Old posts from my very first travel website and my first backpacking trip (a year in 2000-2001)!

A very interesting time. We liked Cambodia so much our first few days, and left hating everything about it and wanting to get out as fast as we could.

It is a very beautiful country with wonderful small villages with water buffalo, cows, pigs, dogs, half naked little kids running about, etc. The roads are almost all dirt and full of potholes which makes every trip an adventure. We saw the temples at Angkor Wat which were truly amazing. So many people speak English there, too, and US dollars are the preferred currency which makes the prices higher than they should be. Some of the little kids we talked to spoke many different languages! Then on to Phnom Penh. There’s a bar there called Heart of Darkness which sums up the country pretty well. We saw the prison and killing field where many of the 2 million people murdered by the Khmer Rouge were held, tortured, and then burried. It was so sad. We mentioned to a guy at the tourist office how nice the poeple seemed in Siem Reap, and he said they may seem nice, but they would kill their brother. There is so much corruption, scams, etc. there we weren’t sure we would even make it out of the country.