Boring towns and mass genocide

After recovering from our night of merriment (ho ho ho), a full day ordeal, we got a few more ours of Wat-ing in, then took off for Battambang in a taxi with some other Khmer dude. We arrived to discover... nothing. The town was dead. Not a soul roamed the streets. There was one streetlight every few hundred metres, leaving the streets shrouded in darkness. The taxi driver took us to his hotel of choice (where he receives his cut), and after checking our trusty Lonely Planet guide we discovered that there were only about two hotels in Battambang anyway so we accepted. At $5 a night for the two of us it's easily the best value place we've been, although the million flights of stairs and confusingly laid out building hardly helped. This turned out to be the best part of Battambang. During the day the city is actually packed with people, but there is still precisely jack shit to do. We got a tuk tuk twenty kms out of the city to find something worthwhile - the jolly Killing Caves, a place of wonderment and happiness. We hiked up the mountain to get to the caves where the Khmer Rouge (top blokes) led some 15,000 people to the edge of a cliff leading down to the caves below, smashed them in the face with bamboo sticks, and let them fall to their deaths during their four year regime in Cambodia in the seventies. We walked down into the caves and found a little shrine full of the skulls of the fallen. Eerie. Back to Battambang and then immediately out of the boring little place.

Next we hopped on a bus (SUPER COMFY!) full of locals and nicked off to the country's capital, Phnom Penh. This place is a pretty big city, with a cool contrast of dirty poverty and glitzy shopping centries. Cheap accomodation is conveniently located above a mozzie infested swamp, so we decided to splurge and get some decent accomodation by the riverside, the happening part of town. We got the most awesome hotel ever (owned by an Aussie dude), and somehow knocked $10 off the price of the room, but they were only available for one night, so we sadly packed up and went to an infinitely worse place (for the same price) elsewhere for the next two nights. We rode seven or eight escalators and went into a rooftop restaurant in a fancy tower to get a view of the city, and had fun explaining to the waiters that we had no desire to actually eat at their establishment, but rather stand around on their enourmously high balcony. We got drenched in the hottest and heaviest rain I've ever experienced. I wished I had some soap and shampoo with me, as it was a far more pleasant shower than the dodgy cold one in the hotel bathroom.

Depressing though we knew it would be, we felt obliged to visit the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng, the two worst sites of the Khmer Rouge brutality. The Killing Fields were where the Khmer Rouge led their prisoners to mass graves. To save on the cost of ammo, each victim was smashed across the head with various instruments. There was even a tree where infants and children were beaten against. The strange thing is that the fields are beautiful. It just looks like a pleasant meadow with green foliage and butterflies, and a rather large number of holes in the ground. It's a surreal mixture of appalling and pleasant, and it messes with your head. In the centre of the fields is an enoumous stupa filled with 8000 human skulls, and a pile of rag-like clothes that the victims were wearing when they were murdered.

Tuol Sleng was even harder to endure. It was a high school that the Khmer Rouge converted into a prison where they "interrogated" suspects. Of the tens of thousands of people sent into the prison, seven made it through alive. Seven. The place has been retained much as the Vietnamese found it when they drove the Khmer Rouge out in 1978. Each classroom has a steel bed and a cast iron "beating stick" next to it, complete with a photo on the wall of the dead, bloody and mangled body of a victim on that very bed that the Vietnamese took when they discovered the place (it was hurredly evacuated by the Khmer Rouge as the Viets approached). There are walls and walls of photos of the faces of the dead, included six year old kids and elderly women. There is a billboard listing the rules of the place, including "you shall not cry at all", which is punishable by even more torture (lashings by electric wire. Nice dudes). Needless to say, we left feeling pretty glum.

Tune in next time for MORE tales of mindless brutality as our intrepid travellers make their way to Saigon, Vietnam!