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…We arrived in Phnom Penn in the afternoon and found somewhere to stay (Eileen n Bri in their nice air con n hot water room, us, on our now dwindling budget, sticking with the fan and cold water!) PP was nice, quite small, it seemed, for a capitol. I had an ‘oh dear, im my fathers daughter’ moment when I was leaving the hotel, asked mike for the key to which he replied ‘what have you forgotten now??’ at which point I blushed slightly looking down ‘my shoes!’!!!
Here we went to the killing fields which were….surreal, I would say. I know it should be devastatingly sad, but somehow you’re too far removed, the bones and clothes everywhere - your mind just cant accept it. For those who don’t know (and I didn’t) the killing fields are one of the many places where people were taken and killed during the khmer rouge regime - where nearly a third of the entire country was wiped out because the kmer rouge wanted complete communism - and basically killed any doctors/teachers/educated people, and a lot more people starved to death because so much food that was harvested was then taken away and exchanged for arms instead of feeding the people.
After Phnom Penn we headed to sihanoukville, another beach (I had lost my camera, but was very kindly leant brian’s). It was lovely and we hung out and taught the others to drive motorbikes etc. (The manual ones here are weird - there’s a peddle for the gears where there would normally be, in front of your left foot, but only to go down, the peddle to go up the gears is then behind your left foot, which is somewhat of a tricky manoeuvre in flip flops - and they don’t even have a clutch!!! So that was fun! But then you could actually start n stop in 4th gear anyway, which seemed to be what the locals did, so I didn’t really get the point in the gears at all!!) Here I saw an ice ring, which was pretty cool, a complete rainbow around the sun - the picture doesn’t do it justice but check it out anyway!
We ended Cambodia in Siem Reap, which we all loved. On the first day there we went and gave blood at a children’s hospital. (Having never been able to before, and usually feinting at blood tests, I was quite terrified! But Eileen managed to distract me and keep me calm.) The next 3 days were spent exploring the temples (and on the evening before the last day I bought a super-duper new camera - just in time for Angkor Wat!) However, after sunrise at Angkor Wat and wandering round the vast expanse, while impressive, I much preferred Bayon (the one with the big heads in the pictures) …sounds like such a snobby traveller thing to say!!! Lol.
And so, we parted ways from our friends, which after several weeks of travelling together was very sad! And we headed back on down to Bangkok….
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