Along Mao Zedong Boulevard sit foreign embassies and the garish blue-and-white tower of the anti-poverty group CARE, a perfect symbol of the excesses of the international charity complex. By ten o’clock the streets are free of traffic, and a motorcycle can quickly cover the city center.

Other than the nightclubs and “hostess bars” whose neon lights illuminate a few dim side streets, the rest of Phnom Penh shuts down early.

A waitress holding a small baby under her arm served them mugs of beer and the signature “Huxley’s Tower” of Cajun-breaded shrimp, pork ribs, and chicken wings. “I’m too tired these days to even think about sex,” I overheard a Briton complain to his friend one night last July at a faux pub called Huxley’s Brave New World, which featured a soundtrack heavy on the Rolling Stones and the Doors. At night, Westerners push their way to the quay’s open-air bars and restaurants through a circus of street vendors: book and video sellers, opium dealers, tuk-tuk drivers, and the unavoidable young prostitutes.

By day they flock to the grounds of the Royal Palace, with its famous Silver Pagoda and dollhouse-like Napoleon III Pavilion, and to Wat Botum, a golden spire–topped Buddhist monastery that in the 1930s fostered a young novice monk named Saloth Sar, better known later in life as Pol Pot. Running alongside the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers, the Sisowath Quay is the main drag for tourists, expatriates, and international aid workers in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh.

Free the tone future factory ken