Genocide and biker gangs

---

After the rest and relaxation of Don Det it was time to move to my 3rd country in as many weeks and head south into Cambodia. My 1st introuction to the people of Cambodia consisted of an extortion racket by the immigration guys at the border. They try an force you to pay stamping fees for you visa at the Laos side and the cambodian side, plus some people got one for a so called quarantine fee of $1. None of these fees are enforcable but these ex militay guys are pretty stern and they play hardball. I sat it out and got mine sorted for free in the end but plenty of people caved in.

We arrived in Cambodias capital, Phnom Penh some 6 hours later. The city is a little like bangkok in its crazines but with much more charm. Traffic regulations seem to not exist and the tuk-tuk rides can be pretty eventful, especially at crossroads where anything goes! The city was completely evacuated by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regine in April 1975 as all its inhabitants were told the americans were about to bomb the place. Everyone retreated to the countryside where they were then forced to work the fields day and night as Pol Pot started to implement his twisted vision of the perfect communist nation. Mllions died from exhaustion, starvation and murder. All intellectuals and potential enemies of the state were rounded up, interrogated, toruters and eventually executed.

One of Phnom Penh's schools was turned into a prision for housing these so called betrayers and today that prison is a museum, housing many reminders of the horrors that occured. We spent a couple of hours going from room to room, seeing photos of what was found there when the Vietnemese liberated the city in 1979. It was horrendous to see the faces of women and children staring back at the camera when their prison photographs were taken.

We decided we hadn't had enough depression so headed to the killing fields, 20km outside of Phnom Penh. The clue is in the title of this place. Many mass graves were found here and a tall monuments houses hundereds of skulls and bones that were recovered when some of the graves were excavated. The place is incredibly serene now and it's very hard to imagine what it would have been like to die there, hit with a mahete to the neck or skull and tossed into a pit with hundreds of other dead or dying. It was an incredibly dpressing visit but it's important to see these things to remind ourselves of what people can be capable of if they're allowed to.

The day was rounded up with a trip to the royal palace, but it was closed. So we turned around to go somehere else, only to be simultaneously over and undertaken but teeneagers on bikes speeding through the traffic. As they passed I noticed the kid on one of the bikes had a pair of nunchucks and was trying to take out someone on the other bike. The tuk-tuk stopped in the road as the locals looked on with disbelief. The bikes performed a u-turn and sped back towards us and into a public park, scattering the pigeons as they went ebfore hammering out into a busy crossroads. One bike came back towards us, accelerating for 60 or 70mph in heavy traffic while the other bike lost it on the corner, skidded out and bailed.Some onlookers managed to grab hold of one of the kids until the police arrived. So we had our very own action movie from the back of a tuk-tuk, just annoyed I put my camera away minutes earlier! I must stress that, going from the dumfounded expressions of the locals, this wasn't a regular occurance in Cambodia!



Anyway, that was a long one, next stop is Sihanoukville on the southern tip of Cambodia for some beach time and New Years Eve celebrations!

---