A very full day

We left our bikes and mechanic in Vietnam, so this morning we got our Cambodian bikes and mechanic.  Then we took a ferry across the river and rode a loop around the island of Dach Koh.  (Since Koh means island, that sentence is a bit of a redundancy.)  Dach Koh is almost completely agricultural.  It was a lovely ride past fields plowed by teams of cows, pagodas, and very few shops.  The houses were all on stilts, and the people had cottage industries on the ground level.  We stopped to watch two women weaving on looms.  We also saw young monks for the first time, which I know I will see a lot more of when I go across Laos and Thailand.  They walk down the street and people give them food and pray with them.  There was almost no traffic.  It was just a great ride.

We only had time for a quick lunch so we went into the French bakery next door to our hotel.  I wish I had discovered it for breakfast.  They had THE BEST pastry, croissants, donuts, and bread.  The best.

In the afternoon we visited the Killing Fields and the Genocide Museum - two separate places.  There is nothing to say.  I knew the general history but the Cambodians are trying to both acknowledge their past and make sure it never happens again, so the exhibits are quite graphic.  Of all the horrible mass murders of the Twentieth Century, the Khmer Rouge killed the most on a percentage basis - a full one quarter of the country's population.  No museum can make this understandable.

The US Embassy sent me a warning two days ago about demonstrations in Phnom Penh.  We saw nothing yesterday, but on the way to the Genocide Museum today our bus ran into a demonstration and had to take a detour.  Everyone we talked to gave us a different reason for the demonstrations but they have gone from weekly to daily.  Someone is serious about something.

For dinner we went to a restaurant named Friends which serves Western/Asian tapas.  The restaurant is owned by Friends International which helps "urban marginalized children," i.e. street kids.  All of the kitchen staff and waiters are these young people learning skills in the restaurant industry which is growing rapidly in Cambodia as tourism increases.  And the food is good.  I had the perhaps incongruous combination of a chicken banana flower salad (it was so good last night) and braised pork quesadillas.  Others at the table had pesto penne, fried zucchini, and shrimp wontons.  It was a pretty eclectic menu.  But we did not have dessert.  Suzanne and I, together with Pam and Ian, took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel (without incident tonight) to hit the French bakery one more time.  It felt like being in Bella Bru or any coffee shop or cafe in the States.  Very comfortable.