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We arrived yesterday in Siem Reap after 10 hours in the bus. We got into a row with our tuk tuk driver to lied to us about the fare -when he heard we would not use him the next day the price all of a sudden tripled... THank g. not all People are like that. But later on Siem Reap, I left the travelstory in Phnom Penh, which is a hectic place after tranquil Laos. There are motorcyclists everywhere and they absolutely drive like maniacs, so you need eyes in the back of your head. We visited a few landmarks, one being the very depressing Tuol Sleng museum, a former interrogation/detention centres under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime 1975-1979. The atrocities commited here are inhumane. The scary bit is that they were commited by very young people at the time, totally indoctrinated. Most of them are now 'normal' husbands and wives leading a normal life. Most people responsible for this genocide are given amnesty from the government and some are in the current government, unbelievable. We decided to give the actual 'killing fields' a miss, as we had enough to think about after this visit. Off to Kampot next then. A provincial town south of Phnom Penh it has some colonial buildings and a totally deserted French colonial hill station, Bokor Hill station and national park. We visited this park part of a tour group and had a good day out. We saw a ghost town up Bokor hill, built there for the cooler weather by the French early 20th century. It was used by the Khmer Rouge as late as 1998 to hide and a lot of bullet marks in the building are witness to the fighting. After this bit of history we went to Sihanouk ville for some beach. We thought we could just relax and work on our tans but only partly succeeded in this. Sihanouk Ville is a Benidorm in the making and it attracts a lot of chavs - it makes for some nice people watching for a little while but because of the enormous tourism boom you get also bombarded every 5 minutes with Cambodians wanting to sell you a massage, manicure, fruit salad, jewellery, most of them kids who are so jaded or cheeky. Worse are the beggars, most of them missing one or more limbs and looking appalingly and begging for the dollars in your wallet... So after 3 days we decided to pack up and take the 10 hour bus ride to the north of the country - we have now arrived in Siem Reap our final destination in Cambodia. We will be visiting the temples here for 3 days, the most famous being Angkor Wat But We will tell you about that later. Take care! Es & Rober x
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