Blogs from Cambodia, Asia - page 791

having arrived to the Camobodian capital phnom penh - we visited the killing flieds - very disturbing - loads of mass graves because of the Pol Pot genocide in the 70s and also S21 - a museum which once was a school which was then turned into a POW / concentration camp - gruesome. the locals are amazing - with such a terrible recent history and with corruption still rife in the current government they are so forward looking and happy and the country is literally ameliorating and becoming a force to be reckoned with before your eyes...... Go Team!! To lighten the load, we went to a international kick boxing match that afternoon. in its setting and time it gave a very underground feel to the whole thing. the place was jammed and the atmosphere ... read more

The boy you see in the picture is Toula, a young Khmer child who is lucky enough to attend the Happy School. On our previous visit to Phnom Penh, Eva, Leens and I had fallen in love with this little creature, so full of energy and cheek. He had been the only one of the kids who had dared come closer to us 'barangs'', and we had embraced him, literally. Of course, we thought, ''Oh, what a happy little boy in his dirty little clothes'', the typical Western, uneducated response. Now, on my return to the school, I have begun to understand a tiny bit better what some of these kids actually go through, and that their dirty little clothes are not dirty, but filthy, from wearing them in and out, day after day. I have ... read more

We took a bus from Phnom Penh over to Siem Reap so we could spend a few days looking around the Temples at Angkor. We got off the bus in Siem Reap and were surrounded by about 15 tuk-tuk drivers all wanting to take us to the hotel that they got commission for. We found one that was prepared to take us to where we wanted to go, and headed off to our hotel. That afternoon we spent some time wandering around Siem Reap. At around 5pm that evening the heavens opened and it absolutely pissed down. The whole town was under water so we had to have dinner at the hotel restaurant with the frogs that came out to play in the rain. The next morning we were feeling energetic enough to hire mountain bikes ... read more

Rebecca's brother Michael came out for a visit and joined us in Siem Reap. He pampered us with a fancy 5-star hotel, Hotel de la Paix, which was a nice change of pace from our usual budget hotels. The hotel advertised that it offered "the true essence of Cambodia". We weren't so sure about that, but still had a fabulous and cushy time there. Other than relaxing by the hotel pool, we spent a few dizzying days touring the temples of Angkor and learning about the Khmer Empire. There are hundreds of temples dedicated to Hindu gods and mountains built between the 9th and 14th centuries, all in varying states of repair and disrepair. They have dramatic lotus bud-shaped towers, grand gateways and entry bridges decorated with symbolic statues and faces, and lacey stone carvings telling ... read more

After only one nite in Bangkok, we were headed off to see the temples in Angkor Wat, Cambodia. We were picked up in Bangkok from our hotel in a minibus and taken to the Cambodian border - about 3 hours. We stopped at a restaurant first to fill out our vias paperwork - this way you spend money there and they tried to overcharge us for our visas. We said we'd do it ourselves at the border, so off to the border we went, back in the bus. we arrived at the border, very much like the mexico/us border, dirty, lots of food stalls, people, trucks, backpackers everywhere. We were bombarded with beggars and touts trying to help with our visas. These Irish girls and us gave some money to a Cambodian to help with our ... read more