the National Museum and decided to leave The Royal Palace for the next afternoon. The museum was brilliant and made us realise what wonders would be in store for us at Angkor Wat. After the museum we wandered down to the river front, which is very French, no surprise seeing as the French ruled Cambodia from 1863 until 1941, then the Japanese invaded and the French were preoccupied with World War II. We stopped off at a riverside bar for our first taste of Cambodian food, which was great, similar to Chinese and Thai except that they used only herbs to flavour instead of spices.

We were up early as our trip to the Killing Fields was booked for 9 a.m. so we went down for breakfast, they can’t half cook up a great cheese omelette! We were both aware of the atrocities that were committed by the Khmer Rouge but nothing could prepare you for what we witnessed. On route I remembered the way I felt

after mine and Cath’s visit to the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin and was sure that I would feel very much the same way again. We had a guide for our visit which I think is imperative for such important and distressing places. There is a monument which houses shelves as high as you can see, which are just filled with skulls, each shelf has a small plaque saying the age of the victims. At the bottom there is just a mass of ragged clothes from the sorry victims. It was incredibly emotional and hard to believe that these were only part of the remains that had been uncovered. There are 129 graves in total and so far only 86 had been unearthed and within these mass graves, the skulls and bones of 8985 victims were found. And this is just one of scores mass grave sites to be found all over Cambodia. In all it is estimated that around 2 million people were killed under the Khmer Rouge, about a quarter of the population. Some of the graves have explanations as to who was buried within them and our guide