Cambodia was a huge shock. Soon after crossing the border, our bus stopped at a market next to the river we would ferry over shortly. Here were girls and woman in dirty clothes carrying baskets of everything from fish to friend insects in wicker baskets atop their heads, streets littered with piles of plastic garbage and food scraps, cattle walking the streets and sidewalks, naked toddlers running about with no supervision, and children banging on our bus windows and door yelling and begging for money.
Entering Phnom Penh the traffic was thick and the air putrid with pollution from whatever dirty fuels they burned. The streets and buildings here were almost as bad as the city by the river where we had stopped earlier on. When I disembarked along with the Englishmen and the Spaniard I met on the bus, I found that the tuk tuk drivers were far more insistant than elsewhere in SE Asia, and appeared more gruff as well. Later we would admit to having been scared by what we saw on our initial entry into Cambodia. As Salvador said, "I'm wouldn't want to go out here alone." We stuck together along with two Chinese-Malaysian girls and one Chinese girl that we met. We arrived at 1:00 pm and by 6:00 we had seen the most prominent "killing fields" in Cambodia, the S-21 sight, and found our way to a nice dorm. We drank that night, I ate grilled frog, bought some juicier crickets than I had previously had, and ate a snake on a stick. The next day we visited the S-21 prison (seperate from the killing fields), and the history museum where many Angkor relics are housed. By 2:00 that afternoon we were gone.
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