I travelled to Phnom Penh with Malcolm and Max on a 2 day boat trip along the Mekong Delta. This trip included a trip to a floating fishing village, a Muslim village and a nights stay in a small town by the Vietnam/Cambodia border.
On the trip we met 3 other English guys, Nick, Lee and Chris and had a few beers with them in the evening. Early evening, on the boat, just after it got dark we were swarmed by midges. Hundreds of tiny little flies would be all over us at any one time. I have not seen anything so bad (well, maybe when I did the three peaks challenge it was nearly as bad). They don’t bite, like Mosquitos, but they are bloody annoying!
I had 3 days in Phnom Penh with the guys. We saw the Genocide museum and Royal Palace on the first day. It was baking hot and the museum was really moving. The last few days have been a harsh insight into just how bad things have been in SE Asia over the last 40 or 50 years. It makes me so much more impressed with the region and how well things are developing and especially how friendly the locals are. I am sure that deep down the recent history is still a major factor, but not once have I seen or heard anyone mention the atrocities that have happened, from the Vietnam War to the Pol Pot times of the Khmer Rouge. The SE Asians are fantastic people.
The next day we went to the rifle range to shoot some more guns. This time I shot 15 rounds in an AK-47 and hit the target 14 times with some pretty good hits. Next I shot 10 rounds with a CZ 75 handgun. I wasn’t so good here. I only hit the target 2 times out of the 10 shots... but they were both good kill shots!
After the rifle range we went on a trip to the Killing Fields. This is a grouping of mass graves that were used in the mid/late 70’s during Pol Pots rain and the Khmer Rouge.
Around 2 million Cambodians were executed over 4 years and many of them just dumped in mass graves. The Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot decided that Cambodia’s future was based in farming. So anyone who wasn’t a farmer, couldn’t be a farmer or had any sign of intelligence, such as doctors, lawyers, people with degrees, etc were executed. It was damned harsh. As you enter the killing fields there is a big glass display case with around 8000 skulls on display as a reminder of how bad things were. There are still parts of the sites being excavated and as you walk around you still see bits of clothing and some bones sticking out of the ground where it hasn’t been fully excavated yet. It was another very moving experience. It is painful to think that even with all this evidence of how bad people can be it is still going on in the world today. And we call ourselves a civilised race.
I am glad that we went to the firing range before the killing fields, otherwise it would have been a very different and probably more disturbing experience.
On the way home we stopped briefly at Wat Phou. There is a massive clock built into the grass. Very cool.