There were a band of musicians playing in a corner of the palace. I was interested in the instruments. One of the musicians seemed a tad young.
Cambodia Phnom Penh – a street parade. – Photos
Cambodia – Villages, Temples, Child Labour and People
We went from Angkor Wat out into the villages. There was a lot of child labour. Children were making a lot of trivial tat for tourists.
There were shrines and offerings. Temples and monks. The lake had fishermen using traditional methods. The villages were on stilts to accommodate the rising waters in the rainy season.
Angkor Wat – The main Temple – Photos
Angkor Wat – Cambodia – 12th Century marvels – photos
Angkor Wat in the morning mist – photos
Cambodia – Angkor Wat
If you are in Cambodia Angkor Wat has to be somewhere you have to visit. It is a massive temple complex. You could spend weeks wandering around it from temple to temple – in fact I’d love to do just that.
We started off at one of the minor temples before heading for the main event!
It was shrouded in early morning mist!
Cambodian traditional Dance
My wife is a dancer. Where-ever we travel the one thing I know will be on the agenda is an evening of traditional dance. She will hunt out performances and book tickets. I will sit through hours of performance as local musicians and troupes of dancers all in traditional costumes perform dances based on old rural tales, fairy stories or traditional stories. From the type of costumes and stories, I imagine a lot of these evolved out of performances aimed at the royal courts.
They usually involve demons, gods and hapless love.
Cambodian dance seems to have these colourful, pristine villagers performing everyday tasks – like harvesting rice. Not quite what I was seeing out in the fields.
Cambodian dance involves a lot of elaborate hand gestures. All very stylised.
Cambodia – The river communities – photos
Pol Pot – Cambodia’s mass murderer – Security Prison 21 – Tuol Sleng – Site of torture and genocide. The Killing Fields.
There is a madness and hysteria that grips people sometimes. It turns normally pleasant ordinary people into crazed torturers capable of doing the most terrible things.
The Cambodian people were some of the most friendly I have met.
The people carrying out these tortures and killings were brutal, callous devils.
Pol Pot did not start out as a crazed evil psychopath. He was an idealistic freedom fighter.
It all has shades of ISIS, Taliban, AlQaeda, Boko Haraam and the rest.
What happened in this camp was beyond words. Pol Pot was responsible for the torture and death of one and a half million people in the Killing Fields. There were 150 killing  camps like Prison 21.
Pol Pot – a callous man, paranoid and ruthless. A psychotic despot and mass murderer.
I met Chum Mey – survivor of the camp and he signed his book for me.
What goes on in the mind of a torturer? how can they live with what they do? How can they justify it?
