As the sun rose over Angkor Wat, the worlds largest religious building, I was filled with a sense of achievement; having wanted to come here for so long and finally being here, at 5.30am witnessing the day starting over such an amazing building. Breakfast might have added to my happiness, but not by much. Quickly realising we hadnt a clue what anything was we hired a friendly guide who told us a lot. We understood a little. Happy and, clearly knowledgable, his accent left a lot to be desired, and so it was with great confusion we listened to the phrase "the french have restored this ceiling with semen... You understand?!"

We stood for at least a minute in embarrased silence until we gratefully stumbled across the true meaning - CEMENT. Thank goodness for that, i know the french are eccentric and everything but really....

We spent a full day (well a full day that starts at 5am ends at 1pm no?!) exploring the temples surrounding Angkor Wat; the huge carved faces at Bayon were amazing as many other faces in the temples were destoryed in the Khmer Rouge search for gold and diamonds amongst the buddha heads. Doing the Lara Croft thing we found ourselves happily deserted (by sheer luck it was tour group lunchtime) at Ta Prohm, the temple that has been left as archeologists found it, and so is being slowly strangled by trees vines and creepers - it looks wicked!

After a month in Asia we are now used to the constant barrage of 'tuk-tuk', 'taxi', 'buy sumsing', but were taken aback by just how friendly the Cambodians are at doing it. For a nation of people with such a recently disturbing past it is amazing at just how happy and carefree they seem to go about their days, with a real lust for life and happiness at talking to strangers.

And so to that recently dark past, we travelled to Phnom Pehn and the Prison of Tuol Sleng aka S-21, where over 20,000 everyday Cambodians were tortured and killed (of those 20,000 just 7 survived. A total of 3 million were killed throughout Cambodia in just 4 years) less than thirty years ago under the gruesome regime of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot. Cells strewn with just a bare mattress, torture implements and a photo of a corpse are all that greet you in most of the rooms, but it was the passport-like photographs taken of all 'inmates' that i found most disturbing, some looking at the camera with confusion, sadness, or pure fear. Strange that, like the Nazi's, the Khmer Rouge chose to document their victims so well, but in a very dark way a good thing as it allows family members to discover what may have happened to their loved ones, and for people like to appreciate the horrors on a personal level.

The disturbing 'sights' of Phnom Pehn sadly do not end there, as 15km away from the city lie the Killing Fields of Choeng Ek, where many of S-21's prisoners met their end. Many of whom, apparently to save bullets, were simply bludgeoned to death with a spade after digging their own mass graves. Inevitably some were only knocked unconscious and died from suffocation from earth and other corpses; a more gruesome way to die I cannot imagine. After the Khmer Rouge fell aid agencies excavated the mass graves for evidence againt Pol Pot and in an attempt to discover identities of those killed here, but the excavation clearly only concentrated on large bones and skulls as the fields are literally littered with human bones and clothing. Of all the horrifying images we saw that day, the sight of trousers and femurs poking up through tree roots will never leave me, really bringing home just how recent a tragedy this was. I hope for the people of Cambodia that the trial against the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge will someday bring them closure (as continual salt in the wounds the men responsible for the genocide still havent been brought to justice and continue to live as free men).