Cambodia

The next morning Patchy and I had planned to meet bright and early (8am) to catch the bus to Phenom Phen, and Roy was gonna stay so he could do a tunnel tour. Patchy no showed (I later find out the lazy prick didn’t get up until 2pm) so I solo to Cambodia. I had managed to purchase some flip flops the night before, we were playing pool against a local he and laughed at me for having no thongs. I offered him 50000 dong (about $3.50) for his, and he obliged. I later found out that he only paid 30000 for them and by the time I wandered back past that bar, he had already bought a replacement pair. We swapped and I kept the new pair.
So I arrived in Cambodia, and had made friends with a nice but timid Japanese guy (think, opening line at the border crossing “ohh I am travelling by my self and I am so so lonely” he was doing a visa run as he was meant to be flying to France soon but was “so so scared” or the riots. I advised him of the irony that he was scared of going to France, so went to Cambodia instead, then had some really good chats about him studying in Australia and holidaying in Tassie and stuff. He found Tassie nice but devoid of fellow Asians. I also met Tony from London, he had shared a bus with Patchy a few days before, and we had met at Go 2 bar in Ho Chi Mihn. The first night was pretty quite, funny how a day on a bus doing SFA can make you tired.
The next day I did little but went out for some drinks with Tony, He had organised a Killing Fields moto (motorbike) driver for the next day, and he was our personal limo driver for the evening (that’s if you can call one of the most clapped out pieced of crap mopeds a limo, but well he did drive us places, until I got drunk enough that I hassled him to let me drive) we drank Beer Lao, I had a great hot and sour chicken soup, and we chatted to the kids selling rip off books about Cambodia and south east Asian guide books. Tony had picked up a Cambodia Lonely Planet in Vietnam, it seems they go for something close to 10% of the cover price. But you can see the dodgy photo copy marks and stuff. The new ones are a heap better, the covers look better and all the text is nice and clear. Although the girl selling the books was referring to us as either lady boys or monkeys (I get the monkey call often due to the beard) she had moments of being very sweet, and polite. She had great English and was planning on being a teacher when she left school, so I bought a book.
The next day, Tony’s moto driver arrived as promised, and I hired a 250cc dirt bike. Although I didn’t get a chance to really let it hit top speed, zigging through the traffic with twice the power of any thing else on the road is quite fun, its big and comfy and good on the crappy roads. Our guide dropped off at a firing range first, and for $30 Tony got to fire 30 rounds on an AK47. there was a price list covering ak’s, M16’s, Tommy Guns, a range of hand guns, some machine gun that looked like a small turret and grenades, who ever scored these relics from the wars must be making some what more than minimum wage. Depending on how affordable the police bribes they’d pay to keep the place open.
The photos are here of the Killing Fields, its an odd experience a fairly small plot of land where close to 9000 bodies have been excavated from mass graves. The Genocideal Pol Pot regime of the 70’s was unbelievable, a shrine on the site has 17 layers of human bones, the first layers filled with age and sex classified skulls. Seeing skulls with execution style bullet wounds between the eyes, or a 14 year old’s skull that had been caved in was a moving experience. As the photos show there was just so many of them. It’s hard to think each and every one of them was a son, daughter, mother or father and trying to fathom what a country would go through with its government ordering mass murder like that.