My journey to Cambodia started with what could be interpreted as a bad omen – nudging through the narrow Bangkok backstreets I managed to knock over and smash a Buddhist shrine. Thankfully my piecing together job was enough to avoid bad karma and I relished the feeling of finally being on my way again after such little mileage in the past few weeks.

Just before the Thai border I met a Swiss journalist who worked for a Pattaya newspaper. Always one to indulge the press, I agreed to give a short interview about my trip and where I was planning to go, tactfully neglecting to mention that I’d visited Pattaya in case any of the city’s residents thought their home was something more than an oversized brothel.

At the Cambodian border I briefly met up with Neil and Meryl and thankfully avoided their hassles of dealing with the mafia-run public transport system, although I did still have to deal with the unreasonably awful Poipet – Siem Reap road, apparently left so ludicrously neglected on the back of a hefty commission to the government by a certain airline operating out of Siem Reap.

Absolutely caked from head to foot in a thick coat of orange dust, I was forced to stop for the night only half way there. The next morning I resumed my battle with the dust and sharp rocks of the road, playing Russian roulette every time I passed a truck, whose heavy wheels would kick up blinding clouds so that I could only pray there'd be no serious potholes or oncoming vehicles when I tried to overtake.

THE TEMPLES OF ANGKOR:

One of the wonders of the world, the Temples of Angkor are simply breathtaking. Built between the 9th and 13th centuries, this gigantic complex formed the political and religious centre of the formidable Khmer Empire. Rediscovered in the 1860’s by the French naturalist Henri Mouhot, the site retains a romantic sense of exploration and excitement, and despite the growing numbers of tourists, I still felt as though I was stepping into a Tintin adventure.

Jasper & Neil at Ta Prohm Temple

Although there are enough temples to keep you busy for weeks, we only had enough energy to explore the three main ones. Firstly, Bayon, a bizarre Temple characterized by the 216 colossal faces staring in every direction with the same disturbingly confident smile, so that no matter where you are in or around Bayon, there are always at least one set of eyes, as large as dinner plates, staring you down.

Ta Prohm, the second temple we visited, looks as if it’s fighting a losing battle with the surrounding forest. Thoroughly entangled with powerful tree roots, the stonework gives the impression of being slowly crushed in the suffocating grip of a giant python. This, however, only adds to the romance of Ta Prohm which amply fulfills, beyond the capacity of imagination, anyone’s idea of a lost city. Film directors have also picked up on this and the temple featured as the set of ‘Tomb Raider’ amongst other adventure movies.

A face at Bayon Temple

 certainly in terms of sheer size and magnitude, is undoubtedly Angkor Wat. The largest religious building in the world, with a moat and outer wall reaching 3.6 km long and a central tiered complex consisting of 9 enormous lotus shaped towers, Angkor Wat cuts an incomparable silhouette with the dawn sun rising behind it. Within the temple are many wonderful bas-reliefs, but the most fascinating thing for me was climbing the tremendously steep steps to the top of the central complex and taking in the spectacular expanses of dense forest stretching the whole width of the flat horizon, imagining how different this view must have been to the monks who lived here a thousand years ago, when the surrounding area was a great urban civilization of one million inhabitants.

Equally jaw-dropping, Meryl gave fellow tourists another unforgettable sight when, wearing (perhaps in-appropriately - although it was hot, but luckily not too hot for underwear) a dress which the local kids had earlier complimented as a T-shirt, she climbed the extremely steep temple stairs and confirmed to a number of onlookers that she was, in fact, a certified ‘coke’.

Branch covered doorway - Ta Prohm Temple

Angkor Wat at dawn

TOWARDS PHNOM PENH:

While Neil and Meryl took the boat down the Mekong to Phnom Penh, I had a good ride along the vastly improved road for about an hour until, with my eyelids weighing down heavily, I decided I had to stop to take a break.

Meryl silhouetted through a window at Angkor Wat

Larking around at Bayon!

Parking my bike just off the road and spreading my jacket in its shadow, I  

settled down and was asleep in minutes. An hour or so later I woke suddenly to voices floating over my head – as I opened my eyes I was a little shocked to see about ten perplexed little faces peering down at me. It appeared that I’d parked up and gone to sleep in a corner of a school playground!  In Phnom Penh I found an idyllic guesthouse, built on a wooden deck jutting out onto a peaceful lake, covered in lilies and other vegetation – very peaceful for a capital city.

THE KILLING FIELDS AND S-21:

We couldn’t visit Cambodia without somehow acknowledging the atrocities that occurred here back in the 1970’s with the barbaric reign of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. The Killing Field of Choeung Ek, 14km outside Phnom Penh, claimed approximately 17,000 men, women and children from mid-1975 to December 1978.

A former orchard, part of the field is still covered in orderly planted longan trees, providing a comforting notion of calm and normality. The gentle swaying of the branches and distant shouts and laughter coming from the next door school, make the unspeakable slaughter which occurred here seem even more implausible. The west side of the field is pock-marked with large open craters, around which tangle a confused network of footpaths leading down to a stagnant pond, half dried-out with a knotted barbed wire fence sinking into its far bank.

Within the disorderly craters, filthy rags and broken shards of bone poke out of the soil, jabbing your consciousness into visualising the executions. A lone tree with a thick, sturdy trunk stands at the edge of a crater. Beside it is a sign reading ‘Killing Tree’ and a gruesome illustration of how Khmer Rouge soldiers used it to whack babies against. An adjacent board exhibits another child-killing method. One soldier hurls an infant up into the air while his comrade positions his bayonet underneath to impale it.

Somberly standing at the entrance of the field is a tall, glass-walled stupa, crammed full of human skulls taken from the site. Some are visibly crushed through bludgeoning, some have bullet holes in them, while others are undamaged due to a death-blow to the spine. Many are so small they can only have belonged to toddlers.

Obviously not quite disturbed enough, we continued on to S-21, a former high school in central Phnom Penh which had been converted into a ‘re-education center’ for political prisoners during Khmer Rouge control.  From being filled with pupils and desks, the classrooms were onverted into torture chambers, solely furnished with a single iron bed frame and iron manacles - just entering the room instills a haunting sense of suffering.  On one of the bare walls stood a blown up photograph of the room’s same iron bed frame occupied by a mutilated corpse, frozen in a twisted position perpetuating untold agonies.

Dried spots of blood still lay splattered on the walls and floor. In other classrooms, thousands of mug-shots of inmates were posted on the walls and free-standing boards. Men, women and children, many dressed in the apparel of Khmer Rouge workers and soldiers, victimized by a paranoid regime for ‘knowing too much’.

Stupa at Cheoeung Ek Killing Field

Of the thousands of prisoners who passed through S-21, only seven avoided death through torture or execution at Choeung Ek.

PHNOM PENH:

Just to round off a truly nauseating day, Neil and Meryl dared me to savour some local culinary delights – hairy tarantulas and fat juicy cockroaches. Having been fairly confident in my abilities to ignore the relevant discouraging instincts, the extreme density and thickness of the hairs on the spider’s legs and the inescapable dread of exactly what foul-tasting liquid would gush out if I were burst the cockroach's plump belly, proved too hard to ignore. As a compromise, I settled for the not nearly so unappetising crickets, which, having tentatively tried the first one, I munched down with glee.

Relaxing back at the guesthouse, harmony was disturbed by a mad little dog which suddenly decided to jump up and viciously gnaw on Meryl’s leg while she was dozing in a hammock. After repeated, unrelenting attacks on Meryl (despite my valiant but usually unsuccessful efforts to kick it) it finally stopped terrorizing us when I squashed it against a wall with my foot. Meryl sustained some pretty nasty bites and I enjoyed spending the rest of the evening recalling the details of the current SE Asian rabies epidemic (I was fairly confident the dog didn’t actually have rabies).

SIANOUKVILLE:

We spent pretty much all of our time here relaxing at the beach, thoroughly enjoying a seriously laid-back lifestyle of sun-bathing (or getting ludicrously burnt in mine and Meryl’s case), visiting idyllic tropical islands, chasing shoals of fish with a mask and snorkel, meeting other travellers, drinking 50 cent beers on the beach, eating lots of fresh fish and discussing at length the aromatic and flavoursome differences between Angkor and Anchor beer and why they had to make the names so damn confusing.

Buddhist monks on the beach at Sianoukville

Sunset with fishing boat, Sianoukville

KAMPOT:

A good ride east apart from one part where I had to cross a very flat plain in a wide open valley where the gale-force winds were hitting me directly side-on, making me feel like my wheels were going to be blown out from under me – nerve-racking.

Because I stopped along the way and got totally lost in Kampot, Meryl and Neil arrived at Bodhi Villa ahead of me, a place that someone had recommended to Neil back in Ko Chang. When I got there I was greeted by Meryl who rushed out with a wide grin on her face saying our room was ‘pretty cool’.

Rural house on stilts, Kampot Road, Sianoukville

It certainly was. Situated literally on the beautiful Teuk Chhou River (it was floating on empty fuel barrels) and with a whole wall facing the river completely missing, you could literally dive off your bed into the clear warm water.  With only two beds available, I set up my hammock between two beams stretching over our wall-sized window – it was just magical to fall asleep looking out across the river at the vividly starry sky and black water below, alive with intensely sparkling phosphorescence. I felt like I was dreaming before I’d closed my eyes. (I got that from Tom, he likes to say it in bed).

We enjoyed a truly amazing few days, lounging around in the most chilled-out atmosphere possible. Our time was spent riding into town for some unbelievable Cambodian cuisine (the local beef stew and very stinky durian fruit), riding upriver to the rapids and swimming in the crystal clear waters there, giving Meryl practice rides on my bike (terrifying for all three of us – bike included), sharing a few drinks and chatting away to people at Bodhi Villa in the evenings, and then going for night-time swims in the magnificent phosphorescence of the river.

PHNOM PENH:

The landscape throughout the Cambodia that I’ve seen so far has been fairly flat and desolate although I know there’s much more to it. The roads generally pass through farmland which, at this time of year, is arid and harvested and consistently scattered with tall, dry palms with pale brittle looking leaves, giving an impression of drought. The temperatures rise pretty high during the middle of the day so I sampled some of Cambodia’s unique rest areas – much better than the one’s in England. Here, you can pull your bike up right next to a roadside hammock, clamber into it, order a drink then go to sleep for as long as you like, get up, pay about 10p and be on your way...brilliant.

On the way I saw a fairly gruesome accident – a completely flattened bike with a mat spread over the poor casualty and a white outline sprayed around the whole mess. Twenty yards down the road was an enormous truck carrying a massive dumpster and the same white line sprayed around it – chilling to think what must have happened.

View over the lake from our guesthouse Phnom Penh

We annoyingly had to wait around in Phnom Penh for our Vietnamese visas and entertained ourselves in various ways – Neil beat me in a pool competition, I mention it because I know he’ll complain if I don’t.

I had the extreme difficulty of leaving my bike and most of my belongings in our guesthouse (Vietnam annoyingly don’t allow foreign vehicles into their country so I planned to go around on buses with Neil and Meryl for a few weeks before coming back to Phnom Penh to collect my bike). I remember being a little disconcerted by the extremely relaxed attitude the manager took towards me leaving all my precious belongings at the guesthouse, but laziness and a persevering optimism that it’ll all be fine meant that I didn’t bother looking for a better situation. I really hope I don’t regret it.