My gears just crunched loudly, deafeningly, and I've not quite recovered.

I left Singapore and flew to Phnom Penh.

Singapore: terrifyingly clean, wealthy, educated, multicultural, smart, new, tech-smart and confident. An entrepôt port for two centuries and a jewel on the international map.

Cambodia: filthy, achingly poor, introspective, brutalised, backward and directionless.

One sweats the most out of it's twentieth century past, the other stuck in it's own. Arguably, the key difference is that when Sing got independence it did everything in the names of growth and capitalism. Cambodia, however, imploded through an orgy of communist madness.

By nature, I would have expected to be drawn to the British colony of Singapore, but it comes across as the school swot, the try-hard, the goody-two-shoes. I like it, but I'll never love it.

Cambodia I love almost instantly, but don't ask me why. It's a diamond in the rough. Beautiful Khmer architecture. Devastating poverty. Ruinous civil war (all of which occurred in my own life time, which bites very hard on the soul) has left it badly mutilated.

The nation is the underdog I am rooting for in every breath. This could so easily be another Bangkok, another KL, another Singapore.

Wifi here is a rarity, and inevitably a bit crap, so this will be a bit of a mishmash of bits.

After i flew in yesterday, the first priority was to get some washing done Rather than use the hotel's laundry service, I walked out to find a local one. A tourist office singled out a back street so narrow I had to sidle down it. One word written on a piece of plank. "Lundry". A teenage boy with the earliest wisp of a moustache led me to the Lundry. A one room home, no furniture to speak of, smaller than my bedroom, more bare concrete than plaster on the Walls or tiling on the floor, but kept immaculately clean.

How much for the load? Six dollars, he said, but his eyes said what I already knew; I'm supposed to haggle.

This time, balls to that. I can see two children and one mum. They cook and play in the tiny side street; it is only two and a half football's widths. Six dollars is four quid to me; I could lose that down the back of a sofa and not notice. Here it might actually help a tiny bit. Done, I said.

Today was a roller coaster. I saw the mass graves of the killing fields, I fired an A47 and an M16, I saw the tree which the Khmer rouge would whack babies against until they died (I seriously cannot believe this happened at any time, let alone MY LIFETIME), I saw a few of the ancient treasures of Angkor, I ate khmer pancakes, I visited s21 (the secondary school turned into a torture centre).

Finally my guide, Veasna, also aged 36, has invited me round to his mum's house for dinner. She speaks no English, I speak no Khmer. I've never seen so many children playing contentedly for so long: no shouting, complaining, fighting. We talk, about life, the universe and everything.

These are good people. If only they had ever had a government worthy of them.