Cambodia - Phnom Penh (24 -26 April & 5 May)

A really big, busy city but we really liked it for some reason. They have 'cyclos' - a sort of wheelchair with a bicycle attached to it and the driver sitting really high up behind, like an old penny farthing bike. Saw a temple on the only hill in the city with loads of friendly monkeys in the gardens nearby. Had a decent guesthouse that had a third floor balcony on the corner of the street where we could look at the busy streets below. Saw some royal palace or something or other... Rory had his hair cut in a random barber's shop. They did an ok job (no worse than usual) and for some reason all the barbers wore surgical masks...

The trafic here is really frantic: there's only a handful of traffic lights and no road markings at all - people just steer around each other and drive the wrong way up the street if they need to. The law is that the biggest vehicles are the boss and they use their horns constantly to warn other people or animals (lots of random cows on the main roads) where they are. Nobody gets angry though: there's no shouting, no angry beeping horns and no road rage. It seems to work pretty well, though there has just been a motorbike crash outside as I write this!

Visited the Cheoung Ek killing field / war memorial: 16000 people were executed here when the Khmer Rouge were in power and now 8000 of their skulls are housed behind glass in the grisly memorial. After, we visited S-21/Tuol Sleng prison: an old school converted into a prison/torture camp for people who were accused of 'anti-revolutionary' crimes. They were forced to make confessions, then killed at Cheoung Ek (if they had not already died at the prison). Only 7 out of thousands of prisoners survived. There was 100s of mug shots on the walls, taken when they arrived. 1 in 5 Cambodians (2 million people) died in the 4 years that they were in power. Pretty grim.