A though day...

Olga had to leave at 6 in the morning to the airport, so it was only Jim and I who were going to take a tuk tuk tour around the city and see it's sights.

We had agreed with the tuk tuk driver the night before that he was going to pick us up a the hostel at 10 am.

The timing worked out although I wouldn't have minded a little bit of a longer nap. Anyway we checked out of the hostel and the tuk tuk driver brought us over to our new hostel which was more backpacker oriented.

Soon after this we were on the road and our first stop was the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum which shows some of the cruelties that happend here not even 40 years ago.

The Khmer Rouge used this former school building to detain, punish, rape and kill anyone who were opposing the regime or were just unlucky enough to have had good education and did not fit in the ideology of this regime.

The Museum was set up in some of the former class rooms and showed pictures of some of the more than 20000 people who stayed here between 1975 and 1979.

More horrific thought than the things we have seen at the Museum were the Killing fields of Choeung Ek.

These lie a few kilometres outside of Phnom Penh and are places where the prisoners were brought after being detained in the Prisons.

They were told to be resettled to new houses, but instead were killed with blows to the head (by a variety of tools from bamboo sticks to spades and pickaxes), standing in front of their future mass graves because bullets were to expensive. (sounds familiar to any other events in history?).

In some cases little babies were held by their feet and slammed head first against trees.

Both, the S21 Museum and the Killing fields were quite impressive and more so shocking of how little we know about this time in Europe. This Genocide happened just 30 years after you would have thought the world learned from the atrocities in Europe and the Pacific.

After coming back to the Tuk tuk with busy minds trying to understand how humans were able to do any of these things, the driver asked us if we wanted to go to the shooting range to shoot some AK-47, M16 or maybe a rocket launcher.

Unbelievable I thought at first that this was the next possible destination but thinking about it, I understand he also wants to make a living and the commission he was going to get from the shooting range would certainly help. I don't blame the people who offer it but I do blame the people who actually use these offers (especially just half an hour after learning about these horrible events here in Cambodia).

The last stop was the Central market, a large square with a star-shaped market building where we got some noodle soup.

We were pretty wrecked after this long day in the heat and all these impressions but since Jim was going to leave in the morning we headed out and tried to find a nice spot for a beer.

We could only find a very empty and quite Irish pub or strip bars. When we thought we found a nice little street corner bar and set down we noticed very soon, probably when two quite short dressed girls set down at our table, that this bar also was not what we were looking for.

So it was off to the hostel and getting a bit of sleep for us.