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Wow I have really been neglecting this thing! I've actually been in Oz for ages now, but i'm here for 2 and a half months and am mainly chilling so I have plenty of time to get up to date. OK soooo after Vietnam it was Cambodia, first stop Phnom Penh. We arrived there at night after another massively long boat ride from the Mekong Delta trip and yet another cramped minibus journey. The place was a lot more built up and westernised than we were expecting, with the riverfront packed with tons of bars and restaurants with flashing signs beckoning at you for business. But funnily enough upon closer inspection we found that hardly anyone was actually in any of them, most were empty! I don't know if it was low season for tourism, which seems unlikely because a lot of the hostels were full, but it looked like a lot of effort for nothing. Anyway we did find a seemingly decent room in a hostel, but were awoken at around 5am the following morning to a loud and repetitive banging sound and the smell of s***. We soon found out we were right next to the kitchen so got moved to a room upstairs for the second night. We actually only had a day and half in Phnom Penh but that was enough as again we got up early each day and blitzed it. The one full day was distinctly historical as we visited various sights demonstrating the terrible genocide in Cambodia in the 1970s under the Khymer Rogue regime. First we went to the famous killing fields (later the title of the multi oscar winning movie, I think John Malkovich was in it) where anyone who even breathed opposition was sent to be "re-educated." The place was basically a large field full of huge ditches which were dug up mass graves and a tall monument in the middle housing thousands and thousands of human skulls stacked on shelves all the way to the top. It was pretty harrowing but was all set up in a very respectable way. Then it was off to Tuol Sleng prison where people were kept and tortured before being sent to the killing fields. The place used to be a high school but was turned into a prison for detainees with the buildings enclosed in iron bars and barbed wire and the classrooms divided into small torture chambers. Again it was all pretty disturbing but a very genuine and real experience as it was all open so you could actually go into all the tiny interrogation cells and classrooms with blood-stained floors under your feet. The whole morning was a rather disconcerting insight into the dark depths of the human psyche in terms of the people who carried out the atrocities at these places for fear of being subject to them themselves. So after a taxing morning on the senses we spent that afternoon just cruising around the markets and chilling. I finally took the plunge and ate some insects, gave this kid at a stand a dollar and told him to fill up a bag with goodies. I had a tarantula, a big and small cockroach, a locust and some little crickets. The locust and the tarantula weren't bad actually although the tarantula had eggs inside it so I hope they aren't currently festering in my insides waiting to hatch. But the big cockroach was awful, so crunchy and flaky and slimy inside I almost vommed all over the street, much to the amusement of the locals who had unbeknownst to me formed a crowd around us during the ordeal. Typically Ben pussied out. That evening we just chilled in one of the empty restaurants and bars, where the thought crossed my mind that maybe the overabundance of these places was a sign of the Cambodians overcompensating for the morbidity of their recent past in a zealous attempt to move on. Who knows? The following morning, we went to the Royal Palace complex, which was impressive enough but you couldn't really go anywhere to get any good shots. Every time we seemed to wander anywhere we were immediately shooed off by a guard. Naturally we still took too many photos. That afternoon we left for Seam Reap on a bus (6 dollars only! and it was spacious and air-conditioned! we were eagerly awaiting the scam to reveal itself, but it didn't, could our scam days have been behind us??). All in all Phnom Penh, although disheartening at times, was a very far-reaching experience and seemed to play on all the emotions, which was a welcome alternative to the boozing.
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