Driving from the airport on a muggy, dark gray afternoon, we passed through miles of grim, crude, cinder block construction. Fesenberg waxed in a winsome German accent about her enthusiasm for the city. After years in Angkor Wat, she'd had the option of transferring to a hotel in Europe or the United States. But all of those places were too built up and boring, she said.
I'd been hearing about Phnom Penh since at least the early s, when a group of journalists from New York were hired to staff the just-introduced Cambodia Daily. Dispatches they sent to acquaintances sounded hellish and exciting, in that young-man-meets-failed-state sort of way, with reports of land mines, military checkpoints, handguns, machine guns, coup attempts, cratered streets, opiates and amputee teen prostitutes. At that time, Cambodia was like the floor. Its culture, economy and history had been razed during the s by the political and genocidal experiments of the Khmer Rouge and subsequent occupation by Vietnamese forces.
But then waves of outsiders began to arrive, the first bent on regenerating the country United Nations soldiers, de-miners, consultants, NGO staff , the second with less noble motivations international lowlifes in search of cheap sex, housing, alcohol and drugs.
And in a surprisingly positive way, they created a kind of economic topsoil in the city that is now enabling a newer class of entrepreneurs to take root as the country surges unevenly back to life. Alexis de Suremain, 43, is a hotelier and the proprietor of the Pavilion Hotel, down the street from the Royal Palace. It's comfortable but chic, tasteful but not too trendy, and very popular among the growing portion of Cambodia's two million visitors who now add a once-unthinkable stop in Phnom Penh to their Angkor Wat itinerary.
De Suremain, who came to Cambodia eight years ago with a French NGO, admits that when he first arrived in the city, he hated it. He found the Khmer population easygoing but painfully shy and ruefully uneducated.
