Phnom Penh and A Genocide

So, let me start with this: bus companies love to get paid by tuk-tuk cartels. Tuk-tuk cartels pay bus companies to use stations far from the center of town and then pay police to make them the exclusive drivers for that station. When passengers arrive they have only 2 choices: pay the extorted price or walk.

Well, Leighton chose option 3: get his American on and flatly inform the driver we would not be paying twice as much to get to our hotel as we had for a 6 hour bus ride from Sihanoukville. They saw his logic (or the murder in his eyes) and agreed.

Fast forward to today. We've been here for 3 nights and 3 days and it has been pretty riotous! We spent Tuesday walking around and exploring a bit. We're staying near the river (Mekhong AGAIN!) and there is a fantastic river walk that runs the length of downtown. It provides a massive area for food vendors, street dancers, tuk-tuk and motorbike parking, and still leaves room for pedestrians to actually use the sidewalk! Now if only the rest of Asia got the memo...

We also visited the Royal Palace of Cambodia. It was somewhat impressive. No pictures allowed of the throne. I'm sure wikipedia has one. The Buddha with 2086 diamonds was pretty!



We also got a surprise on Tuesday night: Emily!!! Hooray for Emily coming back into our lives! She came in from Vietnam and happened to stay at the guest house just down the street from ours. How perfectly serendipitous. So we had a few drinks and caught up, met her new travel buddy, Zoe from Israel who also holds British citizenship and a US greencard (tired yet?), then turned in early. We had to get up early Wednesday for a breakfast buffet we found!

For $2.75 we enjoyed all-you-can-eat: coffee, tea, baguettes, toast, pastries of every ilk, dohnuts, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, omelettes with tomatoes, lightly-fried tomatoes seasoned with salt and pepper, pineapple, bananas, watermelon, butter and jam, and we got a free newspaper. We didn't eat lunch that afternoon... or this afternoon after we had the buffet again!

We visited the Killing Fields on Wednesday and the S-21 prison today. Think concentration camp with all the trappings of SE Asia cleanliness. Absolutely horrendous. Everyone should read up on the Cambodian Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot died a natural death and a free man. 80,000 people were tortured and killed at this ONE place just 15km from our guest house. This is a case of skulls at the killing fields. A small portion of those buried here in mass graves.One of the mass graves.This is the man who was in charge of killing over 80,000 people. Just a fraction of the more than 3 million, 3,000,000 killed nationwide.These are mug shots taken at the prison S-21 before they were were killed. Only 7 people sent to this former elementary school turned concentration camp survived. Seven people. Out of 80,000.

We spent Wednesday night out for the last time with Emily and visited the FCC, Foreign Correspondants Club, where the foreign press reported on a genocide that a planet largely ignored. Happy hour there was good.


Today we went to this post office and sent 14 post cards that have been accumulating since Luang Prabang.
Next stop: Ho Chi Minh, aka, Siagon. One more day here (laundry day) then were off!