Border Crossing

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Our day started early with a visit to a local fish market and a Cham minority village before we were put onto our speedboat and on our way across the Vietnam/Cambodia border. At the border we stopped for approximately 15 mins where we were meant to have our bags scanned and passports checked but all it takes is a packet of cigarettes and you are home free.

We continued on in the speedboat and arrived in Phnom Penh just after 12pm. We spent the afternoon looking around the National Museum and the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. The Royal Palace is quite similar to the one in Bangkok.

The National Museum holds a collection of Khmer sculptures dating as far back as the 4th century.

The first impressions of Cambodia is that the architecture is more beautiful than that of Vietnam and the people seem to be more friendly. But everything seems to be more expensive as everything is in american dollars.

There are a lot of land mine victims walking round selling books or just begging for money which is very hard to see. That evening we decided to go out for dinner and we found a restaurant that is non-profit and the money goes into looking after street kids and orphans.

Saturday we hired a tuk-tuk driver who navigated the dusty, bumpy roads and took us to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. This is the site of an extermination camp where 17,000 men, women, children and infants were killed between 1975 and 1978. There is a memorial stupa containing approx 8,000 skulls arranged by sex and age of the victims, and a collection of mass graves which was very chilling.

From here we went to the Tuol Sleng Museum. Which originally was S-21, which is the largest centre of detention and torture in the country between 1975-78, and now has been turned into a genocide museum containing photos and stories of many of the victims.

The whole day was a very sombre experience but something that needs to be seen to get an understanding of what went on and will hopefully stop this from happening again.

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