Depressive and uplifting tourism
For those who don’t know Cambodia has one of the most horrific pasts. During the 1970’s a group called the Khmer Rouge overthrew the government and had some brilliant idea to abolish the currency and hospitals, plant land mines everywhere, kill all the smart people and move everyone to the country to be farmers. Brilliant. So in a nut shell they screwed there own country over and killed and tortured around a million people, with people still dying today from the thousands of landmines still around. Pretty much making Cambodia one of the poorest countries around. And this was only 30 years ago so there a more than usual amount of people missing limbs around. So the main tourist attractions here are the mass graves of the killing fields and the torture prison called S-21. What a depressing day, but good to learn a bit more about the country’s history. The guest house we are at shows the movie “the killing fields’ so was good to be able to see that as well. In fact the guest house not only offers movies, food, games, bus services and all the usual tourist stuff, its also seems Cambodia offers more drugs than Amsterdam, so along with pizza and milkshakes you can also get the ‘happy option’ which wasn’t really making all the other people that happy, mostly meant everyone watched movies all day. But anyway for Phonom Phen offered a bit more.
As well as the killing related attractions we also had an amazing (and expensive) dinner at a restaurant run by an NGO with incredible food, Jeff even brought their cookbook so hit him up about cooking you dinner sometime.
Another reason for being in the capital was to visit a group called Young Life, chrstian youth workers that do similar stuff to us back home so we had lunch with a few of them, visited a school and went to a youth group night.
We had also organised to visit mine and Jeff’s sponsered kids, from World Vision which is an aid organisation that me and Jeff work for back home. For those of you who know world vision, know that your money is being well spent and they are doing amazing stuff. So we sent the day hanging out with world vision outside of the city seeing what they do and a few projects. Meeting our kids was really cool and also a bit awkward as langage barriers are always a problem. But the girl I sponser is lovely, really quite and shy but cool and was great to meet her and her dad. So all of you go sponser a child now! www.worldvision.com, its al over the world and I can tell you first hand that they are not stealing your money.
So that was the end of our good-deeds then it was off to the coast for some sun.
Tags: Cambodia, Travel
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Keep going Arnika love your stories.Terry