Battered and Bonged

The rest of Siem Reap was a blur of fried eggs, pizza and even more food that we didn't want but ate all the same, and then we got on the boat to Battambong. We had heard that the journey there would be fantastic. It simply wasn't.

Despite the fact that Helen and I had a storming row because I'd bought some overpriced mouldy cheese from a lady at the dock, the journey was nothing but dangerous, with tree branches whipping you across the face every two seconds and poisonous looking insects flying at you from every which way. More expensive than the fucking bus too. Not recommended.

In Battambong we went to the 'Killing Caves'. These were caves that the Khmer Rouge had herded hundreds and hundreds of people into and executed them in an industrial fashion. We went there, not knowing what to expect, and we were sort of shocked at how the place was treated.

I'm not sure if it was always that way, as we went on a big Cambodian holiday, but it was full of teenage Cambodian kids running about, smoking and laughing and joking around. This didn't really fit with my image of what it was to be a memorial site, or indeed how to act at one, and it weirded me out to the point that I no longer had any interest in what we were doing there.

I was expecting a strange place with a strange atmosphere, but not like that at all. Perhaps this is me being very British about my mourning, and perhaps too close-minded. But for a site kept to remind us of the depths that human brutality can reach, and for it to have happened such a relatively short time ago, it was slightly upsetting.

Our next stop was Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia and the smelliest place on the planet. We didn't do a great deal here apart from get in a fight with two wanker ex-pats who were throwing stuff at a street kid, uploaded A LOT of pictures of temples onto Spacebox and also go to S-21 - or Tuol Sleng as it is now called.

Tuol Sleng was the Khmer Rouge's number one prison - a dungeon, really - for 'political prisoners', and is now kept as a museum in memory of the atrocities that occurred at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Again, like the Killing Caves, this was pretty harassing, but it was also a very good museum.

The down-point was, again, seemingly thoughtless people. Tourists filming - filming - the graphic photos of the people that had died there in the most horrific circumstances. One man was videotaping the film about the prison and the crimes that went on there. Who the fuck are you going to show that to?

But perhaps, again, this was my own problem. But I found it hard to concentrate with those people there.

We had to stay in Phnom Penh longer than we wanted to as we needed to get our Vietnam visas organised. This took three days and as soon as we had them we shot down to a fantastic beach-side town called Sihanoukville, where it was cheaper to drink beer than water and everyone wanted to give you drugs. Everyone.

The annoying thing was our Visas took three days to come back because they had been sent to Sihanoukville to get processed!


Here we went on a really great snorkelling trip to three different islands, and I got the most sunburned I have ever been. The red was not so much a colour as a noise.

This scorching of my otherwise perfect body was due to the fact we are, or rather were, taking the cheapest anti-malarial tablets that we could find and they have suitably unstable side-effects. One of which is: 'You might as well be ginger'.

Speaking of gingers - we also, of course, met up with Ed and Nicky again and spent lots of time frolicking in the sea and eating curry and fish. We spent quite a fair bit of time in an Israeli run place that did really good curries, and would have spent our last day there, but when we walked in they were 'having a day off'. A day off from smoking weed and telling Cambodian people what to cook, presumably. Giant craziness.

It was here that we met an old guy that looked like Jesus and spent his time wearing minuscule shorts and smoking copious amounts of pot. Turned out his name was actually Moses. How we laughed.

Ed and I got into a little ruckus with some young children when we refused to buy yet more fucking bracelets. One girl went as far as saying she was going to 'kill and eat' us. Nice kids.


This place was a nice little spot to gather ourselves after the rather hard-hitting history of Phnom Penh had seeped into our pores. It's an odd feeling getting drunk and enjoying yourself in places like this. There's a lingering sense of guilt, but it's hard to put your finger on what it is that is making you feel guilty.

Anyway. Having relaxed for a few days, we did something I haven't done since '67.

Grease up my foxhole and head back into 'Nam.*

*This will be the last reference I make to 'being in 'Nam'' like I'm some sort of war veteran, it's utterly distasteful and you should all be ashamed of yourselves.