The Fourth Country

Our time in Vietnam is over. Today we set off for Cambodia, and more specifically, the capital, Phnom Penh. We grab bakery goods for breakfast before jumping on the 8AM bus, which takes six hours including the border crossing. The journey runs smoothly the entire way and a little Asian girl kept coming down the bus aisle to play. She was cute. She made me poke her cheek when it was full of fruit, pulled faces at me and played a hide-and-seek type game whereby she poked her head over her seat and if I looked at her she hid behind it. It was fun, and lasted until Phnom Penh. 

We jumped off the bus and made our way towards a guesthouse we chose from our Lonely Planet book. The streets are in a grid system and numbered (like in New York, though I've never been there). This makes it easy to find our guesthouse. We check-in, but leave as soon as we have dropped our bags in the room to find the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum before it shuts. It's a building once used as a school, but when Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge came into power, it was transformed into a torture prison called S-21. There are two buildings with three floors. One building has all the torture rooms and some rooms have photographs of tortured bodies. The other building has photographs of all the people who entered the camp - the Khmer Rouge took photographs of them all as they arrived. There were faces of young and old. There were also more photographs of tortured people in the second building. In the courtyard once used for sport by school children, was old gym equipment used by the Khmer Rouge to hang people upside down as an interrogation tactic. Whilst we walked around the museum's corridors and rooms, there was a thunderstorm outside. The sound of rain and thunder seemed all too apt - a pathetic fallacy, as Rachelle put it.

From the museum we took a Tuk-Tuk to the riverside where all the bars and restaurants are. The city is much like other big Southeast Asian cities - which I suppose I was surprised about given Cambodia's reputation for being so poor. We went to a couple of bars and a restaurant. Everything here is commonly paid for with a combination of American dollar notes and Cambodian Riel.