I woke up to my first Phnom Penh morning to discover my hotel was under a foot-and-a-half of ominously murky-brown water. After sniffing sceptically from the last dry step on the stairs leading from the deluged lobby, I took encouragement from the laisser faire attitude of the unperturbed Cambodians and jumped in. I didn’t really have much of a choice – I had a meeting to make and short of finding a canoe taxi my trip was going to involve getting wet.

With the end of my shorts rolled up and my flip-flops in hand, I waded through the lobby and had a nose at the street outside. The powerful morning sun bounced off the shimmering brown water and gave the otherwise cruddy side-street an almost ethereal feel. I had a half hour before I was due to meet my self-appointed driver Sonny and had earmarked the time-slot as my opportunity to get some breakfast. My original plan was to eat in the hotel, but chowing down while up to my knees in what looked like a mixture of sewerage water and Mekong run-off didn’t appeal. I decided to head towards the city’s main tourist strip of Sisowath Quay, which sits at the edge of a steep embankment with the confluence of the Tonle Sap and Mekong rivers far below. Sadly, giggling Cambodians just metres from the front of the hotel were at times finding themselves in water close to waist depth, meaning a trip on foot wasn’t an option.

I looked questioningly at the gathered motorbike taxi drivers, normally straight in as soon as they see a tourist hesitate, but their response was unequivocal: “Too much water! Moto bike no work!” My exasperation at being stranded was just about to prompt me to whip my valuables out of my pockets and wade in when I noticed an alternative means of transport; a giant three-wheeled bicycle with a passenger seat on the front not dissimilar to the scoop on the front of a JCB, known as a cyclo. I gestured to the stick-thin Khmer gentleman of around sixty who was slowly peddling the gleaming aluminium contraption through the shimmering garbage soup and he responded with a broad, sporadically toothed smile. His cyclo altered its course with the speed of a u-turning ocean liner and I jumped on board. “Two dollar, okay sir?” he said with arched eyebrows when I told him my destination. It was probably ten times what the locals pay but the man was proposing to cycle me through a kilometre of flooded streets so I had no intentions of bargaining him down.

The sight of the city’s population cheerfully working around what would be considered a catastrophe in Ireland was something to see. Giddy children, naked as they day they were born, splashed around in the flood water while watchful parents gazed at them from elevated hammocks. We cut through an outdoor market which remained entirely operational despite the downpour. A large Cambodian woman chattered after passersby in the clipped tones of the Khmer language while languidly pulling stunned white chickens from a bamboo cage beside her, snapping their knecks and then tossing them into a basket that rested on a table just inches above the flood line. Happily, the water level dropped to nothing by the time we got to Sisowath’s strip of restaurants and cafés and after a bite to eat and a phone call, Sonny collected me there and off we sped.

I had arranged to meet Thida, a tourguide/translator who a friend of mine from Bangkok recommended. I was sure I’d need someone who could speak the lingo at some stage while working on the guns in Cambodia story and this Thida guy sounded just the job. I hopped out of Sonny’s tuk tuk outside the arranged café close to the city’s Royal Palace and plonked down on an umbrella-shaded seat outside. “Excuse me?” said a girl’s voice which I expected would belong to a waitress set to take my order. “Are you Robert?”

Thida, as it turned out, was most definitely not a ‘he’. Rather, she proved to be an absolutely ridiculously good looking Khmer girl in her mid-20s. I could actually feel my pupils dilating as I coughed out a stuttering reply and she took a seat opposite. She was short, smartly dressed and had huge brown eyes set in a face that proved quick to smile.

After the introductions were out of the way I gathered my composure enough to participate in a discussion about the article I was working on. She had come up with a number of suggestions with regard to places she thought I should visit as a way of framing the article. The notorious Khmer Rouge torture chamber and slaughterhouse of S-21 was among them as she felt it would give me a good idea of how violent things had got here. She also ventured that it would give me a solid chronological starting point for an article dealing with the deluge of weapons that found their way into the country. She was definitely on-the-ball and it was just as well; if my stilted introduction was anything to go by then being in the company of someone so farcically attractive would mean my capacity to concentrate and function normally would be severely limited.