28th February 2009

After an easy three hour minivan journey, we arrived in the centre of Phnom Penh. We had made a reservation at a hotel called Her Royal Highness Hotel and fortunately for us our driver dropped us off right outside. We had a nice and spacious room here, the only odd thing was that the bathroom had no ceiling, so you could hear everything from the bedroom! It was in a very good position too, near all the tourist attractions and close by to some bars and restaurants on the river front.

We only wanted to spend a couple of nights in Phnom Penh, so as our time here was limited, we quickly had some lunch and set about walking to the Royal Palace. On the way there we noticed that it was quite a dirty city, but at least it wasn't quite as hectic as most other capitals like Bangkok.

After a short but very hot walk, we arrived at the palace. As we were waiting to get in, a young girl approached us and tried to sell us some water. Unfortunately for her, we didn't need any then, but if we did later, we told her, we would buy some. With our ticket to the palace we received a map and a guide book, so we quickly set about looking around. It was interesting at first, looking around the various buildings and temples and seeing where the king of Cambodia now lives, but as it got hotter, in all honesty it did get a little boring. After all it is quite a recently built palace and not that different to others that you find in Asia. We spent a good couple of hours here looking around and finally decided to head back to our hotel. As we left the palace, the water seller bounced back up to us and once again tried to sell us some water. We didn't need any more as we'd had to buy some inside the palace or face dehydrating, so we declined her desperate pleas. We've never seen anything so funny, as soon as we'd said "no", she began sulking and then threw herself onto the pavement in a heap! It was just like watching our niece or nephew having a tantrum, very funny!

We headed back to our hotel for a rest from the heat and prepared ourselves for an evening out. We were pretty nervous about being in Phnom Penh as we had read some pretty stern warnings about gun crime and muggings, so we headed out with only a small amount of money on us. We had a very nice dinner out at The Happy Herb Pizza (very Cambodian, we know) and the city wasn't quite as bad as how our guide book makes out, although there are no street lights at night which does make you feel a little uneasy.

For the next day we had arranged a tuk tuk to take us around the city to visit the remaining must see places and he was waiting outside our hotel right on time at 10am.

Our first stop was the famous S-21 prison. This was an old school that had been converted into a prison by the Khmer Rouge for the incarceration and torture of over 17,000 innocent people. As soon as we made our way inside, a very sombre mood hit us, this was going to be a very emotional visit. They have preserved the prison, just as it was the day Phnom Penh was liberated from the Khmer Rouge in 1979 and it was a very eerie place. We walked through all the old detention cells, some which still had instruments of torture left in them and through a smaller solitary confinement block. These cells were only as wide as a coffin, they were tiny. Some of the rooms had photographs of torture victims displayed in them, but the true brutality of the killings here were made so real with the gallery section, which showed all the innocent victims. There was no discrimination here, from women and children to old men and babies, a whole generation was wiped out here. This was a very interesting visit, where we learnt a great deal about how the Cambodians have suffered so recently, but it was also a truly saddening and emotional visit.

After the horror of S-21, we made our way back to our waiting tuk tuk, through the many war victims begging for money and set off for our next cheery destination, The Killing Fields of Choeung Ek.

It was a long journey through many rural areas, slums and pretty villages and we eventually pulled up at our next stop. This is the site where the Khmer Rouge buried all the torture victims from the S-21 prison in mass graves, sometimes when they weren't even dead. They have built a large memorial here in the middle of the fields, it is a large stupa which contains the skulls of over 8000 people that they have so far unearthed. The burial pits are all still there to see, we had heard many accounts of bones still sticking out from the ground, but we scoured them all and didn't see any. We were a little disappointed in a strange way! The fields are over quite a large area surrounded by farmland, it is now very lush and green and although it was very sad, it did feel like just a stroll around a park, had it not been for the constant begging of children around the fences.

The last port of call on our day out was The Russian Market, which is named after the Russian traders that mainly used it many years ago. It is a huge covered market which sells pretty much everything from fruit, car parts, spices, silks and tourist souvenirs. We had a well deserved lunch before heading into the market. Once inside it was a massive labyrinth of small corridors all heading in different directions and it was extremely hot and humid in there. We enjoyed having a look around for a while, but soon the heat just got too hard to handle, so we left, found our driver and headed back to the comfort of the air con in our hotel.

We had a great day out and it really made us appreciate how much this country has suffered so recently and just how far they have come since these terrible times. It really is a credit to how friendly and welcoming we have found the Cambodian people.

We spent the rest of the day resting and had a very tasty dinner at a friendly restaurant called The Dolphin which was very near our hotel. Then it was an early night again for us in preparation for another early minivan journey, this time to Siem Reap.