These guys are like vultures, they are wherever a crowd is, or wherever a crowd might be, or right behind you, or waiting for you outside the hotel while you eat breakfast or dinner, and the second you're up from your seat, so are they! Having said that, on the odd occasion you do want a tuk-tuk, and you've agreed a price for your journey, on the whole they're really nice guys (not seen a single woman driver) who, at the end of the day, are providing for the family. We found this out as we got harangued yet again as we got off the bus at Phnom Penh and on our trips over the last couple of days.
...for every victim of the Khmer Rouge.
15 minutes after getting to 'BJ's House', our home for the next 2 nights, we were out again for our first sight of the city. Tuol Sleng or S-21, where the Khmer Rouge reportedly detained, tortured and killed thousands of Cambodians in an old school, was a stark reminder of the evil that exists in the world. We completed our history lesson by visiting the killing fields of Choeung Ek, one of 300 such fields in Cambodia. The weather is still turning up human bones and clothes of the victims in the fields from the ground, and the curators have to do a monthly sweep to collect them. As we walked through the fields, it was obvious that the monthly sweep had not yet happened! Its scary to think that this only ended 33 years ago and even scarier that the trial hasn't concluded yet.
The tuk-tuk journeys to and from the fields put us right in the middle of the mayhem that is the traffic in Phnom Penh. It's worse than Bangkok, but none of the drivers seem to be stressed about it, so we eventually relaxed in to it as well.
...for every Buddha we've seen in South East Asia so far.
The Royal Palace was our way of alleviating the reflective moods that followed the killing fields. No world's largest this, biggest that... just a beautiful big park with some good looking, old buildings in it! And a miniature of Angkor Wat with a fake moat around it, containing too many carp, a few terrapins, a couple of very large turtles and a huge fish that looked like a cross between a fish, a turtle and a croc!
...for every family of 3 or 4 on a single moped!
There seem to be even more in Cambodia than in Thailand, often 2 small kids and 2 adults on a bike, the kids held on by their parents, often with 1 arm steering the bike, the other holding the baby. Crazy!
...for every curry that I've eaten.
So today we both had a 'Happy Herb Pizza' for dinner - best pizza we've had in Asia!
If you add all those pennies together, we'd probably have enough to spend it on another 6 months travelling!
Tomorrow (Thursday) we bid a temporary farewell to Phnom Penh (we might be coming bak on our way to 'Nam) as we travel to Siem Reap.
Lee-a howy (or Goodbye - literal pronunciation, not actual spelling!)
No comments:
Post a Comment