Set amid elevated pine forests, Kirirom National Park offers some small waterfalls and decent walking trails. Hook up with a ranger for a 2hr hike up to Phnom Dat Chivit (End of the World Mountain) where an abrupt cliff-face offers an unbroken view of the western mountain ranges.

It's one of the few national parks to have a community tourism programme and proceeds from its educational walks are pumped back into the community.

One of Cambodia's premier protected areas, Bokor National Park clings to the southern tip of the Elephant Mountains. Besides a refreshingly cool climate, the park possesses secluded waterfalls, commanding ocean views, an abandoned and eerie French hill station (elevation 1080m/3543ft) and exceedingly elusive animals like tigers and elephants.

At great financial and human expense (many indentured labourers perished in the process), the French forged a road into the area in the first quarter of the 20th century. A small community was created and soon the grand colonial hotel, known as Bokor Palace, was inaugurated in 1925. The hill station was twice abandoned: first in the late 1940s when the Vietnamese and Khmer Issarak (Free Khmer) forces overran it while fighting for independence against the French, and again in the early 1970s when it was left to the invading Khmer Rouge. It now has a genuine ghost-town feel, especially when thick mists envelope the skeletons of the original structures.

Rising amid 129 mass graves (43 of which remain untouched) is a blinding white stupa memorialising the approximately 17,000 people executed here by the Khmer Rouge between mid-1975 and December 1978. Displayed on shelves behind the stupa's glass panels are over 8000 skulls found during excavations here in 1980 - a moving reminder of Cambodia's dark past.

Some of the skulls still bear witness to the fact that their owners were bludgeoned to death for the sake of saving precious bullets. Certainly, wandering to sounds of joyful children playing at a nearby school and spotting human bone and clothing poking from the churned ground startlingly brings home the striking contrast of Cambodia today to the dark abyss of its recent past.