In October of 2012, I fell in love with the capital of Cambodia. I saw three Phnom Penhs. The first layer was the old decaying remains of the French. Bright, pastel colonial architecture was scattered throughout the city. These buildings were always a single colour, always with lines of windows and columns, a rare mix of bureaucracy and children's drawings. The imposing, yellow Central Market looked like a colosseum from an 80s sci-fi movie.
The second layer sat on top of the past, the emerging modern city, the waterfront hotels, restaurants, and paved roads, the buzzing of tuk-tuks, motorbikes, and black government SUVs. At night, the wide path along the Mekong River would fill with locals strolling, playing soccer with a wicker ball, and, my favourite, dance classes where eager participants, young and old, followed instructors as Bruno Mars' Lazy Song blasted on a portable amp.
Move five minutes deeper into the city, away from the water, the Royal Palace, and the tourists, and you'd notice the heights of buildings lower and the dust rise. This is where local restaurants and businesses were, attracting people from the countryside, aspiring to move into the apartments toward the Mekong. I gawked at closing time at the Russian Market, where two roads, filled with motorbikes, calmly flowed into each other like competing faucets.
The most enduring memory I have was in that thin slice between the water and the dust, the few roads of apartments with shopping malls, grocery stores, and electronics shops. It was in this emerging middle that the thickest tangle of above ground wiring on Earth can be seen. It looked like an homage to the twisting trees of Ta Prohm. Cables were draped and spooled everywhere, hanging off of the corners of buildings and across apartment porches where people would use them to hang wet laundry. It looks like, instead of paying a contractor, the city got its cousin to hang the phone lines, electricity, and other black cords of modernity that the average Cambodian would never use. It was frenetic, functional, unsafe, and brimming with life, activity, every day the desperation and hope of the city's promise hung above their heads, the noose, the rescue line, scribbled, overlapping diagrams of blood vessels, the web of lost spiders, the tangle, the tangle, so sad and so spirited in the same instant. I'm not a romantic, there were a lot of wires in the sky, hung with the reckless lack of long-term vision characteristic of a growing city. It was absurd and beautiful and one of the images I most often recall from my travels.
The final layer was the people, improvising their businesses in small stalls along the high palace walls, selling beer, haircuts, local food, scarves, and gasoline in plastic water bottles, hustling on the streets, drivers shouted at you, offering tuk-tuk tours because $2 American was like $200. In Cambodia, it was a delight to be a tourist. I was a billionaire savant. Locals were still fascinated with foreigners. A young group of children asked if I had email and wanted me to open my bag to see it. If you were ripped off the most you lost was $5. You could lose your shirt in a deal and still be wearing your shirt. And if you said 'thank you' in Khmer you were treated with such appreciation and wonder that you felt like a child who had shared a short, witty allegory explaining special relativity.
