As expected I met up with my lovely Annie in Ho Chi Minh to get an afternoon bus across the border from Vietnam and into Cambodia. This was my first land crossing border experience and it was slightly strange.
We arrived in Phnom Penh and checked into Billabong Hostel where we met two girls in our room travelling together from Birmingham. We went on to spend the whole of Cambodia with Elle and Ria.
We decided since this hostel had a pool we deserved a chilled out day. This just so happened to fall on the day of the rugby semi-finals. We found a significantly large sports bar filled with English and Kiwi’s and ordered a beer tower, which you can imagine was a brilliant atmosphere.
After the fun of the rugby we were joined by another two girls from Brighton, Megan and Dayna and formed a girl band.
It was eventually time to do organise some sight-seeing, the whole reason I came to Cambodia. We booked the S-21 Prison tour as well as the Killing fields.
Firstly the S-21 prison – the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. A former secondary school which was used as a security prison by the Khmer Rouge regime.
The prison had very strict regulations, and severe beatings were inflicted upon any prisoner who tried to disobey. Almost every action had to be approved by one of the prison’s guards. They were sometimes forced to eat human feces and drink human urine.
The next stop was the Cambodian Killing Fields which are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War.
I found it really difficult walking around here, even more so than Auschwitz, due to the fact it was all so preserved in an original way, to the point where if its a rainy day sometimes bones still resurface from the ground. Walking round listening to the audio of the horrors that occurred here only somewhat 40 years ago was soul destroying.
Phnom Penh as a city itself didn’t offer much. There was a lot of rubbish everywhere and very unpleasant smells. After we had explored the history of Cambodia it was time to visit some islands.
Wanderlust Adventure 