Phnom Penh is the capital city of Cambodia. It is quite different to the rest of the country with a lot of European-looking buildings, it even has shopping malls and department stores. However, not all the city is like that - there are piles of rubbish and rotting food in some areas that absolutely stink!

Around the huge Independence Monument (commemorating liberation from French rule in the 1950s) is a park which seems like a nice place to relax - lots of people strolling round or playing badminton. It was near here that a few of us joined a free meditation session with a monk at Wat Lanka temple. I found it a bit uncomfortable to sit in the meditation position for so long without moving - I think I need more practice!

We spent one morning visiting the two main relics (for want of a better word) of the Khmer Rouge. I have been reading 'Cambodia Year Zero', a collection of stories of people that lived throught the Khmer Rouge regime, and I was glad that I had done so because I felt mentally prepared for the horrifying things we saw and stories we heard.

First we went to the Tuol Sleng Museum - originally a school, the Khmer Rouge turned it into a prison known as S21 where they tortured and killed tens of thousands of innocent people. It was quite chilling to see the classroms that had been turned into cells and interrogation rooms in which detainees were chained by their ankles to a bed and kept there for days, weeks or even months.

Afterwards we went just outside the city to Choeung Ek Killing Fields where detainees from S21 were taken to be executed and dumped in mass graves. There were killing sites all over Cambodia but this one is the largest - 86 mass graves were discovered there and 8,000 skulls that were excavated have been arranged into a slightly grotesque monument which succeeds in conveying the shocking truth of what took place there.

The other face of Phnom Penh is the extravagant Royal Palace with many beautiful buildings including the famous Silver Pagoda - the floor is tiled with silver and it contains thousands of gold and jewel-encrusted artefacts, mainly Buddhas. The central attractions are the Emerald Buddha (about 2-3 feet high) and the Golden Buddha (about 5 feet high with over 2,000 diamonds, one of which has 25 carats).

I also visited the Russian Market and Central Market, where I could haggle for all the usual tat - handbags, scarves, t-shirts and souvenirs. And we had a fantastic lunch at the Friends restaurant, which provides training/employment and runs projects for street children. Most evenings we ate by the river (and got eaten alive by the insects!).