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It was thoroughly daylight as we made our way through the seedier streets of Phnom Penh, past the container port, through the bleak and resentful Muslim section where a group of men were at prayer in an open-fronted mosque and women tended small fires in the dirty lanes to dispose of the family rubbish. Eventually, the city just sort of gave out, as though in defeat, and we were plunged into a ragtag industrial area that was waking up to the day’s business.

The proof of this were the motos that had little square trailers hitched to them. Sheets of wood had been laid across the beds of the trailers. These platforms supported young people, girls and women mostly, as many as thirty or forty either standing or squatting or sitting with their legs dangling over the sides. It seems impossible that so many bodies could fit on such a small surface or that one tiny engine could pull so much weight. These were workers going to begin their day in one factory or another and they were illustrative not just of a new generation’s promise, but of a problem, as well.

So many of the social ills in Asian countries are a result of the way cities have been flooded by people leaving their homes in towns and the countryside to find work. For example, Bangkok has 10 or maybe 12 million people while the next-largest Thai centre, Chiang Mai, has only about three hundred thousand. Phnom Penh certainly has a million residents; the total may be nearer 2 million. But Battambang, the second-biggest community in Cambodia, is home to perhaps 150,000. The people we kept passing were rural folks seeking a better life, but being dragged to exploitative dead-end jobs where long days of brutally repetitive labour might, or might not, provide a little money to send back to their families.

We entered Kampong Chhnang province. The name translates roughly as “pottery port,” for the area is synonymous with a certain type of brown clay vessel. Thousands of examples from the smallest to the most huge were stacked up along the highway to tempt customers. Except for long, completely rural, stretches between villages and towns, there was always activity along the shoulders. Nearly every house, however humble, had some sort of little unpainted stand by the road with a few vegetables or soft drinks for sale. Men fixed motos by the berm while women hawked religious articles and general kitsch. I avoided the temptation to read too much significance into the little braziers where people bought frog meat, cut into strips and grilled with a sauce I couldn’t identify and Vorn didn’t know the English word for. Yes, in an earlier age of ignorance many bigoted Anglos referred to French people as “Frogs.” The slur derived from the fact that frog legs were often listed on menus in France. But I doubt very much that the French enthusiasm for that delicacy was transferred to its Cambodian colony. Cambodia simply has a great many frogs: rather large ones, it appears. So does Vietnam. In both places, they are eaten by ordinary folks. They aren’t expensive, aren’t elaborately prepared, and aren’t considered a gourmet treat. I wasn’t finding much of a French presence in the former French Indochina, but I was trying not to reach too far for it, either.

The actual town of Kampong Chhnang may seem the type of place where nothing ever appears to happen, but it does afford something to travellers interested in twentieth-century history. Comparisons between some rundown French houses and Khmer dwellings on stilts give another hint of how life was lived by the people on different sides of the camera lens. Then there is a completely unsubtle reminder of a more recent past. Just outside town are the overgrown ruins of a large airport engineered and financed by the Chinese during the Khmer Rouge regime, supposedly for peaceful domestic uses, but perhaps also, as is widely believed, as a base for the Cambodians to attack the Vietnamese (who instead attacked them). The runway was built by corvée labourers. Once the job was done, Pol Pot is said to have had all of them murdered.

The heat made the road appear to shimmer. It was about noon. The only significant place before we reached Battambang would be Pursat, capital of the province of the same name. The place had more traffic than Kampong Chhnang and seemed a bit livelier, but that may have been my thirst and hunger talking. Here, too, there were colonial-era buildings put to postcolonial uses, but shown no respect. I suggested we stop there for a cool drink and a bite to eat, but Vorn was determined to push on. In time, his reasoning became clear. Not far beyond the city was a restaurant he knew, one operated, I presumed, by a putative grandparent, cousin, in-law, aunt, or uncle. I wasn’t certain which, but whoever was in charge welcomed him fulsomely and seemed willing to tolerate me. The few tables were outdoors, under a plastic canopy. They provided shade for the spike-haired dogs that, between alms from the humans, slept beneath the tables. Fruit flies buzzed all round. There was no menu. Vorn simply exchanged a word or two with his cherished family member and a teenage girl wearing a traditional skirt and a Planet Hollywood T-shirt brought each of us a bowl and a tiny plate. I thought I had eaten most every type of East Asian cuisine, in circumstances ranging from streets stalls to formal banquets. But rice was the only dish I recognized here.

Throughout the meal, Vorn seemed to be looking at me oddly. At first I thought he was watching the movement of my mouth, the way a lip-reader would, for he and I both found that we understood each other better when we were speaking face-to-face and were concentrating on what we were hearing. Or maybe I had dropped a bite of food. Perhaps I had a dollop of bobor in the corner of my mouth or a spot of samla on the collar of my brand-new fatigues (the indestructible type known to Canadians as Tilleys, after their Vancouver manufacturer). Soon he stepped out and walked toward the road where mobile-phone reception was evidently better. I watched the pantomime of him making several calls. I presumed he was arranging our next stop — possibly at some dilapidated guest house in Battambang, run by another imaginary family member, where he would receive yet another kickback. Suddenly he snapped shut the jaw of his phone and we were off down the road once again.

At length, we did indeed make it to Battambang, capital of the next province along, an old community, but one that hasn’t been part of Cambodia for very long — not in historical terms. Starting in the fifteenth century and for much of its existence thereafter, it was fought over by the Siamese, the Burmese, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, and, in a nasty series of civil wars, by the Khmers themselves. The first of these groups, the Thais, proved the longest-lived rulers. For more than a century, from 1795 to 1907, the title of lord protector, the name given to the overlord appointed by the Thais, was held by successive members of a single family. It was during the latter half of this period that the French, who already had the other part of modern Cambodia in their shopping basket, were scheming and finagling to get control of this area, as well. Among the advantages they saw there were the riches of Chuor Phnom Kravanh — the Cardamom Mountains. This range is the primary source of cardamom, a plant that is a relative of the ginger and whose black seeds are a herbal medicine as well as a spice. In the olden days, cardamom merchants from France — plump bearded men wearing white linen suits and sola topis — would turn up each year to bargain for the harvest and arrange for its shipment to Europe.

However difficult life was for the Khmers under the French, it was better than life under the Thais had been. There was a suffocating caste system somewhat like that of India, but in one sense worse. Khnhom or slaves comprised a large segment of society and their children became slaves, as well. Most were debtors, captured enemy soldiers or petty criminals. The fate of those in the third category easily might have been worse. Painful, degrading, and often hideous punishments were selected from an extensive menu. In those days before the French introduced the non-judgmental guillotine, prisoners, each wearing a red flower in his hair, were executed, sometimes extrajudicially, by an official who first bound them in front of an open pit and then performed an elaborate circular dance before decapitating them. Rules forbade a prisoner to be killed all by himself; the victims were always dispatched in pairs. The executioner’s weapon was a sword called srey khmav: the Black Lady. It was the personal property of the lord governor.

The lords governor owned all the rice fields, as well. They collected confiscatory taxes on the people who worked them and also on those who picked the cardamom seeds (thus igniting the Cardamom Rebellion of 1898, the only uprising against Thai rule). The last of the line of lords governor was said to possess an ice machine; everyone else did without this valuable commodity. The middle and lower classes lived on crocodile meat, fish, and vegetables. They got along mostly by means of subsistence farming and a few crafts. For example, they made both paper fans and gunpowder. For the latter, they used saltpetre they mined themselves, but the finished product was of such poor quality that it could be used only for cheap fireworks. Travel was often by elephant or buffalo. (When the French took over in 1907, they found that only four people in the province owned bicycles.) This particular bit of Indochina was in surprising ways both less Indian and less Chinese than one might expect. Battambang was a society without, for example, restaurants, tailors or barbers, though it was one that was avid for cockfighting and particularly rich in odd folk beliefs. When first the French administration and then the Catholic Church established hospitals in Battambang, the Khmers boycotted them on superstitious grounds.

A crude census taken in 1884 by the French, who were well on their way to supplanting the Thais through a policy of exploiting the complex ethnic animosities and wars, recorded six thousand Chinese in the province out of a total population of more than a hundred thousand. There were also Vietnamese, Burmese, Lao, and Javanese people, but surprisingly few actual Thais, only about eight hundred. Among the dominant Khmer population, however, were twenty thousand “Khmer who claim to be Thai.” Thais got control again, from 1941 to 1946, when the French temporarily lost the colonies to the Japanese.

Battambang today is much less interesting than the above might lead you to expect. One drives into town past an enormously long wall that supports a contemporary sculpture, donated by an admirer in California, in which scores of male figures in a line are holding a mammoth cobra: a retelling of the snake goddess legend. Then one crosses over the Sangker (also known, more quaintly, as the Sângkê), a river that, like numerous others in Cambodia, has been canalized as a flood-control measure. Then it’s right into the centre of the city where some of the large public buildings, such as the Commissariat de la police, are shabby and poor-looking. The best preserved is the former French governor’s mansion, painted the same shade of yellow one sees on old official buildings in this part of the world wherever the Tricolour once flew. There is a museum in town, open again after a long closure, and accessible by pounding on the massive metal doors suggesting the gates of a castle. It’s a tiny place given over to early Khmer carvings and other artworks, labelled in French in the most basic, and, well, primitive way in terms of museumology. Three or four staff sat at one end of the single room, playing cards and gossiping in low tones appropriate to the august surroundings. The place smells like a tomb.

In sharp contrast to Siem Reap, as little as three or four hours away by fast boat, depending on the stage of the river, Battambang has few foreigners. I saw none, in fact. This was a far cry from a decade or so ago when United Nations troops and bureaucrats were there. For Battambang is a market town, pure and simple. Certainly the multi-storey indoor/outdoor market is the scene of whatever activity exists. It squats, tumbling down slowly, in a large square, round which young people, desperate with the boredom of small-town youth, race their motos while yakking on their mobiles. At one end of the market is an art deco clock tower of four or five storeys; the clock mechanism itself was removed years ago, so that the only way one could determine the time of day would be by using the tower as a sundial. At ground level, three generations of women, who seem to be given spots in the shade on the basis of their seniority, haggle with potential customers over the price of vegetables. Just as so many markets in Europe or America once did, this one has a small and utterly unprepossessing hotel nearby (Hotel Paris Hotel — a Chinese establishment) to serve the needs of farmers who have travelled some distance to sell their produce.

I heard no French, indeed saw no French on signs or in newspapers. The old story I have heard so often all over Asia grows inexorably truer with time: English, English of a kind at least, is becoming the second language (though the future probably favours Mandarin instead). A few years ago one might have expected “Gecko Café — Good food, drinks & foot massage” to signify an expat establishment. But not necessarily any longer, or at least not here. It was full of Khmer youth who are encouraged to drive their motos right up to the bar. Along the river there are still old shophouses from the French period, many of them decayed, one burned, a large number of them functioning as mobile phone shops. In the market I found one shophouse with a stepped roof, like a house in Amsterdam. It can only have been built by someone from northern France. Otherwise, as far as my ears could detect, there was only the sound of the wind erasing the faint traces of European colonialism.