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We stopped at three or four bars, FCC, the Heart, a nightclub filled with underage whores. At the end of the night, I asked Tim how much to tip my moto driver, a kid who’d been hustling me around town on the back of his bike all night, waiting for me outside until I was ready, then taking me to the next place.

‘Give him three dollars,’ he said.

I gave him five. What the hell? Two extra dollars, right? He needed it more than I did.

‘What are you doing?’ complained Tim. ‘You’ll ruin it for everybody!’

Psar Thmei is the central market, a fetid, sweltering mess with heaps of room-temperature food sweating in the crowded aisles beneath heavy canvas tarpaulins – none of it looking (or smelling) any too fresh.

The difference between this market and markets in Vietnam was like night and day. But then, the Vietnamese have the luxury of pride. I passed by reeking cloudy-eyed fish, limp vegetables, slimy, graying poultry. Philippe, however, was undeterred. He dug into a towering pile of lemongrass tripe and tongue with a blissed-out expression on his face. ‘Mmmm! Yummy!’ he said to the tripemonger, clasping his hands together and affecting a short bow. ‘Tony! You should try some! It’s delicious!’ He came at me with a steaming, dog-smelling mouthful of tripe pinched between chopsticks. I opened my mouth, and bit down, reminding myself to call Nancy later and ask her to make an appointment with the gastroenterologist. Philippe was trying to kill me.

He tried to kill me again at the ‘Jello-O’ stand at the market, insisting I try the nasty-looking gelatinous kelp-colored stuff they were eating from iced bowls. But Philippe is an adventurer, a gourmand, in the best senses of those words. He is afraid of absolutely nothing. He’ll put anything in his mouth. Maybe it’s because he’s French. We visited a Vietnamese floating village off Tonle Sap, or Great Lake. We drifted past floating homes, businesses, livestock pens, catfish farms. ‘What is she eating?’ asked Philippe, pointing out a woman cooking in a wok on the small porch of a dingy floating house, naked children squatting next to her. He made us take our boat over. He smiled broadly and asked the woman if she’d be willing to share a small portion of her meal with us. She very nicely obliged, spooning up a serving of ground fish and pork cooked in sugar syrup with dried shrimp. It tasted pretty decent. As we pulled away after a rudimentary but filling meal, I pointed something out to Philippe. The woman was rinsing the wok in the brown river water a few feet down from a floating livestock pen, and a child washing nearby. ‘How do you say E-coli in French?’ I asked.

I knew it was close. I could smell it. The fabled durian fruit. You can smell it a hundred yards away. Imagine a big green menacingly spiked football – only it exudes an unforgettable, gassy, pungent, decomposing smell. It’s an odor that hangs over markets and produce stalls all over Asia. It is said to be delicious. I was intrigued. Expensive, ugly, difficult to transport – it’s against the law to take durian on most planes, buses, and trains – it is said to be one of the most prized delicacies of the East. I had to try it. I bought a nice big one; it looked much like the relatively benign jackfruit, except spikier. I’d planned on taking it back to the hotel, but after ten minutes in the car with the reeking, foul-smelling object, the crew were crying for mercy. We had to pull over by Wat Phnom, a pagoda and park in the center of town, where, under the watchful eye of an elephant, I carved up my durian, sawing through the thick skin and cutting myself on the stegaosauruslike armor. God it stank! It smelled like you’d buried somebody holding a big wheel of Stilton in his arms, then dug him up a few weeks later. After sawing through the skin, I pulled apart the fibrous yellowy pulp, exposing, around the avocado-sized pits, lobes of cheesy, gooey, spreadable material that looked very much like whole foie gras.