We went to the shooting range first. Shooting a gun has been on my bucket list for awhile now, and I thought it would be awesome to cross that one off by shooting AK 47s and a Russian handgun in Cambodia. I knew a gun would be powerful but I was pretty blown away with that first shot. And then when they put it to automatic mode it's pretty insane. Mark shot a video of me and I'm screaming half the time haha. The handgun was better but I was still a bit nervous as it was also more powerful than it looks. We each took turns on both of these guns, running up a tally of $150 between us 3. Which, if you consider what it cost at home, was a decent deal. And the setting couldn't of been more ideal. Shooting off guns in a country that has seen some crazy stuff in the past 40 years made it more awesome.
Next up was the killing fields. Let me try to explain as best as I can without having to google. We visited "the killing fields" but this was one of MANY. What many don't know or aren't hugely educated on (nor were we) is that there was a mass civil genocide in Cambodia from 1975-1979. In short, the Pol Pot regime took over and recruited young peasant people, promising them a good life in return for their work. This sounded good to young people who had nothing. Soon the regime gained more power and began to take over the city dwellers, ie: the people who had money, the doctors, lawyers, etc. They bombed hospitals, schools and monuments. What I got out of it was, they basically wanted to get rid of the middle upper class and build a new society of their own. In doing so they successfully killed 1-2 million of their own people. That's one out of every 4 citizens. Imagine Canada doing that? No, you can't. They killed men, women, children and babies. The killing field we were at was a place where they would bring people by the truck load, and drop them off to by executed. This site has deep trench like areas where mass burials have now been dug up. Walking around the grounds, you can't imagine what took place there. There was a big tree at one spot and it read that this was the tree they would use to take a baby by its legs and hit its head against the tree and toss it into the mass grave, probably infront of their mother. At another tree it said that this was where they would hang a big music player so they could blare a song to cover up the screams and moans of those being killed. Overall, a very awakening afternoon. Very educational but very sad. Later on that day, our tuk tuk driver Sam was having a beer with us and I asked him if he was affected at all by the genocide and he said that he had lost his brother and parents. A very sad historical few years for that country. Sam says the government in Cambodia is still very bad and very corrupt, but it's slowly, slowly getting better. Hopefully that continues.
After 4 glorious nights in Phnom Penh, we headed to Siem Reap, the access point to the Angkor Wat temples. Unfortunately, the day we arrived, the city's power had been cut. Someone had crashed into a pole somewhere and cut the power off in the city. Not good news when its +40 degrees and humid. Apparently they get their power from Thailand so it was going to take a long time to get it fixed. Fortunately, power in the city was being rotated. But, our first night there we had nothing but a ceiling fan that went on and off throughout the night. Lets just say I slept for max 2 hours, then layed there in my own sweat the rest of the time. I can now say I've gotten up in the middle of the night to have a cold shower.
We headed to Angkor Wat in the morning. We had around 4 hours there and had a driver take us around the the major temples. These architectural wonders were built from 1113-1150 AD. 37 years of man power. Elephants hauling huge stones from 60km away, and men manually creating these masterpieces.. For 37 years straight. Now, Angkor Wat is the biggest tourist attraction in Cambodia, drawing 3 million people or more a year. Touring around these temples made me realize what a human faucet looks like, because all 3 of us were literally pouring sweat for hours. The heat is innnnsaaane. And it didn't help that when we got to our hotel they had no power. So we suffered through another few hours of hell before leaving for a different hotel. Had a much better sleep that night!!!
We are now in the city of Bangkok! Hello Thailand! More to follow...
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