A jungle tale

Our big adventure in Koh Kong was still to come. We made contact with a brand new ecotourism outfit in a village one hour out of town, known as CBET (Community Based Eco Tourism). CBET is run but members from the rural community of the region, and employs ex-hunters, loggers and those struggling to make a living to improve the local environment and boost the rural economy.

The tension between economic development and the sustainable management of forests, wildlife, and natural resources in the rural and protected areas of South East Asia is a momentous challenge. Illegal logging, hunting, and clearing for farms threaten the species and the integrity of the forest ecosystems and watersheds. Illegal activities are caused both by poverty and by commercial exploitation of natural resources. International demand for wildlife and wildlife products also contribute to the destruction of biodiversity.

CBET addresses the drivers of deforestation and the demand for wildlife on a local level with financial and technical assistant from Wildlife Alliance. These CBET projects aim to provide villagers with economically and ecologically sustainable income opportunities from tourism and help them protect the biodiversity and natural resources of their region.

We arrived at the CBET office in the small, road-side village of Trapeang Rung to a wide-eyed and smiling welcome party. They had even made a 'Welcome James and Sally' sign - it was a kind touch that made us feel instantly at home.

After a heartfelt introduction from the CBET team, we cycled across dirt track and sand to a small, traditional village by the river to our homestay: a modest, wooden family home where we would stay for the night. We were welcomed once again with opened arms and settled into our simple, homely room.

Our host family spoke not one word of English, not a whisker, so we had to speak Khmer to them as best we could, learning a few choice words and phrases that sent the family and their numerous guests into chortles of laughter each time we spoke. Myt, the gap-toothed lady of the house, would just take my hand into hers and hold it there and that was all the communication we needed.

That afternoon we got our hands dirty making traditional Namchak cakes, a sticky, sweet local delicacy grilled on an open flame and served in palm leave parcels. Simple, delicious and so sugary it's a miracle the villagers have any teeth left at all.

As the sun went down, our new family fed us a feast of pork and dried fish which we ate by the light of a kerosene lamp from a small table in the kitchen, sitting cross-legged on the floor boards and politely accepting the extra helpings they insisted we eat. We said our thanks, I tried and failed to help with the washing up in a bucket and then moved to the wooden step to look out at the stars. But we were quickly hurried off to bed by Myt and it was only 6.20pm! With no way to communicate our puzzlement, we washed by candle light using the tub of water in the bamboo bathroom and then laid on our thin mattress and listened to the comings and goings of the family for the next two hours or more. We never did find out why we were sent to bed so early, but we did have a big day ahead of us.

Early the next morning we cycled on our rickety bicycles to meet our jungle guide, Virak, and our jungle cook, Thyra, who would be our only company and lifeline for the next three days. We were about to trek into the dense Cambodian jungle and through the foothills of the Cardamom mountains. We were going where no man had been before...well, certainly where no tourist had ever been before. We were their first trekkers and that made us a little apprehensive - so this was what a real adventure tastes like.

Virak and Thyra were both ex-hunters and employed by CBET, taught basic English and equipped with a new trade as trekking companions. And as far as trekking companions go, they were the best! We had such good fun, laughing and joking around with them despite the language barrier and the often treacherous conditions on the trek.

Off we set. We sweated through jungle terrain, wading through filthy bogs, flicking off leaches and avoiding the tangles of spider webs. We hiked up a mountain to eat our salty pork, omelette and rice lunch, packed neatly in a little betel nut box - it was lip-smacking tasty and would be our staple meal for the next three days. We then hiked and stumbled down the mountain after spotting bats in a cave and beautiful hornbills, gliding across the infinite views of the thick rainforest that lay ahead of us.

By some miracle, after nearly seven hours of trekking and sweating, we arrived at our humble camp for the night. Med had a nasty blister and my feet looked like wizened prunes - it's like our trekking in Nepal was but a daydream. Virak and Thyra, ever the hard working duo, hung brand new hammocks from the asymmetrical frame that had been erected using trees from the site. And that was camp.

Med and I headed to the river for a wash and let our wet clothes sizzle in the low afternoon sun, still hot and glowing. Thyra, despite having lost one hand in some accident we couldn't quite fathom from the broken English and puzzling charades he used, was amazingly adept and, with the help of Virak, lit a fire and cooked us up a feast of pork, vegetables and rice. The remaining pork was then left out to dry in the sun with our clothes - I pretended not to notice it was crawling with ants! We would eat that pork for another two days.

After dinner, we sat around the fire and drank sweet, hot coffee from small, recycled food tins and watched the stars come out and throw a twinkling blanket over our tiny camp and the vast jungle around us. Into the hammocks we go, a comfy little place to sleep with a mosquito net to keep the bugglies out.

I hardly slept that night as I was on the edge of camp right next to the dense, moving jungle.

Crunch, creep, scamper, squawk.

The next morning, we flopped out of our hammocks as the sun rose, enticed by the streamy wafts of breakfast: rice, omelette and coffee in a tin. As everything at camp was carried on the aching backs of Virak and Thyra, packing up took a while each morning as they methodically crammed their backpacks until bursting point. Today, we insisted on carrying our own lunches in the handmade packs.

With almost-dry socks, we trekked on with a bounce in our step once more, looking up through the sky-scraping trees to follow the calls of jungle birds. We spotted a few gibbons, swinging themselves along the vines - funky, we mused. The dense rainforest gave way to dry plains of white-barked trees and scrub, where we laid out in the shade for lunch of, you guessed it, pork, rice and omelette.

That afternoon, while walking, Thyra leaped in the air and backwards letting out a squeak of surprise. It was an amber snake and a deadly one at that, as Virak demonstrated, crossing his finger across his neck, making a face and saying "die". Expecting a giant cobra, I tiptoed forward for a look at this venomous beast in our path. It was minuscule compared to my imagined enemy, but this made it all the more unsettling. I could stand on one of these at any moment. A few deep breaths later and I'm good to go, my eyes now glued to the leafy, rough terrain underfoot. Within ten minutes, Med then spots another snake, this time black, but equally poisonous.

We are in the middle of the jungle, on a freshly trodden trail and we are surrounded by snakes. I was tense all afternoon, my eyes making snake shapes out of branches and leaves.

That evening's camp was by a huge waterfall, blissful in the last of the sunlight. We went for a swim to shed the day's trekking grime. As we dried off, Med discovered two fat leeches on his bloody blister, which made it bleed without coagulating. My stomach flipped and my knees buckled when he asked for help, so he had to fend for himself.

Meanwhile, I was still on a snake hunt, which made going to the toilet in the jungle away from camp a major event. But as we ate our supper (of pork, omelette and rice) in the fading light by the waterfall, our troubles were washed away and I slept very well indeed that night. I must buy a hammock when I get home.

The last day was another long one, but we enjoyed our breaks of swimming in the river we had to cross and stopping off in a tiny village for lunch. Many of the villagers, including the children, had never seen foreigners before and they were asking Virak about the marks on my skin (my freckles) and said I had a very long, thin nose! "What about his nose?" I cried, pointing at Med's sizable conk. They all just giggled, and carried on pointing at mine. We handed out little packets of biscuits to the children and bought iced coffee made with condensed milk - it was the best coffee I've ever tasted.

As we ambled back towards CBET, you'd think we had returned from a war zone. We received a heroes welcome from the villagers, who were waving and shouting at us and handing our guides a can of beer each. We took Virak and Thyra for an ice cold beer in a small shack and toasted our trek - "jul mouy!"

We headed back to our homestay in the dark, where this time there was no early curfew as there was a bit of a party (on a Monday) happening. The extended family were sat around on the wooden slats drinking beer out of any receptacle they could find (we got a metal bowl), insisting we sit down and join them.

Exhausted, aching and stinking of sweat and leech repellant, we eventually made our excuses and headed for a candlelit bucket shower and bed. Off to the land of nod, dreaming of snakes, waterfalls, rice and pork.

King (Koh) Kong

In Cambodia, it's easy to be swept along in the backpacking trail and head straight from the capital (Fernom, Fernay, as we affectionately call it after a wee mistake by our Irish buddy Mark - must be that accent?) to Siem Reap - all hail the mighty Angkor Wat.

But we wanted to go off the map and try our luck in the Cambodian wilds. So, with little planning and even less of a clue, we jumped on a bus with not a tourist in sight to head to the only town of the region, Koh Kong town.

We'll be honest here, there was nothing in this run down town and our 'off the map' adventure was looking a little down in the mouth.

But we pulled ourselves together and headed to breathtaking and, most importantly, non-touristy waterfalls (memories of falls in Vietnam still make me shudder) and mangrove forests on a motorbike.

Next, we hired a boat to take us to Koh Kong island for the day (the people of the Koh Kong region can't be credited for their imagination when it comes to the naming of places). This was heaven on earth. We spotted dolphins on the boat and then moored up at quiet, uninhabited paradise.

I had never seen sand so fine and white as icing sugar or water so crystaline turquoise. Wading out from the shore I could count every grain of sand caressing my toes and spot each little fish darting around me.

Our grinning guides provided us with snorkel gear and so we headed off to spot fish before tucking into a fire-cooked lunch of succulent barracuda, rice and spiced salad. A perfect day.

The ghosts of Phnom Penh

Next on our journey was Cambodia: a land of ancient triumphs, recent tragedies and undiscovered beauty.

Travelling overland from Saigon, we crossed the border with Aoife and Mark to Phnom Penh. As we stepped out from the arctic bus, the heat hit us straight on, bam! And we hadn't learnt our lesson; we hadn't booked any accommodation. Fending off the very articulate tuk tuk drivers - calling us "man" in phony American accents - we started our ascent to the city's guest house area with 15kg on our backs, snaking from place to place, upstairs, downstairs, round in circles, to find the cheapest deal. This kind of arrival into a city can only be likened to some kind of punishing military training - I'm pretty sure after 12 months of this I'd sail through army recruitment.

It might have a sad history, but Phnom Penh is a lively, energetic city. The riverside bustles with people, day and night. You'll find Hindu and Buddhist worshippers going about their devotions at one of the many temples, families enjoying a stroll together, children playing football, barefoot, with wicker balls (takrah) and large numbers of people group dancing to music blaring from portable stereo systems. This was my favourite part of the riverside: watching (and attempting to join in with) the evening aerobics and hip hop classes that had as many devotees as the neighbouring temples.

With all the living that's going on around you, it's easy to forget what happened here and across the whole country.

After the Vietnam War, on the 17th April 1975, the Khmer Rouge took over the city, and the people cheered in the streets thinking that good things were finally to come for them. But just three hours later their cheers turned into tears as they were told they must pack only essential belongings, leave the city at once and walk for days in the dry heat to become rural peasants. The entire population was forced to labour in agricultural work camps and many families were split up, never to hear from or see each other again.

Money, foreign objects (and all foreigners - some were killed), brightly coloured clothing, all forms of media, religion, school and everything that makes for a civilised society was forbidden. The Khmer Rouge were the dictators, and the peasants were dispensable.

During these four short years between 2 and 3 million people died, either as a direct result of torture and executions (an estimated 1.7 million), or from the starvation and diseases which were rampant during this time. There were no doctors or medicines so the sick were left to die alone in old warehouses.

People worked long hours in the fields and had very little food (they were trading most of the rice the workers grew with China to buy ammunition to fight against the Vietnamese) so they went hungry every day, especially the small children, many of whom just stopped growing. The people were not allowed to talk to each other or show any signs of affection towards each other. Doing so would either have you moved to another site or to a 're-education camp', which normally meant death. Lies were used to remove suspicious individuals from camps and they were never seen or talked about again. They just became ghosts in people's trodden memories.

Anyone with any type of previous education and deemed to pose a threat to the Khmer Rouge, which meant teachers, doctors, ex-government works and lawyers, were usually brought to S-21 (or Tuol Sleng prison) if they were discovered, where they would be tortured for information on anyone else they might know. After that, not only would they be killed, but their whole family would be massacred - including the children - as it was thought that if the children were left alive they might grow up and seek revenge on the Khmer Rouge. Even wearing a pair of glasses was a sign of education and punishable by death. Those with lighter, 'foreign' skin disappeared. And those with soft hands also suffered an untimely death. They were simply no good for the peasant society.

This is only a small part of the story - and I thoroughly recommend the book 'First they killed my father' by Loung Ung - a first hand account of a young child who narrowly escaped with her life, despite her parents and sisters being brutally murdered. I bought my copy off a man whose legs have been blown off by a Khmer Rouge land mine, just to put things into perspective a little bit.

Alongside the mental scars and personal accounts, Cambodia still shows the physical scars of the genocide, no more so than in the many killing fields across the country, used for their discreet locations by the Khmer Rouge. One of the biggest killing fields is just outside of Phnom Penh, Choeung Ek. More than 17,000 innocent people were brutally massacred there -and we were to walk around the fields to try to gain a small understanding of the horror of those four years.

A heaviness descended over all of us right from the start as we had to walk past beggars, all missing limbs, to get to the entrance gate. I had a lump in my throat from that moment; it hit me that we had just made the journey that 17,000 people made to their death less than forty years ago. Did they know their fate? Or did they clutch to the lies they were force fed, too hungry, too tired and too frightened to consider the reality.

Victims were brought here by the truck load, up to 300 in a day, where they were bound and forced to kneel down in front of one of the mass graves, already seething with rotting corpses, which will have been sprayed with DDT to disguise the smell from anyone passing by.

As we walked around, we listened to the voices of real survivors of the Pol Pot regime via an audio guide, showing us the many mass graves that were discovered here (some of which were purging teeth and bones), the piles of clothing that emerge every year when the river levels drop, and, worst of all, the tree against which the children were smashed to death in front of their mothers.

Pol Pot did not want to waste money on bullets, so the common method of killing was beating to the back of the head with hammers, axe handles and bamboo sticks for adults, while children were either beaten against a tree or thrown in the air and speared on a bayonet. They even used the leaves of a razor-sharp palm tree to cut throats of certain victims, and many were beheaded completely. We walked around the site in stunned silence, everyone's emotions as tangible as the bones and clothes before us.

After paying a visit to the commemorative stupa, filled with over 5,000 skulls of victims, we then made the reverse journey back to the city, something the 17,000 innocent people were never lucky enough to do.

We headed to where the atrocities began: S-21, formally a public school in the centre of the city, but transformed immediately by the Khmer Rouge into a high security prison where detainees, thought to be enemies, were systematically photographed, interrogated, tortured, and eventually sentenced for execution. Enemies included professionals, monks and anyone who were considered a threat to the ultra-paranoid regime - all forced to sign a false confession for crimes they didn't commit.

In the cells they were shackled together on the ground without any kind of bedding or mats underneath them. Once here you were not allowed to talk or make any noise. Doing so would result in lashes or electric shocks. If you needed to adjust your position on the floor, you had to ask permission first, as doing so without permission would result in punishment.

Visiting S-21 was another sombre experience. Walls are lined with rows upon rows of photographs. Old men, pregnant women, and small children - the faces of the dead whose eyes bore into you. Cabinets are filled with skulls, and cells still have rusting devices of torture within them.

The most harrowing image of the all was an old exercise structure in the school's playground. It had been turned into a torture device where prisoners were strung up, their wrists tied behind their backs, and were dunked in huge tubs of water and suspended in mid air at intervals until they gave the name of other 'enemies', probably their own family and close friends.

Out of an estimated 17,000 people imprisoned at Tuol Sleng, there were only seven known survivors.

I don't think I can get across the extent of what we saw that day in words. And I was frustrated that Europe or America didn't step in to prevent the four year mass genocide. It was the Vietnamese, in the end, who saved thousands.

One of the other things I can't get my head around is that even though this was all discovered in 1980, only now, in 2011, are the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders standing trial in the hands of the UN. In fact, the UN continued to recognise Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge as the leaders of Cambodia until 1997. Justice still hasn't been served for the millions who suffered and died in the hands of evil, and his army.

The effects the Khmer Rouge rule can be still observed in the population today. Families are still struggling to re-stabilise themselves after losing a high proportion of their male members, and jobs are still a hot commodity in a country where many of the cities were completely destroyed. The lack of jobs is not the only factor affecting the recovery of Cambodia's economy, another debilitating factor is the complete lack of education received by children growing up during and shortly after the Khmer Rouge period. What's more, physical disabilities caused by torture, land mines, and chronic hunger still affect many people today.

As a result, Cambodia is still one of Asia's poorest countries. But rather than viewing the country with pity (despite being reduced to tears at times during our time there), I'm in awe of how they have recovered from the scars caused by the Khmer Rouge.

Years of suffering have crippled the country, but they show so much pride in what they do have: the greatness of Angkor, incredible natural beauty and kind, forgiving hearts. It was the incredible people that really made our time in Cambodia.