Places To See: Cambodia

PHNOM PENH

Located at the junction of the Mekong, Bassac and Tonle Sap rivers, Phnom Penh has been Cambodia's capital for most of the last six centuries. It retains a rather dusty, small town feel, with crumbling French colonial buildings, sprawling Wats (as the pagodas are known here), and the imposing Royal Palace. Brutal legacies of the genocide that occurred under the Khmer Rouge include Tuol Sleng, the one-time school that was used as a torture centre and has now been preserved as a museum, and the Killing Fields, an area nearby were some 17,000 men, women and children were murdered and dumped in mass graves. Not for the faint-of-heart, these sites are sobering reminders of the Khmer Rouge's brutality'and the rest of the world's failure to intervene.

SIEM REAP

THE TEMPLES OF ANGKOR:
To sum up the magnificence of Angkor's temples in a few lines is impossible. Built between seven and 11 centuries ago the temples'about 100 of which are still standing'were devoted to Buddha and Hindu deities. Within the fortified city of Angkor Thom lies The Bayon, the third tier of which is lined by more than 200 huge, carved faces of that stare down from 54 towers. Other highlights include the Buddhist temple of Ta Prohm, which was not been restored and looks just as it did when French explorers stumbled upon it in the 1860s, and Angkor Wat, a vast temple complex dedicated to Vishnu in the early 12th century. Many of the temples are covered with fantastic carvings depicting religious stories and scenes from daily life.
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