There was a Danish couple on today’s bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap and they were travelling with their ten year old boy.

How I wish my parents would have taken me to South East Asia when I was this boy’s age!

I had no idea about the world at ten, when my poles were as far as my mum’s cousin’s town and this town in Northern Italy that had a good hospital for my uncle.

In between, my elementary school and the books that didn’t talk about Pol Pot yet.

I visited the Genocide museum which used to be a detention and torture center for the prisoners of the Khmer Rouge regime. The buildings were a former high school in a once and still busy part of town, so how could all the horror that was happening inside its walls be kept secret ? One of the rules was to accept lashes and electric shock without crying, so that these ground operations could remain, indeed, secret.

Went to the Central Market for a juice fix and loved it!

They have all kind of services: massages, haircuts, nail polishing, women playing cards…and locals seemed to be enjoying their Saturday as much as I was (well, everyday is Saturday when you are travelling and not riding a bus for twenty-three hours straight).

I like Phnom Penh and wish I could stay longer to walk on the riverside more and maybe join one of these sunset aerobic classes that looks so random and so much fun too!

Or I would go see the Silver Pagoda or to check out why they have a Russian Market and what it sells.

But it is time to be on the bus again, heading to Siem Reap on a scenic ride through villages of  colorful stilt houses, lots of mud and many fruit trees again. Kids playing soccer or sliding down hills of hay, swinging hammocks and herds of hungry cows.

The rest-stop on the way was selling snacks of bugs and ants. I decided it was better to not spoil my dinner appetite, so I passed, this time…