The night bus was not quite what I was expecting. The upgraded hotel sleeper consisted of what was pretty much a single bed, except a foot too short... shared with another person. Lucky me got to spoon with a Cambodian dude all night. Not the best sleep.
Arriving early at 5am, I hopped in a tuk tuk to my next hostel. I slept on a couch in the foyer for a couple hours before going out wandering to the river.
I was approached by a Thai guy claiming that his niece was getting a job in Adelaide and wanted to take me to his brother's house for breakfast to chat to her. What are the chances? Slim to none. I told him meet me in a cafe near my hostel and we'll talk. He dropped me back at my hostel and that was it, he vanished... I later read that it is a common scam to lure people and drug them to steal their money.
Not much more to report on here; I just chilled out in Phnom Penh for a little while, hanging out with some dudes from the hostel.
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The next night I caught up with Nathan and his girl again. She had a friend she met travelling years earlier, a Lebanese guy living and working in PP. A group of five of us went out to a Lebanese restaurant which was great to eat something beside rice and noodles for once.
Later we went to a club this bloke was DJ'ing at and had some more drinks.
Nathan told me of his grand plan to head fly to Hanoi and have a tuk tuk sleeper built. They had contacts in Vietnam that were able to build such a thing; they wanted to buy a bike and build a trailer setup to attach to it, similar to the tuk tuks in Cambodia, that they can use to traverse the country and sleep in. Very cool if it pans out!
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The next day it was finally time to do some activities; the Choeung Ek Killing Fields and the S-21 prison compound museum.
The killing fields were truly eye opening. The audio tour takes around an hour to complete, taking you to different sites across the area and describing the happenings that occurred there less than fourty years earlier.
The most fucked up thing about it is that Pol Pot was killing his own people. The genocide took place among Cambodians. He decided that anyone living in cities or with any form of education were not native Cambodians and should be exterminated - it was only the old people, those living and working the land and in farms that should survive under his new order. Crazy shit.
The quotes that are played to you during the audio tour are horrendous. There is utter and complete lack of worth for human life. One of the quotes is along the lines of to keep them alive is no gain, to have them killed is no loss.
The lake above is said to be home to a number of bodies that have never been exhumed like a lot of the mass graves scattered throughout the area. In the late 80's an initiative was put in place to try to work out exactly what happened during the few years in the late 70's this area was active.
This tree, which has since been covered in wristbands from passing travellers, was where children and babes had their heads smashed against before being thrown into a nearby mass grave. In the 80's the researchers found bones and brain fragments covering the tree.
In the late 90's this memorial was built to house the skulls and bones found at the site. The lower level has had the skulls categorised into age and means of death. Huge gaping holes in the skulls can be seen where victims were plowed over the head with the back of a garden hoe.
Following the Killing Fields, we went to the prison to see more of what life was like for the victims of the Khmer Rouge. Once again a home to torture, starvation and misery.
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