Sihanoukville

This is Otress Beach. The quietest, most peaceful beach in Sihanoukville. I wanted to sit on this swing forever.

Life of Pi, really good book. Just about everyone I've met here has read it.

Hippie love.

Taken at Tuol Sleng prison, which was formerly a high school before being turned into a detention centre by the Khymer Rouge in 1975. The K.R. killed 1.5 million Cambodians in their aim to create an agrarian society. They rounded up people they perceived to be intellectuals or against the state and tortured them until they confessed to crimes they didn't commit. They then took them to the Killing Fields, which are not far from the prison. They were shot or clubbed to death.
Sihanoukville is a province in southern Cambodia. It was a military port for the Vietcong and after 1975, during the regime of General Lon Nol it was the service of the United States.

You don't think about what day it is or what time. You simply lie on the beach, cycle around or sit around with strangers who are now friends.

You can easily live off less than $10 a day. Everything becomes less important and you realise the things that you worried about back home don't really mean anything in the broad scheme of things. You also realise that essentially people are the same everywhere. The notion of nationality becomes irrelevant.

After travelling Vietnam and Cambodia for almost six weeks, a lot of the time alone, I have devised three salient rules for myself:

1. Never, ever make eye contact with a dog that looks like it is about to attack you. Same goes for tuk tuk drivers.

2. Smile when people stare at you instead of verbally abusing them, as you would do in Australia. If you smile, they will smile, then you talk to them and you have a new friend.

3. Under no circumstances let valuable possessions out of your sight in public places. Before I left people warned me my backpack would be cut open while I was walking down the street. This is total crap. Don't be scared of people just because they don't speak English. But NEVER leave your shit alone, even if you're the only person in 30 km radius on a deserted beach.
And another...
4. When getting off a motorbike, always get off the left hand side. If you're like me and don't know what an exhaust pipe is... you only need to know one thing, it burns like hell.

Come to Cambodia if you want to feel at peace.