Phnom Penh Genocide Museum

Got up after a massive sleep and the interruption of someone's alarm playing Jingle Bells followed by We Wish You A Merry Christmas and finally Deck The Halls at about 6am! That was more than a little confusing waking in a strange place to Christmas tunes believe me!

We headed to the Russian Market for a bit of a look around...basically a large tourist market but some good deals going on. After our window event it seems that
now either Martin and I or the next closest person to us has to break something at least once a day. Today was the turn of an wooden elephant trunk on a rather nice little ornament which a shoplady promptly threw to the floor on showing us! Martin sorted himself out with a Rolex for $9 which now makes my cheap I-don't-care-if-I-lose-it Casio look rather bad! But then at least mine's actually a real Casio!

Next we headed to Toul Sleng Genocide Museum - the former Khmer Rouge S-21 prison which was previously a school. From what we were told it ran in a pretty similar way to Drapchi prison in Tibet with officials trying to beat confessions out of the inmates and the inmates having to provide their full biographies. Not surprising as the Khmer Rouge were built up and trained in China really. The prison tortured and subsequently killed 10,499 adults and approx 2000 children and by the end of their short range the prisoners included Khmer Rouge members as the whole system just became really paranoid. Cleverly they sent the educated to work on the land and the uneducated ran the state!! Apparently this would "further the revolution". I've started reading "When Broken Glass Floats" by Charinthy Him - a first-hand account about the attrocities and its pretty grim.

To lighten the mood we decided to go for a wander afterwards in search of the necessary goods for my birthday celebrations the following night and then stumbled into a guitar shop. A bit of bartering later and we had a beautiful Korean Guitar and some replacement strings all for $28! Now with two guitars Siem Reap's Burning can really take off! Its an awesome name needing little explanation - we have two guitars...one blue like water and the other red like fire. Obviously wherever we currently are wouldn't be burning as then we wouldn't be there...so it must be the last place we were at. Therefore back at the start of the trip London was burning, but now its Siem Reaps turn. With all this carnage we were going to call ourselves the Firestarters but felt we might overshadow a tune we rather like with our awesome guitar mastery!

Now that's explained check out this brief video of our cyclo ride...frustratingly it doesn't really show the true craziness of this place but it gives you an idea at least!