Welcome to Cambodia ... off to Phnom Penh

We took a boat from Chau Doc to Phnom Penh. Although it was not the first boat trip, it is always exciting to see life not from the street side, but from the water side.

The border was annoying again, they always try to collect some illegal extra fee (e.g. "stamp fee"). Then you argue for a long time, they claim "That's how it is", we say "Why? Where does it say that? ... then there must be a receipt for it", and so on. It's always the same game at border crossings ... sometimes you're lucky and they give in ... but sometimes they don't! In any case, it's a bit annoying ...

In no man's land between Vietnam and Cambodia we met Mariann and Fahid from Munich. After a fun ride, we spent almost all of our time in Cambodia with them.

Phnom Penh has developed and we had a good time in a very emerging city. There are no major highlights, but many little things to see. We had nice days here with very nice encounters! In addition, there is great food and you can go out nicely, although Mariann and Lisa were not exactly welcome in the red light district ... a few drinks were okay 😉

What is still somehow present is the chapter of the Khmer Rouge, probably simply because it is not so long ago. What this group did during the 3 years and 8 months of their rule cannot be described. A third of the population was killed on the way to an absolute agrarian country, including Stone Age communism. Especially those who seemed intelligent. Wearing glasses, having soft hands, or speaking another language was enough for a death sentence. After the regime, for example, there were only 50 doctors in the entire country. You can't describe all of this, especially not the brutality. Nevertheless, we found it important to also deal with this part of more recent history in order to better understand the present. We visited the S21 torture prison, a large interrogation prison in the premises of an old school. Although thousands were interrogated here, only a single-digit number of people survived. Really dark. They were tortured until they confessed ... most of the time they didn't even know why. They were forced to come up with mistakes that they could then confess and the guards would have further reasons for torture. In the end (often after months of torture) they were sentenced to death and taken to so-called killing fields and killed. There are dozens of these killing fields in Cambodia. We visited one near Phnom Penh. It's very heavy stuff. Due to a lack of ammunition, the people there were beaten to death in rapid succession with loud music, with bare hands or with batons - thousands ... With their brutality, they spared no one, not even women, children, and even infants. Absolutely terrible ...

Despite all of this and despite the fact that an entire generation of educated people was wiped out, the country is looking forward. The people are very open and friendly. There are still / again many monks who stand out in their orange robes everywhere. They usually smile, greet kindly and amuse themselves with my (-Daniels 😉) beard. But the monks are no longer what they used to be 😊 Under their robes, they usually produce a smartphone, take pictures of each other with pleasure or go into the depths of the internet. Apparently, this no longer counts as abstinence for modern monks.