We got a bus from Saigon to the capital of Cambodia and found a guesthouse to stay in with some guys from our bus and who had also been on our tour of the Cu Chi tunnels - an American from Texas, an Irish, a Brazilian and a Dutch guy. The guesthouse had such a great chilled out vibe, with a communal lounge area with tv that played scrubs all day and movies in the evening and speakers where you could play your own music from. It had hammocks strung up around the place, potted plants everywhere, a pool table, there were children and dogs running around because it was family run and it was built on stilts right on the lake so that when you looked through gaps in the floorboards you could see water underneath. And there were some interesting characters too - like a French girl called Lydia who made us want to stick pins in our eyes.

When we were having dinner, a bunch of children came up to us trying to sell us photocopied books. It was kind of sad seeing them having to work and sell to tourists, and some of the more clever ones with better english would tell you that they needed your money to buy food or go to school. There was one boy called Wee who came and sang a song to us he'd learnt in school where he pointed at me and sang 'This is my mother, niiice to meeet youu, nice to meet you too' and then at Shapiro 'This is my father, nice to meet you, nice to meet you too' then at himself 'This is my brother etc' then at Tom 'This is my ladyboy, nice to meet you, nice to meet you too' which was hilarious! Then he brought 3 little girls, his book-selling children friends over to sit with us and me, Shapiro and Tom sat and played with them for ages tickling them, playing hand-clapping games, one of them did my hair in a cool french plait, they tried teaching us Khmer numbers for a bit, and when they found out we were from London one of the girls goes in her little cambodian accent "Lubbly Jubbly! Top Banana! Diamond Geezer!" and "Oi oi Saveloy!" - it was SO CUTE, she was this 8 yr old Cambodian girl that must have learnt phrases from tourists. Amazing.

The next day we got in a tuk tuk and visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and learnt about the Khmer Rouge regime under Pol Pot. It was just as gruesome as the War Remnants museum in Saigon. The building used to be a secondary school which was transformed into a prison and interrogation centre - all the classrooms were turned into cells where people were subject to torture and then were killed or taken to extermination camps outside the city. Most of the population of Phnom Penh and other major towns were removed to the countryside to work as peasants so that the regime could succeed in turning the country into a socialist agrarian collective. And what the prison was for was to carry out Pol Pot's mass extermination of intellectuals, teachers, writers, any educated people and their families - even wearing glasses was a sign of intelligence. So the prison has been left largely untouched except is now filled with galleries of photos of starved tortured victims, there are rooms upstairs with beds and instruments of torture and pictures of how they were used.
We then took our tuk tuk to the Killing Fields to see the mass graves of the dead. Theres a giant tall white stupa built housing rows and rows of unearthed skulls on glass shelves, and there are untouched graves of people that were beaten to death, shot, beheaded or tied up and buried alive. There are trees with signs that tell you how they were used eg. "Magic Tree. The tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker which make sound louder to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed".
As the American guy we were with put it, it was a very sobering day in the hedonistic life of a backpacker, and I ended up feeling really homesick.


It was Tom's birthday whilst we were in Phnom Penh so me and Shapiro woke early to buy him his birthday cake. For presents we gave him a colouring book, a book of kakuro, a minnie mouse rucksack, and a chest pull/chest expander so he could work on his guns.
We tried going to the Cambodian courthouses to watch the war trials that we knew were going on but didn't succeed so went to the shooting range instead where one of the guys we were with got to fire a tommy gun.
Then we went to the Royal Palace and silver pagoda which were really pretty.

That night Hugo and Hannah and their travel group joined us so I got to have a proper girly chat and gossip for the first time in like 4 weeks. It was so great seeing friends from back home seeing as I'd felt so homesick the day before, and we went out with everyone from our guesthouse to a floating bar called Pontoon to get Tom wasted for his birthday.