An Awfully Big Adventure: Cambodia

After Vietnam I decided to take five days to hop over to Cambodia. I took a bus across the border and after hours of handing off my passport, waiting, switching buses, more waiting, and more handing off my passport I eventually arrived into Cambodia.

I visited Phnom Penh to see the killing fields. In the 1960s and 70s the Khmer Rouge, a communist party, ruled Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge saw themselves as a superior race and held onto commuist ideas to diminish a bourgeois class. This lead to a mass genocide in the late 70s of Chinese, Vietnamese, and anyone who "wore glasses" including doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. The genocide grew to a mass killing of around 2 million people including women and children. The killing fields site is a memorial to this tragedy.

(Spirit House)

After only a day in Phnom Penh I head to Siam Reap to see another historical site of Cambodia, the spectacular Angkor Wat "City of Temples."

Angkor Wat is one of the largest religious sites in the world and can take several days to visit all the different ruins and temples. The site was built in the early 12th century by King Suryavarman and is a sanctuary for both Hindus and Buddhists.

I spent an entire day starting at sunrise to visit as many temples as I could including where tomb raider was filmed. I hired a tuk tuk driver to take me around to the different sites. I explored many of the temples and ruins under the hot sun and enjoyed a lunch consisting of rice and stuffed toad with my tuk tuk driver by lake. The temples were incredible and massive.

That night I was able to hang out in a village with some local Cambodians. They cooked fish while occasionally scooping out a cup of whiskey from a giant bucket. Later that night they joined a bunch of us backpackers for some dancing.