I stayed at three hotels in Phnom Penh. The first was Manor House (8B, Street 266; e-mail: info@manorhousecambodia.com), a boutique guesthouse located in an affluent area popular with NGO workers. The nearest restaurant offered French haute cuisine and priced its delights in US dollars. The nearby streets were leafy, and the houses comfortable and dignified. The motorbike-taxi hadn't wanted to take me there because he wasn't sure he'd get a commission, a fear that proved justified. The room, at US$30 a night, was exceptionally comfortable, though the Western breakfast was rather bland.
The second hotel I sampled was the Renakse (40, Samdach Sothearos Boulevard; e-mail: renaske-htl@camnet.com.kh), a rundown French colonial building directly opposite the Royal Palace. "Our rooms are US$40," announced a sharp-tongued assistant, "but if you stay the price will be US35." In the Renakse everything creaks — the doors, the windows, the beds. Lugubrious and echoing, it has atmosphere (of a sort) without being able to claim any discernable charm.
The best hotel I found, the Golden Bridge (7CD, Street 278, Sangkat Beoung Keng Kang 1, Khan Chamkamon; www.goldenbridgehtl.com), was also the cheapest. The secret was that it was Chinese-owned and Chinese-run. It cost a mere US$13 — one hi-tech Japanese guest had been tapping away on his computer there for two months. The street also boasts some good but inexpensive restaurants — try the EU Food at 11 — and an Internet coffeeshop. The Lucky Supermarket nearby shows you, under one roof, how Phnom Penh's rich really live.
"Cambodia's amazing!" a young British businessman had told me in a Ho Chi Minh City cafe. "I saw a railway that only had one train a week, and the rest of the time people work their way along the line in a wicker contraption on wheels." And as I got ready to leave I thought that perhaps I wasn't giving Cambodia a chance. What about Angkor, Battanbang, and all the villages where the Cambodian riel rather than the US dollar is the unit of currency? Shouldn't I take a look at these as well? I concluded, however, that the world's a big place and you can't see everything. More than that — understanding that you can't see it all is one of the secrets of happiness. Besides, I missed the films of Almodovar and Ho Chi Minh City's Chinese circuses and Catholic splendors, and could, in truth, hardly wait to get back to Vietnam.
The two most shocking books I know on Cambodia are William Shawcross's Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (Chatto, 1979) and Amit Gilboa's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh; Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja (Asia Books, 1998). Both tell similar stories, of the hideous exploitation of an innocent, but also strangely passive and acquiescent, people.
RSS