A letter from someone unknown...
Ni Hao everyone!
Ni hao ma?
Are you back to your old lifes?
Did classes start already for you?
Mark and I stayed the rest of our time in Qingdao
after you left. We bought two bikes at the Carrefour
and cycled along the coastline of Qingdao. Pretty
nice!
We were too late to get a nighttrain back to Beijing (everything was booked), so we had to take a normal hard-seat train back to Beijing. It took us 16 hours, and we arrived at 03:30 in the morning! Well, we survived. We spend the rest of the day sleeping and shopping, and we visited a Kung-fu show in the evening. The next morning we flew to Bangkok.
Once in Bangkok we were shocked by the amount of
tourists! After finding a Guesthouse, we went to a
restaurant that was filled with Dutch people! AAAAAAA!
We visited a Thai-box event and some temples and a big shoppingmall in Bangkok and then we went to Cambodia by bus.
The journey was horrible, but it was definetly worth
it! We spend 4 days in Angkor with it's beautiful
temples, we watched sunset and sunrise, and we spend
time with a group of backpackers. Angkor is the most
beautiful place we've ever seen so far! The area
coveres about 25 square kilometers and is packed with
around 100 Hinduistic-Buddhistic temples in
Khmer-style. It's in the middle of the jungle and not
even near as touristic/crowded as China or Thailand.
This is one of those places one has to see once in a
lifetime, really impressive!
After Angkor, we decided to stay in cambodia for the
rest of our holiday, because we loved it so much.
We went to Phnom Penh (capital) and visited the
Killing Fields, Tuol Sleng prison (both monuments of
the Khmer Rouge period) and the National Museum with
it's beautiful Khmer treasures taken from the Angkor
temples. In the Killing Fields (area of mass-graves)we
saw thousands of skulls piled up a few meters and a
huge pile of clothes, but the Tuol Sleng prison was
even more impressive. Tuol Sleng was Highschool turned
into a prison used to detain and interrogate/torture
'enemies' of the Khmer Rouge, around 25 years ago.
This prison had 17.000 people, children included, and
when the Vietnamese army came in, there were only 4
prisoners alive.
It is now a museum and they kept everything the same
way they found it. We saw torture-rooms with all the
torturing materials in it and a photograph of what
they found in there when they freed it (a brutally
abused dead person tied on a bedframe with open wounds
etc.). It was horrible, but is was something we had to
see. The Khmer Rouge also kept pictures of all their
prisoners, and these pictures where also displayed
with some stories of the victims, both prisoners and prisonpersonnel. They often used children to do the slaughtering, cause they're easy to be turned into monsters under the influence of abuse and drugs. (same is happening today in some African countries) Unbelievable cruelty.
After Phnon Penh we went to Sihanoukville, a
'touristic' (for cambodian standards) coastal city
down south. Here we finally relaxed. We spend our last
days laying on the beach. After that it was time to go
back to Bangkok for our flight back to home.
We had two great months in Asia, one month with you
guys and one month by ourselves. This was a great
experience for us, no doubt for you to!
I hope to hear from you all and maybe even see some of
you in Holland or elsewhere! (next destination:
Korea...?)
Lots of love,
Manisha (& Mark)
Ni hao ma?
Are you back to your old lifes?
Did classes start already for you?
Mark and I stayed the rest of our time in Qingdao
after you left. We bought two bikes at the Carrefour
and cycled along the coastline of Qingdao. Pretty
nice!
We were too late to get a nighttrain back to Beijing (everything was booked), so we had to take a normal hard-seat train back to Beijing. It took us 16 hours, and we arrived at 03:30 in the morning! Well, we survived. We spend the rest of the day sleeping and shopping, and we visited a Kung-fu show in the evening. The next morning we flew to Bangkok.
Once in Bangkok we were shocked by the amount of
tourists! After finding a Guesthouse, we went to a
restaurant that was filled with Dutch people! AAAAAAA!
We visited a Thai-box event and some temples and a big shoppingmall in Bangkok and then we went to Cambodia by bus.
The journey was horrible, but it was definetly worth
it! We spend 4 days in Angkor with it's beautiful
temples, we watched sunset and sunrise, and we spend
time with a group of backpackers. Angkor is the most
beautiful place we've ever seen so far! The area
coveres about 25 square kilometers and is packed with
around 100 Hinduistic-Buddhistic temples in
Khmer-style. It's in the middle of the jungle and not
even near as touristic/crowded as China or Thailand.
This is one of those places one has to see once in a
lifetime, really impressive!
After Angkor, we decided to stay in cambodia for the
rest of our holiday, because we loved it so much.
We went to Phnom Penh (capital) and visited the
Killing Fields, Tuol Sleng prison (both monuments of
the Khmer Rouge period) and the National Museum with
it's beautiful Khmer treasures taken from the Angkor
temples. In the Killing Fields (area of mass-graves)we
saw thousands of skulls piled up a few meters and a
huge pile of clothes, but the Tuol Sleng prison was
even more impressive. Tuol Sleng was Highschool turned
into a prison used to detain and interrogate/torture
'enemies' of the Khmer Rouge, around 25 years ago.
This prison had 17.000 people, children included, and
when the Vietnamese army came in, there were only 4
prisoners alive.
It is now a museum and they kept everything the same
way they found it. We saw torture-rooms with all the
torturing materials in it and a photograph of what
they found in there when they freed it (a brutally
abused dead person tied on a bedframe with open wounds
etc.). It was horrible, but is was something we had to
see. The Khmer Rouge also kept pictures of all their
prisoners, and these pictures where also displayed
with some stories of the victims, both prisoners and prisonpersonnel. They often used children to do the slaughtering, cause they're easy to be turned into monsters under the influence of abuse and drugs. (same is happening today in some African countries) Unbelievable cruelty.
After Phnon Penh we went to Sihanoukville, a
'touristic' (for cambodian standards) coastal city
down south. Here we finally relaxed. We spend our last
days laying on the beach. After that it was time to go
back to Bangkok for our flight back to home.
We had two great months in Asia, one month with you
guys and one month by ourselves. This was a great
experience for us, no doubt for you to!
I hope to hear from you all and maybe even see some of
you in Holland or elsewhere! (next destination:
Korea...?)
Lots of love,
Manisha (& Mark)
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