We have come a long way since last we wrote. I write this watching the sun setting over the foothills of the Himalayas, in Northern India. We arrived in India about two weeks ago and have spent much of that time in the company of our wonderful hosts, the Bedis and the Rishis in Punjab, Northern India. Unfortunately, we have been internet free for most of it, and so we have some catching up to do. Sorry for the delay and Merry Christmas!

Just west of the centre of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, lies the Tuol Sleng museum. During the Khmer Rouge regime this former secondary school was the epicentre of the torture and brutality that typified the regime. Of 17,000 people (Cambodians and some foreigners) imprisoned here, fewer than ten survived. The main exhibit is the building itself: it has been preserved in its original state, rolls of barbed wire on the external walls, barbed wire fences on the upper floors thwarting the frequent suicide attempts, tiny cells and metal hooks on the floor to which prisoners would be shackled by the ankles and forbidden to move.

Like the Nazis, and so many other perpetrators of genocide, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous documentation, photographing each prisoner upon arrival and again at various stages of their torture and humiliation, right up to death. These photographs fill three rooms, hundreds of faces staring at the camera; terrified, dignified, confused, defiant, proud, broken, angry faces show the different ways people reacted to this horrific situation. You try to look at each face separately, to conceive that image as an individual - a whole life - and thereby begin to comprehend the horror, but it is impossible. Slowly the faces blend together, with only an occasional face that stands out, like the woman, a look of poorly-concealed rage glaring at the camera while holding her baby, its broken arm in a splint.

Worse than this however, is seeing a face for a second time, their defiance broken, their worst fears realised, sometimes dead on the ground, a metal bed leg rising out of the pool of blood below.

One particularly vile method of execution was "death by blood letting", where the guards extracted pint upon pint of a prisoner's blood - later used in the army hospital - until the victim, in excruciating pain but with no strength left, weakly faded away.

In a stance that typified the confusion within the regime, it demanded that each prisoner must have confessed their crimes before they could be executed. Ostensibly there were two reasons for this: first, in an atmosphere of ever-increasing paranoia they wanted the name of every "enemy of the people" that might still be free; secondly, they insisted - in an attempt to justify their excesses and confirm to the faithful their moral authority - that only guilty people would be executed. Where people were innocent, as the majority were, they were continually tortured and interrogated until they eventually made something up, often listing every person they could remember by name in an attempt to finally end the pain. Frequently the guards would assist in the writing of confessions, starting with suggestions as to possible counter-revolutionary actions the prisoner had committed and going all the way to writing full confessions on their behalf.

In the film 'S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine', a documentary including interviews with both former inmates and former guards, you can witness an extraordinary act of double-think, as one of the guards talks of how he wrote a most extraordinary confession for one female prisoner - a long list of counter-revolutionary crimes including defecating in the army kitchen in an attempt to spread disease - but still believes that she was guilty of the crimes they had made up together and deserved to be executed.

The guards of Tuol Sleng, some of whom are still alive today, also considered themselves victims of the system. They had an unenviable choice: either carry out these atrocities or be imprisoned there themselves. In fact most guards and torturers did eventually fall prey to the system, ultimately being taken along with the other prisoners to be executed at the 'Killing Fields' of Choeung Ek. Murder here was particularly brutal, usually performed with a wooden club over an open grave, to save bullets. Husbands and wives were transported separately. The common lie was that they were being relocated, either to a more reasonable prison or to hospital to receive treatment for the various injuries and malnourishment they had endured. The guards' worry was that spouses would recognise each other's voices from behind their blindfolds, expose the lie and deduce the horror that lay ahead.

The old school's blackboard still lists the rules of the prison, in both Cambodian and French, and is a startling reminder of just how recent this is: not some distant history, but a genocide that occurred within my lifetime and the chalk has not yet rubbed off. Most gut-wrenching of all, this is not even a unique blip: Rwanda, Sudan, Bosnia; all within my lifetime and all occurring under the watch of a world powerless, or unwilling, to intervene.

One of the guides at Tuol Sleng was a former prisoner who escaped as a child by climbing a tree and then waiting until the night to jump over the barbed wire fence. As she sat in the tree, one of the guards saw her but, in a moment of extraordinary good fortune, gestured for her to keep quiet and moved on in his round. We will never know the other little acts of heroism and kindness that occurred - people who died without incriminating anyone, guards who refused their "duty" - these stories will remain untold.

There are three parallel avenues in Phnom Penh, each named after important figures in different eras during Cambodia's twentieth-century history: Sihanouk (the royal family, deposed by the Khmer Rouge, but now back), Mao Tse Toung and Charles De Gaulle. This is indicative of Cambodia's willingness to confront its past, an astonishing openness which avoids easy excuses and glossing over the unsavoury parts. Finally, as of July 2006, the judicial system has caught up with the rest of the country - 30 Cambodian and UN judges were sworn in and trials of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime, including Comrade Duch, the official in charge of Tuol Sleng who was tracked down working as a rural school teacher, will begin early next year.

From Phnom Penh, we travelled up to Siem Reap, the city beside the great temples of Angkor Wat. We also visited what one French doctor described as "the holiest temple of Angkor Wat", the Jayavarman VII children's hospital. This hospital is the third of the Kantha Bopha children's hospitals, named after King Sihanouk's daughter who died of leukaemia. Each hospital has been built and is run by an extraordinary Swiss doctor called Beat Richner, who worked in the first hospital in the 70s, and then returned to rebuild it after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Since 1995 they have also built a second hospital in Phnom Penh and the Jayavarman VII in Siem Reap.

Dr Richner is a man whose fund-raising methods are as unconventional as his approach to medicine in the third world; both would appear to be extremely successful. He is a proficient cellist and every Saturday the "duo" 'Beatocello' perform in the main auditorium (this facility also works as a training centre for Cambodian Doctors) to raise awareness and money for this hospital which relies on private donations for 90% of its funding. Interspersed between Bach solo cello suites and his own compositions, are anecdotes, films and information about the hospitals, their successes and his frequent run-ins with the world health orthodoxy.

These hospitals treat around 40,000 out-patients and 5,000 in-patients a year, all for free, in a country where the normal health system is too expensive for poor families to use and considerably less effective. Among their successes is in the treatment of a previously unknown syndrome (now known as Kantha-Bopha-Syndrome) where they have managed to lower the mortality rate from 65% to 1.8%. This was possible due in part to a Computer Tomograph (CT) scanner, the acquisition of which was continually criticised by world health authorities and experts.

The prevailing orthodoxy within the field of third world health is that this sort of equipment is too sophisticated, a luxury that the third world does not need, so-called "Rolls-Royce medicine". Our own Princess Anne, in her role as president of "Save the Children Fund", made the charming point on a visit to the hospital that, "before installing such modern equipment in Cambodia, you first have to teach the Cambodians to wash their hands". While personal hygiene is of course important, it will do little to prevent the transmission of tuberculosis in newborns and infants, which was the underlying cause of Kantha-Bopha-Syndrome.

(Medical Bit - feel free to skip: Basically a common viral infection - fever often with diarrhoea or rhinitis - engenders pulmonary vasculitis, the lungs having been weakened by dormant tuberculosis. Calcification of the lungs, a strong indication of tuberculosis in children, is only visible is it is larger than 2mm across. By using the CT they have been able to diagnose vast numbers of children with smaller calcifications.)

Tuberculosis is not only the problem for Kantha-Bopha-Syndrome: a range of diseases and illnesses, including kidney disease, abscesses and septicaemia of burns victims are all linked to this dormant TB, while viral diseases like Dengue fever, Japanese Encephalitis and Hepatitis B and C are considerably more virulent when the child is already infected with tuberculosis.

This aspect is just one of the major successes of these hospitals and just one one the many orthodoxies he has through practice refuted. This exceptional man's methods clearly work with fundraising too: when we were there, a group of Japanese businessmen pledged 25,000 dollars. It was wonderful for us to see music being used so differently, and for such a good cause.

After a short break in Thailand, in time to see the International Jazz Festival in Bangkok, we made our way to India. After long discussions with the yachting fraternity in Phuket, and having received the opportunity to stay with a family in Northern India over the Christmas period, we decided to renege on our earlier plan to sail over to India - a trip that could feasibly take three choppy weeks - and fly instead.