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So the time has come to leave Australia. After we got back from the Tip we spent a couple of days saying goodbye to Tank and resting up before the next part of our adventure begins. From Cairns we went to Sydney to catch our flight to Cambodia.
It was quite a long journey via Singapore we were a little worried about the visas as Shentons passport is not great. You just get to the counter in the airport and it is like a conveyor belt. Basically you give your passport and the form with a photo, then it gets passed along the line and when they have approved it you pay your $20. Mine was done very quickly and it was taking a while for Shentons to get done but in the end his was approved too.
As we left the airport and got a taxi immediatley you can see we are in Asia, the smells, heat and sounds are all so familiar from the time we spent in Thailand. There are loads of bikes everywhere all carrying 3 or more passengers.
We get to the hotel that we found on the internet and up in the
room the airconditioing is so nice that we just crash and fall asleep. We wake up to a view over the Mekong river, the sun is just rising though we have slept for more than 12hrs,. Phnom Penh is bustling but there are not so many tourists here so the tuk tuk drivers all want to take you places. We get a guide who takes us to "shoot some guns" we are not sure where he is going to take us but it sounds like an adventure, at 930am it has to be!
So after a crazy tuk tuk ride, road rules do not apply here and cars and bikes are going everywhere in all directions, we end up at a mock military base, or maybe real who knows? Where we are presented with a menu of guns we can shoot! They even have rocket launchers which you can go up into the mountains and fire..... Shenton chooses an AK47 and he gets set up in a room. First he gets to shoot at a coconut (for an extra $1 of course) on his first shot it misses then he gets his reading glasses on and hey presto he
hits it first time. He then fires it on automatic and at the end is presetned with his target where he hits it mainly in the head even though there is a target at the chest area. The guys asked me if I wanted a go but I said no and they replied "why not, we have lady guns".....probably had lady boy guns as well !!
Next stop was the killing fields, words can not describe this place and how sad that this could have happened to this country in such recent times, the monument to the bodies found here are at the entrance where there are levels of skulls and bones and clothes piled up on each other. As you walk around the mass graves the recent rains have unearthed more clothes and you are just walking over them. It is so sad to think that almost half of the population of Camobida at that time were killed in such a terrible way and for what???? The genocide museum, the state high school in the center of the city, is another eye opener and is one of the places that people were taken to be cruely tortured before
being taken to the killing fields. We both leave with a sense of horror and feel sick to our stomachs that this could happen and that the perpetrators are not being held responsible for the horror that they brought upon their own people, women with their babies, children and men, all ages and all classes. The end game was that the Khmer rouge started killing each other, this was all recorded in detail, so there was real structure and planning behind this. The people, the survivors here and their children are still traumatised by their recent history.
We spend the afternoon relaxing at the hotel before we head out again for a stroll around the city in the evening. We get caught in a heavy rain storm and see lots of street children enjoying the down pour in the murky water that is flowing down the street. Poverty is so evident here but the people are super friendly and happy to have a chat with you, usually while trying to sell you something though, it is the people's spirit that shines through more than all the diversity that we see.
We spend the next days exploring the markets
and the city using Tuk Tuks we have to keep going back to the hotel as it is so hot outside. Tomorrow we atart a 4 days bike tour to Siem Reap, every person we tell this to just laughs at us cycling there, I guess we must be mad.....
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knight
non-member comment
Is amazing what you can trainmonkey to do- I taught mine to be a butler, he could mix great martini's but I had to let him go eventually. he kept throwing shit at me.