A few days in Phenom Penh

A new addition to our traveling duo arrived right from the west coast of the motherland - Molly Lehrkind is here in Cambodia!
We picked up Molly at the airport, complete with our own welcome song/rap to sing to her on the tuk-tuk to our hotel.
We spent the afternoon at the Royal palace with every other tourist in the city of Phenom Penh. Nice looking place with pretty gardens but I personally felt it a little over-rated. We walked all around town, showing Molly the city as best we could. Then dinner, I would say our nicest and tastiest dinner in Asia. The restaurant is called Friends and is run by an NGO (as many restaurants in PP are which is a great way to give). The restaurant is staffed (kitchen and wait-staff) by homeless kids who are helped with schooling and skills training, drug rehab and/or family reunification. It was an EXCELLENT meal and the staff was superb.

For the next two days, we explored the main sites of Phenom Penh which include the S-21 prison where Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge housed and tortured prisoners before sending them to the Killing Fields for extermination. We visited both the prison and the Killing Fields (a former fruit orchard about 15 km outside of the city). Needless to say this was a difficult history to learn about and walk through. The Khmer Rouge, much like the Nazis of WWII, documented their brutality and killings quite thoroughly. The prison, a converted High school, still stands almost exactly as it was and is filled with photographs of the victims. We also watched a short film documentary and read many accounts. The most astounding parts of this very dark part of Cambodian history is how recent it was and how little legal justice has taken place. The Khmer Rouge was pushed out of Cambodia 30 years ago yesterday (Jan. 7 is national Victory Over Genocide Day here) but the leaders have never been officially tried. In 1979, the year that my older brother was born, 2 million people were murdered in this country by fellow Khmer, mostly out of fear of being killed themselves by the Khmer Rouge.

History lesson over.

The three of us also took part in another Hashing run. We met up with a number of expats and travelers and ran about 5 km through some rice paddies and ended at a wat somewhere way out in the countryside. We ended that evening with dinner for about 15 with plenty of Angkor Beer to go around. Good conversations and good food.

We left Phenom Penh for a day of small town relief from the big city. Staying in Kampong Chhnang for the night was sufficiently and pleasantly small town; everything closed at 8pm. We rode bikes to the riverfront to catch a little gondola-esque boat for a tour of the floating village. A cluster of maybe 100 or so floating boats and houses and everything in between were lashed together and floating on clusters of bamboo rods. Quite a sight.
Off to Battambang - second largest town in Cambodia.