Phnom Penh and Cambodia

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The Horrors of the Khmer Rouge

Arriving in Phnom Pehn after what was the shortest flight i have ever taken we grabbed a tuk tuk and headed into town, we arranged to get a Laos visa here but due to new year, ( my third this year), and the weekend it was going to take 4 days.
Our first day we did the Killing fields where there was minimal information about the Khmer Rouge but a chilling atmosphere, the tower of skulls and little signs saying things like this is the tree used by soldiers to kill babies by throwing them against it. Following this we went to S21 prison a converted school (which had all been shut down by the Khmer Rouge) where classrooms had been converted into cells and barbed wire placed over the outside of the buildings to prevent desperate prisoners flinging themselves over the edge to commit suicide. Even the ropes normally used in P.E. had become instruments of torture there!
Before coming to Cambodia I read the book 'First they killed my Farther' so I'd understand the war a little and was glad i had because no foreign journalists were allowed in during the war and the true brutality of the war was not captured on camera, only in the accounts of people who lived through the genocide which killed 15- 20% of their entire population.
Anyway enough of the depressing stuff, (and it really was depressing) for the rest of our few days in the capital we chilled out visited markets and ate good food, i have discovered that my favorite traditional Cambodian dish is amok, a beautiful peanut and coconut sauce served with a choice of meat of fish with rice, Delicious!
Considering we had so much time in Phnom Penh we decided to help out at a local orphanage for a couple of days. We brought supplies such as rice and exercise books pencils pens etc, and spent a couple of days playing games such as bingo and having water fights with the kids. The children there were lovely and it was nice to see that the orphanage, which is run by volunteers, felt more like a family than a kids home. Unfortunately because of the Khmer new year they weren't doing any more English lessons for a week and many of the children had been able to go home to visit other family members so we couldn't be of as much help as we'd have liked.
We also met loads of people in Phnom Penh and when we eventually could leave with our new visa's we traveled with Tara and Zeena to Sihanoukville.

Sihanoukville

Party central of Cambodia, it was nice to unwind after the history of Phnom Penh and go out and party with lots of people my own age. Saying that... after a couple of days this place really was too much, it was all about going out getting pissed, sleeping in and getting up late and doing it all again, three days was definitely all i could take there due to a distinct lack of anything interesting to do. Mind you i did learn to ride a scooter there which was really cool and fairly nerve wrecking! Me whizzing around at night not very far but the rounder-bout was a nightmare as they have no real road rules here, they only brought in traffic lights a year ago there and clearly don't understand them.
After three nights of sleeping in a dorm of thirty people all drunk, (apart from some people who worked there with their families) getting in at 6 in the morning, we'd had our fill and decided to continue.

Onto Kampot

From party central where no one goes to sleep till 6 in the morning to sleepy little town of Kampot where you can walk the whole place and everything shuts down at 10 at night. We couldn't get much more of a contrast. We spent a couple of days here doing a little tour of the area on the first, visiting bat caves and salt lakes, pepper farms which I'm assured Kampot is famous for and joining in a talcon powder fight with the children when we unexpectedly came across a new years celebration on the way to the caves.
The second day after Tara left us to head on an explore Vietnam, we did a tour of Bokor National park with all these buildings that had been built in the 1920's and are now deserted looking like a ghost town on the top of a hill surrounded by jungle, it was a lovely day out but a little spoilt by the huge amount of internal tourists who just chucked rubbish absolutely everywhere. I'm glad i got the chance to visit this place now because we went over to see the plans for Bokor National park development project which will cost around 2 billion and basically involves building huge resorts covering both plateaus, with buildings that just don't belong in a national park. This will also cause the loss of the parks rangers as the NGO that mostly pays for the rangers refuses to pay them once this resort is built understandably as why should they pay to protect a national park which the government is using to it's own gain. (OK now I'll stop sounding like a geographer and get on with it)
In the evening after our trip to Bokor we went on a sunset cruise where we went to watch the sunset at the confluence of the river, despite cloud cover obscuring the best views of the sunset we got some beautiful pictures and chilled out before returning to eat on the river side.

Phnom Pehn again and Siem Riep

We had to go back through Phnom Pehn a second time in order to get to Siem Riep and the Angkor Wat temples so we stayed by the Lakeside this time for a change of scenery and found a lovely backpacker area with bars and a chilled out atmosphere after a day here though we realized we needed to push on having already chilled out a little too long and wanting to see the most important sights in Cambodia, that of the Angkor Wat Temples.
We made it and yesterday went to see one of the 7 man made wonders of the world, and it was incredible! After waking up at 4.20 in the morning to make it to a deserted temple near Angkor Wat for sunrise we spent the next 7 hours wandering round 4 different Temples wonderful, personally my favorite was Ta Prohm where the trees grow through and over the temple itself but where there are still the occasional amazing carving or sculpture. Bayon temple with it's huge buddha faces carvings was the most intricate and Angkor Wat of course was incredible impressing in sheer size.
The funniest thing was the Japanese tourists who kept taking pictures with kiwi throughout the day, and i thought we'd got past all this in China! We only made it to 12pm partly due to the early start but mostly due to sheer heat exhaustion as there's only so many steps you can climb at 40 degree heat. After collapsing into bed and sleeping for a few hours we rose in early evening ready to hit pub street ( actually called that) and find some food.
We bumped into Andrew from Shangri-La in china who showed us the best place in town to get happy shakes. Once we all bumbled out of the happy pizza restaurant 2-3 hours later i headed to the tanks which people set up at night full of those foot eating fish. They felt so weird i was in hysterics i didn't even think that i had ticklish feet any more but with hundreds of fish nibbling away was sooo strange i couldn't quite get used to it, my feet did feel silky smooth afterwards though 😊
There's not really much to say about Cambodia after that, we missed our bus to Karatie the next day (probably the shakes) and delayed them until the day after. This turned into an epic journey concluding with us and a couple of people from the bus station jumping in a taxi for the last couple of hours due to a broken bus. In Karatie we did about the only real thing to do which was go to see the Irrawaddy Dolphins which involved a couple more hours chilled in a boat watching for them to occasionally push their irregularly shaped snouts above water.
From here all we have to do is make it over the border to Laos

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Photos

The killing fields
Amazing that this place has a history like that

Tomb Raider temple
Yes the trees really do just grow through the temples

Talcon powder new year
This is when we got ambushed by the kids when going to visit the caves, they had some techno music playing and it was some sort of local party to celebrate the new year.