Penh pushers
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.
While Phnom Penh is not devoid of 'sights', part of the city's charm comes from the fact you won't need to be out from dawn to dusk to see most of them. The Royal Palace and neighbouring National Museum can comfortably be seen in a morning. The Toul Sleng Genocide Museum, which could never be described as uplifting but which is essential for anyone seeking a better understanding of Cambodia, is the other main 'attraction'.
Toul Sleng was a suburban high school until the Khmer Rouge turned it into a detention and torture centre called S-21, with the horrifying mission of purging so-called traitors from the revolutionary state. Of the 17,000 people dragged in there, fewer than a dozen survived. The faces of some of the dead are displayed in hundreds of black and white portraits taken when the prisoners arrived at the centre from 1976 to late 1978. They are haunting in their sharp focus, illustrating the fear, fight, confusion and resignation that must have prevailed. This is the closest visitors are likely to come to understanding the tragedy from which Cambodia is still recovering. Elsewhere, hardly anyone wants to talk about it.
Phnom Penh is most rewarding to those prepared to wander, soaking up the sounds and smells and looking at the architecture that makes the city unique. Phnom Penh's architectural integrity has been maintained largely because of the 30 years of war: no one was prepared to invest in new properties because the country was too unstable. Ironically, many of the beautiful buildings that survived the war years are now being destroyed in a Hong Kong-style property boom.
Walking the promenade of Sisowath Quay is the quintessential Phnom Penh stroll, with fishing and commercial boats on the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers to the east and several of the city's new bars, cafes and restaurants opposite. The Spanish cuisine and sassy decor of Pacharan are highlights, while the trendy Metro is a cool new kid on the block. More established favourites include the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Cambodia, with its colonial-style balcony bar. But even here, on one of the most expensive commercial strips in the city, it is an indicator of Phnom Penh's relative development that the tourist-orientated enterprises have yet to push out the three coffin shops, two second-hand clothes stores and one last rice wholesaler.
Heading west from the riverfront reveals blocks of cheap residential accommodation in varying states of repair. Prior to the horrors of the 70s this area was reasonably prosperous, with two- and three-storey buildings housing Chinese shophouses on the ground floor and apartments above. Particularly in the tree-lined streets around Psar Thmei (the Central Market), if you look beneath the peeling paintwork you can see the curved lines of art deco Phnom Penh and the distinctive Cambodian architecture that gained an international following during the 60s.
The vast, domed Psar Thmei is the epitome of this side of the city, its dirty yellow facade unable to hide the wonderfully distinctive art deco glass and ironwork. The design is best appreciated by heading past the roast insect and arachnid vendors to the market's centre, where Khmer-Chinese women sell gaudy gold jewellery and the temperature is several degrees cooler than at its edge. If you've already sweated your way through the steamy Psar Toul Tom Poung, or Russian Market, and its myriad dirt-cheap counterfeits, you'll appreciate the design.
It's late afternoon and we've negotiated a riverboat for sunset drinks on the Tonle Sap and Mekong. As we sit watching the sun go down behind the spires of the Royal Palace, while 60s-era Cambodian pop wafts out of the onboard karaoke system, my friend sums it up: 'I thought Angkor Wat was the only place worth seeing in Cambodia. I was wrong.'
