It was when a boy of about seven swiped a gnawed pork rib from my plate that the depth of Cambodia's poverty hit home.
We had been eating at a cheap barbecue stall, where several grubby-faced kids flitted from from table to table asking for cash.
The One With The Common Sense had finished her meal and a young lad asked for a bone which had a thin strip of pork left on it, before rushing off to some hidden place to eat it.
I looked at my own plate, feeling a little guilty about how my habit of picking bones clean meant there would be nothing for them.
How wrong I was.
I had been watching the boy absent-mindedly swinging a plastic bag around his arm, looking for all the world like any carefree primary school kid from home.
But while he looked as though he was daydreaming, those sad eyes must have been scanning the tables.
He quickly stole in to swipe a chewed bone from my plate, popping straight into his mouth to suck off some tiny morsel I'd missed.
It was heartbreaking.
You see poverty everywhere.
Children collect plastic bottles and cans from the rubbish, landmine victims hobble along on crutches, while old women with creased faces are reduced to begging at bus stations.
In rural areas, the tiny wooden or corrugated iron houses must leak like sieves in the rainy season.
One in 15 children die before adulthood, with malaria and HIV among the chief killers.
Yet while what hospitals and clinics there are seem run down and apparently lack specialists, there is plenty of cash to build swanky offices for government departments.
There's also plenty of money to erect hoardings in support of the Cambodian People's Party. Which "people" do they represent, I wonder?
A country so industrious, where all sorts of work goes on at all hours, and inventive (the things they use to fix motorbikes...) must surely be able to develop if it's people are given the opportunity.
It's difficult to know how to react to begging when you're on a long trip and trying to be as thrify as possible.
But even if you could give to everyone, would you be helping or simply further trapping them in that existence by making begging worth their while?
The cynic in you also questions which are real beggers and which are just trying to take advantage of comparatively rich Westerners.
Charities say it's better to donate to organisations that help people out of poverty - but, then, they would say that to justify their existence.
Nonetheless, we decided to make this sort of donation and not give to beggars. Whatever, it won't be enough.
Cambodia's tragic recent past can't have helped.
On arrival at the Khmer Rouge's killing fields, you are greeted by the stares of the skulls of hundreds of unidentified victims from a glass-fronted memorial, known as a stupa.
They represent just a tiny portion of the 1.7 million people killed by the regime, in defence of nothing except a crazed ideology.
Walking around the site, where some 20,000 bodies were slung into pits, reveals the mass graves from where the corpses were eventually recovered.
There is also a large tree, which prison guards used to kill babies and children by swinging their head against its trunk.
Meanwhile, the S21 jail in Phnom Penh - a former secondary school transformed to house political prisoners - reveals rows of wooden or brick cells barely big enough to lie down in.
Another block contains the torture cells, where the beds remain, along with the prisoners' manacles and chains.
Photos on the wall show the disfigured bodies of 17 people as they were found when the Vietnamese liberated the capital.
Most chilling for me, however, were the simple photos of the victims - taken as they arrived at the jail - which line the walls of one block.
Row upon row of men, women and children of all ages stare out. Within them, it seemed I could see the faces of the tuk-tuk drivers, fruit sellers or farmers we had seen on our travels.
It really brought home the cruelty of the regime.
Our final meal in the country sounded a positive note for the country's future, however.
We visited an NGO-run restaurant, staffed by former street children who are being trained to work in the catering industry.
The food was delicious and the service superb. It was so heartening to see.
The meal also allowed us to take our final step on our tour through Cambodia's culinary menagerie. I'd been desperate to try tarantula after we saw great eight-inch beasts being sold during one stop on a bus journey.
However, I'd not been feeling the best that day and so settled for watching one of the locals slowly savour each leg before devouring the body.
As it happened, the fellas that ended up on our plate were only three-inches long.
But they were still hairy enough and, deep fried, they were delicious.
The legs tasted something like crispy fried squid, while the body was something like a shrimp.
I never did find any cockroaches, though. Maybe I'll have to wait until we get to Laos...
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