3 days in Phnom Penh

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I arrived in Phnom Penh yesterday and I have been on the whirlwind tourist circuit ever since. I am staying at Okay Guesthouse - the sister guesthouse of the place I stayed at in Siem Reap. It's got a nice backpackers atmosphere. They assigned me a moter-bike driver right away which was nice yesterday but it's now kind of annoying me. The poor guy is supposed to look-after me during my entire stay it seems. Every time I come downstairs he hands me the menu and tries to get me to order food from the house restaurant. If decline he hounds me about where I want to go and I know he's watching my every move. Luckily I met my Irish friends here so we are all in the same boat with the over-attentive motorbike drivers. And, it's very good to have friends to talk to and hang out with.
Yesterday we went to S-21. The high school the Khmer Rouge converted into torture chambers and prison for 20,000 people before they brought them to the killing fields to be executed. Only 7 people made it out of S-21 alive. Walking around the buildings was very early and very very depressing. They were left almost exactly how they were found in 1979. Complete with torture devices and tiny prison cells. I found it almost impossible to come to grips with the fact that those buildings and classrooms were the last stop before dying for so many people.
Today my driver took me 15Km outside Phnom Penhn to see the killing fields. There were lots of little kids begging and running around the mass graves. I was so shocked to see so many bits of clothing and bones strewn about the place. You can literally walk all over and around the graves and see a tooth here and a pant-leg there. There is even a tree where you can see where the Khmer Rouge beat small children against in order to save on bullets. I couldn't help but feel severely overwhelmed. I had to sit down and try and process everything. And of course the small children came with little hands outstretched whenever I did that. I had an extremely difficult morning.
However, after lunch my driver took me to a small School of the Arts where I could see children practicing traditional Apsara dances. It was neat to just walk in there, take a seat and watch all of the kids. There was a small boy in the corner practicing a monkey dance where he had to scratch his ears and leap. And the little girls in front of me were st reaching their hands so they would be more flexible and elegant for the dances. The school is a wooden building that jets into a lilly-pad covered river. It was almost like watching a scene from a movie or something - one of those rare moments I got to be a fly on the wall.
After the dances we got back on the bikes and the driver shouted something in my ear but it was muffled so I just said yeah, yeah..." And the next thing I knew we were on the banks of the Mekong river watching the sunset. Oh, boy! The longer we were there the more "date-like"it was becoming. He was talking about girlfriends and love in broken English. Aaack! So, I got up and had him take me back to the GH before the sun was all the way down. Phew!
I got my visa for Vietnam tomorrow. I am leaving on the express bus with the girls in the morning. The closer I get to China - the more excited I get. I have been itching to leave Cambodia ever since I arrived in Phnom Penh. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice city full of nice people but it's a little too rough for me. Plus I feel like everyone in the tourism business has one thing on their minds...money. I am constantly calculating the contents of my wallet in my mind and it's getting tiring... I am ready to move on.
The girls and I are taking the express bus to Saigon tomorrow morning. Vietnam here I come!!

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Photos

Toul Sleng, S-21
"The place people go and never come out."

Barbed wire hallway
to prevent the prisoners from commiting suicide

Killing Fields
Where more than 8,000 S-21 prisoners were brutally murdered by the Khmer Rouge.

A jolting reminder of the
individual people who lost their lives. 20% of the nation's population died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. 1975-1979