Travel: Life after death: In the bustling markets, streets and temples of Cambodia, life goes on frenetically despite the murderous legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Robert Turnbull is welcomed by Thailand's troubled neighbour

FRANKLY, I was nervous. In Bangkok I read that two aid workers had been captured by the Khmer Rouge and people were putting it about that Phnom Penh was riddled with gangs who preyed on tourists. I'd been seduced by the sweetness of the Thais and uplifted by the country's affluence and the confidence of its culture. Cambodia was a different story. For three centuries the most powerful empire in South-east Asia, it had slowly crumbled under the might of other nations and then brutally turned in on itself. It was the murderers' legacy that I feared.

The airport was chaos - an undisciplined scramble for impromptu visas, which you can only acquire on arrival; but it was nothing compared to the auction for a cab that followed. About 30 of my would-be chauffeurs surged towards me in the stifling heat, filling the cavernous terminal with manic screams of 'six dollars'. The prospect of choosing only one from this sea of desperate faces made me panic for a minute. I pulled myself together. 'Five dollars', aka Mr Senn, got the job.

In Phnom Penh there is one traffic light. Getting round the city by car is a process of avoiding collisions with bicycles, usually loaded to the brim (one man had a bath strapped to his back) and other drivers, most of whom are leaning on their horns. I had expected to see a strong residue of colonial architecture, but not to find myself in an almost completely French- looking city, by which I don't mean the Deauville seaside style of Hanoi or Saigon, but the kind of Thirties urban 'modernism' parodied in Jacques Tati films. The white villas that lined the streets had some stunning marble and brick mosaic, opaque glass walls and sweeping balconies. Phnom Penh, I decided, must have the greatest concentration of Art Deco buildings outside Miami.

But the boulevards through the heart of the city centre had sunk into an advanced state of decay. Squatting families were preparing lunch alfresco over coal-fired cookers; but the spicy smells disappeared amid the stench of sewage, a legacy of the Khmer Rouge army who destroyed the city's plumbing, along with much of its infrastructure, before retreating defeated to the countryside in 1979 when the Vietnamese invaded. From huge posters around the city, King Sihanouk, the country's leader and great survivor, beams down like an old Soviet despot. Today he is dying of cancer but still struggles to make peace with the Khmer Rouge, now severely reduced but still controlling a large area near the Thai border. I stopped briefly at the central market, a peculiar Thirties structure, where lotus flowers, mangos and cheap clothing were spread out across the warmed pavement. One woman was chewing shiny black cockroaches. When I recoiled involuntarily she laughed mockingly.

A thousand years ago Cambodia's great Khmer empire was populous and wealthy and adorned with immense and glorious palaces from the Gulf of Bengal to the China Sea. But province after province was annexed by invaders until the French came in ostensibly to 'protect' the nation from complete annihilation by Thailand and Burma. The French built a communications network and developed the country's natural resources, especially rubber. Under Sihanouk the country became independent in 1952, but he was powerless to curtail a growing conflict between the urban elite and rural population. Sihanouk's support for the Vietcong in the Vietnam War was the policy that brought him down. But it was the unpopularity of the next American-backed government and Henry Kissinger's bombing campaign that prompted the civil war. The Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh in 1975. For a few weeks the people felt liberated, but then the terror began.

As a people the Cambodians are not unlike the Thais - warm and congenial and, when money isn't involved, courteous. They are also prepared to talk of the horrors of 1975-79 quite openly and without trying to elicit any sympathy. It was soon after arriving at the Renakse Hotel, a colonial relic on the Mekong River, that one of its employees told me her story. Her parents had almost certainly died of starvation in the fields and her brother, a teacher, was bludgeoned to death in 1977. She wasn't sure of the details because the Khmer Rouge policy was to break up families and dispatch its members to different parts of the country. For three years she worked on the land in area close to the the border of Thailand. The Khmer Rouge robbed the country of all its expertise: anyone with a university education, or who could speak a foreign language - even those who wore glasses - perished at their hands, she said. In fact they were generally incompetent at everything but murder. Even the 'great march' into Phnom Penh in 1975 was a shambles - Khmer Rouge guerrillas had seized some tanks for the purpose, but, unable to drive them, forced government soldiers to do so at gunpoint.

I slept badly that night on a creaky bed surrounded by cheap vinyl furniture and garishly patterned wallpaper; only the geckos on the crumbling ochre outer walls and the old wicker chairs on the porch justified the guidebook's description of the place as 'a colonial beauty'. The hotel had been used as an ammunition dump by the Khmer Rouge and I was haunted by what might have happened there. But you can't be a tourist in Cambodia and turn your face away from these events. In the morning I summoned up the courage to visit the Tuol Sleng detention camp, an old school in the southern part of the city which the Khmer Rouge turned into a torture centre, and which the liberating Vietnamese kept intact as the Genocide Museum. Apart from photographs stuck haphazardly on the walls (the Khmer Rouge kept detailed records of 20,000 that met their death here) and some lurid paintings depicting the 'killing fields' 20 kilometres south of the city, the 'curators' had left this place untouched. It made it even more harrowing. There are traces of blood on the floor underneath the beds on which people were tortured, and in the cramped cells complete with leg irons, there remain some old combs and bits of cloth on the floor, presumably possessions of the inmates. At that moment I learnt the meaning of the term 'cold sweat'.

The museum that testifies to Cambodia's more glorious past is the National Museum of Arts on the main square, a French building in the Khmer style. Here sit the Buddhas from the Angkor period with their wide Mona Lisa smiles, depicting the beauty and grace of first God Kings. In the museum shop you can buy replicas for dollars 10 ( pounds 7). When I remarked on a strange and lifeless black object on the floor, I was told that a million bats live in the building's huge teracotta-coloured roof. I could believe it from the screeches above me and the great lumps of bat guano hanging from rafters. This was one of the city's paramount problems, I was told, apparently creating a conflict between sacred tradition and the demands of tourism. It seemed a hideous irony that a nation that had managed to kill two million of its people was helpless in the face of some upturned mammals.

As night descended on a city still largely without electricity, I went in search of the vestiges of European adventurism in the Far East described so cogently by Graham Greene, Conrad and Marguerite Duras. The Foreign Correspondents' Club is a lively and lager- soaked refuge for UN aid workers and entrepreneurs. A group of construction workers from Germany were propping up the sweeping mahogany bar, while some local boys in cocktail jackets were playing at being French waiters. The Australian women who shared my table worked for an organisation that removed mines. A million of them had been found throughout the countryside, and every day 100 people are added to the toll of victims. Many had blown themselves up: having placed mines around their own land to deter invaders, they had then stumbled across them by accident.

The Cafe No Problem, around the corner, more accurately captured what I imagined to be a colonial ambience. A large Provencal- style villa with green louvred doors and a stony courtyard, it is French-owned and offers imported cheese, gateaux and cafe noir to ex-pats, who lounge around on cushions, play mah-jong and drink Cognac until the wee hours. It certainly lives up to its name, I thought, and can't have changed much over the years. But as I left, contemporary reality returned: on the other side of the gates the chant of 'one dollar' began. I tried, in vain, to take a leisurely stroll back to the hotel, 10 rickshaws on my tail.

The Grand Hotel d'Angkor was at one time the best hotel in Siem Reap, the provincial town 300 kilometres from Phnom Penh that services the 10th-13th century temples of Angkor. A friend in London very charitably called it a 'mixture of colonial ambience and Communist service'. The rooms were large but bare and telephoneless, and in the tile-cracked bathroom, brown, lukewarm water coughed spasmodically from rusty taps. The staff were transfixed by the hotel's sole TV showing CNN, and when I asked the receptionist to confirm my ticket back to Phnom Penh, she simply shrugged her shoulders.

But all this recedes into the distance when surrounded by the splendours of Angkor and its 250 square kilometres of temples. No guidebook or travel writer can do justice to the first sight of its vast bulbous towers, colonnaded gateways and the asparas - celestial nymphs - finely etched in stone. At the entrance to the Royal City of Angkor Thom is the Gallery of 1,000 Buddhas, many of them decapitated, either as a result of Khmer Rouge target practice or to adorn rich western mantelpieces, via the antique shops of Bangkok. But the huge stone faces of the God Kings that dominate the Bayon central temple, at the heart of the Angkor Thom complex, are well-preserved and eloquently convey the tyranny with which this mighty empire was sustained. Looking up at these haunting faces reminded me of Shelley's poem 'Ozymandias', with its 'sneer of cold command'. The ruins of Ta Prohm are more romantic and reveal the full extent of the jungle's violent embrace, with stones torn apart or devoured by thick tree roots.

But the joy of Angkor is the life within it. There were old nuns with bald, bronzed heads carrying washing, and lonely children selling stringed instruments. Monks in saffron robes have found makeshift homes in the stones and the cows graze on the grassy patches that separate the temples from the jungle. In a dark corner of the Bayon I was allowed to attend a religious rite as a middle-aged woman summoned up a spirit. Five fellow worshippers tried to control her writhing body and out of her mouth came a terrifying growl. A hundred feet away a gamelan orchestra accompanied a more serene prayer session of about 40 people. I was summoned to join them, but they all broke into peals of laughter when I sat down. My feet were pointing towards the Buddha - a sign of disrespect - and laughter was their way of expressing embarrassment.

Army recruits are stationed around the ruins to prevent the tourists wandering off into minefields. In the rambling 10th-century ruins of Banteay Srei, a two-hour journey by car along a treacherous road, I found live mortar shells lying casually around the broken statues. As I left the temple a woman at a stall offered me home-made soup from a large cauldron. I regretted it immediately. The vomiting and fever started that night and got worse by the time I reached the hospital in Phnom Penh the next day. They treated me for amoebic dysentery. Barely able to board a plane, I postponed my trip to Vietnam to rush back to the hospitals and hospitality of Thailand.-

TRAVEL NOTES

GETTING THERE: Flights to Cambodia can be taken from Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Trailfinders (071-938 3366) has flights in June from Gatwick to Phnom Penh via Bangkok for pounds 605. Thai Airways International (071-499 9113) flies to Phnom Penh via Bangkok for approximately pounds 910, to 15 June. From then the cost will increase to approximately pounds 840; prices depend on banking rates. Campus Travel (071-730 8111, 061-273 1721, 031-668 3303) has a fare of pounds 573 to Phnom Penh via Bangkok.

TOUR OPERATORS: Flight Desk (071- 490 8800) can organise flights and hotel accommodation in Phnom Penh; flights cost approximately pounds 585 and a hotel room for four people will cost pounds 35- pounds 40 per night. Kuoni Travel (0306 740500) has tours from Thailand through Vietnam and Cambodia starting from pounds 1,552 for nine days. Explore Worldwide (0252 319448) has a 19-day trip taking in Cambodia and Vietnam for pounds 1,999 including flights,

B & B, transport and tour leader.

FURTHER INFORMATION: Destination Far East (071-250 3656) can provide flights, accommodation in Phnom Penh and general tourism information for the independent traveller. Recommended inoculations are polio, tetanus, hepatitis A, typhoid and malaria tablets. It is advisable to find out about different areas of the country if travelling through Cambodia. There is no consul or embassy in the UK, but Foreign Office Travel Advice (071-270 4129) will provide information on dangerous areas. It suggests visiting only Phnom Penh and Siem Reap - for the temples of Angkor Wat. Journeys between the two should be made by plane rather than road.

Dawn Rooney, who has travelled extensively in Cambodia, is giving a talk at the Society of Antiquarians, Piccadilly, London SW1 on 27 June at 6.30pm. Tickets are available at pounds 2 from 0732 461982.

(Photograph omitted)