"Tampa_Shawn's Cambodia" a Cambodia Travel Page by tampa_shawn

For me pictures are worth a thousand words...Cambodia is an amazing exciting, exotic and beautiful country...See why I think so

1) QT Luong shows off his amazing collection of photos of Cambodia at http://www.terragalleria.com/theravada/cambodia/cambodia.html

2) for a full screen panoramas of one of the Amazing Angkor temples...this will take awhile to load
http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen2/full7.html

Here is my Pre-trip readings recommendations

I believe the more you understand about the history and the culture of an area the more you enjoy and appreciate it

1) Ankor Wat – Make sure you read or visit some websites on Ankor (one the ancient wonders of the world) and its civilization. I can’t recommend a specific book on this yet… the ones I got from the library were dry, dry, dry

2) Book on the Killing Fields – Between 1975-1979 approximately 1.7 million people, about 25% of the Cambodia population were killed by the Khmer Rouge. I read quite a few books in this area and you only need to read one or two to get the pictures
…all the stories are pretty much the same…

· On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouges took over Phnom Penh they told the people to pack for a few days and forcefully evacuated the city in the Cambodia’s own version of the Amerian’s Trail of Tears
· Families were torn apart and forced to work for Angkor, digging ditches, planting rice…life was very hard, even young children were forced to work 12 + hours a day on only a cup of watery rice
· People with educations and from the city were often brutally killed or sent to “reeducation camps”

3) The Award Winning Movie “The Killing Fields”, the book this is based on the book The death and life of Dith Pran / by Sydney H. Schanberg – I recommend both the book and the movie. There a touching true story of Dith Pran who is unable to leave Cambodia with his American Reporter boss and is sent to a reducation camp before escaping

4) Biography of Pol Pot – The two biographies I read were poorly written but I think you need to have some background on Cambodia’s Nitrous leader

5) A book on Life After the Genocide – I read two here that were OK
A blessing over ashes : the remarkable odyssey of my unlikely brother / Adam Fifield - story of a young boy during the Genoicide and his life after...
The Clay Marble, a fictional story of life in a refugee camp on the Thailand border. It reminded me of the Diary of Anne Frank, a Childs account of the war...

6) A book on the Culture of Cambodia...the library will have several there usually titled something clever like "Cambodia"