Cambodia: a tale of two cities

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We arrived into Cambodia at Phnom Penh, the capital city. Cambodia is culturally different again to Laos and Thailand, most notably due to the still very recent memory of the Khmer Rouge regime and the genocide committed there. It's estimated that over 2 million people were killed in this time, which means that almost everyone living in Cambodia today lost at least one family member. The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, tried to transform Cambodia into a completely independent agrarian communist state, abolishing currency, education, hospitals and religion, and closing the border. Anyone who was seen to be against this way of life, for example, educated people, foreigners, or even those who wore glasses, were killed. Children of those people were also killed to avoid vengeance being taken in the future.

We saw some pretty difficult things on our first day, including the killing fields near Phnom Penh, where people were taken and killed, usually with weapons such as pickaxes or clubs to save on bullets. This site also contains the mass graves of 8895 people, and is the site of the infamous killing tree against which children were killed. We were shocked by the brutality and scale of what happened here. Although there is a monument here which contains the skulls of some of the dead, what I found most affecting was seeing some of the clothing that had been found in the graves, particularly that of young children.

That afternoon we also visited the Tuoi Seng genocide museum which was a former Khmer Rouge prison. It was an interesting place and particularly haunting to see the 'mugshots' of the prisoners. They also had photos of the prison guards, many of whom were young teenagers: the Khmer Rouge actively separated impressionable children from their parents and indoctrinated them. 8 prisoners had managed to survive the prison as they had skills that were useful to the guards like engineering. One such man was there when we visited-he goes every day to sell copies of the book he wrote about his experiences to tourists. We both thought it must be so difficult to go back to the place where you were incarcerated and tortured - every day.

So, a sombre start in Cambodia, but important for us to see and we learned a lot. After checking out the grand palace, we flew to Siem Reap, and visited some of the floating villages on the Tonie Sap lake. This was interesting to see, and we even saw some crocodiles there which had (we assumed!) been caught in the lake. Fun crocodile fact: when Alex was a little boy his ambition when he grew up was to be a crocodile... or own a scrap yard.

So then for the highlight of Cambodia - sunrise at Angkor Wat. We initially worried we'd missed it and it was quite overcast, but we got the money shot in the end when the sun broke through illuminating the temple and reflecting in the lake - magical.

We had a fantastic (and SO cheap) foot massage that afternoon before heading out to see more temples. We visited Angkor Thom and Ta Prohm, which was the temple featured in Tomb Raider. I wore a French plait specially and Alex wore his short shorts. We actually had dinner at the same place Angelina Jolie did when she visited Cambodia. I'm pretty sure she will have ordered a big bowl od pasta like I did, but we decided against adopting a small child to bring home. That night we had a big party with our new friends as for some of them the trip ends here. Next (and final!) stop: Vietnam.

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