After a bizarre day amidst the exquisite rubble of Cambodia?s famed Angkor ruins which had, among other things, brought me into contact with a barefoot Cambodian six-year-old who could converse in Irish, I headed back to my gangster-run hotel and booked a bus ticket to the country?s capital, Phnom Penh, for the following morning. In comparison to the rip-off express that had taken me from Bangkok to the Cambodian town of Siem Riep, a journey which saw me and my fellow travellers subjected to an stunningly imaginative range of scams and bald-headed thievery at the hands of the trip organisers, this last leg of my journey was relatively event-free.
    The reason for my visit to Cambodia, and Phnom Penh in particular, was that I wanted to pen an article about the effect the massive stockpile of weapons various foreign powers had shipped into the country during its long, tragic wars was having on the Cambodian population. That said, I?d read a lot about the city whose wide boulevards, French colonial architecture and glittering temples had earned it the nickname 'The Pearl of Asia' up until it was ravaged by the ultra-Communist Khmer Rouge, and I was looking forward to doing the tourist thing.
    As the bus cut towards the city centre and the corrugated Iron shacks made way for more sturdy structures, the extent of the damage wrought by the Khmer Rouge, who deported Phnom Penh?s population to the countryside after they sacked the city in 1975, became obvious. With a fair chunk of its people living rough or in near derelict buildings, its thrashed roads and the absence of luxuries such as street lighting or 24-hour electricity, it was clear Phnom Penh was a long way from regaining its pearl status.

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As our bus pulled up to the depot a group of about 50 Khmer guys who had been sitting around their motorbikes and tuk tuks near its entrance leapt to their feat and started running alongside our slowing vehicle. They banged on our windows, shouted at us and generally clambered over each other in an attempt to get our attention. When the bus came to a stop they crowded tightly around the door, which meant the passengers, many of whom were clearly petrified of taking the plunge into the shouting crowd, would have to push their way through banks of grabbing, potentially pick-pocketing hands.
The bus depot was nowhere near anything in particular, so everyone was going to have to get a taxi of some description. I decided then, that the best thing to do would be to pick a bloke from among the heckling mob in the hope that he?d help me get through the crowd and into the back of his tuk tuk as quickly as possible, lest I be commandeered by another driver. I stood on the top step of the bus when the doors flung open, while the rest of the passengers fidgeted and waited to see how I would get on, and signalled to a comparatively big, tidily dressed Khmer guy who was waving at me and pointing to a tuk tuk parked behind him. I ignored the pleas of the rest of the drivers, some of whom were attempting to climb onto the bus in order to lay claim to one or other of the passengers, and gave my man the thumbs up. He gave a triumphant yelp and, as I?d hoped, burst his way through the rest of the drivers towards me. With my backpack on front-ways and my wallet in my hand in my pocket, I jumped into the heaving mass of manic Cambodian taxi drivers who by this stage looked like they were going to flip the bus over if the rest of the passengers didn't get a wriggle on and alight. I could feel hands tapping up my pockets as soon as I hit the dirt where the footpath was supposed to be, but my shouting driver bullied his way through and put an end to it with some stern words in Khmer. I'm sure they meant little beyond 'this one is mine!', but did the job all the same and he dragged me clear of the feeding frenzy and into his spluttering three-wheeler.
I threw a look over my shoulder at the unfortunates who had opted to place their bags in the storage compartment of the bus rather than keeping them on board as they tried to fight their way through and then free of the heaving mob of grabbing hands. It was a hairy 'oul welcome to the city and at the risk of sounding sexist, one I would have been all the more uncomfortable with had I been a lone female traveller. Happily, my chosen driver turned out to be a decent guy who not only brought me to my hotel, but proved to be a key ally in my bid to emerge from Cambodia with a decent article.