THE INVITATION HAD come, but did I really want to spend Christmas in Phnom Penh? An introvert’s introvert, my idea of travel is a swim at an empty beach, a short walk and back in my own comfortable bed before midnight. The poverty, heat and madding crowds of the Third World held no siren song for me. And Cambodia – what was Cambodia anyway, but the tired remnants of a shattered country pulling itself out of genocide by its bootstraps? Paul Theroux had gone in 2007, and he found:

‘…ghostliness was present even in the sunniest parts of town, a suggestion of the hideous past, of blood and unburied bodies, of torture, trickery, lies, punishment – like the darkness I had felt rising from the earth when I walked through Dachau, the stink of evil.’