Perdido Por El Mundo: Cambodia -- a Dental Odyssey

At last I'm feeling better after that crazy month I spent in Phnom Penh going to the dentist. I actually had a good month there, and as well as going to about ten dental appointments and moving hotels seven times in an attempt to find one that was relatively quiet, I got to do a bit of sightseeing.

Phnom Penh apartment building

The main tourist attraction in Phnom Penh is a gruesome one. When the Khmer Rouge was in power they used a local school, called S21, as a prison and torture centre, and it has been preserved as a museum.

It's quite disconcerting, because it looks quite peaceful from the outside and is right in downtown Phnom Penh, so it doesn't look as sinister as it feels once you go inside. They've tried to preserve how the rooms looked when the Vietnamese found them when they invaded and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. There are hundreds of photos of inmates displayed, most of them young men and teenagers. (There were 12,000 inmates and only 9 survived).

The grounds of S21 (with graves of the last victims).

I was telling the receptionist at my dentists about my visit and she said that she'd only been for the first time last year, but only because her university was hosting some overseas students and she went with them. She said that until she saw the centre she really didn't believe that what the Khmer Rouge had done was real. (There are former members of the Khmer Rouge, including the Prime Minister, who are currently in government, so there are many powerful people in Cambodia who would prefer if people just forgotthe genocide ever happened). So, I realised that it is really important to keep this evidence of the Khmer Rouge alive (just like they do in places like Auschwitz), so that people can't just brush history under the carpet and pretend it never happened.

I was staying outside the tourist district and had my normal problems finding food to eat. I eventually came across a place with an English menu and then wished I hadn't. I'm was praying I hadn't already eaten "Fried cow's dict with ants".

Pig shopping for Chinese New Year

I took this photo in the meat section of a market. All the meat here seems to be sold like this -- it hangs out in the sun for hours (and it is really hot here) with flies all over it. In the photo you can see that the sun is directly on the meat. What I can't understand is how no-one gets sick. Maybe the heat cooks it?!

I left Phnom Penh and headed 3 hours south to a coastal town called Kep. It used to be a tourist resort for wealthy locals French colonialists and they built a housing development of modernist, concrete, 1960's houses. When the Khmer Rouge arrived they just torched them all. The town today is just guesthouses, a market, and the burnt out shells of houses. It's quite eerie.

Burnt-out house in Kep

They have a big crab market at Kep where you can buy crab and have it cooked on-the-spot over an open fire. I took some photos of the women who spend all day in this incredible heat, stoking fires and cooking crab. The whole scene looked like something out of Dickensian England.

The day before yesterday I finally started feeling a bit better so, to celebrate, I rented a motorbike and went about 10 kms out into the countyside and stayed by the river for a night. Here are a few photos I took on the way. (I love Cambodian kids because they are the only people who talk to me! They can only say "hello!!!" but it's a lot more than the taciturn adults will say).