Finally! A post where I give you the lowdown on how I did Cambodia -- the good, the bad and the ugly (ugly = using band-aids to fix a mosquito net, come on!).

Where I went

Siem Reap

Lonely Planet said anything less than 3 days with the temples of Angor is a travesty, and boy were they wrong. Unless you are a scholar of Hindu carvings or a masochist who loves spending extraneous amounts of time in excruciating heat, you'll be fine with one. The tuk tuk drivers have a pretty solid circuit that took me a morning to bang out. Sure, if you walk slow and are the kind of person who needs to stand in front of a carving for 30 minutes to bask in its glory, you might need more time. Given your tolerance for oppressive humidity and competing with all of China and Korea to see the sights, you probably will finish before noon (I started at 7 am and was passed out in a state of exhaustion/heat stroke by 12:30 back at the hotel). If you really truly believe you will need more time (you're a bonafide photographer or just love being in heavily touristed environments), go ahead, plan for three days.

The Tuol Sleng Museum is located in an old high school. That's because when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, they swiftly converted the high school into a detention center that would come to symbolize many of the great horrors that took place during the Khmer Rouge's reign until the Vietnamese invaded in January 1979. So that when you enter the compound, the first thing that strikes you is not the grim horrors that took place, but wondering what it must have been like to attend high school in Phnom Penh during peaceful times, picturing teenagers coming in and out of the shuttered classroom doors carrying books and lunches and hopes and dreams.

But as you move from room to room, you realize how quickly things can turn on a dime, how one wooden desk can be quickly transformed into a work station for an interrogator, and how all the other furniture can be removed to make way for torture facilities and imprisonment. It is, after all, just a building.

How I Did Cambodia

A visit to the Tuol Sleng Museum and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek

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