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The bus trip from Vietnam to Cambodia went fairly smoothly. It was an air conditioned bus, wasn't too full and the driver wasn't as insane as previously experienced. The border crossing was a bit disorganized and involved a fair amount of standing around waiting, and getting on and off the bus, but eventually we got through without a hitch. Our first meal in Cambodia was at a restaurant the bus stopped at just through the border. We had no idea what the menu said as the Khmer language used is all symbols, and everyone else was just queuing up at the woman dishing food out. We followed like sheep and ended up front of the queue, still not knowing what any dish was. The woman barked at us, "What do you want?" and we just pointed at one dish. She threw it on a plate along with some rice, asked if we wanted an omelette too, but before we could answer threw that on anyway. I was next and wanted something else but she was obviously fed up with foreigners and wasn't interested in what I was saying so I ended up with exactly the same as Emma! It was quite nice in the end though.
The bus carried on to Phnom Penn, driving through endless rice fields. When we arrived there was a swarm of tuk-tuk and moped drivers chasing the bus, and almost fighting over each person getting off. We somehow picked one and he drove us to the backpacker ghetto at the North of Phnom Penn. That is how the Lonely Planet describes it and they are fairly spot on. It is down a narrow dirt road that is crammed full of café's, restaurants and guest houses. All the buildings are more like shacks with corrugated iron roofs that look like a gust of wind could knock them down.
Our hotel in Saigon had recommended a guest house to us, so we went on blind faith and got our tuk-tuk driver to take us there. It was so cheap, just $5 but you could see why. Everything had a very worn look, from the pillow (they only gave us one), to the curtains. But it was a roof over our head, plus their bar downstairs looked out straight onto the lake and had beds to lounge around on. The other guest houses around all looked fairly similar so we just thought we'd live with it. That despite the guy showing us our room saying, "Don't worry, you can smoke weed here, no problem!" It seems most people use this area to smoke with little fear of repercussions. Our favourite café because of this was the Lazy Gecko, run by an Australian, and whose menu stated, "We do not allow the smoking of weed in our café, as it is ACTUALLY ILLEGAL in Cambodia," Most people didn't seem to a) realise or b) care!
We spent a couple of days just "chilling like ice cream filling" (sorry non Jason Mraz fans) in bars and restaurants and on the beds in our bar…it's a hard life! We read, played cards, found Scrabble in one bar, and drank a lot of fruit shakes. Alcohol really doesn't appeal in the heat, but we still managed the odd beer or gin and tonic.Our tuk-tuk driver had offered to take us around the city to see the sites, and as he spoke fairly good English and had a nice smile (!) we took him up on his offer.
We started with the Killing Fields, an eerie, depressing place where you are greeted by a monument to the people that died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge containing over 8500 skulls. All of these were recovered from just one of the mass graves discovered on the site after it was liberated. The rest of the site is dotted with other empty mass graves, trees that babies were thrown against, remains of clothes from the victims and signs describing other horrific stories. We didn't stick around too long and hardly took any photos, which for us is very unusual. It just didn't seem right somehow.
Next stop was the other part of the story: S-21 Prison in the centre of the city. This was where the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and tortured doctors, teachers, opposition soldiers and their families, before sending them by the lorry load to the Killing Fields. It was a school originally which made it seem even more disturbing that it was used for its eventual purpose. Classrooms were full of tiny brick or wooden cells, the rope swings were turned into a torture tool, and 3 story high buildings were completely encased with barbed wire, apparently to stop detainees from jumping to end their suffering.
There were room after room full of photos of the prisoners. Pol Pot wanted detailed documentation of the people imprisoned along with their "crimes". Some photo boards solely of children, some of men smiling, either not knowing what lay ahead or defying it, others showing the injuries afflicted by their captors and some of how corpses were discovered after the KR had fled. There were a number of exhibitions of photos and exerts from books written about the Khmer Rouge. It was all pretty heart breaking, but at least we know Cambodia has come through the worst of it and is rebuilding. You do not see many elderly people in Phnom Penn though.
After all the doom and gloom we felt a touch of shopping and lunch was in order, so we headed to the Russian market. A bag, 2 hammocks and a note book later and we had built up some appetite. Our tuk-tuk driver met us after lunch and we went for a drive past the Royal Palace and the river front before heading to Wat Phnom, a temple on the only hill in the city. To walk up to it we had to work our way past a number of fairly intimidating beggars and guys asking us to pay to set a sparrow free! Once at the Wat it was obviously not going to be the best temple we will see in Cambodia, as it was not in the best keep, smelt a bit of urine and the interior contained enough kitsch flashing lights to make it look like a bad disco. The best thing about it was the wise old monkey taking refuge. He looked deep in thought or prayer. His badly behaved friends were charging around at the bottom of the hill after peoples' food. He was obviously despairing of them!
We spent one more day around the "ghetto" before bussing out headed for Battambang.The bus we got had no other tourists on it, meaning a lot of odd looks. We had originally been put on a bus to Siem Reap, which understandably was packed with tourists, but once they realised their mistake we were swiftly moved off the bus, along with our bags and plonked in the waiting room not knowing if our bus would actually turn up. It had gone too smoothly up to that point. Surprisingly our bus did turn up, and it had a form of air-con! They were though playing very bad Cambodian karaoke videos for most of the journeys but we managed to block it out and read.Once more the journey took us past endless rice fields, this time we didn't have lunch at the stop. We ate Pringles to keep us going. We have learnt that the forced stops never do the best food, so opted to wait until Battambang.
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