Cambodge

Cambodia’s been an incredible experience for us. We spent our first week in Strung Treng and then moved on to Siem Riep where all the temples of the Ankhor empire remain in various states of disrepair/renovation. It was incredible, but the most poignant experience so far has been learning about the reign of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-79.

We didn’t know much but the basics about genocide and civil war, if you can call it a war, over that time but this country is still so affected by it that it’s been incredibly sad learning about what happened.

I’d tentatively asked a few people about it in Siem Riep but no one discusses it. It was only when we got to Phnom Penh and visited S 21, a school that was converted to a torture camp and holding place for as many as 30,000 Cambodians before they were taking to the killing fields to be slaughtered, that we got a glimpse of how terrible the Pol Pot regime was.

A handful of people, including two of the only seven people that actually left the camp alive, were guides at the camp. As one woman told us about the death of all her family at the hands of the Khmer Rouge she choked back tears – I’ve never seen such pain in someone’s face. At the time the revolutionaries cleared out the big cities as part of Pot’s plan to take the country back to an agrarian society with none of the so-called evils of the western world. No one imagined that the incoming army would slaughter a quarter of the country.

There are such terrible stories of atrocities and at S 21 hundreds of pictures were found showing young men who were tortured and put to death. One picture showed a woman holding her baby; after the photo was taken her baby was taken from her arms and beaten against the wall until it was dead. It’s no surprise that families do not talk about their experiences even among themselves. As much as I’ve studied history, this is the most painful story as it was so sudden, brutal and unexpected and speaking to a couple of survivors made it so real. No one expected their own people to cause such devastation.

Before Phnom Pehn we spent two days exploring the temples of Siem Riep (Polly's the little red dot). The short history is that they were built as homes for the gods around year 1000, and they really knew how to build a home for a god. Temple after temple, all unique in their own way with the most immense example being Angkhor Wat. It turns out that the pathway to heaven (represented by the top of the temples) should not be easy, which I discovered as I climbed a staircase that was more like a stone ladder.

We stomped, we trekked, Polly nearly fell off the top of a temple after sunset on the hill and we were fully exhausted. Dan’s travelling tip: Inconspicuous as a tree sounds, beware hidden monsters. Ambling back to our motorbike cart we were assaulted by a serpent that obviously remembered it wasn’t a monkey and fell out of a tree right next to my feet. I pretended to be an elephant and it slipped away without biting me.

We’ve being staying in cheap accommodation, which has been great in some places, but when we arrived in Phnom Penh the guesthouse we arrived at could generously be described as a prison cell. Here’s Polly preparing to kill one of the 936 mosquitoes in the room.

Our good friends at work had given us a generous bundle of cash when we left (in no way would I infer that they couldn’t think of anything good to get us) so we decided to cash our chips. Next day, here we are at Raffles, Phnom Penh. The most delicious breakfast, complimentary massages by the pool, a room you can actually move in and free showery stuff like shampoo = heaven.

Here's a picture of me looking pretty sexy.

We’re not moving outside the hotel, Phnom Penh is proper busy and on the roads there are ten motorbikes per square foot. In two days we leave for Saigon (there’s a new name for it but I can’t spell it), which is apparently 100 times more hectic. We’re resting up good while we can, although I've been toying with some 10k training plans.