My back was soaked as I stood up and shuffled down the bus with my fellow backpackers. The feeble air-conditioning had resulted in everyone sweating profusely in the tight constraints of the bus. I lifted my arms, attempting to stretch the knots out of my back. It was not a long ride by backpacker standards, perhaps five hours but the potholed roads and suspect suspension had not been kind to my tail bone, which I now rubbed gingerly. In travelogues and guide books, such a trip would usually be euphemistically described in a single word: uncomfortable. I pushed my matted hair back and put on my cap in preparation for entry into the sun. Already I could feel the heat of the light rays that had pierced their way through the grimy windows and dusty interior. I traced the individual beams out the window through narrowed eyes as I looked out onto a blinding world. The sand-colored buildings all burnt with a bright luminescence while even the darker colors had been bleached. These buildings provided the backdrop to the swarm of motorcycles, metal beasts crawling in the reflected glare. What seemed like thousands of bikes flowed through the plaza and around buses oblivious to the sounding of their horns. The motorbikes parted before us as our bus pulled up alongside the curb. As I stepped off the bus with my friends CK and Zhirong, the cacophony of horns was joined by the cries of touts.

"Sir, you want ride?" "Where you want to go?" "I know place to stay, cheap, cheap." I smiled wryly and shook my head, "we have a place to stay already" and immediately, the reply came, "I drive you there?" I could not blame him for trying, though after hearing the umpteenth proposition, I just wanted some peace and respite from this agoraphobic environment. The open-air bus station was teeming with people. Touts, tourists and locals all pressed into one another as offers and counter-offers came from all directions. I hated this part - the invariable arrival, disoriented and weary, into a veritable nest of overeager touts. However, we were the tourists, we were what they were after.

We retrieved our bags from the luggage compartment and shouldering the familiar burden, pushed our way through the crush of people. We decided to cross the road to escape the crowd coming down from various buses. This was always a challenge. The buses had the physical authority to move through the motorbikes; we, mere beings of flesh and blood, did not. Instead, we relied on faith. The theory was, moving slowly, the riders would see and avoid you but taking the first step was always too much like attempting to walk on water. Luckily, we saw a local stroll nonchalantly into the traffic and quickly stepped up beside him. When in doubt, always follow the local while crossing the road. Try also to keep said local between the traffic and yourself.

I peeled my bag off my back as CK called his father's friend who worked here in Phnom Penh. I glanced at CK and Zhirong. The former was wiry, his backpack incongruously large in comparison while the latter still had baby fat in his twentieth year and a benign smile on his face. I always thought he would make a good stuffed toy. Different as my friends were, they both bore the unmistakable signs of life in South-East Asia - a sheen of sweat and a tan. Our bermuda shorts, souvenir tee-shirts and huge backpacks however set us apart from the locals while immediately identifying us to our fellow travelers.

We were soon picked up by CK's father's friend, whom we called "Uncle", the normal Singaporean form of address for those significantly older than us. He was a squat man, slightly balding, his bermudas revealing powerfully built calves. His assistant, on the other hand, seemed to tower above us. In a city where there were supposed to be signs requesting that handguns and other weapons be left at the door, he made me feel that little bit safer. That and the SUV we were stepping into. Finally, we escaped from the heat, humidity and noise.

We were deposited at the residential quarters of Uncle's company and I took a much desired shower, washing off the accumulated sweat and grit. I would not remain clean and dry for long but in the air-conditioned comfort of the room, the heat and dirt of Phnom Penh seemed a long way away. Our ablutions completed, we set off for dinner.

After a hugely satisfying meal, we decided to work some of it off by walking around the city center. There was nothing quite like an evening stroll and a beer to round off the day. Uncle dropped us off right by the river. With the flags of various countries fluttering in the wind, lights glittering along the boulevard that ran parallel to the Mekong, and the neo-classical monuments we had just passed, I could almost imagine the old colonial grandeur. The epic statues intricately carved from stone would not have been out of place in Paris. The French had not been the most popular of colonial masters but they certainly knew how to sculpt their cityscape.

All this though, changed after the war. As we walked along the road, we were frequently approached by beggars. There were old and young ones, a mother with a crying child, a man without a leg. They were on every corner. This was a country with a per capita income of $503 a year and it showed. I was no expert on poverty and mendicancy but this place certainly seemed like it had many, many more people living on the streets than either Malaysia or Thailand, the two countries we had passed through before entering Cambodia. Even Siem Reap, the Cambodian town where we took the bus from, seemed significantly better off. I was discomfited every time I averted my eyes from their beseeching hands and a nagging mixture of shame and futility ate at me while I walked down the street. I had no desire to be surrounded by more beggars and no ability to dispel their poverty. Once, I discretely slipped a note to a mother and walked quickly on. I wondered though how long that would last or if it was even enough for a single meal for the family.

We settled on a little restaurant that advertised that it was part of a charity. Having ordered some drinks, we relaxed in our wide chairs, simply glad to be sitting down. The city, having bid farewell to the sun a couple of hours ago, had cooled to a more bearable temperature, with an occasional zephyr floating in over the river. This was when two children walked in, each bearing a bundle of books around their necks that looked too heavy for them. They looked no older than ten. The girl smiled shyly as she walked towards us while the boy approached us cockily, declaring quite peremptorily "you buy from me." While uncertain that this was the best way to approach potential customers, we obligingly looked through their (bootleg) books. CK was the compulsive buyer, and he quickly selected a couple of books he wanted, bantering with the boy about the price, cajoling him to lower it.

"Eight dollars ok? I buy two books," CK said, raising up eight digits, speaking with the cadence of what I thought of as Cambodian street English - the English that many of these children picked up in order to sell their wares.

The boy shook his head vigorously. "No, ten dollars," emphasizing the ten.

"No, no, eight dollars, my friends buy from you too. Give discount," CK tried to persuade him.

"No, eleven dollars now." Amazingly enough, the boy actually raised the price, leaving Zhirong and I to raise our eyebrows at each other and laugh. The two of us silently sifted through the books. There were the Lonely Planet guidebooks, wrapped in plastic so you could not see the quality of the maps inside. Other books described Angkor Wat, the magnificent 12^th century capital of Cambodia whose ruins still stood near Siem Reap. There were also books on Buddhism or the modern history of Cambodia. We soon chose a book each and settled back to await the conclusion of CK's conversation.

Talk to these children and they will sucker you into buying more. We saw it happen many times with CK. They were charming certainly, often greeting us with bright smiles and in multiple languages but they were also not above using the dark arts of emotional blackmail. I once had a (older) girl tugging on my sleeve asking "you only like small girls, why you don't buy from me?" Thus accused, I bought a bottle of water from her at a heavily inflated price. I had a sneaking suspicion that the girl had seen the not insignificant number of advertisements urging one and all to be on the lookout for pedophiles. With so many children on the streets and so little money, it was bleakly easy to imagine why they had such a problem.

Cambodia was the one country where I actually felt compelled to buy anything from children. There were so many of them, cute, energetic and unfortunately, poor, with not much of a future ahead of them. We paid the children for the books and they left. The boy swaggered out boisterously, eager to make more money while the girl smiled at us before hurrying after him. Her huge eyes were upturned into half-crescents, as she flashed her pearly white teeth at us, her bronze face framed by long, dark brown hair. We smiled back, utterly charmed yet saddened. This was a country that had to send its future to work on the streets. As I gazed at their departing backs, I wondered what jobs these children could find when they grew up or if they were even receiving a proper education now.

We left the restaurant soon after that. We planned to walk a little more before catching a cab back to our residence. Strolling along the street, we had an additional companion. Bearing the same contraption as his compatriots we had just met, he followed us, hawking his books. Having already depleted our book fund for the day, we resolutely refused to even take a look at his goods. Despite that, he still followed us determinedly down the street, his exhortations to look at his wares growing increasingly urgent and then desperate as we flagged down a tuk-tuk, a taxi that consisted of a motorcycle attached to a carriage.

We smiled embarrassedly as we took our seats. I certainly felt sorry for him but we could not and would not buy everything from everyone. The knowledge that they probably needed the money more than us twenty year-old backpackers did not sit easy on my conscience though. The tuk-tuk began moving off and we felt increasingly uncomfortable as the boy ran after us. His face contorted itself from pleading to despair. And then it hardened and he said "fuck you." We sat in stunned, guilty silence for a few moments. He was just a boy, not even into his teenage years, but in trying to earn his keep, had sworn at us in frustration. He did not use that word with the innocence of youth but rather with a venom that belied his tender years. It seemed to me that this child regarded us only as potential customers. If we bought nothing from him then we too were insignificant. I felt not anger but a disconcerting helplessness. We certainly could have bought a book and he would not have spat the word out at us but it would not have changed his underlying situation. His precocious callousness and the inuring conditions that caused it would still have remained. At last, we somberly arrived back at what would be our home for the next few days. I was happy to return back to the high-walled company accommodations that Uncle had settled us into. In its air-conditioned confines, we seemed very far away from Phnom Penh.

My feeling of foreboding did not improve the next day as we decided to visit Tuol Sleng, the genocide museum. As I stepped out of the car into the bright sunshine, I saw a beggar whose face was literally scarred beyond recognition. As the man turned to face us, I averted my eyes instinctively. Twice shamed, first for staring and then for looking away, I quickly dug a note out from my wallet. There was nothing else I thought I could do, either for him or for my conscience. Were the scars a legacy of the Khmer Rouge? I would never find out. This was my unforgettable welcome. Tuol Sleng was originally a school building but was converted into a prison during the murderous reign of the Khmer Rouge. Its exterior concealed the past horrors within well. The whitewashed concrete walls, the tiled floors, the stone benches in the courtyard under the leafy palm trees and the blooming frangipani all reminded me of my elementary school. However, once inside the building, I could see the modifications made to facilitate its purpose. The bars and barbed wire still remained while crude implements of torture were displayed as were the photographs of those once interned here. There were rows and rows of them. For most, this would be their last picture.

The faces staring out from the past followed us bleakly as we moved on to Chueungek, the infamous killing fields, where many of the occupants of Tuol Sleng were buried in mass graves. We visited first the charnel house set up as a memorial to the dead. There was a brutal honesty to this shrine with the bottom level filled with the clothing of the deceased while the upper levels housed skull upon skull. They represented only a fraction of the dead. A reminder of the country's dark past, they looked impassively out over the land which itself was indistinguishable from the surroundings. All around, there was packed earth covered by a thin layer of grass. The trees around provided ample shade from the Cambodian sun while the occasional sparrow hopped and chirped, oblivious to all around it. It was peaceful here. Yet on this land too were also sturdy wooden signs demarcating burial plots. On one, plainly written in white paint were the words "MASS GRAVE OF 66 VICTIMS WITH OUT HEADS." Another sign informed us that a particularly big tree was the "KILLING TREE AGAINST WHICH EXECUTIONERS BEAT CHILDREN". Bleached, fragile-looking bones lay on an urn beside the tree, anonymous victims of the Khmer Rouge. As we left the tranquility of the killing fields, I hoped the surviving victims of the Khmer Rouge too had managed to find some measure of serenity.

We returned to our room gloomy. Burnt out by the sun, we took a nap, and then left our room for dinner. As we walked downstairs, we stumbled upon some employees of the company eating and drinking in the courtyard. Surprised by the sudden conviviality, we remembered that it was the Khmer New Year. Catching sight of us, they beckoned invitingly to us. Empty plates lay on the table but that social lubricant, beer, remained in abundant supply. We were given a can each, proceeded to click cans, yell "Happy New Year" and smile as only people with a language barrier between them could do. Tiding over the inevitable awkwardness that must follow, they started dancing to Cambodian music, asking us in halting English to join them. Up till then, I do not think that I have ever danced with total strangers in my life. Yet there was something different that day, perhaps the fact that it was the New Year, their sincerity or maybe even the offer of beer. We joined them. It was one of those folk dances where there were set moves which, after forming a cricle, we had to follow and repeat. We tried sportingly to follow but despite some expert coaching, we never managed to string together more than a couple of repetitions. We laughed as we tried to follow the movement of our hosts whose tanned, open faces were creased by their grins. We soon had to excuse ourselves for dinner but leaving this high-walled compound, I felt strangely elated.

We left Phnom Penh for Vietnam a couple of days later. I was glad to get out of the city because in the words of the author whose pirated book I read, in Cambodia, "the hope is for those not yet born" and yet, the friendliness and the energy of the people had charmed me as well. There was enormous poverty, certainly, and yet there was also joy and with joy, perhaps a little hope as well.