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.

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.