Phnom Penh and 'The Journey'

First off, I'd like to apologise for the slight delay in the blog posts, we've been too busy relaxing on beaches, sitting at bars with cold beers, and meeting new people to tell the world of our most recent adventures.

We finished our visit to Cambodia with a visit to the capital, Phnom Penh, for a few nights.  The city itself was fairly standard, with no real frills.  However, we were not visiting for the nightlife, or for the sights that the city boasted, we were in Phnom Penh to discover more about the painful history of the country, as we felt that we could not justify a visit to such a cultural country without trying to learn a little more about it's herritage.

So one day, James and I shared a moto (a motorbike taxi) to the Killing Fields.  This was were thousands and thousands of Cambodian people were executed in cold blood as part of the Pol Pot regime.  It was a very harrowing experience looking around the site and learning the horrors that took place, but it gave us a greater understanding of the painful memories that the Cambodian people have to carry around every day.  We then went to the S21 prison, which is where the Cambodian people were detained and in many cases tortured before being taken to the Killing Fields.  The prison was very sinister, as it was originally built as a school, so there were classrooms, some still with blackboards on the wall, that had been developed into makeshift prisons, with cells made of thick planks of wood, or brick.  Overall, we both feel that it was very important that we visited these places, so that we could gain a greater understanding, and we both came away thinking how well the country is recovering from such a tragedy.

After our short stay in the capital, we headed back to Thailand.  We had booked a flight from Phnom Penh to Bangkok, which went very smoothly with no delays.  Having landed in Bangkok, we met some British guys at the airport that were heading the same way as us, so we ended up sharing a taxi with them.  All in all, James and I were in Central Bangkok for about twenty minutes, as we bought a ticket on a night bus to the South Islands.  The journey was another interesting one.  We had to changes coaches (for some reason unknown to us) three times and at 03:00am in the morning, we found ourselves sitting in a van that can only be described as the type intended to transport livestock, but we were deliriously tired, so found it highly amusing.  After catching a ferry, contributing to a twenty-one hour journey, we arrived on the beautiful island of Koh Tao... stay tuned!