The trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh was long but comfortable. The Cambodian border crossing was bureaucratic but safe.

In Cambodia (Kampuchea) they speak Khmer. The monetary unit is the riel, but they also use $US, with 4,000 riel to the dollar. You can only get $US out of ATMs, but if you pay with $US, they give you change in riel. And if you try to pay with torn or old dollar bills, they won’t accept them. It’s taking me a while to get used to all this!

Cambodia is quite a bit poorer than Vietnam. It looks more like Thailand in terms of the architecture. There’s a lot of Thai culinary influence (yum!) I am eating way too much on this trip. My stomach will hurt, but I eat anyway. Part of the trouble with staying in hotels is that you spend way too much time in restaurants.

The bathrooms here are more basic, often requiring you to bring your own TP. I guess they expect you to spray yourself with the cold water bidet and drip dry like a man. Not my preferred method of doing things…

Last night we went to see some sites by the river and almost drowned in our tuk tuks, as the deluge soaked us to the bone.

Today we visited the Genocide Museum, which had been a school before being taken over by the Khmer Rouge as a prison. Between 1974-1979 (my carefree college years) 18,000 people were incarcerated and died at this prison alone. Mostly intellectuals, they died of starvation, disease or torture for being enemies of Pol Pot’s brutal regime during the Cambodian civil war.

If that wasn’t enough tragedy, we then toured the Killing Fields, where mass graves of Cambodian civilians, including children and babies, were ruthlessly killed and buried. Many of the “soldiers” doing the massacres were as young as 13 or 14.

Up to 3 million people were killed during that time. Until recently the government was not allowing this horrific aspect of Cambodian history to be taught in schools, but they justified the curriculum in hopes that younger generations might learn from the past. Will they? So many genocides have occurred around the world with an apparent absence of cultural memory…