I finally have time to write again. Quick re-cap: I left Phnom Penh a few days ago headed for the beach, and I have been traveling with a guy from Iceland for a little while now.

Well, we made it to the beach with no problems, but when we went to find a place to stay, most of them were full. This beach is unique in that it has many places that offer free accommodation on the beach as long as you eat at least one meal a day there. We finally found a place and settled in. Within a few hours we had found a great group of people to hang out with, and have been doing things with them this whole time. Yesterday we went on a cruise out to a beach on an island for the day. Tomorrow we are renting a Hobi-cat for the night and going camping on a deserted island across the bay.

Unbeknownst to me before I arrived at this beach, but yesterday was Chinese New Year, and we welcomed in the Year of the Rat in style. This beach reminds me a lot of Myrtle Beach. It is crowded, full of trash, noisy, and still fun. The majority of people here are Cambodians who are on vacation. There was a brand new Escalade parked in front of my cheap bungalow this afternoon, and plenty of Mercedes and Lexuses. Everything has been shut down in town, and we have to wait until Monday to get our visas, but this beach is so noisy that we really want to leave it.

Since I will be updating less in the near future, why don’t you sign up for my feed by email? You don’t have to wonder if the site has been updated. Every morning, if and only if I have updated something, you will get an email with the latest post and most recent photos. No update, no email. Easy.

At the beach during the Cruise

This kid who sat with us at dinner

D inner and the Kid again

Sorry it has been so long, but the internet around here is less than excellent, and I have been moving around a good deal. I am about to get onto a bus that will take me to the southern beaches of Cambodia, where I will stay for maybe four days before coming back to Phnom Penh to get my visa and head to Vietnam. Once there, the posts will resume, but there is not reliable internet at the beach.

I suggest you sign up for the automated  email that only gets sent out when I update. This way, you will know when I have updated the site again,  and can check back at that time. The email only sends out the most recently uploaded photos, and any posts I have changed or added, and only if any changes have been made.

Among the things I need to write about are:

• Getting treed in the top story of our guest house by monkeys
• The Icelandic  guy I have been traveling with who is going to Vietnam with me
• The people from the orphanage who I met in Phnom Penh
• Phnom Penh in general

Back in a while,

Ben

I woke up this morning at 6:30 am for some reason and could not fall back asleep. That being the case, I got out my Bill Bryson book and read for a while, before going down to the café at the bottom of the guesthouse and ordering breakfast. Cambodia is not as cheap as Laos, but it is pretty close. It is cheaper living, but the food is a little more expensive. Still half the price of Thailand though, so I am loving it.I met up with the guy who was going to be taking me around on the back of his motorcycle, and we got going. We drove about 15-20 kilometers out of the city to the Killing Fields. This area is where Pol Pot and his regime killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

The place was unassuming, and simply another field, but it was transformed in to a place of torture, and is full of mass graves. The have exhumed many of them (over 100) but left many still intact. To remember the atrocities committed, the people of Cambodia have erected a giant, 8-story tall pagoda in the center, and filled it with over 8000 of the recovered skulls. It is a truly stunning sight. If you have never seen a human skull before, besides in a museum where is it out of context, the effect is disturbing. When there are 8000 of them piled on top of each other, looking out at you from glass shelves, and laying at your feet, open to the air and just a few inches from you, the effect is devastating. There are no words spoken in the pagoda, just silent reverence.

The rest of the site looks like a bomb field because of the dug up graves. There are pits everywhere, some of them marked with how many people were recovered, others left to the imagination. A grave that holds 200 people is much smaller than I thought it would be, but there were so many of them.

After the Killing fields, I got back on the bike and we went to S-21. S-21 is the detentions center where Pol Pot and his troops kept people before they went to the Killing Fields. However, up to 100 people died here a day. It was originally a high school, before it was turned into a death center. The rooms had been converted into cells, torture chambers, and holding areas. The outside playground was turned into a gallows and interrogation tool. The same bars used for exercise were turned into hanging posts and racking systems.

The center has been turned into a museum, with photos of those killed, taken by Pol Pot’s troops for unearthly reasons, displayed in long lines in the rooms. It is an emotional scene. The crimes committed here were in every why as bad, if not worse than those committed by the Nazis in Germany so many years ago. This took place in the 70’s.

The rest of the day was lighter, as I went to the Grand Palace, but they wanted to much money to go in, so I skipped it and took pictures through the gate. I came back to the guest house, ate some food, and read the rest of my book. Tomorrow I am on an early morning bus to Siam Reap, the home of Angkor Wat, the largest Khmer temple constructed. I should be spending two or three days there before making my way south to the beach before I go to Vietnam.

Skulls in the 8000 skull tower

Torture Cell (The picture on the wall is of a man dead on this bed)

Cells

A lot has happened in the past day, and I will just quickly give you a rundown as I am trying to get this done before I take a moto-taxi around Phnom Penh for the day. I am going to see the Killing Fields, and S-21, along with some museums.

So… I left my guesthouse and booked my flight to Kathmandu, then jumped on the airport shuttle bus. I had tried to plan it out so that I left with no baht left so I didn’t have to worry about converting it, and I ended up getting to the airport with about $1 worth of baht. The flight was on time, and went very smoothly, taking just over an hour from Bangkok to Phnom Penh. The second I walked out of the airport I was accosted by the moto-taxi line, and proceeded to put myself, my bag, the driver, and my backpack onto a small 100cc motor scooter. We took off down a dusty highway, zipping in and around traffic, making out way into town. I couldn’t keep the grin off of my face. I love riding motor scooters here (Southeast Asia) because you can get anywhere quickly, but when you are a passenger on the back with a guy whose job is to weave through traffic like an insane race driver, it is an even better experience.

I immediately liked Cambodia. The people are friendly, love to speak to you, and help you out. My moto-taxi guy took me to six or seven different guest houses on the lake until we found one that had room. I paid, dropped my bag off, and went down to the floating boat that they have turned into a dock. I got some food, read for a little, and took a lot of photos of one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen. The pictures really don’t do it justice. The sun just hung over the water and reflected everywhere, followed by an explosion of color from the horizon that was mirrored in the lake in front of me.

The people who were on the top deck of this boat were about my age, and I had started talking to one of the girls because we were laughing at the boat children, kids who offer to take you out on their boat for $1. They are persistent little guys. Anyway, I went up there to talk with them and ended up staying there the rest of the night. Everything is priced in dollars here, and I was very surprised to see Jackson’s face staring up at me when I pulled money out of the ATM. Here is a foreign country, a very poor foreign country, that uses our dollar as its currency. They also have the reil (not spelling that right), and it is about 4000r to $1.

Alright, I am off to eat some food and jump on a bike for the day. These places are supposed to be very intense, very solemn areas, and from what I know of the history of the area, I think it will be an eye opening day.

Sunset

Kid who wanted me to ride in his boat.

Another boat kid

Simple, I have been sitting around, waiting for my small digital camera to be fixed… but they can’t fix it, so I am just going to have to keep using the big dSLR for everything and look like a tourist. Oh well.

I head to Cambodia tomorrow. First, Phnom Phen, then to the temples of Angkor!