Phnom Penh

So, having lost track of days and dates completely now, we left Siam Reap several days ago.
We headed to Kampong Cham on the Mekong River which is a fairly quiet place. They have a small island in the middle of the river which has tobacco farms, but floods with the monsoons every year. there is a cool bamboo bridge (amazing feat of engineering) which needs to be rebuilt every year, after the floods wash it away.
There is also a Buddhist Wat just out of town which because known as the Killing Temple during the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, where people were shot until it was decided that bullets were too costly, so the methods were replaced with knives and machetes which were sharpened on the backside of a stone statue.
From Kampong Cham we headed though Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville - Cambodia's answer to the beach holiday. There's not that much to do there except snorkel in the warm waters or briefly trek through Ream National Park to yet more secluded, fine, white sandy beaches.
From there we made our way by public, yet thankfully air-conditioned bus to Phnom Penh. It will be New Year here on the 14th of April, so not only will we miss the celebrations, but unfortunately the availability of guides goes down, yet the price for their services goes up, so we arranged for a tour of the sites for that afternoon.
Our first stop was Tuol Sleng Museum. This is one of the grisliest museums I have ever seem. During the early 1970's this was a High School, until Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge started gaining momentum and turned it into an 'Educational Facility' or prison in our terms. Over 100 people were interrogated, tortured and killed per day from this facility, or an estimated 17,000 people from 1975-1979. As I mentioned, bullets were expensive, so the most imaginative methods were used to get information from people that defies comprehension. Initially people threw themselves from the balconies to escape the prolonged torture, but barbed wire was soon put up to prevent any 'vital information' to slip through their fingers. If you didn't die during interrogation, you were trucked about 14kms out of town to the killing fields where you were blindfolded, tied with your hands behind your back, and I think if you were lucky you were struck on the back of the head with a bamboo stick. If you were unlucky you had your throat slowly severed with a branch from the sugar palm tree.
The mass graves at the Killing Fields have not all been recovered. There are some 80 holes that will remain as they are. As you walk around them you are literally walking on the bones and clothes of the thousands of people who remain there, as the rains bring them up every year.
Its hard to look at the older generation who survived this now without wondering how they escaped death. Sadly it was implied that many may have been soldiers, and have no regrets about what happened as they were only doing what they had to, were told to do, in order to survive. Apologies for getting heavy, but its something you can not ignore here.