One would think that after we went to bed late in the morning following the sketchy train ride to Phnom Pehn, we would sleep late, but that was not to be the case.

We were moving about by 8 a.m. to find the nearest Internet café so we could see about updating our website. Four hours later (it takes longer than you think!), I had the last entry posted. Doing any of this stuff on the ancient computers they have is quite a feat.

Immediately afterwards, we found a túk-túk to take us to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. This infamous site is something we had both read and heard about long before entering Cambodia.

After Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge party took over Cambodia in 1975, this high school was converted into Security Prison 21 (S-21). As many as 20,000 people passed through these torturous halls before being routed to the nearby Killing Fields where they were executed in a variety of wicked ways. To conserve bullets, most prisoners were battered with axe handles, sharpened bamboo or hammers. Afterward, the dead were dumped into mass graves.

An estimated 2.3 million people (over 30 percent of the country's entire population) were silenced during the Khmer Rouge's deadly reign. Among these were monks and women, children and babies. Only seven who were imprisoned in S- 21 are known to have survived.

Now Tuol Sleng is but a shell of its former self. The halls and rooms are mostly empty, save for blood stains that still litter the grounds, serving as reminders of the country's grim past. An occasional iron bed frame still stands, though, as do the rusting remains of the makeshift jail cells.

On the grounds are several tombs. These contain the remains of the last people to die at Tuol Sleng, literally as the invading Vietnamese army marched into Phnom Penh, only to discover that the Khmer Rouge agents had yet to dispose of the corpses.

In another room, several dozen cracked human skulls were on display. These proved to be a chilling visual aid in imagining the types of injuries that were inflicted upon the inmates here.

Hundreds and hundreds of premortem pictures of the victims are displayed as a testament to the hatred that engulfed this place. Looking at them was a bit surreal; the hopelessness in their eyes spanning decades past their untimely ends, as if desperately reaching out to the future to say, "Do not forget..."

King Leopold II, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Jean Kambanda, and now the conflict in Darfur...when will we learn?

Afterward, we rode back to the hostel where we hung out with some of the other backpackers, specifically the Swiss and Dutch guys we met on the train the day before. They were particularly perplexed by us because we do not fit the common American stereotype (rude, arrogant, loud, etc.) that so many Europeans have of us "Yanks." We hear this frequently.

Undoubtedly, every conversation with a European concludes with us explaining the stereotype they have of us usually comes from American media such as movies or television shows that are typically set in New York or California- hardly appropriate representations of the entire country and its people. Our explanation is pretty much a routine now, as we have been through it so many times.

To their credit, they were very interested (especially the Swiss guy) in what we had to say. He said that he wants to backpack through America, which we love to hear! However, we always shake our heads because Europeans, when backpacking through America, will generally fly into Los Angeles, check it out, then fly to New York City, and stay there a few days, and then continue around the world, claiming to have "seen" America. www.thestevo.org/adventures/ eurasia.