Ten days in Cambodia: a country that shows you its worst before it shows you its best

The Royal Palace has been the king's residence since the 1860s and still is, which is why part of it is closed and why the dress code is taken seriously at the gate. The building worth the ticket is the Silver Pagoda next door, floored with five thousand tiles of solid silver, mostly under carpet, and holding a life-size gold Buddha set with several thousand diamonds.

Next door, the national museum has the best collection of Khmer sculpture anywhere, in an open-sided terracotta pavilion built in 1920 around a courtyard of frangipani. Then walk the quay, where the Tonle Sap runs into the Mekong and the evening boats leave at about five.

Tuol Sleng was a secondary school until 1975, when the Khmer Rouge turned it into their central interrogation prison. Something over fourteen thousand people were held here between then and 1979 and about a dozen came out alive. The classrooms still have their blackboards and their tiles, and the barbed wire strung along the balconies to stop prisoners jumping is still up.

Fifteen kilometres south is the orchard where the prisoners were taken. There are 129 mass graves at Choeung Ek and the memorial stupa in the middle holds the skulls exhumed from them. The audio guide takes ninety minutes and is one of the best pieces of museum interpretation anywhere.

Come back into town in the late afternoon and go up the hill the city is named after. It is small, cheerful and chaotic, full of fortune tellers and incense, and after the morning you will want it.

Phsar Thmei opened in 1937 with what was then the largest dome in Asia, an ochre cross of four arms with the trading floor under the middle. It survived the war, the evacuation and sixty years of neglect, was restored in 2011, and is still a working market: gold at the centre, fish and flowers at the edges, watch repairers in between.

The Russian Market south of the centre is the other one, named for the Soviet expatriates who shopped there in the 1980s, and it is where the counterfeit clothing and the good silver come from. It is hotter, tighter and better for buying things.

In the evening, get on the water. The boats leave the quay at about five and run out to the confluence and back, which takes an hour and costs almost nothing.

Five hours northwest on a good road, through rice country, with a stop for lunch. Buses leave in the morning and you will be in Battambang by mid afternoon.

The town is a French colonial main street on a river and a provincial museum with a good collection of Angkorian statuary rescued from the surrounding temples. In the evening, go to the circus, which is run by a school founded here in 1994 to take in children orphaned or displaced by the war and teach them the performing arts. The shows are Cambodian stories told with acrobatics rather than acrobatics for their own sake, and the branch in Siem Reap grew out of this one.

Phnom Sampeu is a hill fourteen kilometres southwest with a pagoda on top, and inside it are caves the Khmer Rouge used to dispose of people they had killed at the top. There is a memorial with bones in it and a skylight above where the bodies were pushed through, and it is unsentimental and quiet. At dusk, several million bats pour out of a crack in the cliff below in a stream that lasts about half an hour.

Wat Banan, further south, is a small eleventh-century Angkorian temple at the top of 358 steep steps with five towers and almost nobody at it, and it is what Angkor looks like without the crowd.

Then the town's oddity. When the railway stopped running, locals built bamboo platforms on old bogies with a motorbike engine on the back and used them to move rice. It is now a tourist ride, and it is still a bamboo platform doing 40 kilometres an hour with nothing to hold on to.

Three hours northeast on tarmac and you are in Siem Reap by lunchtime. Buy your Angkor pass online or at the ticket centre before the day ends; if you buy after five in the afternoon it is stamped for the next day but lets you in for that evening's sunset free.

Then go to the museum before you go to the temples. Angkor is not signposted or explained on site, and an afternoon learning the difference between Jayavarman VII and Suryavarman II, and why one built Hindu temples and the other Buddhist ones, turns the next two days from impressive rubble into a story.

The alarm goes at half past four. Angkor Wat faces west, which is unusual for a Khmer temple and probably means it was built as a funerary monument, and the consequence is that sunrise happens behind the towers. Stand at the left-hand pond and be there by 05:30.

Then work north into Angkor Thom, the walled city Jayavarman VII laid out at the end of the twelfth century, nine square kilometres inside a moat with the Bayon at its exact centre. The Bayon carries more than two hundred enormous stone faces, all with the same faint smile, and nobody is certain whether they are the king, a bodhisattva or both.

Finish at Ta Prohm in the afternoon. The restorers left it half-swallowed by silk-cotton and strangler fig rather than clearing the roots out, which is why it is the temple everybody has seen a photograph of.

Banteay Srei is 30 kilometres north of the main park and it is the one temple worth a special journey. It is small, built of a hard pink sandstone that holds detail the local grey stone will not, and the carving is so deep and so fine that early French scholars decided it must have been done by women, which is where the name comes from. Go at opening time.

The road back passes a museum founded by a man who was conscripted as a child by the Khmer Rouge and spent his adult life clearing the mines he had been made to lay. It is a short, uncomfortable half hour and the honest counterweight to a day of temples.

Then take the sunset from Pre Rup, a brick temple-mountain standing above open rice fields, rather than from Phnom Bakheng, where several hundred people a day are rationed onto the summit.

The Tonle Sap is the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia and it does something no other lake does: when the Mekong floods, the river feeding it reverses direction and the lake swells to five times its dry-season size. The villages on it are built on stilts twelve metres high, or float and are towed.

Go east through the rice to Kampong Phluk rather than to the nearest village to town, which has been running a hard sell on visitors for twenty years. Go at seven and you will be ahead of the day boats.

In the afternoon, one more temple, and the best of the quiet ones. Preah Khan was Jayavarman VII's first capital, it housed nearly a hundred thousand people, and it has been left in a half-cleared state with trees on the walls and corridors that narrow as you go in.

Two things sit in town and both take half an hour. Wat Thmei has a memorial stupa of glass holding the bones of Khmer Rouge victims found in the grounds, which closes the loop that opened in Phnom Penh. Wat Preah Prom Rath by the river is the opposite: a working temple under a very shiny modern roof, full of monks and flowers.

Then go. The new airport is 50 kilometres east and the transfer takes an hour, which is longer than the old one and catches people out.