around the towers and another was overgrown with trees and some Raider was filmed there.
Also visited a landmine museum that day which was set up by a guy who as a child was forced to lay the mines and now has removed thousands of them with his own hands. He also helps to home children whose parents have been killed by them. It was shocking to realise that so many countries still produce them having seen the effects of what they can do. Got a lie in the next day, went for some lunch in a place where u basically sit on beds while you eat which was great!! Pottered about, got a foot/leg/back massage and then visited a floating village where there was even a floating basketball court!
We then left for Kampong Cham and on the bus journey there we tried fried crickets, which surprisingly tasted quite nice! We eveb went in for seconds. Our our arrival we had a couple of hours to have lunch and teach our new friend Sarika how to ride a bike in preparation for a bike ride on a nearby island. She did brilliantly and managed to learn in 45 mins!! Visited an English lesson and spoke to the children for a bit and got a crazy ferry there and back which was essentially an enormous piece of wood!
The next day we set off on the bus again for a homestay in Takeo, stopping in Phnon Pehn for lunch. We lived in wooden huts raised off the floor with about 5 of us in each. We settled in then went for a game of volleyball which was hilarious as most of us were pretty rubbish apart from the odd flash of inspiration! The family made us a gorgeous dinner and we played a funny card game before bed. We got back on the bus and set off for Sihanoukville which is a coastal town. Spent the next few days lazing about on the beach, getting a tan and going out which was fab as the weather was great.
After the few days there we left for Phnom Penh and visited the Killing Fields and the S-21 prison which has now been turned into a museum. It was a very overwhelming afternoon learning about the atrocities that went on under the Pol Pot regime. We were told about the methids of torture, shown where the prisoners were kept and in a few of the rooms were noticeboards filled with pictures of the people that died there which was very moving- especially pictures of children and babies. Skulls are on display in glass cabinets and some paintings from 1 of the 7 people out of 20,000 that survived, showing the horrors that he could remember. The Killing Fields themselves are ironically beautiful and what was so eerie was that you could see bones of the dead along the path that haven't been dug up along with clothes from the victims still poking out of the ground. We were all left speechless by what we saw and it's so hard to believe that it all happened just a few years before we were born.
We had 1 more day in Phnom Penh where did a cyclo tour of the city, ate snake (which was also very nice!) and left the next day for Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.
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