This was our final sight of Vietnam on land before we piled onto this little beast for the commute into Cambodia along the Mekong River.

Before long we were at the border for the usual immigration rigmorale. Note how wide the Mekong is here compared to when we first set sail on it a month ago.

I'm not sure who this dude is but he was there to greet us, and as per usual Kristina made a friend.

From there we screamed up the river for another hour, and were then transferred onto this thing which was considerably slower but did at least have an area out back to relax in the sun (and drink cheap beer).

As we cruised along, swarms of kids would emerge out of nowhere to wave to the funny-looking white people on the boat. I'm not sure how school works in these parts, but this lot weren't in it.

And if it wasn't kids waving and screaming at us, it was local villagers sitting around and creepily staring at us.

Several hours later we inched in to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, with one of the scariest recent histories I've heard of (right up there with the Holocaust), but I'll bang on about that tomorrow. Anyway, we're planning to be tripping about Cambodia for a bit over a week before crossing back into Thailand.

Phnom Penh, the capital and largest city of Cambodia, and home to more than two million of Cambodia's total population of over 14 million. Very few people I heard from or anything I've read had anything nice to say about Phnom Penh. Even Lonely Planet's wording suggests they've had to try hard to talk it up hehe. Be that as it may, our main reason for spending some time here is its history and that of Cambodia, but I'll come back to that. We hired ourselves a driver for a day in something that looks like a cross between a tuk-tuk and a horse and cart - it's basically just a trailer with seating tacked on to the back of a scooter. It does the trick though and they're everywhere, and are a godsend for tourists.

Asia - there's no place like it ;)

This was our first stop - a shooting range. We were handed a menu which included the following main courses: AK47 assault rifle, M16 assault rifle, a nondescript shotgun, a grenade launcher, and...

...a rocket launcher hahaha! There were some other outrageous goodies in there too which escape me right now. We chose our weapons and set about shooting at shit (specifically coconuts at a distance of about 30 metres, and that's not a racist term - they actually were coconuts). First up was a semi-automatic pistol, but I forget what type. KM52 seems to stick out in my mind but I just Google'd that and a KM52 is a Russian anti-aircraft gun hehe - this certainly wasn't one of those. I've fired a Glock before (in a shooting range in Philadelphia) but I don't think Kristina has even touched a firearm let alone fired one, and a family friend of hers just got shot in the shoulder about 500 yards around the road from where she lives (bloody America) so I thought it'd be good for her to pop off a few rounds from the little guy. Pop pop!

Next up, the shotgun hahaha! Boom boom! Notice I've got my game face on there. This thing makes a hell of a noise, the recoil really gives you a good shunt, and would be pretty effective at keeping those damn kids off your lawn.

Kristina had a blast and the recoil left its mark on her shoulder hehe.

Last up was the AK47. I would have preferred the M16 (not that I know anything about guns) but it was more expensive and as it was these three cost us $100. That's not as bad as the rocket launcher though - $350 for a single round, ouch!

Notice Kristina's got her game face on here, and notice also the hand on her shoulder - that was our supervisor dude trying to steady her hahaha! The AK47 didn't feel as effective as the shotgun at keeping kids off lawns, but was good fun nonetheless.

And I sure fucked up those coconuts. Remember kids, guns are bad, and if you want to play with them, come to Cambodia.

From there it was a dusty ride to our next stop. Outside of the city centre, I'd have to agree that Phnom Penh is pretty unattractive with some rather curious smells wafting around. However, it's barely any worse than some of the other spots we've seen once you venture outside of their city centres. Sure it's dirty, smelly, noisy, with trash everywhere and traffic everywhere, roadside shacks that look as though they'd implode you if blew on them hard enough and so forth, but it's an experience and seeing the locals doing their daily thing is really interesting to watch. If nothing else, to witness their lives and compare and contrast this to one's own upbringing is just as much of an attraction as all the temples and other bullshit us tourists flock to see.

Now for the serious stuff, and another history lesson.

Just as with Vietnam and much of the surrounding area, Cambodia was colonised by the French in the mid-19th century before gaining independence in the 1950s. The period thereafter was one of peace and prosperity, and a time of creativity and optimism - Cambodia's golden years. Phnom Penh grew in size and stature, and the temples of Angkor (more on them in a few days) were the leading tourist destination in Southeast Asia. This, however, proved to be the calm before the storm.

The Khmer Rouge was an indigenous Cambodian revolutionary movement formed in the 1960s - a guerrilla group driven by communist ideals and led by a man known as Pol Pot. In March 1970 Cambodia's prime minister, Norodom Sihanouk, was deposed in a military coup and overthrown by General Lon Nol. Sihanouk took up residence in Beijing from where he set up a government-in-exile and formed an alliance with the Khmer Rouge for support. This gave their movement legitimacy, with Sihanouk becoming the nominal head of a Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk's popularity in rural Cambodia allowed the Khmer Rouge to extend its power and influence, and when Lon Nol's government collapsed the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17th, 1975 and took over. That's when the shit hit the fan.

Upon taking power, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge immediately set about implementing one of the most radical and brutal restructurings of a society ever attempted. Its goal was to transform Cambodia into a giant peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative, untainted by anything that had come before. On that April 17th, the Khmer Rouge evacuated the entire population of Phnom Penh to camps in the countryside where they were forced to work as slaves for 12 to 15 hours a day (similar evacuations took place every time the Khmer Rouge took over a new city). Pol Pot envisioned a Cambodia absent of any social institutions like banks or religions or any modern technology. His means of implementation was to begin exterminating anyone who didn't fit this new ideal. Intellectuals, businessmen, Buddhists and foreigners were systematically wiped out, often by execution but sometimes simply by working people to death in the fields. This was pure genocide, akin to the Holocaust but at the hands of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot instead of Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. The advent of Khmer Rouge rule was even proclaimed "Year Zero".

The photos above and below are Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This is a former high school, taken over by Pol Pot's security forces who transformed the classrooms into torture chambers and renamed the facility Security Prison 21 (S-21).

 In the early months of S-21's existence, most of the victims were from the previous Lon Nol regime and included soldiers, government officials, as well as academics, doctors, teachers, students, factory workers, monks, engineers, etc. Later, the party leadership's paranoia turned on its own ranks and purges throughout the country saw thousands of party activists and their families brought to S-21 and murdered. It is estimated that around 17,000 people were imprisoned here during the Khmer Rouge rule, with up to 1,500 prisoners at any one time. They were repeatedly tortured and coerced into naming family members and close associates, who were in turn arrested, tortured and killed. Barbed wire was put up to prevent prisoners from committing suicide by jumping from balconies. Of the estimated 17,000 people imprisoned here, only seven are known to have survived. Seven.

Within two or three days after they were brought to S-21, all prisoners were taken for interrogation. The torture system was designed to make prisoners confess to whatever bogus crimes they were charged with by their captors. Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured with electric shocks, searing hot metal instruments and hanging, as well as through the use of various other devices. Some prisoners were cut with knives or suffocated with plastic bags. Other methods for generating confessions included pulling out fingernails while pouring alcohol on the wounds, holding prisoners' heads under water, and waterboarding. Typical confessions ran into thousands of words in which the prisoner would interweave true events in their lives with imaginary accounts of their espionage activities for the CIA, the KGB, or Vietnam. Needless to say,  it is believed that the vast majority of prisoners were innocent of the charges against them and that the torture produced false confessions which led to their murder. Note the bullet hole in the skull above. How the fuck some people sleep at night is beyond me.

For the first year of S-21's existence, corpses were buried near the prison. However, by the end of 1976, burial spaces had run out so the prisoners and their family were taken here to the Choeung Ek extermination centre, the best-known of the Killing Fields where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the Khmer Rouge regime all over the country. The shot above is the memorial stupa, containing the skulls of more than 8,000 victims. Prisoners were often bludgeoned to death to avoid wasting precious bullets, and as such most of these skulls have corresponding wounds.

While wandering through this peaceful former orchard, it's hard to imagine the brutality that unfolded here. See the pits in the ground there - they are/were the mass graves that all up contained 8,895 bodies. Occasionally when this area gets a torrential downpour of rain, teeth get washed up to the surface, as well as rags that were once the prisoners' clothing.

As the sign says, this is the killing tree. Executioners would apparently swing babies and toddlers by the legs head-first into this tree, before discarding their now-lifeless bodies in this pit. Unbelievable. So how was this allowed to happen without foreign intervention? The short answer is no one really knew what was going on here. The Khmer Rouge kept the borders tightly shut, and although huge numbers of refugees managed to flee Cambodia, I don't think the full extent of what was happening was really understood by the international community.

Because of several years of border conflict with Vietnam during the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, Pol Pot, fearing a Vietnamese attack, ordered a pre-emptive invasion of Vietnam in December 1978. His Cambodian forces crossed the border and looted nearby villages. Well that didn't go down very well, and Vietnam (well and truly used to war by now after their involvement in World War II, the First Indochina War, and the Vietnam War which they referred to as the American War - all totalled spanning over 30 years) launched a full-scale invasion on Christmas Day 1978 and fucked them up, capturing Phnom Penh just two weeks later. It was the Vietnamese troops who first discovered the Killing Fields and realised the full extent of what had been happening right next door for almost four years. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge retreated west, and it continued to control certain areas near the Thai border for the next decade.

It is still not known exactly how many Cambodians died during those years of Khmer Rouge rule. The most accepted estimate is that at least 1.7 million people perished at the hands of Pol Prick and his crew of flunkies. Pol Pot continued to lead the Khmer Rouge as an insurgent movement until 1997, when he was arrested and sentenced to house arrest by his own followers after killing one of his closest advisers. However, he died in 1998 in a tiny jungle village, never having faced charges.

History lesson over, and we headed back into the city. Cambodia is currently celebrating its independence from France, which took place on this day in 1953. There was some sort of concert going on (complete with an Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe on stage), and a lot of fireworks. Happy days. Cambodia today is stable and at peace, although not without serious ongoing issues including corruption, income disparities, inflation, and ecological devastation.

The riverfront during rush-hour - there is actually a four-lane road under all that.

We found this rooftop bar and Italian restaurant for dinner, and felt fucking glad that we've never known such hell in our lives as this country has. And that's it for our short stop in Phnom Penh. Tomorrow we head further inland for a couple days in Battambang.

We got our first look at rural Cambodia by road today, and while it's hardly Laos, it's still pretty damn nice (and flat).

Roadside village huts on stilts - everywhere.

The Cambodian People's Party is the current ruling political party. There are signs like this (though much smaller) all over Phnom Penh, and billboards like this at dozens of spots along the main road we were following today. Evidently they like to remind the people who they voted for.

We arrived in Battambang in time to see the sunset from the 4th-storey restaurant above our hotel. This is apparently the second-largest city in Cambodia, and yet its population is just 250,000. The place feels like a big town rather than a city, but there it is. Anyway, we're here for a couple days, and tomorrow we'll be seeing and doing one of the more random things of the trip so far.

Today is the 11th day of the 11th month of the 11th year of this century - 11/11/11, so there you go. Today is also Remembrance Day of course.

Anyway, this is Battambang by day, but we'll be checking it out more closely tomorrow.

Instead, we jumped in a tuk-tuk and headed into the back roads outside of town.

We eventually got dumped here in the neighbouring village of O Dambong. These contraptions are the ingenious Cambodian bamboo trains, known locally as a norry. They are nothing more than a light bamboo frame which is plonked onto a pair of axles. A fan belt connects the rear axle to a little six-horsepower gasoline engine that hurls you along at up to 50km/h, and that's it! They take barely a minute to throw together, and then you're away.

This network of tracks was originally built by French colonial settlers, but was abandoned when the Khmer Rouge regime effectively shut it down. In the years following the Khmer Rouge devastation, Cambodians were struggling to rebuild their lives. With roads in disrepair and few means of transport such as buses and motorbikes, the norry was an ingenious and practical solution. With its launch, the population now had an important albeit rudimentary transport system able to haul products, produce, and people at minimum cost. The norries might look a little flimsy but the bamboo construction is actually very strong. Cattle and pigs would be taken to market, tonnes of vegetables and rice would be delivered, people could get to clinics, and so forth. In its heyday during the 1980s, there were more than a thousand norries operating along 600km of track. Nowadays, little more than a hundred still run, and cover much shorter distances. The track is in quite a bad state and at 50kmh you get thrown round a little, and a huge jolt when you go over points where two rails meet hehe. It's great fun though :) Video here.

About 10km down the track we arrived at our destination, and our train was disassembled and left beside the track so the locals can pass. Video here of our man putting our train together.

This is the little village of O Sra Lav, just one of countless villages that dot the countryside and they're quite amazing to visit. This one was obviously geared towards all the tourists that get the norry out here, and had the usual collection of silk scarves and whatnot.

We made friends with the local kids who all had a surprisingly good grasp of basic English. We asked if they are taught English at school but apparently they're not - they learn from communicating with all the tourists! That being the case, they also knew simple French and Spanish - impressive. One of them was a keen singer, and sang us a Cambodian version of Michael Jackson's You Are Not Alone hahaha - video here.

We then went for a wander around their village and checked out their main source of income (besides us tourists) - a local brick factory.

After all that excitement we started the noisy and jolting ride back towards Battambang, passing through more of the gorgeous Cambodian countryside. That dude is fishing by the way, I think.

Along the way we passed cattle on the tracks, chickens on the track, and randoms on the tracks.

And inevitably, we came face-to-face with an oncoming norry - this one with Asians taking photos of us as I took one of them. In such cases, the lighter of the two norries is disassembled to allow the heavier one to pass.

Apparently an imminent rail line upgrade is in the pipeline which will put an end to this transport system. I'm not sure what impact that will have for the local villages that depend these rails but Battambang is going to lose one of its major attractions, the rest of which we'll be checking out tomorrow.

Our second day in Battambang, and we hired another scooter for the occasion to scope it out. As I mentioned the other day, Battambang (population 250,000) is apparently the second-largest city in Cambodia (population 15 million). The city centre is nothing out of the ordinary compared to what we've seen over the last 45 days, but get outside of it a bit and it all starts to feel like a small town. There are several small wats (temples) dotted all over the show, a big river cutting it in half, and it's all just bloody nice really.

Hey, have you ever wondered what a Cambodian school looks like? Probably not, but regardless now you know.

That bamboo train we did yesterday, this is another section of its track (this bridge crosses the river) though considering the mass of overgrowth behind me I assume it's disused. So these two thought they'd put it to use and take a short cut, and twice the guy in front nearly fell off and through the bridge as I was standing there watching hahaha!

Anyway, as we do, we headed out of town and off the beaten track.

First we headed north, and this was to be our first stop - Wat Ek Phnom, but it looked pretty uninteresting from the outside so I shot this from the road rather than pay to go in (because that's how I roll) and we ventured further.

So Cambodia's largest city (Phnom Penh) is home to about 15% of the country's population, its second-largest city (Battambang) is home to just 2%, and its third-largest (Siem Reap, where we're heading tomorrow) is home to a solitary percent. The reason for the low numbers are these little village communities which are absolutely everywhere. I'm not sure what the rest of the country is like but during the five-hour bus ride here the other day we never seemed to be completely in the middle of nowhere - there was always something or someone around. In other words, I think Cambodia's population is fairly evenly dispersed, which means its main cities are fairly quiet and a nice change of pace from the norm.

And one thing all these villages have in common are the kids who are so keen to shout out "Hello!" to every white person they see, and occasionally you get the "How are you? Where are you from?" etc. (although it's often shortened to just "How you? Where from?" hehe). Even the adults will smile and acknowledge you - very friendly bunch.

We cruised through a couple such villages (video here) and eventually found some nothingness (although the next village was within sight just a bit further up the road).

We turned around and started heading back towards town, but via some more back roads courtesy of Google Maps and my GPS. Seriously, this is one of most enjoyable things to do while travelling - steal or hire yourself a car or scooter or bicycle or whatever, and get off the beaten track. Go find yourself some randomness that few tourists would ever see and discover the real side of the country as opposed to the same-old same-old tourist haunts.

I have no idea what this is. We couldn't find the wat we were originally looking for when we ventured out this way (and the locals had no idea what the weird white people on the scooter were talking about), but we found this instead.

So I'd love to tell you everything you never wanted to know about it, but I can't. It does have a massive reclining Buddha though with a rather satisfied look on his face.

From the unknown wat we drove a ways south to this - Phnom Sampeau. This is a complex of temples, and somewhere nearby are the Killing Caves of Phnom Sampeau - another memorial containing the bones and skulls of some of the people bludgeoned to death at the hands of the Khmer Rouge (much like the Killing Fields we visited outside of Phnom Penh a few days ago).

However, my main reason for coming here was the views. The parts of Cambodia we've seen so far have been as flat as a pancake that's been run over by a tank, so I've been looking out for some hills from which to get an aerial view of this awesome countryside. Not bad :)

More monkeys! According to Lonely Planet, these are macaques (I'm still not sure what those monkeys in Ha Long Bay were - the ones that attacked everyone and stole their stuff hahaha!). These guys were everywhere, but unlike in Ha Long Bay they had no interest in us at all - no one got attacked and no one had their camera or bag stolen. Pity.

With the sun setting fast, we once again took the road less travelled (and for good reason - it's full of holes) towards our final stop of the day.

358 steps...

Unexploded land mines...

Phnom Banan (or what's left of it) - an 11th-century temple that locals claim was the inspiration for Angkor Wat. If you know your shit then that'll mean something to you, and if not well you'll find out over the next few days as Angkor Wat (the biggest of big deals for Cambodians) is our next destination.

I had this whole place to myself as Kristina couldn't be arsed climbing 358 steps and I guess everyone else had left. It was quiet, the dusk views were great, and the ten minutes I sat on my ass just staring out over this was probably the first real moment of peace I've had all trip. She's a hectic continent this one. Anyway, at 7am tomorrow (I hate early starts) we jump on what is apparently Cambodia's most enchanting boat trip (whatever that means) through to Siem Reap. From there we head back to Bangkok (or will try to) which is still severely flooded - good times.