Thailand - My Chiang Mai Life

Divit a local driver took me around to some of the less visited temples. It was nice to be the only one at a temple! My tour guide & driver... Cambodians are very friendly and will go out of their way to make you feel at home in their country. On the way back from one of the temples, that was close to Divit's family home, we stopped and his mother fixed us lunch - tiny whole shrimp, shell and all, in soup with green leafy veggies....... Nice house but NO electricity or no running water. At night they use a car battery for lights. This would be a lower middle class family. Out in the countryside you see "ghost scarecrows" in front of houses. This keeps unwanted ghosts & bad spirits off of your farm. Hmmmm, the original "Ghost Busters"??

8:30 a.m. and on the bus to Siem Reap (S.R.)a 6 hour ride for $11.00. Bus was nice, a/c, t.v., a snack box and bottle of water, and most important a bathroom. At 11:45 we stopped for lunch and then on to S.R. arriving at 2:30 p.m. Lots of horn blowing along the way as the roads are narrow and the bus is wide! Scenes along the way - Greeted by "old friend" upon arrival at hotel. Dog was here 3 years ago when Charlie and I stayed at the hotel.... Start of the day at hotel restaurant. View from breakfast table... A great way to spend the afternoon!! My room.... Street from old city to hotel a 5 minute walk Old market in S.R. River scenes of river that runs through the city. Typical city street in S.R. A S.R. clothes line! Next post my tour guide "Divit" takes me to some of the out of the way temples...

This post is just on the "Genocide Museum" or S-21 prison in Phnom Pen. Pictures taken 20 July 2010..... 26 July 2010 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia (CNN) -- A man who ran a notorious torture prison where more than 14,000 people died during the Khmer Rouge regime was found guilty of war crimes Monday and sentenced to 35 years in prison -- with five years taken off that sentence for time served. At least 1.7 million people -- nearly a quarter of Cambodia's population -- died under the 1975-1979 Khmer Rouge from execution, disease, starvation and overwork, according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia. Captions are not needed as the pictures tell the story - especially the "eyes" of the victims

14th of July I flew to Cambodia to visit a friend in Siem Reap and to explore Phnom Penh. This is the first of several post on my visit to Cambodia plus a little history. Cambodia is an amazing country considering that it tore itself apart in the middle 1970’s. Over 1.7 million people killed by the Khmer Rouge - some estimate as high as 3 million killed! In many areas of the country people were rounded up and executed for speaking a foreign language, wearing glasses, scavenging for food, and even crying for dead loved ones. Former businessmen and bureaucrats were hunted down and killed along with their entire families; the Khmer Rouge feared that they held beliefs that could lead them to oppose their regime. A few Khmer Rouge loyalists were even killed for failing to find enough 'counter-revolutionaries' to execute. Most of the educated Cambodians – teachers, doctors - were either executed or fled the country. Now 30 years later Cambodia is a booming S.E. Asian country. Everywh...