Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

There are two sites in Cambodia which every visitor should experience.  Without them it’s not possible even to begin to imagine the evil of the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal regime that eviscerated the nation between 1975 and 1979.

The first shock at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in the capital, Phnom Penh, is that the buildings are a standard 1960s high school, four three-storey blocks of classrooms with open corridors and concrete staircases.

This was the Chao Ponhea Yat High School, converted in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge into the notorious Security Prison 21 (S-21), in which as many as twenty thousand people were incarcerated and tortured before being transported to the “Killing Fields”, the Choeung Ek extermination centre.

Toul Sleng was one of perhaps 150 such sites across Cambodia.

When the Khmer Rouge fled in 1979 they left in place the last fourteen people to be tortured to death in the centre.  The lowest estimate of the victims is seventeen thousand, and there were twelve known survivors, two of whom are still living.

The site is presented largely as found, with the graves of the fourteen final victims set in a dignified enclosure.  The classrooms remain, as they once were, classrooms, some still with blackboards.

Some contain the rusty iron beds that were the instruments of interrogation, with photographs on the wall of each room as found.

In one block the classrooms were partitioned into tiny cells, hardly big enough to lie down in, built of clumsy brick on the ground floor and timber on the first;  on the top floor prisoners were simply stacked, side by side, head to toe, in chains.

Other rooms are filled with displays of the mugshots which were routinely taken of terrified victims on arrival, male and female, all ages but many of them hardly more than schoolkids, [http://chgs.umn.edu/museum/exhibitions/cambodian/s21.html] together with other gruesome images of the centre in operation.

Alongside the Choeung Ek Memorial [http://www.lonelyplanet.com/cambodia/phnom-penh/sights/museums-galleries/killing-fields-choeung-ek], which I didn’t have the chance to see, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum exists to remind future generations of horrors that must not be forgotten, for fear they may be repeated:  http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g293940-d324063-Reviews-Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum-Phnom_Penh.html.

Tuol Sleng means “Hill of the Poisonous Trees” or “Strychnine Mountain”:  http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/khmeryears/s21.html.

Củ Chi tunnels, Vietnam

It’s hard for a modern tourist in Vietnam to imagine the horrors of war that happened in such a beautiful country – not one war, but three, against France (1946-1954), America (1965-1975) and China (February-March 1979).

It’s important for a Western visitor to adjust away from the conventional mind-set of films such as Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) and even Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), in which the Americans are the “white hats” and the Viet Cong are the villains.

The Củ Chi Tunnels tourist site lies 1½ hours’ drive from the centre of Saigon, yet this labyrinth of tunnels stretches for at least 75 miles and connects with the Saigon River.

On the ground at Củ Chi it makes more sense to take the local viewpoint, “Why are these bastards bombing my village?”  The ingenuity and the endurance of the six thousand Viet Cong guerrillas are astonishing:  the site shows the contrivances to hide access and ventilation to the tunnels, and the fiendishly clever man-traps that were devised to deter American troops on the ground.

A man demonstrates the manufacture of sandals from American truck tyres, deliberately designed with the brand-name upside down, to persuade troops that the footprints went in the opposite direction to the way the wearer was walking.

There is a below-ground kitchen which emits no smoke to its surroundings.

And we were invited to sample the typical Viet Cong diet of cassava (customarily used as cattle feed in Vietnam) and thin, unappetising tea.

I declined the invitation to traverse a short stretch of tunnel, suitably enlarged for Western tourists:  I decided that crawling on all fours in a claustrophobic space in 30°C temperatures wasn’t necessary to appreciate the rigours of fighting the Americans.

But I’m glad I’ve stood on the ground where these things happened, felt the steamy heat, and seen a sanitised but realistic display of artefacts that connect to the reality of war.

Huế Thiên Mụ Pagoda, Vietnam: Thich Quang Duc’s car

One of the disadvantages of travelling with a group across half a dozen time-zones is the difficulty of managing jet lag.

In my first few days in Vietnam I trudged around more Buddhist temples than I really needed, not because they lacked interest but because I lacked sleep.

In Hanoi I somnambulated my way round the Temple of Literature and up the parade-ground to the Hồ Chí Minh Mausoleum.  I declined the tour-guide’s suggestion of a two-kilometre walk to the Botanical Gardens and cut to the chase by walking across to the unique and evocative One-Pillar Temple, a place of pilgrimage for couples in hope of sons.

In the royal capital of Huế we trudged to the Imperial Citadel, where we gazed at the citadel itself, the site of the Purple Forbidden City (which has virtually ceased to exist) and the Palace of Supreme Harmony.  80% of Hue was flattened by the Americans in 1968, and what remains of the Citadel is pockmarked with bullet holes.  It’s another place that’s full of powerful resonances, but they don’t stand out in the midst of a crowded itinerary.  (The 1968 event is portrayed in the movie Full Metal Jacket (1987), much of which was filmed at Beckton Gas Works.)

But at the Thiên Mụ Pagoda amid a succession of shrines was a poignant surprise – the 1959 Austin car that drove the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức to his self-immolation in June 1963.

The Thiên Mụ Pagoda is significant in the religious conflicts within Vietnam at the time of transition from colonial rule, but it’s very difficult to appreciate in a tourist convoy.

That unexpected link to something familiar and British, however, brought into sudden sharp focus an event that at the time it happened seemed a very long way aw