Battambang...

Battambang is the second biggest city in Cambodia but you don't feel it once you are there. There are motorbikes everywhere but you don't feel like if you were in a big city. I arrived here by my own again, I left in Siem Reap the people I had been traveling with since Vientiane in Laos, we were going to different directions now. It was sad to say good bye, but the trip must continue.

Battambang is one of these cities that people usually don't stop. In the city there isn't any attraction, but as soon you leave the city and you get in the countryside you see the real Cambodia.

Yesterday I took a motorbike with a driver that brought me to see some temples 30 km away from Battambang. We were riding throw smalls roads, well, I don't know if I should call them roads so they were very damaged and with no pavement and plenty of cars were stuck on the side of the road. We crossed local villages and the driver was very nice and was explaining everything. He was 47 years old so he knew the histories of the places we went and we talked a lot about the Khmer Rouge and nowadays politics in Cambodia.

At the end of the day we took a ride on a bamboo train, that is an small train built from bamboo with an small engine on it. The bamboo trains have been an unofficial part of the Cambodian transport network for years using the railway network to Phnom Penh that nowadays only departs once a week. The only problem is that there is only one track so if two trains meet, the one with the lightest load has to be taken off the rails so the other can pass.

Today I've been all the day in an orphanage of children who has been injured with mines and bombs. There are 5 spanish volunteers on the orphanage and even I went to a Khmer class with them.

C iu!

first impressions from Cambodia

The arrival to Cambodia was very hard. After the quiet days in Laos, I was not used anymore to the people in the street trying to sell you everything, pushing you to get a tuk-tuk, little children asking for money...

We crossed the border to Cambodia on Friday. The trip was horrible, we were in a minivan with more people than seats, and the road (or something like that was pretending to be a road) was awful, we even have to get off the van to push it...

Yesterday we couldn't get out of the Guest House, it was one of these days very humid, that you just want to spend the day on an hamac reading a book.

Today was different, we got up early and hired a tuk-tuk that brought us to see the tourism high-lights of Phnom Penh. Honestly there is not too much to see but a lot of things to feel. In Phnom Penh, the main touristic activities are related on the genocide of "Khmer Rouge", the communist political party of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

Khmer Rouge overtook the country on April 1975 and created Democratic Kampuchea (KD), a new communist regime with Pol Pot as leader.

It was one of the most lethal regimes of the 20th century. Khmer Rouge imposed a radical form of agrarian communism where the whole population had to work in collective farms or forced labor projects.

Khmer Rouge wanted to eliminate anyone suspected of involvement in market activities. Suspected capitalists encompassed professionals and almost everyone with an education and people with connections to foreign governments

So today, we visited a School that was converted as prison during the regime (S-21). I was very hard so different pictures was showing what was going on during that walls only 30 years ago. And was even worse to visit the killing fields were the people were killed and buried. All the way back we were in silent in the tuk-tuk.

I've spend all the evening reading a book from a child survivor of Pol Pot's brutal regime, Luang Ung, called "First they killed my father".

Well, tomorrow we are heading to Siem Reap!

I'll keep you updated!