We left Hanchey at 7.30 for a five and a half hour bus ride to Siem Reap. We drove through rich tropical farmland with two stops en route to stretch our legs.
This morning we got off the boat up a very steep path on the waters edge then went up to the Hanchey Buddhist Monastery on top of the hill above the river. This was originally a 7th century Hindu Monastery but was taken over by the Buddhists in more modern times. There are still 7th and 8th century buildings here but the modern ones were built in the last century. Many of those in the photos are accommodation or dining houses.
In the afternoon we took a tuk tuk ride around a local island that produces fruit and vegetables that are sent off to the rest of the country. We again called into a private home to see their back garden with a wide variety of tropical fruit trees.
Further up the Mekong we stopped at Angkor Thom, the site of a largish Buddhist Temple and famous for being one of the few villages that escaped destruction during the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s because the regime used its buildings for housing and storage. We walked around the town, past the Temple complex into the village where we visited a typical two storey local house. The woman who lived there was very happy to show us inside. The floor was made of slats that allow the breeze to blow up through the floor. These are covered with nets at night to keep the mosquitoes out. The buildings are also held up on round lists so the snakes can't climb them, or so our guide told us.
Just out of Phnom Penh is an island in the river with a small village, Oknha Tei, where the locals weave silk.
In the afternoon we went on a rickshaw ride around Phnom Penh, visiting the railway station and the Independence Monument followed by the Central Market, restored by the French Government in 2011.
We arrived in Phnom Penh early in the morning. After breakfast we embarked on a tour of one of the 398 Killing Fields in Cambodia, this one just out of the city and not far from the S21 Prison. The S stood for security and this was the prison where people suspected as security threats were sent. The threat was mostly that they’d been trained in Vietnam or China and so couldn’t be trusted to support the nationalist agenda of Pol Pot. Here people were harshly treated, housed in small rooms with multiple people to a room, or in small cells, tortured and executed without trial. The instruments of torture varied from whips and chains to machetes, hoes, spades and axes. 109s of people were killed here and their clothes removed and cleaned to be given to the next batch of prisoners. When the prison was finally shut down by the liberation army 4 young children were discovered hiding under one of those piles of old clothes.
