Sunday, 14 January 2007
Days Seventeen and Eighteen (Beijing)
Count down to Beijing 2008
Andy outside the Forbidden City
On our second day we went to the Mutianyu part of the great Wall of China. We put on all of our clothes (well almost all) and set off for a day of exploring.
I wore 5 t-shirts, 2 pairs of socks, 2 scarfs,a hat, a pair of gloves, a jumper, a coat, my pyjama bottoms and a pair of jeans that day.
The signs were really funny.
Better than the view from Ditcheat hill?
Days Fifteen and Sixteen (Ho Chi Minh)
Days Twelve, Thirteen and Fourteen (Mekong Delta)
I feed some hungry local boys with an orange.
They took us to a crocodile farm. Just want you want to see a load of crocs who will become handbags and shoes!
People have fish farms under their houses.
The floating market
Day Ten (Phnom Penh)
Many of the rooms remained untouched blood and all. In the rooms which had been changed pictures of the prisoners had been hung.
One of the torture rooms
The rules that the prisoners had to obey :
1. You must answer according to my questions. Do not turn away.
2. Do not try to hide the facts by making pretexts of this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Do not be a fool for you are a chap who dares to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Do not tell me either about your immoralities or the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing. Sit and wait for my orders. If there are no orders, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something. You must do it right away without protesting.
8. Do not make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you do not follow all the rules above, you shall get many lashes or electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either 10 lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
Saturday, 13 January 2007
Days Seven, Eight and Nine (Angkor)
The fun was short lived though! After a great first day we went for some local food. The food tasted good, but an hour after eating Andy started to throw up. Despite a cocktail of medicine I had to go to the pharmacy and buy prescription drugs over the counter to make him better (it took 5 days).
Us in front of Angkor
People stole the heads off the statues to sell.
Huge trees took over some of the temples.
Mr.Han our tuk tuk driver
Me after an exhaustive first day.
Indiana Andy
Bigger feet than Andy? - I never thought it possible!
Day Six (Siem Reap)
If buy a pass to Angkor after 5pm you get a free sunset as your pass doesn't start until the next day. Here are our pics!
It looked pretty cool from the bottom.
Climbing to the top of the temple.
Day Five (Cambodia Phnom Penh)
g
g
g After arriving in Phnom Penh we got pulled about by men wanting to give us a ride to our hostel. They tired to pull our bags off our backs and crowded round us saying come with me. It would have probably been easy to just go with one as then the rest would have left us alone. However, our hostel wasn't very far from the bus stop so we wanted to walk.
The walk to our hotel was a real eye opener! The streets were mostly just rubble. The worst part was though they had food markets on streets with rubbish tips on. The rubbish tips were next to people's stalls and they smelt rotten and had hundreds of flies buzzing around! We also found that every hundred yards or so people were asking us to do something (buy something, take a ride etc). It gets tiresome really quickly when you are tired, carrying heavy bags and trying to find somewhere. It is especially hard when they won't listen to "No, thank you", but you are still trying to be polite!
When we got to our hostel we dropped our bags and went straight to The Killing Fields. The leaflet calls it Choeung EK Genocidal Centre (Hell on Earth in 20th Century). After you pay you 5 dollars you have the option to get a guide for another 5 dollars. Andy tried to barter the price down (his experience at all of those fleas came in very handy this holiday!) but the guide wasn't having any of it! After trying to do it ourselves we caved and got a guide for the full 5 dollars.
The first thing we decided to look at was the Charnel which is a the big monument in the picture below:
Although from afar it looks like a normal building once you get closer you get to see the horrors it hides. I don't know how to explain the emotions you feel when faced with 8,000 skulls. The worst thing was seeing that lots of them still had teeth. What I mean by this is you could pretend that they were plastic science models, but then you saw the teeth and then you couldn't pretend.
The government refused to bury these skulls as they say they act as reminder to the Cambodian people. I personally think it is selfish as many of the people killed were Buddhists. Buddhists believe if their bodies are not buried then they can't reach the afterlife. I think the government just want to save money on burials!
You think that the government would actually take the bones out of the ground and bury them properly!
This was the biggest grave they found. It contained 450 corpses. 
They believe that there are many more graves under the river.
We did have a funny moment at the Killing Fields though! We got to a tree called the Killing Tree. This tree was used by the soldiers to kill babies. They would swing the babies round and hit them against the tree. At the point of our guide telling us this I almost collapsed! Andy, our guide and people around thought that I was overcome by the whole place. I was upset and slightly overcome with the place, but the reason for my near collapse was the return of my diahorea. I did make it to the toilet in time though!
After a really good meal and a fun ride on a Tuk Tuk we went to bed early. We had a 7:00 coach to Siem Reap (the whole reason for our trip to Cambodia!) and wanted to be fresh.
