Phnom Penh, 1994: a party at the end of the world

The Killing Fields were a recent memory, guns on every street corner, yet Cambodia's capital pulsed with a raw energy. An FT dispatch, from the archives.

After three hours in Phnom Penh I was lying by the roadside, bleeding from the leg. This atrocity was nothing to do with the Khmer Rouge - I was knocked off my rented bicycle by a 10-year-old boy on a moped.

Three giggling mechanics working on a battered Toyota helped me up and straightened the front wheel. One offered me a grimy rag to use as a bandage. The boy smiled and sped off: no need to exchange names and addresses as nobody there has a driving licence, let alone insurance.

The recent murder and kidnapping of Western tourists would make most people consider a trip to Cambodia as a holiday in hell, yet every day more flights arrive from Bangkok, Paris and Singapore bringing young backpackers and latter-day explorers. So what is the fatal attraction?

In the 1930s Phnom Penh was said to be the most beautiful city in French Indochina, its wide boulevards lined with palm trees and mansions with sweeping balconies. But it has suffered years of neglect. The Khmer Rouge destroyed much of the housing then abandoned the city and frogmarched its inhabitants out to work in the Killing Fields. Later, occupying Vietnamese troops looted much of what remained.

Since the signing of the Paris Peace Accord in 1991, restoration work has begun in earnest and now like a proud elegant madame, Phnom Penh is back on her feet, dusting herself down and powdering her nose. Good breeding, after all, will out.

If your nerves can stand it, renting a bicycle is a fast - and usually painless - way to see the capital. Down broken backstreets stand crumbling colonial villas with wrought-iron gates and pock-marked porticos. Art Deco houses once occupied by French merchants and diplomats would be worth millions in Miami. Some have been restored by foreign embassies but many others are occupied by squatters.

On patchwork rooftops, turrets lean dangerously, apparently held up by a spider’s web of telephone wires and electricity cables. Lines of laundry are strung between TV aerials, and green peeling shutters hang from broken hinges. It looks as if one firmly slammed door would flatten a whole neighbourhood.

The roads in Phnom Penh were laid on a grid system but are maddeningly hard to negotiate. There are no street signs and no apparent logic to the numbers. Rue 113 runs alongside Rue 105 which is followed by Rue 85, and then the main thoroughfare Monivong Boulevard which is also known as Achar Mean Boulevard.

The city boasts just one traffic light and everywhere bicycles vie for elbow space, their panniers piled with video recorders, mattresses and squealing piglets. Unofficial motorbike taxis loiter in packs at every street corner but even those that speak some English seem permanently lost.

I pulled up at a busy junction to get my bearings and a French-speaking policeman drew me a map and waved encouragement as I wobbled off in the right direction. Along the main streets, ethnic Chinese families sell everything from tractor parts to croissants. The shop names have been translated into English and many are collector’s items: Up To Date Elegant Wears, Hung Hut Sell The Glasses and a bar called Drink Tiger Beer No Problem.

At the central market, a star-shaped yellow concrete building, you can buy underwear from Thailand, copy watches from Taiwan and handfuls of fried cockroaches which I could not bring myself to taste.

After getting my leg cleaned up, I ate some spicy fish soup and a baguette at the Capitol Hotel, the favoured hangout of budget travellers. It was a fly-blown dive where German backpackers rubbed shoulders with bleary-eyed French photographers. One drawling American with a big Russian motorbike and a handlebar moustache claimed to be a Vietnam veteran, but behind the Ray-Bans he looked a little too young.

Later I ventured into the Heart of Darkness, an all-night bar where travellers play pool and trade tall stories. I had planned to walk there but a motorbike taxi driver asked to give me a free ride in the hope that I would need him on the way home. Sure enough, when three of us piled out later to go to a nightclub across town, he was waiting. We raced down deserted unlit streets three abreast, swerving potholes as big as bomb craters. Lone soldiers stood at street corners smoking cigarettes, automatic rifles slung across their shoulders. Otherwise, the city slept.

After 15 minutes we ducked down a back street past building sites and ghostly tenement blocks, then turned a corner to see a huge disco heaving with revellers. With banks of flashing lights and pounding music it looked like a party at the end of the world.

The bouncers on the door ignored us: they were busy shaking down a local teenager who was trying to walk in with two handguns stuffed in his jacket pockets. Inside it was wall-to-wall prostitutes. Dozens of pairs of sultry almond eyes followed us to the bar. Hair was hastily adjusted and hemlines wriggled into place. There were 50 or 60 girls there - Vietnamese, Thai and Cambodian - and we appeared to be the only men. “What would you like?’’ whispered a barmaid. We turned and looked at each other. I cleared my throat. “Three pints of Carlsberg, please.’’

Phnom Penh has few sights, the most notorious being the Killing Fields themselves where a glass-panelled stupa packed tightly with human skulls stands in a tranquil meadow. It was there, five miles outside the city centre, that some 17,000 people were massacred. Many were first tortured and mutilated and to save ammunition the Khmer Rouge lined up their victims along the edges of mass graves and clubbed them to death with axe handles.

Scraps of clothing and human bones lie around the field but it remains an inadequate memorial to such a horror. Birds sing in nearby trees and glittering rice terraces stretch out to the horizon. It fails to shock which, in a strange way, makes the experience all the more disturbing.

Far more horrific is Tuol Sleng, a former school turned war museum once used by the Khmer Rouge to torture intellectuals. Countless atrocities have been catalogued there and whole walls covered with pictures of victims who were meticulously numbered and photographed when their time came to die.

Despite Phnom Penh’s bleak history, most visitors are captivated by its vitality and prickly energy. There are so few sights, you feel as if you shouldn’t be there, which is part of the fun.

The newspapers were full of “incidents’’. The previous day three people had died when a train was ambushed by the Khmer Rouge. Such attacks had become so common that the poor were allowed to ride in the front two coaches without paying. It was not exactly free travel: if the train hit a mine, some would pay with their lives.

Cars were stolen by gangs in neighbouring Thailand and waved across the border by corrupt officials which was why half the vehicles were right-hand drive even though Cambodians, officially at least, drive on the right. Landmines remain the greatest danger. There are estimated to be 10million buried around the country, more than enough for every man, woman and child.

Next day, I took a cruise up the Mekong River with a group of British and Australian expats. They had hired a local ferry boat and were knocking back Johnnie Walker and Tiger Beer before lunch. We found a deserted sandbank that would serve as a beach and swam in the slow murky water as it neared the last leg of its epic journey from Tibet to the South China Sea.

In the late afternoon we went in search of food at a riverside village where wealthy locals spend their weekends. There was a string of floating restaurants along the bank but none seemed interested in serving dinner. At one, a group of soldiers lay slumped across tables piled high with empty beer cans. Outside, bare-chested men with tattoos of Buddhist temples across their backs played boules in the dirt.

We got back in the boat for the return journey to Phnom Penh as the sun dipped low over the water. Clouds appeared to the east near the border with Vietnam and sheet lightning flickered across the sky like a broken strip light. We waited for half an hour before the first thunderclap then sat looking to the heavens as fat raindrops exploded on our parched faces like tiny, friendly bombs.

• Originally published in the Financial Times. 1994 Words and photos by Mark Hodson.