Floating Village/Phnom Penh (Cambodia Part II)

The temples (including Angkor Wat, the Bayon, etc) were amazing, to the point that despite my statement at the end of the last post that I was done posting pictures of them I can't help but add a few more.

I actually can't remember which temple this is (Bakheng?) but I remember that we liked it

Another representative stone carving. If you like this kind of thing we have at least 4000
more pictures almost just like it (ancient Cambodians had mad stone carving skills)...

Another shot with another great tree

As breathtaking as Siem Reap and the ruins and temples in the Angkor complex were, it turned out our favorite parts of the trip were in the days that followed. Despite the genocidal horrors of the Khmer Rouge (could this really have happened during our lifetime?) and the subsequent poverty, Cambodians are still remarkably upbeat, generous and willing to talk to foreigners. The pictures that follow show our trip to the floating village outside of Siem Reap (the people, who all live on boats, move with the seasonal tides), and finally to Cambodia's capitol city of Phnom Penh.

Note the barge-like houses in the background

Another inhabitant of the floating village

Sunset...at the river village

Royal Palace in Phnom Penh

Ditto

After taking in the palace we headed for a local park, where we got a taste of what it would be like to live in Phnom Penh: families relaxing, adults letting off steam after work by playing soccer, and children entertaining each other and the cute blond-headed foreigner.

Unlike in Thailand (where the monks all wear the same color of robes) the
Buddhist monks in Cambodia were a bit more colorful

Sunrise over the Mekong river: the silver lining to
Maisy's insistence on waking up literally 'at the crack of dawn'

This was the most humbling experience of our trip: the Tuol Sleng Genocide museum. At this site thousands of innocent Cambodian men, women and children were tortured and murdered. Of the 7.5 million Cambodians living during this time period (1975-79), 1.5 million were murdered through starvation, forced labor, or in facilities like this. As a proportion of the the total population the Khmer Rouge's purge is considered the most lethal of the 20th century.

In a cell of this size dozens of innocent prisoners would be held by there own government. As Dianna noted there was an amazing disparity between the wonders that man can accomplish at Angkor, and the horrors that we sometimes inflict on each other, as represented here.

We were feeling kind of bad about things after the museum, but this guy helped cheer us up after we reentered town.

Dianna and Maisy sporting their new sunglasses

Our strategy for bag retrieval at the Chiang Mai airport is simple:
Maisy distracts people and I grab suitcases as fast as I can.