For convenient tourist access to lawlessness, travelers base themselves in Phnom Penh. In many ways, the Cambodian capital has completely earned its reputation. Few other places in the world can rival Phnom Penh's traffic in illegal weapons, heroin, child prostitution and money-laundering. Local English-language newspapers regularly advertise consulting companies that, for a fee, help expatriates and visiting businessmen negotiate with kidnappers. While neighbors like Thailand and Vietnam are making ventures into information technology and manufacturing, the hottest new Cambodian business at the moment is a swift black-market trade in human organs for medical transplant.
Backpackers collect such facts like souvenirs to support their own sordid experiences.
In Laos, I met three Australians who proudly wore Cambodian army uniforms that they'd purchased off the backs of border guards. In Siem Reap, I met an English girl who spoke glowingly of a week spent tagging along with a U.N. mine defusing team. No Cambodian tourist experience is complete, it seems, without such hints of the bizarre or the dangerous. Interestingly, the modern brothels of Phnom Penh got their biggest boost in 1992, when 20,000 U.N. troops from more than 30 countries arrived to maintain peace in preparation for Cambodia's 1993 presidential elections. Prostitutes had to be imported from Vietnam to meet the overwhelming demands of peacekeeper libidos.