Phnom Penh

Thursday 21st - Friday 22nd September 2017

Thursday

Cambodia is finally here! The country I have been most excited to visit due to its history - both recent and not. As soon as we were out of the airport we went straight to the killing fields. It's crazy how many innocent people were slaughtered there and how 30 years later the rainy seasons bring up more bones and teeth from the mass graves. We didn't stay too long here unfortunately as monsoon season had finally lived up to its name and the heavens opened before us! Luckily we had time to look around the memorial, where they have hundreds of skulls all sorted by age, gender and how they think they were killed. It's powerful stuff. We then managed to borrow some umbrellas from the people who worked there and made our way to the coach and then onto the genocide museum. Here our guide gave us a brief talk - block a is for the more powerful prisoners, block b for the guards, block c for most of the prisoners and block d where they tortured the victims. Out of the thousands of people that were here, only a few managed to survive and we were lucky enough to meet Chum Mey and he described some of the ways in which he was tortured. I bought his book and I'm excited to read that when I'm home! We had free time to walk round all the blocks, it's such an incredible experience to be able to see what a horrific time the Cambodians had first hand through pictures and from being in the place where it happened. After this we checked in to our hotel and headed out to a 'family style' dinner at a restaurant called the titanic. It was pretty good! A few of us went back to the hotel and chilled out in the jacuzzis with prosecco. It was a perfect evening!

Friday

I woke up feeling very ill this morning, like I'd been feeling a bit worse for wear recently but after breakfast this morning I had the worst stomach cramps and just stayed in bed until we checked out at 12 and caught our flight to Siem Reap.