We found the coach we boarded in Saigon to be clean and comfortable, with huge seats which staggeringly afforded me enough room to fit in my gangly legs. In said comfort, we set off and were soon cruising through the beautiful countryside outwith the city, comprising endless expanses of partially flooded rice paddies with the occasional distant hill jutting out of the otherwise uniformly straight horizon. Above this were gathered the most magnificent formations of clouds, filling the huge sky like the painted work of a master.

As we drove through these wonderful scenes the conductor, for want of a better word, began walking down the aisle asking for everyone's passports. When he reached us, we declined to give him our passports, stating that we would deal with any border formalities ourselves. We took this approach because we knew that the bus companies were in the habit of charging a fee for arranging visas and so forth, which only involved filling out a basic form and could be easily completed independently. The conductor was not best pleased with our refusal, and tried to scare us with stories of being left 8km from the border and having to get a motorbike to the border to complete the formalities before being able to join the bus.

We ignored all this nonsense and filled in our immigration forms on the bus. Sure enough, an hour or so later we pulled up to a checkpoint where we disembarked and had one stamp issued for leaving Vietnam, then continued to the Cambodian border where we walked up to a desk, had our passports stamped and a visa issued for $20 rather than the $25 everyone else on the bus paid, then walked through the immigration station to reboard the bus.

Just across the border, we carried on through similar scenery for a short distance, the only difference being massive casino complexes lining the roads, which I imagine targetted Vietnamese who were maybe subject to unfavourable gambling laws across the border. We passed a few of these huge, poor-man's-Vegas monsters before pulling into a little roadisde restaurant. We had a drink here before the journey continued through the flat, flooded paddies of Cambodia, somehow even more beautiful than Vietnam, into the night.

In the evening we entered what we knew to be Phnom Penh, and found ourselves surrounded by buildings with the familiar bustle of a city all around. The bus crossed the mighty Mekong on a bridge and turned to follow the river up a wide avenue. On one side of this thoroughfare were restaurants and bars, some in pretty colonial buildings with balconies overlooking the river, and on the other a wide promenade which was filled, to our amusement, with numerous large groups of Cambodians dancing in formation to music emitting from boom boxes placed on the ground.

Immediately we felt that we liked the city, and were eager to explore when we got off the bus, further up the river. Ignoring the tuk tuk drivers who pounced, albeit in a friendly manner, on us as soon as we emerged from the bus, we walked a short distance to a bar with a nice outdoor seating area across from the river and with a night market nearby. As we were looking at the menu for the bar we spotted a couple sitting at a table who haven't been mentioned yet in the blog, but probably should have been. We had seen this couple first of all on the night bus between Hoi An and Nha Trang and, although we hadn't spoken to them, we had spotted them so many times since then at the oddest and most improbable times. They had been at the water park in Nha Trang, V Cafe with the bad musician in Da Lat, the Reunification Palace in Saigon, and probably more places, and now at this bar in Phnom Penh all at the same exact moment as us. We felt we had to speak to them now so said hello and discovered we hadn't been alone in noticing these numerous strange coincidences. We sat with them for a while and had a drink, and discovered they were a really nice couple which made us wish we'd spoken to them sooner.

After our drink, we realised it was getting quite late and we still needed to find accomodation. We had a place in mind based on online research, and managed to haggle a nearby tuk tuk driver down to a very acceptable rate to take us there. We piled our bags and ourselves into the tuk tuk, which we found in Cambodia consisted of a small motorbike with a trailer attached in which the passengers sat, and were driven down the riverside road, past some large and fancy hotels before turning into a short, narrow street filled with guest houses.

We paid the driver and hopped out, then looked around first the place we had originally intended to check out, OK Guest House, followed by a couple of others which we found to be either too expensive or full. In the end we went for a clean large room with air conditioning in the OK Guest House which we managed to bargain down to $10 per night.

We left our stuff in the room and went down to the restaurant/common area where we ordered some food. It turned out to be tasty and I enjoyed a bowl of fish amok, a typical khmer dish somewhere halfway between a curry and a soup. Lucy had some sweet and sour chicken and we also shared some spring rolls.

We went back upstairs and watched some TV in our room whilst checking some stuff out online. Through facebook, I knew that there were a few people I had known at univeristy who now lived in Phnom Penh. I got in touch with Jen, a girl who had been on my course at uni and Niall, who I had lived beside in halls and his wife Shona. We made tentative plans to try and meet up the following evening, before we headed off to sleep.

In the morning we had a fairly long lie, then got up and went downstairs for some breakfast. After eating some tasty baguettes with eggs, or butter in Lucy's case, we spoke to one of the employees from the guest house who was offering tuk tuk trips to the various tourists sights around the city. We bargained with him and agreed to hire his services for the day to take us first out to the killing fields and Chueng Ek and then Tuol Sleng AKA S-21, the former school used as a prison during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror.

We hopped in the tuk tuk and rode through the city, past lots of wide open grassy areas and squares with statues and monuments, then between shops and apartments before emerging into the countryside. We drove for around 15km through countryside and basic, outlying villages until we pulled into a parking area from which we could see an arched gateway and beyond, a tall and pretty white stupa.

This marked the infamous killing fields of Chueng Ek, where during the Khmer Rouge's years in power, thousands of people the regime saw as enemies were indiscriminately murdered in the most brutal and horrific methods imaginable. Anyone perceived as posing a threat to the demented madmen in power were bludgeoned to death with any implements the poor brainwashed followers of Pol Pot had to hand, so as to save ammunition. This included any intellectuals, teachers, religious leaders and those who the paranoid leaders thought would stand against them, as well as the families of the condemned, women and children included.

We paid the entrance fee to the fields and for our money were provided with an electronic audio guide, which related the history and appaling facts of the site as we walked around it. At first it was difficult to imagine the peaceful, grassy countryside area as the site of such horror, but listening to the accounts of survivors and former members of the regime and seeing the sunken areas where the mass graves had been exhumed brought it into gruesomly sharp focus. We walked around the site enthralled and appalled by the accounts we heard, and saw such sights as a box containing bones and another containing clothing fragments, both of which still surface in the areas of the graves following rains every wet season. The most harrowing sight was the singularly appaling 'killing tree' against which babies were dashed to their death before being thrown in a pit which, when excavated, was found to contain over 100 skeletons, all of women and children.

After completing a circuit of the fields we looked inside the elegant stupa erected as a memorial to the victims, and found it contained around 17 levels of shelving all completely packed with the smashed skulls and bones of the countless poor souls who were murdered. The fact that this was only one of hundreds of such sites really made it hit home how appallingly the Cambodian people had suffered during those terrible years.

Before leaving the killing fields we had a look in the small museum which contained sickening examples of the tools used in the regime's dirtiest work, and clothing and other photographs relating to the site.

We then got back in the tuk tuk for the journey back to the city where we wound through the busy streets until our driver dropped us off in a busy seemingly residential area. Across the road we could see a wall topped with barbed wire, behind which were a number of characterlessly square official looking buildings a few stories high. This was the notorious Tuol Sleng or S-21 where we had read that some 20,000 prisoners had been kept during the Khmer Rouge's time in power, with only 7 living to tell the tale, the rest having been tortured to death or sent to the killing fields for the reasons only apparent to the psychotic leaders of that regime.

We entered through an unassuming gate into a grassy courtyard which would have been a playground during the compound's days as a high school. We then spent some time walking through the corridors of the concrete buildings, peering into blank tiled rooms which in some cases contained rusty metal bed frames and the ammunition boxes provided as toilets for the prisoners. Sickening photographs on the walls showed the scenes discovered after the regime's demise, when mutilated, tortured bodies were found having been left to rot in the cells.

In some of the buildings, crude and utterly inhumane cells had been constructed by erecting shoddy brick walls in the large rooms of the former school buildings, and holes knocked through these walls to create long corridors. In other areas wood had been used to the same effect. These cells were all uniformly tiny and contained rings in the floor to which the poor inmates would have been chained. The buildings, although lifeless, gave off such a depressing and melancholy air that it was quite harrowing to walk through the corridors. The most affecting sight, however, was to be found in one building where barbed wire mesh had been erected in front of the open balconies to prevent suicide on the part of the inamtes. In here, in a number of rooms were boards with countless portraits of the former inmates of the nightmare prison, all staring forth with heart-wrenching expressions directly at us. You could feel the bewilderment, terror, or hopeless resignation in each of those sets of eyes and it was a very moving sight to behold.

In yet more rooms, where numbers were daubed crudely on the walls above bolts to which prisoners would have been shackled, were boards with the accounts of some of the survivors, as well as those of former Khmer Rouge soldiers. These accounts were fascinating, particularly the mixture of emotions on the part of Pol Pot's former lackeys.

When we had exhausted the horrors of S-21 we returned to our tuk tuk driver and he drove us back to the guest house. We had had no lunch and were quite hungry, so ordered some spring rolls and what turned out to be some of the best home made chips ever from the kitchen. We checked our emails and confirmed plans to meet Niall and Shona, as well as Jen at a bar later in the evening.

We relaxed in our room for a bit then, discovering via an email that our friends Matt and Carolyn and their boys were staying in a hotel next door, went there to meet them for a drink as they were leaving the next morning. We weren't able to spend long with them as we had to leave to meet the others, but it was good to see them and catch up.

After our drink we got a tuk tuk to Touk bar, which was on the main street running alongside the river with a balcony overlooking both the river and the street below. We met Niall and Shona here, but there was no sign of Jen. We had some happy hour beers and, after introducing Lucy who had never met Niall or Shona, we all chatted for a while.

Soon we were hungry, so walked to a cheap noodle place nearby and had some tasty noodle and rice dishes. Then we decided to go to Java Cafe, where Jen had mentioned she would be going to meet some friends. We found the place, a glass-fronted modern bar overlooking a main grassy square near the city's Independence Monument, and found Jen there with her friends, at an open-mic night. We stayed for a little while but, rather than the music we had been hoping for, the open mic performances were mainly spoken word, with one particular self-important American doing his best to put us off ever listening to poetry again. As Jen was preoccupied with her friends and we weren't enjoying the entertainment, Lucy, Niall, Shona and I walked to the nearby St. 278, which contained numerous bars and nightspots.

We went to Liquid, a smart bar with a free pool table an ordered some drinks. Niall and I played a few games of pool, with me in both cases losing out to his superior skill. We got chatting to some other patrons in the bar including an American girl who queried Niall and Shona, who were both teachers in Phnom Penh, about teaching English, a vocation she had recently undertaken.

After a fun evening, we all hopped in a tuk tuk and shared it as far as St. 258 where we were staying, and left Niall and Shona to continue home. We arranged to meet up again before we left Phnom Penh, then we returned to our room and went to bed.

The next morning we ended up having another long lie, then left the guest house to walk around town and explore a bit. We ended up at the river where we wandered up the wide, smartly paved promenade along the bank. We were amazed how high the river was, with only inches between its surface and the lip of the pathway along its side.

We walked a fair distance up the river then cut into a street perpendicular to the river to find a cafe to get some breakfast. We found a nice looking place and ordered some food. While we were eating, to our surprise we saw Jen crossing the street in front of us. I got up and caught her to say hello. We chatted for a bit and she was apologetic about not managing to catch up properly the night before. Therefore we arranged to try and meet up that evening, before I left her and returned to my breakfast.

After we had eaten we continued through the busy streets of the town in the direction of the central market. Phnom Penh had a much less developed feel that the big cities in Vietnam, for example, but you could tell it was changing quite quickly with new construction going on all over the place. It still had its share of modern buildings, though no large skyscrapers, and had all the modern conveniences you could need in the shops along its busy streets. One other difference we noticed to Vietnam was the lower concentration of motorbikes and the greater number of cars, in particular Lexus SUVs which the well-to-do Cambodians were obviously very proud of, as each of these Lexii had a huge golden 'LEXUS' engraved down the side, just in case you didn't realise what they were driving.

We criss-crossed through the streets, stopping along the way to buy a Cambodian SIM card for our phone, and soon emerged into a huge square between the city blocks containing the massive circular form of the central market. The big, domed structure looked quite modern and was surrounded by a dense forest of small stalls selling everything from flowers to t-shirts to Tupperware. We walked up one of the radial aisles leading to the main covered area, checking out the touristy stalls along the way. Once inside the massive central dome, which contained mainly jewellery stalls, we branched off down some of the aisles and completed a few concentric circuits of the stalls, which sold all sorts of things from clothes to electronics. We then gravitated out of the main building, through fresh food stalls until we found an area with some hawker stalls selling cooked food. We were enticed by some skewers of prawns being grilled at one stall, and ordered a cheap skewer to share. We were served the prawns with some fresh lime and a salt and pepper mixture to dip them in, and tucked in, demolishing them in a few minutes.

After our snack we walked back through the market and bought some souvenirs and gifts, including a 'krama' or checked scarf each which, after breathing in quite a lot of dust on our tuk tuk ride through the countryside the day before, thought we might employ as a mask on similar excursions in the future. We also picked up of our favourite lychee-like fruit, rambutans, to eat as a snack.

After making our purchases we left the market and set a course towards the river, deciding part of the way along the long straight street to get a tuk tuk the remainder of the distance. Back at the river we plonked ourselves on a bench to chill out for a bit, but it wasn't long before we were approached by a friendly local guy. On our guard after our experiences with all the salespeople in Vietnam, we chatted to the guy, waiting for him to start his sales spiel. We deduced correctly that he had a tuk tuk and was going to build up to offering us a ride somewhere but by slipping this into the conversation and pre-empting his sales pitch, we disarmed him and he talked away quite happily and openly. We told him how much we liked Cambodia and its friendly people, which he was genuinely chuffed to hear, and then when we talked about where we had been the subject inevitably turned to the Khmer Rouge. We learned that 8 members of his family had been killed or died during their reign, which only made his cheery disposition, and that of his countrymen, all the more astonishing.

As it turned out, we did actually want a tuk tuk so engaged our new acquaintance to drive us to the royal palace, further down the river back towards our guest house.

When we arrived at the palace, we found out that the dress code was quite strict, with women required to have their shoulders covered. Apparently a shawl across the shoulders wasn't enough so Lucy, wearing a strappy vest-top, had to buy a cheap white t-shirt at the ticket booth to the palace. With our tickets bought, and Lucy garbed in her massive white t-shirt, we entered the sizeable compound containing the area of the palace open to the public.

This area comprised of numerous courtyards dotted with potted plants and containing large white temple buildings with steep colourful roofs, nagas at their points. We entered and looked around some of these temples, finding some of them to be fantastically decorated with murals on the walls and ceilings depicting religious figures and scenes in colourful detail. In one courtyard we entered the silver pagoda, so called because its floor was made up of thousands of engraved tiles made of silver. Unfortunately most of the floor was covered by a carpet but the areas that were uncovered were quite impressive. Around the walls of the pagoda were glass cabinets containing hundreds of Buddhist artifacts and in the centre a large ornate statue of Buddha himself.

After the pagoda we walked through some other courtyards, some with topiaries in the shape of elephants and through a hall which was filled with display cases exclusively containing boxes in the shape of elephants and another with a gigantic scale model of a royal procession which was about a hundred feet long.

After leaving the palace we walked back to our guest house where we ordered some more of the amazing chips and some fruit shakes and sat browsing the internet for a bit. While we were sitting at the table I saw a guy pass whose face I recognised. To me he looked exactly like Conrad Keely, the frontman from one of my facourite bands, ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead. When he re-crossed the room I was fairly convinced it was him but he had gone up the stairs before I had a chance to speak to him.

We spent the next while up in our room reading and relaxing. Lucy had a nap, then in the evening we got up and caught a tuk tuk over to Niall and Shona's apartment, near to Tuol Sleng. Niall came down and unlocked the huge metal gate which served as the entrance to the building and we climbed a spiral staircase to their gigantic balcony. After looking around their apartment, which was really big with the fantastic balcony, we sat out on the balcony and had some drinks and snacks.

We found out from Jen that she wouldn't be able to meet us that evening, so the four of us went out for some dinner. We got a tuk tuk through town to Romdeng, a restaurant based in a big fancy villa and run by an NGO, training up young people in the service industry. We had heard the food was amazing and that there were some interesting items on the menu, and this was entirely correct. We ended up ordering, to start, a plate of deep fried tarantulas with a lime and pepper dip, followed by some fish soup, a beef curry with potatoes, a dish of pork ribs baked with tamarind and aubergines, and finally stir fried red ants with beef.

When the tarantulas arrived I was a little apprehensive about even picking them up, but I managed to overcome my natural instincts and picked one up, first snapping off a leg to try, finding it crispy but very tasty. I soon worked up to chomping down on the squidgy abdomen and the front end, and in the end it was all really tasty. Niall tucked in with abandon, but Shona was a bit more reluctant. Unbelievably, Lucy, the most arachnophobic person I have ever met, even managed to try some of the legs which earned her a massive amount of respect from the rest of us.

The main courses were just as tasty as the spiders, particularly the ants which were huge, and stir fried with lemongrass, chilli and beef and indeed had the zingy, citrus flavour I had heard they had. After our delicious meal we settled up and went for a walk through the nearby streets to find somewhere to have a drink. We stumbled across 'The Pub' which was run by an Englishman and had walls covered in posters from British gangster films, leading us to wonder about the proprietor's former career and his reason for being in Cambodia. Whatever the background, the pub had a free (if wonky) pool table and cheap beer so we spent a little while there before sharing a tuk tuk back to our place, with Niall and Shona carrying on to theirs again.

Back at the guest house we made some calls home on skype before heading off to sleep.

The next morning we got up a bit earlier than the previous few days, then went downstairs for some breakfast. After eating, Lucy left on her own to get a tuk tuk to the international school where Shona worked, to check out the working conditions.

Just after she left, the guy I'd spotted the day before came down and sat at a nearby table. I went over with the remains of my iced coffee and asked if I could join him before enquiring if he was indeed Conrad Keely. It turned out he was, and was travelling around Southeast Asia with his dad, who was Thai.

We got chatting and exhanged travelling stories as well as just generally shooting the breeze, until first Conrad's dad then Lucy, upon returning from her trip to Shona's school, joined us. After a while Conrad and his dad made a move, but we arranged to meet up later for a drink before Lucy and I also left to see some more of Phnom Penh.

This time we got a tuk tuk south through the city to the so-called 'Russian market'. We delved into this covered warren of tightly packed souvenir stalls and dingy, fragrant food courts, buying a few souvenirs along the way and stopping for a drink at one stall. After our drink we looked through some more of the market, and discovered the less tourist part where the packed stalls were crammed with motorbike parts, power tools and household equipment, in an incredibly confusing but evidently ordered jumble.

After looking around the market we got another tuk tuk back up the main riverside road and got dropped off where our bus from Saigon had dropped us. We went into the office for the bus company to enquire about prices for a bus to Siem Reap the following day, but were quoted a price much higher than the bus our guest house was selling. We left and cut in from the river towards Wat Phnom, the temple on a hill after which the city was named. Along the way we called our guest house and booked a bus through them to take us to Siem Reap the following morning.

We soon arrived at Wat Phnom, which was a modest leafy mound rising from the otherwise flat city, ringed by a fairly busy road. We climbed the steps to the fairly underwhelming temple at the top, and although it wasn't anything special we arrived in time to witness a Buddhist ceremony in progress, which we watched respectfully from the back of the temple. After that we walked down the far side of the mound. I'm not sure if the route we took was a very poorly made or maintained staircase, or whether it was a stone drainage channel, but it comprised dangerously sloped and slippery steps down the hillside.

We made it to the bottom in one piece and hopped in another tuk tuk which conveyed us back to the guest house. We arrived and ascended to our room, just as we heard the heavens open and an almighty downpour pound a tatoo on the rooftops around us. We sheltered from the rain and had a nap in our room, then got up in the early evening.

We went next door to the smart new hotel where Matt and Carolyn had been staying and, no thanks to the hopeless staff working there managed to procure some happy hour beers and cocktails. After our drink we returned to the cheaper OK Guest House for our dinner where we had another tasty meal, this time more sweet and sour chicken for Lucy, and a beef curry for me, with some fried morning glory to share. While we were eating we got in touch with Conrad and arranged to meet him at a nearby restaurant in a bit.

After eating we got a tuk tuk to the restaurant, Sovana, and met Conrad along with a German guy Johannes who was a friend of a friend of Conrad's and some others, who were eating what looked like a great meal. We joined them in drinking cheap jugs of draft beer over ice and chatted for a while before some of the group left.

The remainder of the group shared a tuk tuk and Conrad's rented scooter to go across town to Dodo Rum Bar, where we had some incredible coffee flavoured rum on the rocks, served by a barman with the most striking charicatured French accent we had ever heard. A girl who had accompanied us from the restaurant then left as she had a flight to catch the next day, while an English guy, Ryan, who had been at Conrad's last-minute solo gig in one of the bars on St. 278 (which we'd annoyingly missed) arrived.

After finishing our drinks in Dodo, we hopped on Conrad's scooter and Ryan's dirtbike and drove through the quiet streets in a safe and controlled manner to the nearby Zeppelin Cafe. This place was great, with a chilled out vibe and a big Chinese guy sitting in a little enclosure up the back of the bar, surrounded by shelves of old LPs like some 70s living room, playing classic rock and pop hits from yesteryear.

We had a few more drinks here and shot the breeze some more, until it was time for us to call it a night. We left the guys in the bar and caught a tuk tuk back to OK, where we crashed out to try and get some sleep before our bus the next morning.

I couldn't really sleep, which I think may have been due to the coffee rum, and only managed to get a couple of hours before it was time to get up again. We packed, showered and took our stuff downstairs where we grabbed a quick breakfast and paid the bill before hopping in a tuk tuk to a travel agent's office somewhere in town. We waited at the office for a short time before getting on a comfortable coach and taking our seats for the journey north to Siem Reap.