Landed (eventually) and Merry Christmas

Depite Qatar Airways best efforts to have 15 of us stranded in Doha after missing our London connection, and despite the fog hampering air travel to London, I finally landed after midnight last night - coming via Zurich eventually. Well, it was a small price to pay after 11 great weeks.

Merry Christmas everyone and happy new year too.

James

Complete map and route taken

Now I'm back in Bangkok, in advance of flying home tomorrow. Here's the final map and complete route I took - I've also marked on it some of my favourite places:

Cambodia map and route

A map of my progress and route through Cambodia, starting from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam:

Sihanoukville by sea

Sihanoukville is Cambodia's only real seaside resort, and a good place for me to bring my trip towards a conclusion and ready myself for the cold British winter! The beaches and resorts are less developed than those in Thailand, but appear to be attracting an increasing package tourist trade. Nevertheless they certainly have their appeal, with shack style restaurant's, BBQs, and bars spilling over on to the beach itself. I'm alternating myself between these beach and the guesthouse pool - a nice way to relax and finish my book, and indeed the whole trip - from here its back to Phnom Penh and then to Bangkok for the flight home.

Phnom Penh and the Killing Fields

Phnom Penh, the capital city, is a microcosm of Cambodia as a whole - reflecting the contrasts of the remnants of the glorious ancient Khmer empire and the colonial beauty, which the French brought (wanting to make this the capital of their Indochina empire - Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) against the horrors and tragedies of the relatively recent Pol Pot regime. I visited first the Tuol Sleng prison, where the enemies and 'traitors' of the 1975-79 regime were imprisoned and tortured in inhumane conditions and followed this with a trip out to the local Killing Fields, where 17,000 prisoners were subsequently executed and buried in mass graves - across Cambodia they estimate that nearly 2 million people perished during those 4 years of terror. Following the moving experience of those visits, I spent this afternoon learning more about Angkor and Khmer history at the National Museum and then visited the grand colonial style Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda......quite a contrast.

Battambang and beyond

From Siem Reap, yesterday, I took the boat down the Tonle Sap to Battambang, Cambodia's second city. The boat trip lasted seven and a half hours, but was pretty scenic and passed through a number of farming and fishing villages, picking up and dropping off locals on the way. Battambang itself is a fairly ordinary town, although there are some olf french style facaded houses by the riverfront. I'd heard and read that the country surrounding Battambang was more interesting than the city itself, so I hired a moto guide today and took off on a tour of some of the sites. This included a couple of remote temples, farming villages and some old Khmer Rouge cave prisons / torture chambers, which chillingly had a cage full of human bones and skulls on display. My moto driver was 50, so he had lived through the 1975-79 Khmer Rouge genocide regime, and shared with me his sad personal story - during Pol Pot's dictatorship he had lost both his parents and three siblings; some murdered, the others starved or died of malaria. An interesting day - learning about several aspects of Cambodia: past and present.

More from Angkor

Photos, that is -

1) Angkor Wat at sunrise 2) Angkor Wat early morning close up

2) Bayon faces