Siem Reap and Phnom Penh

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We haven't spent that long in Cambodia, just over a week. However, its so hot here that any longer would be painful, unless we were doing nothing somewhere on a beach I suppose! Our guesthouse (Prom Roth) in Siem Reap was really nice. The owners were really helpful and would go out their way to help. This even included one guy phoning another one who was enjoying his time off to ask where would be a good place for us to swim. This recommendation was amazing, and we went to this beautiful pool for a relaxing afternoon.

We met a nice couple, Helen and Jason, in our guesthouse in Laos. They were getting the same flight as us and we decided to share a taxi at the other end. We then decided to visit the temples with them, which was great fun and it cut the cost (which in total was quite steep). The Angkor Temples were incredible. I won't go on about each one, but the Angkor Wat and the Ta Prhom (where Tomb Raider was filmed) were both stunning, but for different reasons. Angkor Wat was so grand, and we got up early to watch the sunrise behind it. Ta Prhom was more destroyed, but has trees growing all over it. It was amazing how these trees had smothered the building, growing into any available space, reminding us of how water trickles into gaps. Another great thing about Siem Reap was the food. Every meal we had was incredible, including chicken in palm sugar, fish with pineapple and a DIY BBQ!

We had a fairly uneventful 6 hour journey to Phnom Penh, and we checked into Spring Guesthouse. With only a small amount of the afternoon left we thought it wouldn't be worth going to the museum or anything that day. Instead, we had a wander round the city, down the river and found somewhere to eat. The next morning we visited the S-21 prison. For those that don't know, this was an old high school, which the Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, turned into a detention and torture centre. The rooms are lined with photographs as the officers took a photo of each person that entered the prison. The images of children are particularly harrowing. We found out some pretty horrible facts like a wooden frame, built for swings and ropes for the children to play on, was turned into a torture device used to hang people upside down until they passed out. The twisting of something built for enjoyment into something to inflict pain and terror is particularly sadistic. There were 7 people that survived S-21 and one works in the museum selling his book. In the afternoon we went to the Royal Palace, which was a bit of a disappointment to be honest! In comparison to the Palaces in Thailand, this one was a bit dull. A lot of the grounds were prohibited, so there wasn't even that much we could see. However, it was still interesting and it was in a similar part of town as this amazing restaurant that we wanted to try. We ate there last night, we had pork in caramel with bamboo shoots and fish in a tamarind sauce, delicious. Phnom Penh is meant to be centre of great food, and if this is anything to go by, thats certainly true.

This morning we went to the Killing Fields. The size of the mass graves were really small for the numbers of corpses found inside. Most harrowing was the clothing coming up from the ground, like the earth is rejecting them. Floods cause the clothes to rise and can be seen partially emerged. You even have to step over it on the footpaths. Its really hard to understand the brutality. Even when faced with the mass graves of thousands of people it doesn't fully sink in. I think this is because we have nothing in our lives to compare it to, so its far outside our realms of comprehension.

This afternoon we are going to treat ourselves to a massage. We have been recommended a place called Seeing Hands, which is where blind people are trained to become a masseuse. Its meant to be amazing because they massage based on the damage or tension they can feel rather than by sight.

Tomorrow we move onto Ho Chi Minh City, to spend our last month in Vietnam. The time is going so quickly now!

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