The stats alone are impressive. Opened only weeks ago, Techo International Airport might soon be the ninth-largest on earth. Designed by Foster + Partners, its serenely golden profile – a grid of tented vaults – rises like a desert mirage above the green paddy fields. You can see water buffalo from the Starbucks outlet.
What’s more, the first ground was broken just five years ago by its Chinese engineers – in other words, the whole thing has been completed in the time it takes the UK to consider and then cancel a small multi-faith prayer shelter near Newent. The airport is so vast – and getting vaster – because it is intended to handle 50 million passengers a year by 2050 – and this in a nation of just 17 million people.
Designed by Foster + Partners, the airport is intended to handle 50 million passengers a year by 2050
And it’s this location that makes the airport genuinely remarkable. Because Techo airport is the new airport for Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia, a country which, 50 years ago, was so brutally misruled by homegrown genocidal Maoists, that its life expectancy went down to 12. Now, via the gleaming metal arches of Techo, the city is inviting the world to come and see exactly how much things have changed for the better.
Why visit now?
So, should you take a holiday punt on Phnom Penh? My answer is yes. Indeed, my answer is yes, yes, YES, because I reckon Phnom Penh might just be the most alluring city on earth right now.
Why? Let me count the ways. First, the city is now blessed with some truly captivating hotels. There’s the space-age Rosewood, which resembles a Kyoto ryokan married to a huge modernist penthouse, somehow balanced on the top of one of Phnom Penh’s tallest skyscrapers. The skybar is spectacular, the contemporary Khmer art in the lobby is sumptuous, and CUTS restaurant does one of the best rib eyes in Indochina.
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At the other end of the spectrum is the French colonial superluxe of Raffles, once Le Royale, where everything smells of jasmine and lemongrass, the breakfasts come with vintage bubbles, and the blissful swimming pool, around which life revolves, is probably the finest pool in any hotel in any capital city in the world. I’ve tried seriously hard to think of a better one – while sipping kaffir-leaf cocktails by the Raffles pool – and failed.
Of course, Raffles and Rosewood don’t come cheap, but they come cheaper than the equivalent elsewhere – because Phnom Penh, as a city, is astonishingly good value. You can get a cold beer right on buzzy Sisowath Quay, by the mighty Tonle Sap river, for £2; you can get a great meal of beef lok lak anywhere for £5-6. Tuktuk rides – summoned in gratifying moments via an app called Grab – cost pennies.
Scooters and tuktuks stream along Sisowath Quay, capturing the lively rhythm of the city’s centre – Glyn Thomas Photography / Alamy Stock Photo
What’s more, that beef lok lak – essentially sliced beef in Kampot pepper sauce (“Cambodian Kampot pepper is the best in the world” – Anthony Bourdain) – will likely be brilliant. Because Cambodian food, especially in Phnom Penh, is commonly brilliant. Fresh, clever, surprising, healthy, herby, spicy, and sometimes flavoured with sour red ants.
A great way to explore the many byways of Phnom Penh’s gastronomic scene is a twilight food tour. You will be picked up at your hotel and then whisked around a city that surges into life – and traffic – as the tropic sun sinks, like a tangerine in crimson rice wine, behind the braiding waters of the rivers.
Try everything, even the garlic-stuffed frogs. OK, maybe not the frogs. Try the bewildering tropical fruits at the glitteringly vivacious Russian Market. Try the buffalo beef jerky with cold Angkor beer by the floodlit splendour of the Royal Palace – it’s a standard after-work pleasure for office people, and it’s highly addictive.
Night markets are a vibrant hallmark of Southeast Asian street culture – YamMo
And when you finish eating, it is time to drink. You could tour the chic gastro bars of BKK1, a kind of Southeast Asian Shoreditch. You could lose an entire evening in Bassac Lane, a newish, mazy, bohemian nightlife district near the Independence Monument, where trendy Vietnamese whisky bars run by tattooed lesbian guitarists stand shoulder to shoulder with Burmese sushi stalls, Sino-Indian vodka pop-ups, and miniaturised American speakeasies serving weirdly good beer nuts.
Or you could reserve a bar stool across town at Mawsim, where, inside a concrete block so forbidding you expect to be kidnapped (you won’t – Phnom Penh is very safe), a garrulous Japanese mixologist serves the world’s best gin (World Gin Awards 2023) alongside a gin-paired tasting menu. Only in Phnom Penh do you get a gin-paired tasting menu. The city is simply that kind of place: madly creative, urgently experimental, and full of young ideas (the median age is 26, after all). It is like Thailand 40 years ago, but with 20 years of 6 per cent annual GDP growth. That sort of boom does something to a place.
What else? So much else. Take a street-art tour by the now-vanished Boeung Kak Lake. Take a Vespa tour of the old silk villages across the river. Wander the sweetly chaotic Central Market, which resembles a retro concrete UFO inexplicably landed downtown, and buy authentic Burmese jade bracelets for six quid.
On my last night in enticing, hedonistic, sunburnt Phnom Penh, I sink an excellent craft IPA at a new Khmer-German beer garden, Botanico. I try the wheat beer, the Mexican beer, the Munich-style Pilsener, with an amiably mixed crowd of Brits, Malaysians, Italians, Khmers, Poles, Hong Kongers, and we all munch fine Cambodian bratwurst with French bread assembled by a Michelin-star chef with a backstory so compelling it was made into a TV documentary. Because of course we do, because this is Phnom Penh.
Phnom Penh wakes up for another night of eating and drinking, with new hotels rising in the skyline – Craig Hastings
Then I fall into conversation with Marco, the young German co-owner. After enthusing about life in the city – eg, how everyone here is starting their own companies, whereas “literally no one I know in Germany is starting their own company” – he wonders aloud whether enough tourists will fill the new airport.
I reassure him, as best I can, that they will. Then I try the mango beer with morning-glory pickles, and I wonder whether I actually want to fly home at all.
Essentials
Cultural adventure specialists InsideAsia Tours offers an 11-night Khmer Capitals and Islands cultural adventure from £2,540pp, including three nights in both Phnom Penh and Siem Reap and an island stay; all transport across the country; some private guides; and various other cultural experiences. InsideAsia can design trips to suit timeframes, interests and budgets.
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