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Uncharacteristically, I read the small section in the Lonely Planet guide on Pailin:

Pailin occupies a curious position as a semi-autonomous zone in which leaders of the former Khmer Rouge can seek haven, avoiding the long arm of international law. There is little of interest to the tourist here, unless you know a bit about gemstones or like hanging out with geriatrics responsible for mass murder. It is indeed ironic that this one time Khmer Rouge model town is these days a center of vice and gambling.

‘Vice’? ‘Gambling’? This was going to be the kind of lusty adventure I’d read about in Terry and the Pirates as a kid! Roadblocks. Sinister guys with automatic weapons. A heart-shaped water bed in some Maoist version of Trump Castle. Even if it was a little rustic, how bad could it be? When Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo in Vegas, things were still pretty rough out there. This could be fun!

I flew Air Vietnam into Phnom Penh. At Pochentong Airport, a long desk of uniformed military men examined my passport, documents, medical certificate, and visas. All of them were in full parade regalia: leather-billed hats, mortarboards with tassels on their shoulders, chests festooned with medals. It looked like the Joint Chiefs had gathered to personally inspect every incoming visitor. The first guy gravely scrutinized my papers, handed them to the officer on his right, who read closely, made a tiny written notation, then handed them to the man on his right, who stamped them and returned them to the first guy – where the whole process began again. My papers made it all the way down to the last guy. Then, after some tiny incongruity was noticed, they were returned, once again, to the beginning of the line. Eventually, my documents made it through this ludicrously overdressed gauntlet and I was in. Welcome to Cambodia. This is the last law you’ll see.

Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.

One in eight Cambodians – as many as 2 million people – were killed during the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to eradicate their country’s history. One out of every 250 Cambodians is missing a limb, crippled by one of the thousands and thousands of land mines still waiting to be stepped on in the country’s roads, fields, forests, and irrigation ditches. Destabilized, bombed, invaded, forced into slave labor, murdered by the thousands, the Cambodians must have been relieved when the Vietnamese, Cambodia’s historical archenemy, invaded.

One look at the abject squalor of the capital city’s crumbling and unpaved streets and any thought that Cambodia might be fun flew out the window. If you’re a previously unemployable ex-convenience store clerk from Leeds or Tulsa, however, a guy with no conscience and no chance of ever knowing the love of an unintoxicated woman, then Cambodia can be a paradise. You can get a job as an English teacher for about seven dollars an hour (which makes you one of the richest people in the country). Weed, smack, whores, guns, and prescription drugs are cheap and easy to find. You can behave as badly as you wish. Shy boys on motorbikes will ferry you from bar to bar, waiting outside while you drink yourself into a stupor. You can eat dinner, then penetrate indentured underaged prostitutes, buy a kilo of not very good weed, drink yourself stuttering