It's Friday night and I'm reclined on one of several loungers scattered around a pool. Locals, expatriates and tourists are dancing as a DJ spins the tunes. The bar, beneath a restored French-style villa and facing a lush garden, is busy with staff mixing mojitos and joking with the patrons. When a bikini-clad woman jumps into the pool, followed by a man wearing nothing but his boxer shorts, my visiting friend shakes his head with a look of welcome disbelief. 'This place is so ... Hugh Hefner,' he says. 'It's not what I expected at all in this town.'
But we're not at the Playboy Mansion, nor a hip new garden bar in Paris or Sydney. 'This town' is Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, a country long synonymous with killing fields, land mines and tourist attractions that involved aiming bazookas at buffalos. But eight years after the demise of the Khmer Rouge, the city has changed. Bars and restaurants like the Hefner-esque Elsewhere are heaving because Phnom Penh has finally begun to grow out of its lawless reputation - and the shadow of Angkor Wat - to emerge as a destination in itself.
A stroll along the Tonle Sap riverfront reveals a multitude of nationalities is hearing the message. However, while the growth in tourism and the booming economy are certainly linked, there is little evidence that Cambodia has emerged as a model democracy. What has emerged is an ostentatious class of wealthy Khmers who give the city a dynamic, if often tasteless, ambience. As one man recently told me: 'It's like Moscow was in 1993 - people suddenly have access to a lot of money and they want to let everyone know.' The results can be fascinating to watch. One of the more obvious examples is the number of Lexus four-wheel drives, complete with windows tinted virtually black, which seems to grow by the day. To set themselves apart, the city's super-rich now drive around in Hummers.
Phnom Penh's most expensive bars and restaurants are no longer the preserve of highly paid western consultants and diplomats, but rather the cashed-up offspring of the elite. These people, generally known here as 'children of high-ranking officials', showed one recent evening exactly how infatuated with image Phnom Penh has become. The Rock, a hangar-sized nightclub favoured by rich Khmers, was hosting a Lexus Party, to which entry was limited to those arriving in Lexuses.
To call the capital crass and corrupt would be a gross understatement - even the national police chief
has admitted to a French newspaper that he 'earns' US$300,000 a month - but the absolute control exercised by the government has made it much safer to visit than in the past.
Of course, only part of Phnom Penh's allure is related to watching a post-conflict country experience a sort of pink-Spandex-pants moment in its history that will, one hopes, be looked back on with a sense that it was all a bit over the top. The picturesque, low-rise Indochine architecture, smiling children, tree-lined streets and hot, unhurried pace of life give the city an air of 1960s Bangkok or Saigon, before the concrete skyscrapers. Phnom Penh might be modernising as fast as money laundering will allow, but the tallest building in town is, for now, only about 10 storeys high.