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In the capital of Cambodia, some months are dry and some are very wet indeed. None, however, seems substantially less hot than the others, at least not by standards upheld in the West. So the best plan, I believe, is always to stay on the eastern margin of the city, preferably along the Sisowath Quay. This is a street with only one side, for directly opposite is an embankment leading down to the waterfront. Worn steps descend to the Tonlé Sap, in the middle of which sits a large island. Along the farther shore side of the island — the back channel — is the Tonlé Mekong. These two magnificent rivers are full of life and traffic. I, for one, could gaze at them endlessly, watching all manner of river craft, from homemade fishing boats barely big enough for two people to substantial freshwater freighters, go about their business all day — and throughout the evening, as well, becoming only dots of light criss-crossing in the darkness. Yet the true advantage of being so near the water is the slight possibility of catching a breeze. One lives in hope.

The first time I visited Phnom Penh I was with M. We stayed at the Hotel Cambodiana, just down the quay, past the Royal Palace and the National Assembly. It was then a rather new joint-venture affair that was run, and very smoothly too, by people from Singapore. It was full of tourists who liked to wake in the morning not quite remembering whether they were in Phnom Penh, New York, or London. Since then, however, locals have grabbed the management contract and the establishment has declined. One evening, I decided to revisit the place for dinner. I was pleased to see that the two women from France with a pastry shop in the lobby are still there, making Gateaux Saint-Honoré (by special arrangement) and innumerable lesser desserts. But the hotel itself looked forlorn and disorganized. As I was conserving cash, I was careful to note the sticker on the door with the familiar Visa logo. Inside, at the front desk and the concierge’s stand, both unmanned when I passed, were displays of Visa application forms. When I finished my meal, however, I learned that in fact the hotel no longer accepts the card. Agh!

This time, as I was making my own travel arrangements, I was staying at one of the many narrow rundown places a short walk upstream, one which, with apologies to Ludwig Bemelmans, I shall call the Hôtel Splendide, for many such establishments rejoice in grandiose names that fool no one. When I entered my room for the first time, I found a small laminated card at the spot on the pillow where, at the Cambodiana during its Singapore period, I would have expected to discover a chocolate mint. The card was certainly mint-green, but it said: NO FIREARM OPIUMS IN ROOM. My first reaction was of course to slap my forehead and exclaim “Where are my manners!” For local custom is evidently to check one’s opiums at the front desk. Possibly this is one reason lockers are provided. The lockers look as though they might be second-hand ones from a rural bus depot.

As for the room, it had some sort of ornate plate-rail, very likely French, but the doors both interior and exterior were of lacquered plywood. The space was surprisingly clean, though while lying on the bed, I couldn’t ignore enormous patches of mould that turned the ceiling into a mappa mundi. There was a narrow veranda overlooking the street. Decades of automobile particulate, however, had eaten away the stonework of the stubby balustrade. The chest of drawers and armoire had many locks, and I found a ring of keys in a desk on the opposite wall. But none of the keys matched any of the locks.

Noise from the street rose on the hot air, and at night there was a scratching sound inside one of the walls. The hot water was cold and cold drinks were warm, and there didn’t seem to be enough towels or loo paper for all the rooms and no soap whatever. Nor enough cash in the till downstairs to make change for even a small purchase. When questioned about the simplest matter, staff members looked dolefully perplexed. The rest of the time they quarrelled amongst themselves, loudly and in numerous languages and dialects. The lift, which was scarcely larger than a red English telephone box, stopped at various floors randomly and closed its door quickly enough to imprison people like a Venus flytrap.

“Be thankful,” said an Aussie. “This is the only thing in the whole bloody place that goes fast enough to break a sweat. But you get used to it. I’ve lived here sixteen years.”

Later that day, when I was coming back to my room, I put the door key into the lock and the entire knob mechanism, cover plate and all, fell to the floor with a crash, leaving me with the key still in my hand. There was no one to fix the lock, so I requested another room, one with the same view. The management reluctantly agreed. And so it went.

The Quay is the Sumkumvit of Phnom Penh, but with a different sort of expat community, even though it includes many American seniors, and some Australian ones, as well, perhaps a Kiwi or two, whose principal connections to their own cultures were severed during the American War. For reasons often more psychological than strictly political, these often bitter exiles in their early or mid sixties have cast themselves out. It isn’t quite accurate to say that they have, in the Australian phrase, gone troppo, for they are commonly not so well integrated into the host culture as their long residence might suggest. They are simply stubborn and defiant, frequently tired, and often a little drunk on Mekong Whisky or Angkor Beer.

Standing in contrast are the great many younger men, and, significantly, women, who arrived during or after the genocidal civil wars, often working for government aid agencies and NGOs of one sort or another. This group includes a large segment of francophones. Thus the Phnom Penh scene is again set apart from Bangkok’s. There is no historical reason for French to be spoken in Thailand, the only country in the region that has never been officially a Western or Japanese colony. In many other ways too, the old-timers, the ones that is who still have lives and livers, share little with the new breed, who are well educated and well paid. It’s for these latter folks, as well as the tourists, that streets like the Quay are lined with intimate bars and bistros, and restos selling premium fair-trade coffees rather than Nescafé.

Only a short distance along the Quay from the Splendide is a hotel called the Indochine, though it’s obviously run by Aussies, as the logo is a kangaroo. Another neighbour is a former ship chandler who now repairs and rebuilds motorcycles — motos. They are found everywhere. The current custom, as two different people explained to me, is for parents to buy their son a moto so he can commute to school. Many of the young men, however, sell them to such a person as the shop owner and use the money to gamble on soccer matches. Gambling is one of the few traditional vices legal in Cambodia, as distinct from all the others, which go on without much regard for the law one way or the other; there even used to be a large floating casino opposite the Royal Palace. Of the remaining addresses in my section of the Quay, many were taken up with ambiguous massage places, mini-marts, money changers, and shops selling pirated DVDs of movies. Other than these, and the open-air work space and showroom of a maker of sometimes rather kitschy coffins, virtually every other shophouse is a cellphone place, so many of them that surely the market penetration must be total. I’ve always felt that allowing the military to own businesses, making the generals and the colonels no longer quite so dependent on the government for funding, is a terrible mistake. Just as one of the biggest savings and lending institutions in Bangkok is the Thai Military Bank, so one of the biggest phone companies in Cambodia is owned by the army.

Still, for all the French tourists and public-policy workers, one must squint one’s ears to hear French spoken recklessly in the streets of Phnom Penh (in the boulevard Mao Tsé-Toung, par exemple), so great is the general babble. The French wish is to cling to whatever influence they retain while not appearing to be interested in political or even economic power. Sometimes one will see or meet someone from the French embassy, which, significantly perhaps, is, of the all the legations in the capital, the one located farthest from the urban centre of action.

One of the shops selling the pirated movies boasted a sign announcing that it has a selection of films in French. On inspection I discovered that the inventory inclines heavily toward La Déchirure, La Soupe au canard and Indochine — that is, The Killing Fields avec Sam Waterston, Duck Soup avec Groucho Marx, and, well, Indochine avec Catherine Deneuve. The above titles no doubt symbolize once again the pointlessness of my making this journey, not only for its own sake, but also to gauge the amount of lingering French in the region — and to return imaginatively to the era of the postcards, trying to understand something of the people snapping the shutter, as well as of those being photographed.

Just as the presence of the Bangkok Post and the Nation show the strength of the English language in Thailand, the newspapers in Phnom Penh show the comparative poverty of French in Cambodia. The Phnom Penh Post, published only in English as the name suggests, is far and away the most important foreign newspaper in the country. It dares to report Cambodian politics honestly despite fierce government suspicion. Perhaps its most closely read feature, however, is the always lively Police Blotter, from which I cannot help but quote at random for the insight it gives on the city’s daily life.

Police on Thursday raided a café showing porn movies in Chamkarmon district, Phnom Penh, arresting 100 including the café’s two female owners. Police seized 74 motorbikes and the equipment used for showing movies. All but the owners were later released with their motorbikes, but they had to pay money to the police for various reasons.

You will find nothing so sociologically revealing in the Cambodia Daily, which is some sort of subsidized training ground for tyro journalists and looks as though it’s been produced at Kinko’s. It is far below the level of the Cambodia Weekly, published by the University of Cambodia. That leaves only Cambodge Soir Hebdo, which, though it ventures into current affairs, does so cautiously. I saw a headline — les royalistes à nouveau plongés dans le chaos — that might have been plucked from the time the postcards were printed. But then the paper is not independent, but rather “est soutenu par l’Organisation internationale de la francophonie.”

Buildings outlive persons, especially in places where economic growth was slow for so many decades and health care remains, to put the best possible face on the situation, rather basic. Despite the rush of development between the end of the civil war era in 1999 and the global economic crisis a decade later, Phnom Penh certainly harbours examples of French colonial architecture. The quickest to be preserved are the private residences, which are called villas even though they’re in the centre of the city, far from the countryside. They are customarily two storeys high with an elaborate central entranceway and tall, narrow windows with louvered wooden shutters, the whole affair surrounded by a wall (protective but also decorative). The exteriors are often pastel — yellows or blues — and the roofs have Asian lines. These were the homes of French merchants and businessmen, and they appear not to have changed much over the years. Some were pointed out to me as late nineteenth century and at least one as being from the 1930s. The only example I saw that was dated had 1926 in a cartouche over the upper storey. Did these people know how quickly their empire there would vanish once the Second World War cleared the ground for fierce nativism to grow?

Some French buildings on the grander scale, which is to say ones perhaps too big for a single foreign individual to purchase, repair, and restore, have fared far less well. One of these, the former Hôtel Renaske, stands vacant and has been the subject of various legal actions; it may meet the fate of so many smaller ones and be torn down or permitted to collapse. Another one, near the palace, is a wonderfully and monumentally bizarre two-storey mansion with large porticos. It has ornate masonry work everywhere. Although it juggles allegorical Khmer motifs with its many Corinthian columns, it is most definitely the work of a European sensibility. It is also a ruin. The wall and gate are shot up and cracking. The windows are knocked out, a few boarded over with plywood or corrugated iron, but most not. Old tires and wrecked automobiles litter the front garden, which is overgrown with weeds. Birds and animals nest in the arches and on the ledges. Trees grow inside the building itself; one of them is tall enough to be visible through a formerly ornate second-storey window.

I asked Vorn, a young character I had retained for his Local Knowledge, what had befallen this marvellous pile of stones.

“The King build for bodyguards,” he explained. “No more King.”

“But still plenty of bodyguards, eh?” I repied.

Cambodia, like the former Soviet Union, found that as soon as it loosened control of the economy it gained, overnight, a mafia class, whose members enjoyed driving round the city with all their heavily armed retainers, some of them non-Asians, big fellows, Russian perhaps.

Vorn shrugged.

Later I learned that the building is not entirely without some civic purpose. From time to time, it seems, rock concerts have been held there. That may account for some of the outright damage just as the withering of royalist sentiment explains some of the mere neglect. But who knows? The country has gone through such hell in the past few decades that any survival seems miraculous and any loss perfectly if tragically predictable.

The pollution in Phnom Penh, no doubt combined with that of Bangkok, soon left me with a lung ailment. I was able to go to the Russian Market and buy 400 milligrams of Noroxin without a prescription — after carefully checking to see that it hadn’t exceeded its best-before date and showed no evidence of being counterfeit. One doesn’t require a doctor’s scrip in Cambodia because there are too few doctors. Historically speaking, the shortage goes back to the Pol Pot regime, when most of licensed professionals who didn’t flee were systematically murdered. In Thailand by comparison, one needs only a quick nod from a medical middle-man to obtain whatever prescription one seeks. I’m told that the system helps to prevent an even faster spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Lord knows what sort of treatment is available to the sex workers and johns of Kilometre Eleven, the horrifying prostitution-village that sprang up eleven kilometres outside Phnom Penh, catering originally to UN peacekeepers.