Pleasureand pain in Phnom Penh

When you travel from Vietnam into Cambodia, you cross one of Asia's most significant divides. Behind you lies the pan-Chinese world. Vietnam may today use the French-imposed Western alphabet but its culture essentially comes from China, and you see Chinese characters everywhere in Vietnamese temple inscriptions. Cambodia, by contrast, once lay under India's influence. Its script is Indian-derived (as is Thai's), and the Lunar New Year, universally observed in Vietnam as Tet, passes almost unnoticed in the Cambodian countryside. More importantly, Chinese-style industriousness, so evident in Ho Chi Minh City, appears remote indeed from the Cambodian national psyche.

Driving along the straight, tree-lined road from the Vietnamese border at Bavet towards Phnom Penh, the landscape is uniformly flat and brown, at least in the dry season. There are few cars, just motorbikes, the occasional truck, and local buses with passengers sitting on the roof. There's no sign of the light-industry factories visible on the Vietnamese side of the border, and pigs and calves cross the road at leisure in the still, sunny weather.

Soon you reach the Mekong. Young boys are washing down small horses, some submerged up to their nostrils. The bus, however, goes across on a modern ferry. Then you're churning your way along a muddy track, necessitated by the construction of a new highway. Six hours after leaving Ho Chi Minh City you finally reach Phnom Penh.

All hotels in Phnom Penh display signs prohibiting the admission of under-age girls and boys into the rooms, except in the company of a parent. "That's OK," goes a local joke. "The mother comes along too to collect the cash." But the reality isn't funny. Child prostitution is merely the latest plague to afflict a country so badly mauled over the last 30 years that some commentators believe it'll soon disappear altogether, divided up between Vietnam and Thailand.

As it is, Phnom Penh offers beauties and horrors in roughly equal measure.

At the center stands the truly magnificent Royal Palace, something all visitors should make sure they see. But one block away, overlooking the confluence of the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, there's a prominent pavilion which could also be splendid, but isn't. Coils of plastic hose-piping are stacked in one corner, some ancient recliners are chained together, and two rickety desks are wired to some dodgy-looking electric cable. Children play soccer with an old slipper, somebody urinates into a flowerbed, and vendors pick their teeth under tacky umbrellas waiting for customers to gain merit by releasing caged swallows. The whole area has a gummy air, and you sit on the balustrade at your peril.

Why the banks of the Mekong should present this almost derelict aspect when nearby there are side-streets giving off an air of relaxed luxury under tropical skies is initially unclear. The reason becomes apparent, however, as soon as you encounter the Cambodian middle classes.

They greet each other with the most ceremonious of hand gestures, then proceed to their seats to watch ancient dance dramas of insufferable tedium. Their off-spring, I was told, have little problem gaining admission to college, while the poor have to be brilliant indeed if they don't have money to back up their applications.

A large number of splendid Phnom Penh villas are advertised everywhere, starting at a monthly rental of some US$1,000. Expatriate embassy staff, someone who worked for a rental agency told me, earn as much as US$5,000 a month, and most NGO staff get around US$3,000 (though volunteers as little as US$250). By contrast, the usual monthly wage for Cambodians working in factories is US$40, he said. (When the UN was in Cambodia, its soldiers received allowances of US$145 a day).