CAMBODIA REVISITED

THIS, believe it or not, was the job: to check out intriguing new luxury hotels in a country I had not been back to in some 15 years. The country was Cambodia, and the only catch was—well, there wasn’t a catch.

I first went to Cambodia in 1996, at the invitation of an old friend and fellow journalist. He was writing for a newspaper named the Cambodia Daily. He insisted I come see this place. I did. My two-week visit stretched into a life-altering year, then longer.

The country captured me, charmed and confused me. It has that effect on people, it draws them in. I abandoned my plans, cancelled medical school, dropped out of a relationship with a wonderful girl, and wrote half of a juvenile novel about expat life, about the streams of bats that blackened the skies at sunset and the conflict of feeling so happy and free in a country savaged by genocide and war.

I got a motorcycle, a rented room, a new love, and a new sense of purpose. It was a thrilling time. My friend had been right: there really was no more interesting or important place. Cambodia was on the cusp, emerging from the nightmare of the cultural cleansing carried out by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge; between 1975 and 1979 an estimated 1.7 million people, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, had been killed by starvation, overwork, or outright murder. But the intervening years had pushed the Khmer Rouge into hiding, and after another decade of civil war, the country seemed to finally be ready for peace—democracy, even. And perhaps, we all dreamed, we might somehow help it along.

In the late 1990s, the little ruined riverside capital