I spent two nights in Phnom Penh and that was enough. It is not a very nice city, its full of rubbish and other than the obligatory sights not much to it at all.

I arrived in the afternoon and found myself a cheap hostel. It was family run and very pleasant. That afternoon I walked around the city, past Independence monument to the Laos Airlines office where I booked a flight to Vientiane.

The next day I hired a tuk tuk and made my way round the sights including Tuol Sleng Museum, the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek and the Royal Palace.

The Tuol Sleng Museum was horrifying. It was a high school that was used as a prison by Pol Pots security forces. I think there was something like 17000 prisoners over the few years that the Khmer Rouge were in control and only 12 survived.

The high school was split into cells and interrogation/ torture rooms and much of the evidence still remains. The museum was very interesting. I visited the interrogation rooms, watched a documentary and viewed a photo exhibition about the survivors and the people who worked there.

When people were taken prisoner they had their photo taken and their biographies noted. Most of these photos are still there. There are literally thousands of mug shots of men, women and children who were held prisoner at Tuol Sleng and then later killed.

If the prisoners were not killed during “interrogation” they were taken to what is now known as the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Here the prisoners were taken to be executed and thrown into mass graves. Most of the time the prisoners were beaten, knocked out then had their throats slit to save on bullets.

It was pretty gruesome. At the killing fields there were hundreds of skulls in a memorial and many human bones scattered around. The mass graves just looked like inverted bumps in the soil. For some reason I was expecting it to be a lot larger but they managed to cram thousands of bodies into a very small field.

Apparently during the 4 year reign of Pol Pots regime the Khmer Rouge almost 2 million Cambodians perished from a population of 8 million. Both the museum and killing fields were horrible to see but yet very captivating.

By the afternoon I had had enough of the tragic history lesson and visited the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda. To be honest I didn`t stay very long. The palace consisted of about 20 or so different pagodas. Some are quite pretty but they are generally the same and once you have seen one pagoda you`ve seen them all. I had a quick look round then left to eat alongside the big brown river that dominates the city.

On my final day in Phnom Penh I had intended to visit the Russian Market but I ended going on an epic journey round the city in search of a post office to send some postcards. Everyone I met kept sending me in different directions! In the end I had to get a motorbike to take me to the main post office way across town. Still, not going to the market was not a big loss, I have been to hundreds now and I`m sure they would sell the same tacky souvenirs!

That afternoon I left for the airport to fly to Vientiane, Laos. Apart from the historical sights from the Khmer Rouge reign I wasn`t very impressed by Phnom Penh. Other than those sights there didn`t seem to be much else there, no life, no charm, nothing.

www.picasaweb.google.com/johndatherton