Cambodia and It's Magnificent temples

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Arriving in Cambodia we'd hit the 14th country on our travels, not a bad achievement in the 5 or so months we have been going!
We managed to find ourselves a guest house pretty close to the river front, close being a walk and not a Tuk Tuk Ride away. Unfortunately for us the riverfront isn't what it used to be , or described as, because the river isn't actually visable due to the massive boards that now obliterate the view and now you have no idea if there's a river or a new set of temples behind it.
As we're on a pretty tight schedule now we got up early on our first day and decided to have a nice, happy, uplifting day by visiting some sights of the Khmer Rouge Genocide that happened in the late 70's.
I know most people that have visited this part of the world are pretty familiar with the devestating effects that occured here but for those not in the know, here's a brief summary.

The Khmer rouge came to power on the back of fierce anti-American sentiment following bombing of the eastern half of cambodia border with Vietnam, they rolled into Phonm Penh as saviours quickly removing the population of the city to the countryside on the pretext of bombing raids by the vietnamese and using this method over all the cities and towns through the country.
From here followed the implementation of an extreme form of social engineering on Cambodian society—a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects. Over the next 4 years an estimated 2 million people died through execution, torture, starvation and forced labor. Deaths included teachers and academics (a threat to the state) persons wearing glasses (intellectuals), members of the former regime, and surprisingly members of the khmer rouge who were accused or betraying the party or revolution.

Our first destination was the torture prison known as Tuol Sleng or S-21, a former school and detention centre where 17,000 - 20,000 people were processed in 4 years. 12 known people survived.

The buildings are preserved as they were left when the Khmer Rouge were driven out in 1979. They kept extensive records, including thousands of photographs. Some of the rooms of the museum are now lined, floor to ceiling, with black and white photographs of the prisoners who passed through the prison.

Other rooms contain only a rusting iron bedframe, beneath a black and white photograph showing the room as it was found by the Vietnamese. In each photograph, the mutilated body of a prisoner is chained to the bed, killed by his fleeing jailor only hours before the prison was captured.

We decided to pay for a tour guide who showed us the torture rooms, detention blocks and told us her personal story, she was 7 years old when the KR rolled into town and was displaced close to the western border with thailand, she lost 2 brohers and her father in the following 4 years. How she relives this every day by guiding people round is beyond me, she had us all close to tears towards the end. The attached photo's show some of the remains of torture rooms and implements.

From here we jumped back in our Tuk Tuk and headed down to the Killing Fields around 14K south of the city, the location where the bodies from the S-21 prison ended up, it was for all of us a sombre experience and we took our time wandering round seeing the mass graves where the bodies were found and the Stupa in the middle where skulls of the deceased have been left. Even on a second visit it was as poignent my first some years back. For Carol it was an even more shocking account of what occured here and the lack of sense it made to any of us.

From here we needed some kind of cheer to end the day, so we hit the rifle range (some say it's bad taste, but we had the 1 day only) and chose some guns to shoot. I initially chose an UZI 40mm but after consulting with the locals who had a very dim view of it i went for the AK-47, a powerhouse of a gun and took 30 bullets to shoot down the range, it was fun, and there's a video of me going crazy on automatic on Facebook.

We left Phonm Penh early the next morning (told you we were rushing!) and caught the bus to Siem Reap, the jumping off point for the temples at Angkor Wat. The bus journey was again long taking 9 hours to get there mainly due to the bus breaking down for an hour, and a traffic jam due to pretty horiffic accident. We got there in the end and was collected from the station by a guest house we had booked with in Phonm Penh. In the evening we went out as a big group joined by Lou and Adam who we had met in HCMC to the aptly named 'bar street' area of town for a decent indian curry (mmmmm) and a pint before heading back for a earlish night. We had decided on an early start to make the most of our day in the temples getting up at 4am. Thats not a typo, that is 4am, our earliest start by far since Africa to get to Angkor for sunrise. We clambered along the causeway in the pitch black just after 5 in the morning making our way to the left hand side in front of the lake for a good photo view along with the other hundred or so stupid people who got up early hoping for that perfect photo of sun rising over the temples, it was not to be as it was too cloudy and compouded by the batteries running out. My fault, oops, had to go barter a local down from $10 for 4 batteries the rip off little thieves.

We went for an early breakfast and spent the day exploring all the temples we could fit in, the spectacular ones at Bayon, ........................As well as exploring the temples we had great fun taking photo's of the japenese in increasingly hysterical poses either in camera shots or taking them! We spent a little time reinacting them with some moderate sucess we just don't know how they do it!

The midday heat soon took it's toll and we had to keep stopping to have a sit down or cold drink in the temples, at the same time avoiding the hawkers and sellers who rpice everything at 1 dollar and you can't get away from it. They alos go for the brilliant tactic of shouting loudest at you, trying to be heard above the rest to get the all important western sale.

We also had to deal with Carols fear of height's once we had climbed to the top of the temple and looked down. I will say the stairs were sandy, dicy, very thin and very high and was a nervy climb down for all of us, more so for Carol who we had to coax down from the top 'DON't TOUCH ME!!!'. At least she took my mind off climbing down. I realised at the top that i hated it last time so should of known better really!!

Anyway, i'll let the photo's do the talking, have a good look!! Impressive and awe inspiring don't do them justice. Our photo's, not the temples, the temples were average :-)

We finished up dusty, sweaty and wiped out at 5pm and headed back to the Hotel for some air con and satellite TV to remove all thoughts of culture from our minds and soon raised ourselves to go back into town for some fine pizza and drinks unfortunately deciding to have a late night and ruin our early morning start towards the border.

We had an early start feeling slightly bamboozled from the night before thanks to 21 and got onto the bus for the border. It was quite clear we were late as everyone else had grabbed all the comfy seats at the front and decided to have 2 seats each. We were left with the back seat and the seats above the wheel arch with reduced leg room. OK we've been on enough buses now to know optimum paces to sit with the best leg room. You call it sad, i call it important knowledge in the search for comfort!! We stretched out, only to watch more people to get on the bus and cram on the front seats leaving us alone at the back. Now this i was happier with!! We spent the next 5 hours jumping along the dusty track to Poipet the bordertown with no air con it meant the windows were open, allowing dust to billow through leaving us all with a fine coat of dust all over, not all that great. We hit the border, crossed and back into thailand. This was only 1 o'clock and we didn't arrive back in Bangkok until 8.30. How this happened i have no idea, the worst part of the journey was over, but we still managed to hang around doing nothing but asking when we was leaving for nearly 3 hours at the border.

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Photos

Tuol Sleng
S21 Torture Prison

Torture rooms
With our guide

One of the cells
Prisoners were in here 23 hours of the day, removed only for interrogation

Killing Fields
The stupa containing the skulls

The gang
It's just the way we roll.....

Baphaun temple
pyramid like structure being rebuit

Carol
Respecting the ancient artifacts at Angkor Wat