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Published: March 15th 2011
Bus travel in Cambodia is definitely less plush than in Malaysia, and it seems to be a mistake to let the hotel organise anything ever, since you end up with a crappy service at twice the price. Anyway, we bumped along the road south from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh in a minibus which was air conditioned for some of the time. Cambodian road manners are always interesting, the horn seems to mean "dont panic motorbike person, I am going to drive a bus past you and it would be tragic if you swerved"!
Phnom Penh has had a tragic history. I don't know how I really feel about the sites of tragedy being turned into tourist attractions. It is strange to have tuk tuk drivers constantly shouting "killing fields" at you. I wonder how they feel about a glass tower filled with skulls being the source of their income? I suppose most are young enough not to feel too much personal involvement with the Khmer Rouge regime. But seeing the very few older people on the streets, one wonders what they were doing in the late 1970s - were they forced into the countryside to labour on irrigation schemes,
An amazing tree at the palace
Yes those are flowers coming out of it all over the place on long stalks!or staffing S21?
In the end, we skipped the killing fields and the orphanages, and missed the chance to fire a rocket launcher at the firing range. I did go to the genocide museum. The Khmer Rouge's most feared prison facility was built by a schoolteacher in an old school. You can see there how they split the classrooms into cells and how they wrote the prisoner numbers up on the walls to keep track of them. Of all the thousands who were sent there, only 7 survived.
However there are less depressing things to see and do! The Cambodians are also wonderful people. We had a visit to the palace, to see the silver pagoda, which contains a gold buddha studded with an indeterminate number of diamonds - between 900 and 9,000 depending on who you believe, and also the emerald buddha, actually made of jade. We missed seeing the solid silver floor, because of the carpets. No pictures of that because photos not allowed. Even more exciting were the cocktails served in Elephant cups at the Raffles!
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