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Published: June 24th 2010
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Cambodia - May 21st - 25th, 2010 When leaving Saigon, we boarded an air conditioned bus for the 8 hour journey to Phnom Penh , the capitol of Cambodia. All was good for the first 3 hours as the bus was nearly empty and we could sprawl out. Shortly after crossing the border, the AC stopped working. Since it was an AC bus, the windows did not open, so for the last 5 hours of the trip we were trapped in what basically amounted to a sauna. We arrived in Phnom Penh on time, completely soaked with our own sweat, and I assume a few pounds lighter then when we started.
We instantly liked it here as well... it was cheap, clean and the people were friendly. We found a great guesthouse (with a working AC) for $12 CAD, and went out to explore the city. For us, Cambodia was one of the cheapest places we have yet to visit. We quickly dubbed it the dollar store of South East Asia because not very many things cost over a dollar here. You can have a good meal for a dollar or two, take a tuk tuk ride for a
dollar across town, or buy a round of beers for a dollar.
We hired a tuk tuk for the day (which was a bit more than a dollar) to take us around town and to the Killing Fields. This was the place where hundreds of thousands of people were murdered under the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. It was located about 18km outside of town, and was a pretty surreal sight. The skulls of hundreds of victims are on display in a massive stupa, all arranged to look back at you from behind the glass. The remains of mass graves are all around the sight, and every year during the rainy season, they reveal even more bones of the victims.
From the Killing Fields we went to the Genocide museum at the former S-21 prison. This was a notorious place of torture and was very similar to the Auschwitz Museum in Poland. Hundreds of pictures of the victims are posted on the walls along with their stories. The craziest thing about this place was seeing these pictures and knowing that Khmer Rouge did this to their own people. There have been many genocides in history, but what
Stupa at Choeung Ek
Houses over 9000 human skulls of victims. most of them have in common is that it’s usually one group killing another, here it was the regime wiping out their own people. The insanity of the whole thing is best summed up in a Khmer Rouge policy... “to keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss”.
After a whole day of genocide related tours, we went for some 50 cent beers to plan out the next part of the trip. The ruins of Angkor Wat were not far away, but we were hesitant to go as we had seen so many ruins, that we were basically sick of them. We reluctantly decide to go, just because we were so close, but that decision turned out to be one of the best of our trip. The great thing about traveling in Cambodia is that each guest house is also a travel agency. They will book your ticket, drive you to the bus station, arrange a place to stay in your next destination and even have a tuk tuk waiting for you with a sign to take you to your new hotel. Makes for effortless and convenient travel.
So we ended up in Siem Reap
to tour the ruins of Angkor, which I can say for me was one the most amazing things we’ve seen on our trip. It ranks right up there with the Pyramids, the Taj and Petra. So completely different than anything we’ve seen, these ruins were definitely worth coming for. This was the kind of thing you imagine when you hear of a long lost civilization in the jungle. Some temples have been restored, while others were left exactly as they were found in the early 20th century, with the jungle slowly reclaiming the land. We only spent one day exploring the main temples, as there are over 200 of them in the area, and that could take up a week to see. Nonetheless, this day was definitely one of the highlights of our trip, and I doubt we will see anything like that again. From there, it was back to Bangkok to start our trip to the southern islands to find that picture perfect beach to relax on.
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