Saigon -> Phnom Penh -> Battambang -> Siem Reap

Continuing in the tradition of countries featured on Changsha et al., Cambodia's humanistic allure grows out of its ingenuous pre-modern history. On the one hand, Cambodia, like Vietnam, deals honestly and (moreso than Vietnam) relatively even-handedly with its twentieth century turmoil. The Killing Fields of Cheung Ek outside of Phnomh Penh, as well as the museum at the Tuol Sleng prison - an erstwhile Khmer Rouge torture and reeducation center - are just condemnatory enough to satisfy the Western moralist. In Vietnam, the War Remnants Museum in Saigon and the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" are putrid pustules of propaganda, but they, too, are put forth as attractions. However, few tourists seem to go to Vietnam for a lesson in the vicissitudes of interventionist foreign policy, and even fewer come to Cambodia with the goal of understanding the horrors of genocide. Instead, it is temples, wats and palaces that suddenly enrapture each wide-eyed patron. Everyone becomes an archaeologist, and an ungovernably pertinacious scholar of Buddhist architecture, when the specters of the Southeast Asian empires of yore rear their decomposed heads. Such, such were the joys when one's king built an adamantine, amaranthine empire out of stone.