Tbird

Today was the day for the sad stuff. The 2 sites on the agenda were S21 and Choeung Ek. For those that don't know about these places, S21 was a prison the Khmer Rouge used to interrogate their prisoners. Once they had the information they wanted, the prisoner was shipped off to Choeung Ek, the killing fields. So yeah, content warning S21 started its life as a highschool. In that capacity I imagine it was quite a lovely school. Three large 3 storey buildings surrounding beautiful green quads. But as Pol Pot disposed of all the schools. While he was educated in Paris, it was a privilege he wanted denied to most of his countrymen. Its not surprising really, he recruited his army from the rural areas. Young uneducated, disenfranchised youth. They were poor and they ... read more

This trip is started out bit differently to my other adventures. I usually try to arrange my flights so that I land in my destination city late afternoon. Giving me enough time to get to my hotel, have a shower, and then maybe head out to do a bit of exploring before dinner and crash out for the night. This time however, my flight left late Friday night and I arrived in Phnom Phen late Saturday morning. Check in isn't until 2 so I could only drop my bags at the hotel and then head out to explore the city still covered in the grime of a day's travel. No matter, I had 2 goals 1) find an ATM to pull out some Cambodian reels and 2) find a place to taste test the local beer ... read more

For the first time since arriving I had a lousy nights sleep. I woke to dogs barking their heads off at 3AM. Followed by a drunk or potentially crazy guy wandering down my street raving about god knows what. (turns out the Nepali have crazy folks too) and then around 5AM the rooster started. Its not so cute now. Apparently, there were more celebrations last night, but I was so tired and sore I retired at a respectable hour which I now regret. I could have been drinking with drunk/crazy guy I didn’t have to check out the hotel to midday so I decided to go for a walk. I hadn’t made it to the wood carving museum so I thought this morning would be a good time to try and find it. Instead I ran ... read more

The plan of attack for today was a) find an ATM as I didn’t have many rupees and b) see some of this Biska Jatra festival and c) maybe squeeze in a walking tour if I could. As I walked into Dubar square (the main square) I was offered a taxi and a guide within 30 seconds. Not bad considering it was still early. I turned down the taxi and negotiated a price with the guide. Once we had a agreed a price the first question I asked my newly found guide was where is an ATM. Which of course he was most happy to show me the way. That being said Roshan was an excellent guide. What I thought would be a one or two hour tour turned into four. We walked all over the ... read more

Our plane departure time was 8am, so we were required to be at Baracoa airport at 6am. So we were up to see the sunrise this morning. More importantly we saw the full moon over Baracoa bay, and it was lovely. It weren’t for the powerlines in the way it would have been a perfect view. Our host had organised a taxi for us who turned up around 5.30, put our bags on his roof rack and we were off to the airport. Now why we needed to check in two hours before when there are only two flights in an out of Baracoa a day, I don’t know. There were only about 70 passengers on the flight, but hey…that’s Cuba. To be fair, almost everything is manual. They manually wrote out our boarding passes, they ... read more