Siem Reap, the gateway to explore the famed temples of Angkor, gave us our first taste of Cambodia, and an introduction to the country's golden days of history. After arriving at Siem Reap International Airport, we jumped on two motorbike taxis to find a guesthouse - loving the laid-back attitude that SE Asian transport lends itself to!

We spent two days giving our thighs a good work out as we walked up and down step after step to explore the massive temple complex housing Angkor Wat and family. I am sure many reading this are familiar with the temples of Angkor, known as the 8th wonder of the world, but here are a few key facts anyway:

• The Angkor temple complex (made up of hundreds of temples mostly built around the 12th century) was once the vast political, religious and social centre of the ancient Khmer empire
• Angkor Wat is the world's largest religious building (401 acres)
• At its zenith, Angkor was a city of 1 million people when London was just a small town of 50,000.

Angkor Wat - like all the temples - is indeed hugely impressive, a striking and gothic-looking building surrounded by a huge moat - and like many a national symbol, you've seen pictures of it so many times before you almost feel as if you know it, but it only seeing it in person that you can begin to understand how impressive and significant a site it was for the Cambodian people then, as well as now. There are just so many temples that I won't bore you with too much more description, but almost as (surprisingly) impressive as Angkor Wat were the temples submerged in the jungle, with huge trees growing over and around them, their vines and roots creeping like octopus tentacles round the ancient buildings. We were also surprised as to how much we were all free to clamber over the temples - great for close access but cannot be so great for future sustainability!

Some of the temples fused worship of both Hindu and Buddhist gods, and as such were dedicated to Buddha, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, which is still apparent today with the number of Buddhist monks in saffron robes and incense offerings to the Hindu gods found amongst the temples nooks and crannies, giving a good indication of how revered the site is still to this day.

The town itself of Siem Reap was a colourful place, with so many bars on one particular street that it is simply called Pub Street, providing no shortage of happy hours and loud bars to rest temple-weary limbs….and although I will be the first to admit that we made good use of the cocktail happy hours (Simon reliving his Thailand gap yah days with a few whisky buckets), it was all a bit jarring to see in contrast to the begging children and abundance of landmine victims with heartbreaking injuries - somehow it just didn't feel right seeing people vomiting and passed out from alcohol, in the face of far worse afflictions in the same street, but then Cambodia is a land of such contradictions as we were to learn.

Our next stop was Phnom Pehn, Cambodia's capital, a fun, 'shabby-chic' sort of city with a mix of grand French colonial architecture and the bright lights of its non-too-subtle red light district. Despite an inauspicious start (checking out of our first guest house at midnight on suspicion of bed bugs, then checking into the hotel next door at the same time as a western guy and a prostitute), we loved Phnom Penh. It was probably due to the continued indulgence, started in Siem Reap, in food that was not chicken and rice, the small-city charm, the friendly smiles of its inhabitants, the cool river-side setting, and probably the general chaotic hustle and bustle of any Asian city. Food-wise we were in heaven, having discovered lovely iced coffees, some great restaurants and the Foreign Correspondents Club, a colonial gem of a building and a Phonm Penh institution. The FCC became a favourite of ours in the 4 nights we were there, for its river views, happy hours and one of our 'Top 5' meals which was a classy 'meal deal' of a bucket of shrimps on ice, chips, baguette and a glass of wine for $14, which even with our budget-conscious mode of sharing this between us still seemed like a luxurious feast.

A visit to some of Phnom Penh's main 'tourist' sites provided a more sobering experience, but a good understanding of Cambodia's less glorious history. First we went to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, known as S-21 during the Khmer Rouge regime - a prison which saw 20,000 inmates go through its grisly gateways, and who were held captive, tortured and interrogated for months, only to be executed at the Choeung Ek 'killings fields' site outside of Phnom Penh.

S-21 was a former school before the Khmer Rouge took it over in 1975, for a very different purpose, transforming the classrooms into torture chambers and prison cells, once Phnom Penh had been emptied by Pol Pot's forces and its inhabitants forced to work in labour camps throughout the countryside. It was pretty horrific seeing how this former space of learning and education had been turned into a place of torture, pain and death, with signs of what went on so evident to this day: each of the torture and interrogation rooms still had the prisoner's iron bed, iron locks and chains and sometimes a photo on the wall of some of the decomposing corpses that were found there at the fall of the regime in early 1979. In some of the rooms you could even see blood stains on the walls and ceilings, making it all hideously real. And in the former central playground, an exercise pole and swing originally for the school children was used as a water torture instrument, where prisoners were hung upside down until falling unconscious and then dipped into large water pots to wake them up and carry on the torture. The front of the buildings were covered in barbed wire, which at the time was a method of preventing prisoners from committing suicide by jumping from the upper floors.

When Phnom Penh was liberated by Vietnamese troops in January 1979, there were 14 corpses found (whose graves are visible in the courtyard) and only 7 survivors out of the estimated 20,000 - the survivors having lived as they all had a certain skill deemed useful by the Khmer Rouge - either photographers, painters or sewing machine menders - who were spared to help with recording events / fixing things around the prison. Each prisoner that passed through there was documented and photographed, and the archive room of the former prison displays haunting black and white portraits of all the men and women that passed through the prison gates and torture cells, and then on to their death - this also included children, as the Khmer Rouge believed it was best to eradicate any future enemies by wiping out whole families. On display also were the shackles and torture equipment used, to try and elicit 'confessions' from the prisoners to crimes they hadn't committed, for example for being spies for the CIA, leading rebellions, speaking out against the Khmer Rouge etc.

Following this visit, we then went on to Choeung Ek, site of one of the most notorious 'killing fields', and now a memorial to the approximately 20,000 people executed there after being held captive and tortured at S-21. 14km outside of Phnom Penh, the site was once a peaceful orchard but during the regime turned into one of the most well-known of over 300 killings fields throughout Cambodia, which now houses former mass graves (the biggest containing 450 victims), visible today by the huge mounds and indents in the ground. While walking around the site with the audio tour, narrated by one of the survivors of S21, we saw a few bits of bones just visible in some of the grave sites; a mass grave which held 160+ victims without heads; the killing tools storage room; a glass box of remains of victims' clothing; and worst of all, the 'killing tree' - where babies were held by their legs and their heads bashed against the tree to kill them in front of their stricken parents, before being thrown into the graves. Next to this was the 'magic tree' - where Khmer Rouge propaganda songs and music would blare out during executions, to muffle the victims' screams - most were bludgeoned to death to save on precious bullets. The last thing today's visitors see is the memorial 'stupa', built to house around 8000 skulls of the victims, which were found after excavation in 1980 - an important structure as Cambodia culture dictates that the dead are given a proper burial and blessing.

Both this and the former S-21 prison visit were both so interesting but equally horrifying. The lasting message communicated through the information at both places is the hope that by making national and international tourists aware of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime, this will hopefully serve as a way of preventing such atrocities from happening again in Cambodia and elsewhere in the world - a very powerful, and possibly optimistic message. Either way, these were definitely the most emotional and moving 'tourist sites' we'd ever been to. What seems even more shocking to us is that this was all going on just before we were born, which, in spite of the date showing on our passports, really doesn't seem a long enough time ago for such things to have taken place. The reality of how relatively recent it all was is made even more apparent by the very real 'mementoes' you see at both memorial and museum sites, and the fact that 2 out of the 5 main leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime are still being tried to this day for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It is still not known how many Cambodians died during Khmer Rouge rule from 1975-1979, but is estimated to be around 1.7 million - a bit more than the population of Phnom Penh today. Inspired by what we had learnt, we have both since read the excellent book 'Survival in the Killing Fields', by Haing Ngor, a former Phnom Penh doctor whose book recounts his life and surprising survival under Pol Pot's mass labour camp / communist experiment, and who later starred in the 1984 film 'The Killing Fields' - a film I am sure our parents' generation is more familiar with.