Digging out the digital photo album, we’ll never forget our amazing tour to Indochina seven years ago – Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. More of those countries as we go further down the alphabet, but today C is for Cambodia and its capital Phnom Penh, an extraordinary contrast between the beautiful and the ugly, a city of amazing resilience and the dignity to look its awful recent past straight in the eye. Please bear in mind that among these pictures are images from the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields, if you’d sooner not see.

So what do you think of when you think of Phnom Penh? Probably not the Mekong, but that was our incredible introduction to the city, as we entered Cambodia from Vietnam on a speed boat, and, when you see the Phnom Penh skyline for the first time, it takes your breath away.

One’s overwhelming memory of Phnom Penh is of the exquisitely decorated buildings that form the Royal Palace.

Internal decorations are stunning too. This is Wat Phnom temple, built in 1373.

And of course, you can ask for a blessing… from a statue…. for cash!

The city is a mix of bustling commercial streets

where health and safety is always scrupulously observed…

and the Highway Code is king.

And after all that hard work…

There’s always time for a nap.

It’s a city of modern architecture too, with the University of Medical Science

The Railway Station

And modernistic office blocks

Combined with the Old World Grandeur of the Post Office

Sadly one can never, and must never, forget the horrors of the past. This was Pol Pot’s detention centre and is today the Museum of Genocide.

The cells contain exhibits of the dreadful past, and many of the floors bear the bloodstains that won’t ever get clean, no matter how hard they are scrubbed.

Photographic memorials to some of the fallen make tragic viewing. You can only admire the defiance and insolence on some of the faces as they refuse to submit willingly to their deaths.

And you can get plenty of awful insights into daily life here in the 70s, with the gibbets still on display

There weren’t many survivors – just a handful. But one, Chum Mey, spends almost every day at the centre selling and signing his book, giving talks to local children, in the hope that this genocide never recurs.

Visiting the Museum is harrowing enough, but nothing can really prepare you for a visit to The Killing Fields. But it’s one of those awful places that you feel you should see, so that you can bear witness to the agonies of that past generation. This is the central monument, if you look closely behind the glass, you’ll see that inside is just racks and racks of human skulls.

The bark of this particular tree has barbs so sharp that it was used to execute victims.

Everywhere are mass graves.

But I think the most pathetic and saddest thing of all is the collection of victims’ clothes

which in places you can still see peeping through the surface of the ground, along with remnants of bones. A fragment of shirt here, a piece of underpant there. It’s truly horrifying.

But life goes on, fortunately. The market is a bustle of colours and smells

Kids go to school

And men go to work

You can do deliveries with the motorbike

Or you can potter about on the Mekong

And I, of course, integrated with the locals and never stuck out like a sore thumb once.

If you’d like to read a little more about our adventure in Phnom Penh here is the original blog post I wrote at the time. Tomorrow it’s back to the old theatre trips and reminiscences of shows I saw in 1976-77. Stay safe!