ON THE ROAD/Rosita Boland: All travel around Cambodia is difficult, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. The boats are frighteningly overcrowded; the "roads" appalling dirt-tracks steaming with dust and full of crater-like potholes; the trains are agonisingly slow and schedules uncertain so as to fox bandits.
If the state of a country's infrastructure is a clue to understanding that country, then landmined Cambodia is a place that feels truly pulverised.
I took the daily boat from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, which crosses the immense Tonle Sap lake, and which was so overloaded it rode worryingly low in the water. The price for a foreigner's ticket is $23 - the locals pay a fraction of this. I counted some 80 Westerners on the roof alone, and reckoned the combined total of our fares from just one trip would possibly buy the boat. Undoubtedly, some of the money goes to paying off bandits, who have held up the boat at gunpoint several times, knowing it is the route most used by tourists.
Phnom Penh must be one of the strangest capital cities in the world. Hardly any of the city's streets are paved; every household reputedly contains at least one gun; armed robbery is so frequent as to be unremarkable; and the ghosts of thousands of its citizens murdered during Pol Pot's mad regime pulse everywhere by day and haunt your dreams by night.
When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, it had a population of two million. All but 50,000 of them were forced into the countryside in an effort to restructure society into a submissive and peasant-dominated country.
No one will ever know exactly how many millions of Cambodians died under Pol Pot, but at least one-fifth, possibly a quarter, of its people were wiped out.
I was sufficiently intimidated by the stories I'd heard of armed robbery to hire a motorbike driver for a couple of days so I could explore without worrying about ending up trotting down the wrong street. Every hotel has its regular and known drivers, and you're supposed to be reasonably safe if you use one of these.
My driver, from the Indochine Hotel, told me his father had died under Pol Pot, and I could hardly bear to think of what was going through his head as he drove me to the genocide museum of Tuol Sleng, and later to the infamous Killing Fields, 15 kilometres from Phnom Penh.
Dreadful as the genocide museum is, at least Cambodia has one. To my knowledge nowhere in China, where countless millions died under Mao's crazed Cultural Revolution, is there any similar attempt to examine a bloody and senseless period of history.
Until 1975, Tuol Sleng was a high school in an unremarkable suburb of Phnom Penh. Pol Pot turned it into the country's biggest and most notorious secret prison. Everything has been left as it was; classrooms turned into warrens of torture cells and leg-irons still bolted to the stone floors.
It's the photographs, though, taken of each prisoner on arrival and which now line the walls, that are the hardest things to look at.
There is a myth that a drowning person sees images from their life pass before them when they die. I thought of that when I looked at those photographs of the doomed Cambodians.
Of the 17,000 men, women and children (the Khmer Rouge's method was to kill entire families) who were sent to Tuol Sleng, only seven survived.
All the rest were murdered in the Killing Fields, a tormented patch of dusty land yawning with sunken grass pits and reeking of an evil so potent my legs literally collapsed as I walked around the site; pushed out from under me by some malevolent force still present there.
I had not wanted to go to these places, but the travel agent in Siem Reap who sold me my boat ticket had told me how important it was that I go - to understand what had happened to his people.
One thing is clear: it will take generations for Cambodia to heal from what it has suffered so recently.
Phnom Penh also contained happier things. In the grounds of the atmospheric Royal Palace there is a pagoda with a floor made entirely of silver tiles, gleaming like something from a fairy tale. The same pagoda also contains an exquisite solid-gold Buddha, weighing 90 kilos and decorated with over 9,000 diamonds, and one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
In the faded courtyards of the gorgeous National Museum, full of statues from Angkor's temples, rescued from destruction by the Khmer Rouge, I fell asleep on a bench and woke to find myself covered with bright butterflies the width of a hand-span.
I originally never intended going to Cambodia, and the day I was leaving I realised with dismay that I hadn't spent half enough time there.
Changing buses at the Vietnamese border, I looked back at Cambodia through its lovely burnt-orange, stone archway and vowed to return some day to explore more of this troubled but brave and extraordinary country.