While planning my trip in Seattle, I had reluctantly decided to skip Cambodia. Information from internet travel reports listed things like land mines, bandits along the roads, general lawlessness, disease, etc. Who needs things like these? I wanted a vacation, not an epic.
But after two and a half weeks of travel and successfully negotiating the City of Bangkok, I thought I was ready to take on Cambodia. I really wanted to see Angkor Wat, southeast asia's most significant archeological site. Could it be any worse than a large, congested, polluted city of 9 million people? I booked a flight from Bangkok to Phnom Penh for $90 each way.
After arriving at Phnom Penh's airport in the morning, you just buy your Cambodia entry visa at the airport for $20 US. I appeared to be the only person though, that didn't have a passport photo for the visa. No problem, just pay us an extra $2. Fine.
I discovered that the country uses the US dollar as their regular currency. Their money, the Riel, is so weak that it is only used for fractional amounts of a one dollar bill (3700 Riel to the dollar).
I hired a motorscooter driver to take me from the airport into the city for $3. He drove me to my hotel and then agreed to show me a few of the city sites.
Photos below are taken from the back of a motorscooter driving through downtown Phnom Penh.
The first tourist site I went was "Toul Sleng" in the south part of the city. This was a former high school that was converted to an interrogation center for Pol Pot in the late 1970's. Some 20,000 "confessions" were received from "enemies of the revolution". The photo below shows a map of Cambodia on the right, and a list of the atrocities under Pol Pot on the left (in French).
This was a sign posted in Toul Sleng listing the "rules" that they were under while interrogation.
I also made a trip out of town to the "Killing Fields". This is where the tortured victims of Pol Pot were finished off. A stupa has been errected as a memorial. The depressions in the foreground are over 100 mass grave sites, where over 10,000 victims bodies have been recovered.
A close up view of the stupa.
Quite a day of tourist sight-seeing!
The next day I took an express boat up the Tonle Sap River to Siem Riep, which is a very small town right on the edge of the Angkor Wat ruins. It was about a six hour boat ride under a very hot, intense sun, but I preferred riding on top with this great view of river life than inside the boat cabin.
A scene of one of the small villages nearby Phnom Penh built right on the river.
