After talking to a few people I was a little worried about Battambang, one guy called it the whore house of Cambodia and judging by the initial drive through the city and the hotel we stayed in it looked like they might have been right.

Turns out they were wrong, we had another moped tour organised similar to the one we had done in Hue. The tour visited small out of town family run operations that make rice paper, grind rice, catch and cook water snake (we all tried a bit, tastes like fishy chicken) and a fish market. It was a really nice getting out of the city and seeing some real Cambodian life and I loved all the kids who jumped up and down waving and shouting “hello”.

Finally we visited a temple that was used by the Khmer Rouge as a torture and detention centre, the gardens where also used as mass graves similar to S21 and the killing fields in Phnom Penh. There’s now a monument filled with the skulls and bones of those that were found in the graves. My moped driver told me how he was recruited to the Khmer rouge when he was 9 years old, but fled to Thailand (which took 3 weeks of walking) soon after and joined the army. He told me that he had lost half his family to Pol Pot’s regime.

We only had one night in Battambang and we were up bright and early the following day for an 8 hour drive to Bangkok. I’ve got a week here before Pam arrives and don’t really want to stay in the city so I’ve booked a flight down to Ko Sumui to meet up with some of the guys I met on the tour, should be a laugh.

Not long after arriving in Siem Reap we were loaded on the bust and taken to our first temple to watch the sunset. After a 20 minute walk to the top of a hill it became apparent that sunsets are a popular pastime in Siem Reap. There was easily 1000 people standing on anything they could to get a better view of what admittedly was an amazing sunset.

I wish I could say the same about the sunrise over the main Angkor Wat temple which we had to be up at 4am to watch along with a hell of a lot more tourists. The whole temple complex (of which there are over 100) feels a little like a theme park although I guess if you go to some of the smaller less popular temples you’d have a lot more of a personal experience. Most of us went on a balloon ride that looked a lot cooler from the temples than it actually was. You stand inside a large circular cage attached to a helium balloon and then a winch lets you up to about 200 meters high and then straight back down again. It cost $15(US) each, but only lasted about 10 minutes. We spent the rest of the day touring round more temple ruins which were all very interesting, but after 5 or 6 hours I have to admit that I got a little boarded.

We did stop off at a museum setup by a former Khmer Rouge child Soldier who defected to the Vietnamese army and now spends all his time detecting and disarming landmines, something he does for free as opposed to the UN that charges $5,000 per mine.
That night we headed to Bar Street (guess why it’s called that) and found a Mexican restaurant that sold cocktails for $2. Three tequila sunrises, three margaritas and an argument about the US/UK/Australian healthcare systems later we called it a night and took a tuck-tuck back to the hotel.

There were a few sore heads the next morning as we headed out to our last temple, Ta Prohm – the one used in the movie Tomb Raider. It’s really overgrown and atmospheric, but unfortunately overrun by Japanese and Korean tourists, all more interested in Angelina Jolie than the temple. Looking back, I was really grumpy that morning, maybe I had more of a hangover than I thought.
We also went for a little boat trip on the Tonle Sap Lake the biggest lake in Asia. There are an entire floating village of Vietnamese people. When I say floating village I mean that everything is on the water, there’s a floating hospital, church, shops and cafes. I made friends with a little kid who took great delight in scaring Frank, the German guy on the tour with a crayfish he had picked up. On the way back we saw freshly skinned rainbow snakes hanging in the sun to dry, tasty.

On our last evening we went for dinner with a family who where friends of our guide. We were collected by a pickup truck with seats along the back and taken to a tiny little suburb of Siem Reap where we were treated to a banquet followed by games and dancing with all the kids in the village.

Next stop Battambang

To be honest, my first impressions of Cambodia weren’t that great. We caught a public bus from Saigon n to Phnom Penh , during which the driver made friends with a six year old Dutch kid and thought he’d like to play with the PA system. One hour of Dutch nursery rhymes later I was ready to wrap the chord round his neck. We stepped off the bus into a throng of tuck-tuck drivers each trying to carry your bags and get you into their tuck-tuck. There was even a guy with a bamboo stick to try and control them.
Cambodia is a lot poorer that Vietnam and it’s really apparent buy the amount of rubbish on the streets. Because of the genocide that took place during the Pol Pot regime in the late 70’s (more on that in a bit) about half the population is under 18 and the majority of the population is illiterate. Also crossing the road is a little more difficult because the moped riders don’t seem to have the same instinctive way of dealing with pedestrian. Whilst in Vietnam I didn’t see a single crash and on the fist afternoon in Phnom Penh I saw two.
We got up early the next morning to visit S21 and the Killing fields. S21 was the converted school that was used by the Pol Pot regime to interrogate and torture anyone they felt may pose a threat to them along with all their families. It was really quite heartbreaking to walk around, the worst I found was all the rooms in building A that each contained a bed, a set of leg irons, maybe a ammunition box that was used as a toilet and a photograph on the wall taken by the Vietnamese army of the victim in each room when they captured the place. You could sometimes see stains on the floor under the bed. About 17,000 people passed through this place before being taken to the killing fields for execution, no one was ever released. It’s hard to believe that most of this happened just 30 years ago and is still happening now in countries like Darfur. Next we went to the killing fields which if you didn’t know any better is a series of small ditches and a large monument containing thousands of sculls. Each one of the ditches is what remains of a mass grave containing between 50 to 200 bodies that had been beaten with sticks and buried alive, there was also a tree that was used to batter babies against before tossing them in a grave.
To lift our spirits a bit that evening we visited a restaurant that is run by and in aid of a local orphanage. The food was great and the kids even do a couple of dances for you.
Up bright and early again we took a 6 hour bus ride to Siam Reap which is home to the famous Ankor Watt temple complex and I’ve got to be up at 4am tomorrow so that I can go and watch the sunrise.