Jungles, beaches and snakes (Tim)

The bridge wasn't properly constructed outside Kampot town so the bus dropped us off early, leaving us dependent on the crowd of touts gathered to receive us. We went with the guy who could speak the most English, who happened to represent the guesthouse we wanted to stay at anyway. The building was old and cavernous, but cheap and so ideal. Kampot is a quiet town that we visited to take a tour up to the top of a nature reserve jungle mountain thing, but when we tried to book it through the guesthouse they told us that they wouldn't be running the tour the next day because the group that had tried to go today had got stuck in the rain and mud and had to turn back. We had to decide whether we were going to wait for a day or two for the rain to clear up (bearing in mind that it was the wet season, so we might have been waiting for a while and Kampot isn't really the most interesting place to while away a few days) or move on. The decision was made, after a brief discussion, to stay the night and get a bus the next day to the Cambodian coast. When we went to book our tickets at the guesthouse they told us that the trip was back on because they'd found a sturdier vehicle than the run-down, sad looking minibus outside, that could handle the roads.

That night we went out to a Sri-Lankan restaurant, and since we were the only customers the owner of the place talked to us for a while about how he'd previously worked in another Sri-Lankan restaurant down the road, but then set up his own and invented the dishes we were eating and were they nice? Yes, you won't find them anywhere else. He was a fairly endearing man, but we really just wanted to eat.
We had to rise early the following morning to start the trip, and after a hurried breakfast, piled into a 4x4 jeep along with a couple of other intrepid adventurers going on the trip. Normal Cambodian roads are in a dismal state - the standard practice of driving is to use whichever side of the road has the least holes, and on some occasions to go completely off the road to avoid crater-size gaps. It says a lot about the state of the mountain road we went on that day to say that it was far, far below the usual Cambodian standard. Sitting on small benches in the back of the pickup, I had to hold on tight to just stay on, a bit what I imagine a bucking-bronco to be like (and this was with the full suspension of a vehicle designed for offroading). Instead of building a road, I think they just decided to string together some of the country's worst potholes, fill them with rainwater and mud and call it a good job. After about 3 hours navigating these ups and downs (mostly ups, since it was a mountain), passing through quite dense jungle, we reached the first stop of the day. This was a villa where the King of Cambodia visited when on holiday around 50 years ago (before all the bad business with the Khmer Rouge). The building was mostly open, like a pavilion and overlooked the drop of the mountain. Through the mist that enshrouded the building the sea was just visible in the distance and when the wind happened to blow, Phu Quoc Island of Vietnam could be seen as a murky spec. The view itself explained why the King had his holiday home built there. A lot of time has passed since then, and you can see this in the disrepair of the building and the graffiti on the walls, If you used your imagination though, you could picture ornamental furniture and exquisite furnishings, all of the King's guests sat at a large table whilst being served course after course of the rarest and most expensive foods. The image of the Khmer Rouge clearing the place out and keeping stores of ammunition and guns there came just as easily.

It was another couple of hours in the jeep until the next stop-off point, but before we could get there, we hit a particularly nasty hole and something went 'crack' rather loudly, and then "rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr" as we continued for a couple of metres before rolling to a stop. The driver and guide jumped out of the front with looks on their faces that weren't exactly reassuring. The wheel was bent at a squiff angle, the way that a broken leg might. "I think it's the axle that's bent," advised a large American guy (who's name was Oak). The driver fetched a large toolkit from the back, jacked up the vehicle and began to expect the damage, whilst we got out and watched them work, discussing how long it'd take to walk back down (about 4 or 5 hours, I guessed). After 10 minutes, they found that the problem was that the suspension spring above the wheel had slipped (not that the axle had bent, luckily enough) and that it just had to be manoeuvred into place again, which involved levering the wheel with a plank of wood whilst doing something else (I wish I knew more about cars). 5 minutes later it was good to go again and we were on the road once more.

After an hour we reached the main attraction of the day - Boko Palace, an ex-casino, ex-hotel, with eeriness to match the house from The Shining or The Haunting. It was a huge derelict stone and brick building, the windows of which had long ago been removed. A thick layer of mist hung over the site and surrounding mountain-top plane, increasing the feeling of remoteness. When we pulled up in the jeep we were only a couple of metres from the building, but it appeared to us as a dark shadow in the bleak white. Just outside the entrance was a sign saying "No Sleeping", but I think you'd have to be seriously crazy or on 'Most Haunted' to want to spend the night. We wondered around the dark, wet and very creepy corridors whilst our guide prepared lunch, always pretty careful not to stray too far from each other.

As we ate, the guide explained to us the history of the place - before the era of Pol Pot, the building used to be a hotel and casino, where the rich came to spend their money (I assume the place was better furnished back then). There is a large 300m cliff unfortunately placed behind the hotel, where the occasional gambler who had just blown all his earnings jumped to his death. Then it was taken over by the Khmer Rouge, where the cliff was convenient for the disposal of any un-ideologically sound Cambodians. Even now, people still go there to end their lives by jumping off - the most recent being the previous year. Every December, Cambodians from all over the country make the tedious trip to the top of the mountain for a large New Years Eve party that is held in the derelict building. At the last party two people shot and killed each other (as a result of some drunken dispute about the headlights of a car) and several other people were injured by shooting, not to mention injuries received from the building itself (in many places water covers the floor, making it slippery). Would make for an interesting night, if you lived to see the New Year.

After eating, we had some more time to explore the labyrinth of corridors contained within the hotel. A thick layer of grime has built up on the walls over the years and many people who have visited have written messages and drawn pictures by wiping away the dirt. This gives the impression of the cells in a mental institution where the patient has gone mad and written on the walls (again, like The Shining). We took the opportunity to make the most of the eery nature of the house to make a few Blair-Witch style videos on my camera. In one, Ryan is the unseen beast and Shaun and I are the victims-on-camera. We ran away for a while, until Shaun slipped over in that water I was talking about and got absolutely soaked (the camera just managed to pick that up) and then Ryan came out and poured a bottle of water over his head, which made it look a bit like he was melting. The end result was actually quite scary/funny to watch.

The next stop was a large church on a hilltop about 300m away from the Boko Palace. The Cambodian Army used this as a base in fighting the Khmer Rouge in Boko, and a shootout between them (with the Khmer Rouge in the Palace) lasted 3 years. A short way from the church was an anti-aircraft gun that was also used at the time. The last place we visited that day was a large waterfall (the suspension spring slipped once more on our way there, requiring us to all get off and the guys to jimmy it back into place). We walked to the waterfall, which was actually fairly impressive - not as big as some we saw in Laos and Thailand, but really wide and powerful. It was getting late by this point, so after a while we decided to go home. This was easier said than done. A little after we started back, the spring slipped again but proved more difficult than before to fix. As a temporary remedy to the problem, the driver tied a piece of string and a spanner to something or other to keep it in place. This bit of improvisation proved to work quite well and we got a long way down the mountain before we hit a particularly bad hole and the string snapped (the spanner fell off long ago). This time it sounded worse than before..it took the guys much longer to 'fix' it, and a short while later it happened again. After 20 minutes it was clear we were going to have to walk (pushing the jeep every once in a while so it could coast down, all the while making a really bad grating sound). This only worked so long, until they decided to abandon the jeep altogether - it was a lost cause (until someone could come back the next day and tow it down). After a while walking, a jeep passed us with a Cambodian family inside. They stopped and offered us a lift, although there was only room for a couple of us (there were 12 in total). The two guides jumped straight in ("We'll get help, we'll get help"..hmm) and a couple of the other people on the trip, including Shaun and Tracy. This left Ryan, a middle-aged French man, a Welsh man named Andy (I think), Oak and I. By this time it was getting very dark very quickly, which was not only quite scary, being in a jungle on a mountain in Cambodia (where tigers, bears and snakes are common at night), it was also becoming increasingly difficult to see where the road was, and more importantly, where the road wasn't. The French guy was not as nimble as the rest of us and had quite bad eye site so stumbled over a couple of times, almost straining his hands and feet but luckily not as I have no idea how we would have got down then. Every time he fell I was trying to recollect my scout training of how to fashion a stretcher out of tree branches and a t-shirt. It wasn't so bad once our eyes got used to the dark..we heard some lizards and saw a few fireflies lighting up the night. After about an hour and a half we encountered an open-back truck about to pass us and managed to hail it down. The front cab was full and in the back was a collection of logs, petrol barrels, water canisters (that sort of thing) that we climbed on top to get a lift down. All of us got on, apart from Oak (despite the fact that there was more than enough room, if only he perched upon a barrel or something). Instead, he ran along behind the truck in quite a comical way - it reminded me of the t-rex chasing jeep scene in Jurassic Park. It was totally unnecessary..I think we later agreed he had a bit of a hero complex - wanting to get back unaided all by himself. Near the bottom the minivan of our guesthouse (the one that hadn't made it the previous day) was coming to find us and so we thanked the truck drivers and got in (this was a bit more comfortable) and after waiting a few minutes for Oak to catch up, we sped home - exhausted but pretty happy to be heading shower-wards. After cleaning we went out to get some food with (the guy I think is called) Andy and his girlfriend, and a Taiwanese guy also on the trip to discuss the events of the day.

The morning after we hired a taxi to drive the 70(ish)km to Sinhoukville - a place equivocal to Nahtrang in Vietnam..a few bars by the sea open till late and not much to do during the day. After all that tourism and adventure this set-up was ideal. We spent a few days relaxing and not really doing much of interest, but on the last night we wanted to try out the Cambodian tradition of eating snake at a place called (conveniently, we thought) "Snake House". We grabbed some motorbike taxis, but on getting to the restaurant found that the place wasn't called Snake House because they served snake, but because all around (and inside) the tables were snakes in tanks. Whilst still novel, this wasn't quite what we wanted. I asked if maybe they couldn't catch one and cook it up, but sadly they declined. Instead I had some pretty mundane chicken, which was quite an anticlimax.

The day after that we headed back to Phnom Penh to spend a few nights before going to Angkor Wat. I had an infection so spent the rest of that day and the next in bed. Ryan went with a tuk-tuk driver to get a new mp3 player as his broke, and happened to mention that we wanted to eat snake and coincidentally the driver used to work in a place that would cook some for us, so the guy took him to order 2 for later (at about $50 each). When we got to the restaurant (I'd say much posher than the places we're used to eating), a large number of waitresses swarmed us with beer menus until we ordered a couple whilst our snakes were caught from their box/tank. The manager asked us what liquor we wanted with the snake blood - whisky or wine, etc. etc. (settled with whisky as it was cheaper). We were told to go to the kitchen, where the first snake had it's head tied to a shelf (it was a cobra, I think) and one of the chefs was holding the tail of the snake to prevent it from wriggling. It was at this stage that we all started to feel quite guilty about paying to have snakes killed - like we would had we ordered beef and had to watch the cow get slaughtered. The chef started by slicing open the bottom half of the snake and pulling out some of the innards, to let the blood run into the jug with whisky in. After the snake had been drained, the head was cut off to finally kill it and the body taken away. A few moments later the chef offered us a small dish with the still-beating heart. Ryan took a part (it almost beat out of his hand) and swallowed it whole, drinking down a glass of the blood and whisky mix straight after (yum?). Shaun took the other part and did the same. We returned to our table and drank some shots of the blood and whisky (tasted like an alcoholic meaty broth..quite disgusting really as I don't like whisky) whilst talking to our tuk-tuk driver until they had got the other snake out, so we watched the whole grizzly process again. This time the heart was mine, so after poking it a bit I lifted the dish and swallowed the heart whole, as you're supposed to do. It wasn't really a pleasant feeling swallowing a ball of raw meat and it was strange to feel the heart still beating as it went down my throat into my stomach. It's traditionally believed in Cambodia that eating the heart and drinking the blood gives you strength, courage and fertility. I just felt a bit queasy. We sat and talked and drank some more until the dishes were brought out - a soup with sections of snake spine in and a salad with snake meat. We did all feel guilty so tried to eat as much as possible. The spine was quite a lot like fish with the amount of thin bones you had to strip the meat off, but tasted like something near chicken apart from the skin, which was slimy and not very nice. The salad was pretty good, but the snake meat tasted a lot more like seafood. By the time we'd finished, our tuk-tuk driver had had a few beers and was looking non-too sober, but he told us to "trust Windy" (for that was his nickname) and we didn't really have any other way of getting home so didn't have much of a choice. He did weave from side to side whilst driving, but that wasn't too far from the standard Cambodian style of driving and we got home safely, so all was well.

The next day we got a bus to Seam Reap, arriving at the bus station to see a massive crowd of tuk-tuk drivers wanting to take us (because if they can take you to your guesthouse then they can negotiate prices for day-trips to Angkor Wat, which is where their main business comes from) and a man who's soul job was to keep the drivers back by whipping them with a length of rubber tubing. We managed to find two good English speaking driver to take us to the guesthouse, and invariably organised for them to take us to the temples the next day.

A photo blog - at last! (Tim)

At last blogspot is allowing photos to be uploaded to the blog again. There is a massive backlog, but here are a couple for the time being until I have time to put more on.



Ryan shooting an anti-aircraft gun in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.



A patched-up Ryan after his motorbike crash in Ninh Bin, Vietnam.



Shaun and Mons in a boat when we visited the water caves in Ninh Bin, Vietnam.



Us looking pretty bad-ass in the shooting range in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.



Ryan having just absailed down a rockface on our day of canyoning in Dalat, Vietnam.



The guy from the guesthouse in Nahtrang holding a fish his brother just caught. We had no such luck.



Shaun looking very 70's Wedding Singerish in his suit in Hoi An, Vietnam.



Some fruit selling ladies on the beach in Hoi An, Vietnam.



The deaf man and his daughter who lead us up the large rocky hill in Ninh Bin, Vietnam.



The battered skulls of those that perished in the Killing Fields of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

To Cambodia and the Killing Fields (Ryan)

Seriously fellows and fellowettes, that title makes this blog sound like it'll be exciting - it won't. It's actually that long since we did whatever it was we did in the rest of Vietnam, getting to Cambodia, that I can't remember what we did when. As a result, you're all spared the monotony of my normal day-by-day style and I'll instead give you a paraphrased version of events.

So, Vietnam for starters, Madam? After knackering ourselves on that bike ride, which was really rather good fun, especially the 12km downhill stretch, we just stayed in bed late the next day in Mui Ne and did very little. We nearly went to the sand dunes at one point, but were too lethargic to even do that. What are sand dunes likely to be but lots of sand? We really couldn't make ourselves care enough to part with cash to see them. Mui Ne was quiet and basically consisted of one long road running parallel to the reasonably nice beach. Apparently the water was a tad polluted, but we never actually found out, being far too busy sleeping or indulging in other similar activities. On the night before we left, the night of an England game - I'm pretty sure versus Ecuador, but as ever I stopped watching not far through because our play was that sodding boring - we met a really nice Irish couple and a fairly good crowd in a cheap, local bar. Sadly we didn''t see most of them again because we were leaving the following day. That's Mui Ne in a nutshell: sitting/lying around a lot, plys a bit of drinking, pool playing and footie-watching to fill the later hours of the day.

Next stop on our hopefully whirlwind tour: Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City as it has been called for decades now, but nonetheless a name I don't thinkI ever used. Saigon just comes off the tongue so much easier. Rolling in in the early evening was practically like arriving at a strange, warped Picadilly Circus, with great big neon signs and video billboards looming above the street. We found a cheap guesthouse in the backpacker district and that was where we spent every day and night until we left (the district, not the gueshouse, you understand). Our sole venture outside the wee whitey-populated area was a day-trip to the Cu Chi tunnels, apparently left over from the Vietnam War. The fact of the matter is that these tunnels were fabricated and incredibly geared towards tourists and most people in the know we spoke to told us that there were far more authentic ones up north in the DMZ (de-militarised zone). There was also a shooting range built into these tunnels, so I fired an M16 and Tim and Shaun had a crack with an AK. Bullets were expensive though, so we figured we'd wait til Cambodia and do it properly there.

That was the only trip we went on from Saigon, pretty sick of trips as we were. The rest of the time we were staying up late in the Eden Bar, getting up pretty late, going to pretty nice restauraunts up and down the backpacker street, and generally milling around and relaxing. Tim and me both bought CDs, myself taking 25 albums on CD for about 33p each. Putting those only my MP3 player took some time, but kept me out of trouble for a time. Then came the inevitable question of leaving Vietnam and getting to ol' Cambodge. We decided to take a three day, two night trip in the Mekong Delta, including one night's homestay, as a part of which we'd get to go and help buy food for dinner, help cook it, partake in everyday tasks of sorts, ride some bikes around the rice-paddies and generally experience Mekong family life. Sadly, the house we were supposed to stay at was still being renovated on the night we were due to stay there, so we had to rebook with another company. Sadly the itinerary with this new company was the same as it was everywhere else, rather than being the somewhat unique experience we felt we would have had with the first company, but then you can't have everything.

With the second bunch we went to a coconut candy factory and bought an insane amount of candy, basically because it was buy five get one free and we had a sweet tooth. We also visited, during the trip, a place where we could have eaten some fish if we were prepared to pay extra, a place where they served us fresh fruit and played traditional music for us, a rice paper factory, a honey factory and a floating market. All in all a pretty good taste of river life on the Mekong. Sadly the homestay was basically a case of arrive in the pouring rain and sit and eat and drink and then go to bed, before waking up the following morning and getting back on a boat to leave again. Not quite the authentic family experience we might have had with the first company, sadly. It really was more like a small guesthouse, fairly impersonal on the whole. Never mind, though.

So, cut to the Cambodian border, where we ended up for the second night and England's excruciating penalty loss to Portugal, that Rooney sending-off, Cristiano Ronaldo looking agonised and angsty the whole game, before he perked up after knocking that last frigging penalty in. Smug git. Anyway, the Cambodian border, which we arrived at on a boat from Chau Doc in Vietnam. There we were, sitting at a table getting some grub, when a kid came up to the table - he couldn't have been more than eight - and banged a two pound coin down on the table. Evidently, he was looking to sell it to us. 'For how much?' I hear you ask. The answer: two dollars, or one pound. Although it felt slightly like exploitation, I did actually buy the said coin, storing it in a safe place until my return to England. It was a good deal for both of us really, because there's nothing he could do with a two pound coin, so the two dollars benefited him more than the useless disc of metal he had previously and I doubled my money. Wish all business transactions worked that way. After I'd bought that I figure they then pegged me as an easy target, so the same kid then went behind me and started giving me a back massage. Despite my repeated attempts to stop him, he continued unabated for a good long time and, though at times he literally pounded with his fists on the back of my neck, which quite hurt, I sort of felt obliged to pay him in the end. The final money-making scheme of this gang of little border urchins was to grab our rucksacks - or more specifically just mine, for they met little resistance - and haul them to our departing boat for us. I was convinced that the kid who took mine, who would have been outweighed by my rather heavy bag, would just fall over backwards trying to put it on, no matter how many times he flexed his muscles at me and told me he was, 'Strong'. To my great surprise, he grabbed the thing, strapped himself into it and took it all the way to my seat on the boat. Again, cash was parted with, but the service had been most useful and at least this one didn't assault my neck with his little fists.

The rest of the journey to Phnom Penh was fairly uneventful. After our transfer to a minibus, the guide started telling us all about his hotel in Phnom Penh and how it was 'safe' and 'cheap' and all those adjectives that should be used when trying to sell a hotel. When we arrived we didn't look at the rooms and rejected all of the moustached man's overtures, instead finding a tuk-tuk to take us to the Lakeside Guesthouse. I suppose now would be a good time to explain that since Saigon we had been travelling with a couple of volunteers - one of them starting PPE at Oxford this October, which will be handy - and they wanted to meet up with their volunteer friends, who were staying at the very chilled out Lakeside.

The road down the hotel was insanely rocky for such a popular route. Apparently up until about two weeks prior to our arrival it had been in even worse condition and the current state of affairs was only the result of a fortnight's work. It had only just had a drainage system installed, until which point in time, if it rained, faecal matter would literally sail down the street alongside the pedestrian traffic. Glad we arrived when we did, even if there were lethal, completely uncovered manholes every thirty feet. At the guesthouse, I ended up in a room with a broken toilet, a bathroom door that didn't lock and a shower whose feeble trickle struggled to get you wet. Oh yes, and it was on the fourth floor, so my calves got a bit of exercise every day. I just supposed that this was what back-packing in Cambodia was all about. Walking down the street to whatever restauraunt or bar you wished to visit, you were lucky to be asked less than ten times if you wanted a tuk-tuk or motorbike to somewhere, or to be solicited any less times by vendors of substances weird and wondrous. It seemed as though, in Cambodia, anything was on offer.

I don't remember doing an awful lot in Phnom Penh the first time, but one thing we did do was go on a tuk-tuk tour, on our first day, that took in the shooting range, the Killing Fields and S-21 Prison Museum. Before we left, a clearly opiated tuk-tuk driver came up to us, saying, 'You like sheep? Like killing?' We were some what confused, in part by his pretty dodgy English, until he unified the two questions for us. 'Want to shoot sheep? Shoot sheep with rocket launcher? Thirty dollars, shoot sheep with machine gun?' As I say, in Cambodia, it was all on the table. At the shooting range, which was our first stop of the day and where we thankfully were not offered a sheep, we fired a great range of guns between us. I had a whirl on an anti-aircraft gun, which Shaun also fired, and a Colt 45, again which I shared with Shaun. Shaun also fired a Tommy Gun, which wouldn't actually work properly so he also got to have a go with a K50 machine gun as well. Tim fired the Colt and chucked a hand grenade into a pond. All in all, we've fired a fair few firearms since coming away on our travels. I think the biggest thrill any of us had was Tim with his hand grenade, because once the pin's been pulled you know you've got to throw it right and not screw up or you could actually die and probably take everyone else in the vicinity with you. Certainly one for the grandkids.

So, as you can imagine, when we left we were in a strange state of euphoria that inevitably follows the firing of heavy weapons, at least for first-timers like us. We just sat in the back of the tuk-tuk weighed down with this leaden delight, smiling triumphantly at each other. But that mood would soon change. Visiting the Killing Fields was probably one of the most sobering and depressing things Í have ever done. As you tread the path from mass grave to mass grave, you are still walking on the teeth, bones and tattered clothing of the many thousands of victims of the Pol Pot regime. Our guide's parents and uncle were all killed by the Khmer Rouge. As you walk in, there is a massive monument which at first glance could be any pagoda anywhere, but upon closer inspection you realise is filled with skulls, almost nine thousand of them on shelves right the way up to the top. Some of them are smashed to pieces, others cloven with axes or gardening instruments, bludgeoned or shot. Our guide took us round the base informing us how several of these people had met their grisly end, with only one or two having had the privilege of being shot. Bullets were clearly felt to be too good for the majority, who instead got the axes, spades, hoes, hammers and bamboo sticks. We were sombrely informed how babies were thrown in the air for target practice or smashed off trees before being thrown in the pits, women were stripped naked, assaulted and then killed. There was even a tree whose leaves were sharp-edged and which was used to slowly, agonisingly decapitate the so-called 'enemies' of the Pol Pot regime. All in all he killed two million of a population of only six, at Cheoung Ek, the place we visited, and numerous other facilities across the country.

As if it could not get worse, we then visited S-21, the main Khmer Rouge prison. Of 20,000 former inmates, only 7 came out alive. Everyone else who entered was butchered. There were photos on the walls in the cells of what we can only assume were former inhabitants, electrocuted or lashed, beaten and battered. The gallery of pictures of the people who were killed were endless and the victim's were not only able-bodied adult males, but women, old and very young, schoolgirls and grandmothers, young boys and frail old men. The lower floor of one whole wing was taken up by the last photos of all of the victims and you had to wonder if the ones who made it to this display were only the ones lucky enough to be photographed. One of the wings had barbed wire covering it's entire front to prevent suicide. As if it would have mattered had the people leapt to their doom rather than let themselves be tortured. Apparently the Khmer Rouge preferred to personally kill everyone, rather than put their lives back in their hands. There was also a wing given to telling the stories of some of the victims, who basically just disappeared never to be heard of again, aside from when their confessions from S-21 were discovered after their death. These were people who had done absolutely nothing wrong. The regime killed those who it thought might become too powerful, those with glasses, intelligent people; basically anyone it felt threatened by. The final toll came to, as I mentioned above, two million, one third of the population of the country, all killed by their own countrymen at the behest of one madman dictator.

And despite all of the above, it was actually only after coming out that I, and no doubt everyone else, felt the most miserable. As you leave the prison, beggars surround you and remove their caps, for you to put money in. One man had no arm, one no leg, but there was one man in particular who shouldn't even have had to ask for money. His entire face looked like a melted waxwork, all the body and volume gone from beneath his cheeks, his skin instead just sagging, like a popped balloon draped over bone. One whole eye was covered by a drooping flap of skin and the other stared out of his head at an unnatural angle. His hair wouldn't grow out of one particular spot towards the front of his head and even the hand that held his cap was inhumanly disfigured. Not giving money to those people left me feeling more downright miserable than I have perhaps ever felt in my entire life. I could almost have burst into tears in the back of the tuk-tuk, going back to the lake. Instead I just dwelt on that man's face and how fast the mood had changed from one of strange, mechanistic ecstasy to one of grey sobriety and plain, old-fashioned depression.

That night no one felt much like going out, much like doing anything, in fact, but we ventured as far as Heart of Darkness, an apprently notorious Cambodian club where the young Khmer elite, childred of the rich, come and hang out, bringing with them firearms and bodyguards. It was a disappointment, generally befitting the malaise that had engulfed our day. Rather than some great, strobe-lit, slightly dingy and dangerous-looking den of something or other underworldly, we found ourselves in a reasonably trendy, rather small bar/club populated mostly by girls we assume to have been of the working kind. They certainly played pool pretty well, and that's a sure sign that, by the end of the night, you're gonna end up paying for what you've just gratefully received. We drank a bit, we danced, we left. As I said, no one felt much like partying.

The rest of Phnom Penh passed fairly uneventfully. We found an Indian restauraunt offering all you could eat for two dollars, so we ate there a bit. We had breakfast at the same, reasonably priced and reasonably tasty place every day. We also ate some quite delicious but fairly expensive pizza. The volunteer girls left, so we planned our next move, to a town near the coast called Kampot, from where we hoped to visit the nearby abandoned hill station of Bokor, perched on Elephant Mountain, high above the jungle. It sounded like an adventure in the making, so we booked our bus tickets and headed Kampot-way. On the morning we took the bus, the vision of that man's melted face was just about forgotten.