Phnom Penh

A February 11 New York Times travel piece offered the opinion that Phnom Penh may be "the next Prague." What happened to Berlin? Dubrovnik? Harrisburg?

There's no doubt, though, that with Cambodia's economic and political stability apparently assured for the immediate future by the thugs who run the place---the Hun Sen government buys off or eliminates opponents---the country's capital, once the "pearl of Asia," is fast rebounding from decades of civil war and post-war turbulence. And like Prague after the Soviet pullout, the hustlers, in both the good sense and the bad sense, are turning up on schedule.

Hundreds---thousands?---of young farangs are arriving to teach English and enjoy the vibrant cheap-as-it-gets night life. (As in other countries of former French Indochina, English is now the global-connection lingua franca. Yesterday Joe heard a French woman screeching at a hotel clerk. She was suffering the double ignomony of an uncleaned room and of being required to complain about it in English.)

Most tourists visiting Cambodia now fly directly to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat and skip the formerly problematical capital, but that's changing. Along Sithowath Quay, the riverfront restaurants and cafes are packed every night with farangs and East Asians enjoying good Khmer, Thai, Italian and French food. At Borane, a Cambodian place next to our hotel, we had the best sweet and sour tom yam soup (chicken, lemon grass, galanga, mushrooms, kaffir lime leaves and tomatoes) we've had anywhere. Our comfortable quayside hotel, the Star Royal, was nicely troppo shabby genteel, a place where Prince Phillip might end up if he began to hit the bottle and Helen Mirren chucked him out. The water and power cut out from time to time, but never for long.

The bad hustlers of the New Prague, arguably, are the foreign investors and developers whose bribes and kickbacks keep what may be the most corrupt government in Asia afloat. Hun Sen and his crew, former Khmer Rouge officials who broke with Pol Pot in 1977, have renounced their communism but not their crude means for maintaining control. In 1997, the coalition that won a United Nations-supervised election was forced from power in a bloody coup engineered by Hun Sen's Cambodian Peoples Party. The result was mild tut-tutting at the U.N. and a few years of punishing economic sanctions before it was back to business as usual. The king, Norodom Sihanouk's no-account son, has no influence over anything. He presides at ceremonial occasions in a palace room (tourists are allowed in on most days) that is decorated and furnished like the lobby of the Boston Statler-Hilton in 1964.

With its million-plus residents, Phnom Penh is coming along--- development is filtering down and helping workers---but it's still on the threadbare side. Most of the tile-roofed French colonial buildings are gone, and the four- and five-story cement apartment blocks that have replaced them could use a coat of paint. There's no mass transit system, so both the narrow streets and the network of wide boulevards built by the French are gridlocked in the morning and late afternoon with motorbikes, tuk-tuks and---it's pretty depressing---SUVs driven by farangs and by Cambodian businessmen and officials and their bodyguards.

(The country is up to its fried crickets in guns. Armed robbery is no longer routine, as it was a decade ago, but it's not all that rare either. A tuk-tuk driver wanted to take us out to a shooting range, a big tourist attraction. "Americans like guns! English too!" The government, however, has apparently halted the practice of farangs paying money to blow up farm animals with bazookas.)

Generally speaking, driving in Cambodia is on the right but it's not a hard and fast rule. Phnom Penh has few traffic signals and no stop signs. Vehicles take turns bombing through intersections at high speed. Pedestrians are at risk. The best approach is to proceed slowly but with a confident demeanor and let the traffic waters part around you. (We made it out of town alive. We're now in easygoing Sihanoukville on the Cambodian coast of the Gulf of Thailand. We came by bus---intercity public buses are pretty good, especially if you love karaoke videos---and we'll leave by bus on Saturday for the ten-hour ride to Ho Chi Minh City.)

The Phnom Penh sights that will stay with us, of course, were Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields. But there were non-heartbreaking attractions, too. The Royal Palace, with its golden pagoda spires against a brilliant blue sky, is thrilling to behold. As are the golden Buddhas and the emerald Buddha in a long gallery whose floor is all silver. (The Khmer Rouge, trying to stamp out Buddhism and art, both deemed rotten, destroyed 60 percent of of the palace's treasures. Pol Pot left the rest as a tribute to the long-ago Khmer empire. Why did he leave 40 percent and not 90 or 10 percent? This is unclear.)

The National Museum, in a grand red stone Victorian building, has a good collection of Angkor stone carving. Though it is not displayed as well as are the carvings stolen by the French and shown at the Guimee Museum in Paris.

The contents of the Phnom Penh New Market aren't special---it's a kind of Asian Wal-Mart---but its architecture is. Built by the French in the 1930s, it's one of the largest domed spaces in Asia. From a distance, the mustard-yellow, Art Deco, multi-layered structure looks like Ruth St. Denis's hat. The market is arranged oddly inside. Right next to the fine gold jewelery section is the fresh meat section, with glistening animal-innard swags as a backdrop to the duller gold necklaces and bracelets.

The best Phnom Penh attractions were, as is usually the case, the endlessly unfolding exhibits of Khmer daily life. With exceptions, these are nice people to be around. They don't grin as easily as the Thais, and they are not so seductively sedate as the Laos. But they seem to manage their frayed lives with both energy---a feat in this heat---and quiet dignity. We'd be happy to come back here.

One bright morning we went hoofing it (phoofing it?) around the city to see where we might end up. Joe has never met a back alley he did not wish to wander down, so there was a good bit of that. In one roasting third-circle-0f-hell corridor, women were tending boiling cauldrons of water over charcoal fires. Joe wondered if maybe they were selling hot water to hotels. They didn't seem to be doing laundry or making soup.

We rode back to the riverfront that day on cyclos. These are rickshaw-like contraptions, half bicycle but with a single seat in the front, pedaled by ragged, frail men who often have no homes and sleep at night on their cyclos. I felt like some aristocratic twit Hogarth would have savaged. We salved our consciences somewhat by paying these two guys two and a half times the agreed-upon $2 per person price---even though they got lost and didn't take us to where we wanted to go.