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Whitneys on Tour
We arrived here by bus from Siem Reap on 15th May, a journey that took around 5 hours. We saw how the majority of Cambodian people really live on this journey, in ramshackle raised wooden houses in rural areas, a far cry from the tourist area's we've so far visited.
Phnom Penh itself is fairly small for a capital city, about a million inhabitants most of whom seem to get around via motorcycle which makes up most of the traffic. It's oppressively hot and humid too with the further irritation of constant hassle from tuk tuk and moto drivers. You can't walk more than a few steps without the sound of 'tuk tuk sir' coming from somewhere which gets on your nerves somewhat.
To be honest there's nothing special about the city itself and what we and undoubtably other tourists come here for are the rather macabre tourists spots of the Killing Fields and the Khymer Rouge detention centre, S21. The Killing Fields (at least the one where tourists go as there are many in Cambodia) is around 15km outside the city centre. It features a temple style building which has many shelves of human skulls and cloths of murdered victims of the Khymer Rouge. Even more disturbingly when you walk around the mass burial sites you can still see bones of more victims still in the ground not to mention more victims clothes, it really is quite eerie.
The Tuol Sleng Museum manages to match The Killing Fields site for eerieness (is that a word?). This was an old school turned into a detention and torture centre by the Khymer Rouge during their barbaric regime and was known as S21. We saw the tiny cells the victims were housed in and saw displays and written witness accounts of what went on here, not to mention blood on some of the walls and ceilings, we kid you not! The building itself is utterly grim which just adds to the atmosphere. These certainly weren't pleasant visits but it's important that visitors should come here and appreciate what this country went through all too recently.
Sadly, whilst walking along the Mekong river during our time here we managed to see something even worse than S21 or The Killing Fields. Someone was displaying a horribly deformed baby for public viewing, presumably for a bit of money. We saw a crowd and went to have a look thinking it was an act or something but we saw the worst thing we may well see in our lives never mind on this trip. A horrible moment for us both and we felt revulsion at the people that came to display the poor thing and the people who continued to stand and stare.
Our visit here coincided with the Champions league final which Stuart watched at a bar at the ungodly time of 2am. Despite a sizeable western backpacker population here there wasn't many people around to watch the game and so not much of an atmosphere. Not much of a result either obviously and the ref didn't exactly cover himself in glory.
We left on 19th May by boat to Vietnam down the Mekong river.
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