From Saigon we went by night bus to Phnom Penh - this was another approx. 10hr ride and quite ok (not too much delay except for the departure, border crossing went quite smooth,...)
Once arrived and outside the bus we were immediately surrounded by tuk tuk drivers offering us to bring us to a hotel for a "very good price"...aaaand, in addition, it was very very hard to get rid of them - the only way out we found was to go into a restaurant - by that they still waited out front but at least left us alone (...) and we could recover from our trip and check the hotel options at hand.
Once decided we went to the hotel, rooms were ok, checked it and then walked into the city (after some short rest).
Phmon Penh is a really nice city - I was quite surprised by how nice and relaxed (given the recent history of Cambodia). There are quite a few Boulevards, many restaurants and shops and esp. in the evening a lot of Cambodians are outside in the park and the whole atmosphere is very friendly.
We only stayed for 2 days in Phnom Penh - on the first day we walked around, had a look at the city, etc. and on the 2nd day we rented some scooters (traffic is way more relaxed than in Vietnam --> ok for dumb drivers like us :)) and went to the main sites of the city which date back to the time of the Red Khmer - namely the S21/
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields where the corpses of those tortured and murdered in S21 (est. 20'000) were buried.
Both sites were were tough but for me the Killing Fields were worse - main reason being that they "replaced"an old Chinese graveyard and the whole area appears very calm, relaxed, ... - thus knowing that e.g. babies were killed hear by smashing their head against a tree, "branches" of sugarcane trees growing there were used as knifes, ...
Nonetheless, both are a must see and for esp. for the Tuol Sleng museum I strongly recommend to take a guide (unfortunately there was none available when we got there) - might be even worse but there are not too many descriptions inside and one can only guess what happened (which is painful enough though). Same applies for the killing fields but the descriptions are a lot better there.
All in all I felt quite taken back to my visit to Mauthausen - simply in regard to the depressing effect of it. What really surprised me (and thats where I see a huge difference to Europe/ Austria) is the way the Cambodians handle what happened - they (more or less) openly talk about it and do not try to hide it or play down their role (which would be very hard as in the pol pot era about 1/3rd of the whole population got killed).
pics can be found under
https://picasaweb.google.com/108376587121284252497/PhnomPenh?authkey=Gv1sRgCLa0y4GWjI3Weg
