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In his memoir, River of Time, Jon Swain recalls, from the early months of 1975, a group of journalists in Phnom Penh sitting round the pool of the Hôtel le Phnom and singing a ditty composed by James Fenton, who was then writing for the New Statesman. "Will there be an awful bloodbath when the Khmer Rouge come to town", it went to the tune of "She was poor but she was honest." The Khmer Rouge finally did come to town, in April of that year, and there was indeed a bloodbath, the after-effects of which are still felt in Cambodia today. One immediate, minor result was the closure of the Hôtel le Phnom.

It was still closed when I first went to Cambodia in 1989 and remained so for over twenty years. Now re-named Le Royal, it is open once more, under the ownership and management of the Singapore-based Raffles group which has renovated all the great colonial hotels of Southeast Asia: the E. & O. in Penang, the Strand in Rangoon, the Grand Hotel d'Angkor in Siem Reap, the Hotel Le Royal, and, of course, the eponymous Raffles in Singapore. I was in Phnom Penh recently for a few days and thought I'd go and have a look at the place that I had heard so much about. My friend, Tan Sotho, who has a travel agency in the city, came with me.

Le Royal is terrifically luxurious. Rooms cost around US$140 a night (about a mile away I was paying $35). It has two enormous swimming pools - for the use of residents only - and a small of army of staff. The doormen wear traditional costumes of gold-braided silk such as you would expect to see only on dancers of the classical ballet. But outside the road immediately in front of the hotel is so full of potholes that not even cars, let alone cyclos and motos, can drive along it; drivers are forced to make a detour along a patch of derelict ground originally intended as parkland. A number of families also live on this land in very temporary-looking shelters (though I imagine that they have been there for some time), without benefit of electricity or running water. There is still no street lighting in Phnom Penh and Médecins Sans Frontières report that cholera has re-surfaced in Cambodia for the first time since 1992. The old Bibliothèque Nationale, which is right next to le Royal, having had most of its contents burnt by the Khmer Rouge, still contains pitifully few books. As we drove past, a child was pretending to shoot a dog with a white plastic machine gun.

Sydney Schanberg, Jon Swain, James Fenton and the rest may be gratified to learn that the hotel now has a Writer's Bar "named in honour of the many writers and journalists who made the Hotel Le Royal their home while writing and researching in Cambodia". There is also (which is surprising) a suite dedicated to André Malraux. It is one of four "personality" suites; the others are dedicated to Jacqueline Kennedy, Somerset Maugham and Charles de Gaulle, of whom Sihanouk wrote "On the surface we seemed to be so dissimilar - the tall, austere French general and the short, gregarious Cambodian king - yet we were kindred spirits with much in common". A brass plate outside the room commemorates the "young, talented, avant-garde writer and art lover" who "visited Cambodia and incorporated his experiences in the novel, La Voie Royale", a fairly generous gloss on what actually occurred.

It's no secret that when, in 1923, the young Malraux (who would later become Minister of Culture in Paris under de Gaulle) visited Cambodia, he made straight for the exquisite and remote tenth century temple of Banteay Srei and cut from its lovely pink sandstone facade a ton of the finest statues and cornices. Arrested in possession of the treasure as he tried to leave the country, he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment, though he never actually went to jail. These events, thinly disguised, form the basis of La Voie Royale, which the director Andrei Konchalovsy is currently seeking to make into a film. There used to be a notice in the lobby of the Grand Hotel d'Angkor which described the Malraux incident and served as a warning to those whose might be tempted to follow his example.

Yet vandalism of the temples at Angkor continues. Thanks to Tan Sotho's brother, Ang Choulean, who is a professor of "Ancient Khmer Civilization", an anthropologist and was one of the curators of the huge exhibition of Khmer art held at the Grand Palais in Paris in the spring of 1997, I was able to visit the Dépôt de la Conservation d'Angkor in Siem Reap. This is a vast storage area filled with recovered sculptures, many of them in pieces. One massive statue had been sawn into four sections. The thief had then numbered them, one to four, in bright blue paint so that they could be correctly reassembled when they reached their new owner.

Over the years more than 2,000 heads have been chiselled or sawn off statuary. At Preah Khan, the great temple of the Sacred Sword built by Jayavarman VII in the late twelfth century to honour his father, the heads and faces of many of the apsaras have been gouged out of the stone walls where they stood in relief; as recently as January 1990, five massive heads of demons were stolen from the approach to the south gate of Angkor Thom. The heads are so heavy that at least six men would be needed to lift each one. The thefts must therefore have been organized at a relatively high level and were carried out, it seems, by soldiers and policemen. The fragments are smuggled to the Thai border, then sold for a fortune to collectors. A special police force has now been set up to guard the Conservation because the ordinary police are clearly untrustworthy.

Ten years ago it was virtually impossible to find books in English in Phnom Penh. Now whole streets are devoted to English-language schools where teenage boys also sit and play chess. In Monivong Street there is now a glossy, air-conditioned English-language bookshop. For $US5, you can buy a miniature volume entitled The Life and Times of Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge by Sandy Noble and published by Parragon Books which is based in Bristol. The book came out in 1996, well before Pol Pot's capture and subsequent death in captivity. It is a companion volume to such titles as Heroes of the Wild West (which includes General Custer, Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley) and They Died Too Young (Elvis, Isadora Duncan, Malcolm X, amongst others). Pol Pot appears, appropriately, in a class of his own.

It is strange to see this little book on sale in Phnom Penh, where Pol Pot was, until his death in April of this year, the stuff of nightmares for every Cambodian. Already he is history. A senior Western diplomat interviewed earlier this year in the New York Times, was quoted as saying, "Everything that happens in Cambodia becomes history." This may sound obvious or even meaningless, but I think that what he meant was that, in Cambodia, the past is absorbed more rapidly than anywhere else. The only way to deal with the past is to forget it -quickly.

The day before I left Cambodia, Sotho and I took a boat trip up the Mekong River to Mekong Island. As we chugged past the Royal Palace, Sotho put her hands together and bowed her head in the sampeah, the traditional gesture of greeting and respect. 'Tu fais ça pour le Roi?', I asked. 'Non', she answered, 'Je le fait parce que le palais royal est le coeur de Phnom Penh.' Her answer was no surprise; Sihanouk has lost the confidence of many Cambodians. Hopes were high when he returned to the country in 1991, after thirteen years of exile but progress has been slow. Corruption and violence have continued to spread at an alarmingly rate. People complain that Sihanouk spends too much time abroad - much of it in Beijing, ostensibly for medical reasons. In order to ensure calm, he stayed at home through the run-up to last July's elections, but his presence failed to have the desired effect.

Cambodia has been in the grip of violent unrest since March 1997, when a grenade attack on a demonstration against judicial corruption organized by the Khmer Nation Party outside the National Assembly caused the deaths of nineteen people. A further 150 people were badly injured. In July 1997, there followed a coup led by Prime Minster Hun Sen, the predictable victor in July's election. Many Cambodians regard the election as fraudulent and, for the three months since then, the country has been in a state of miserable, bloody turmoil.

Mekong Island is not its real name, nor even a translation of its real name; it is simply a new name given to it by the Ministry of Tourism. Some years ago, desperate for new ways to entertain foreign tourists in Phnom Penh, the Ministry granted a lease of the island to a Frenchman who organized boat journeys up the Mekong, the climax of which were lunch and a cultural show - music and classical dancing - on the island. He also established a small zoo, something which is extremely easy to do in Cambodia where wild animals are freely available (the parking lot to my hotel in Phnom Penh contained two pythons, a baby bear, a macaque and a gibbon - this last a member of an endangered species - keeping uneasy company with numerous rabbits and hamsters). Mekong Island is apparently famous for its silk production but, in the heavy monsoon rain, there were no signs of weaving, and it seemed unlikely that weaving had ever taken place there. The organized boat trips and cultural entertainments had long been discontinued because the tourists found them, Sotho said, too "touristic". Now, if you want to pay a visit to Mekong Island, you must hire a boat for $10 an hour at Sisowath Quay.

The wooden pavilion where the shows used to take place and the huge two-storey restaurant overlooking the river are totally deserted. The inhabitants of the island - the supposed silk-weavers - have been re-housed in wooden houses specially constructed for the purpose and designed, no doubt, to accord with some (possibly French) notion of a traditional Cambodian village. But, Sotho tells me, the houses are not of traditional Khmer design and the village, which has an uncharacteristic, homogenous, orderly appearance, as though it is a model village, is more Thai in style.

Since I was last here a year ago, Sotho's elder daughter, Kulikar, has got married. Her husband, an Australian environmentalist, is thirteen years older than her and has been working in Cambodia for five years. When I see them together for the first time, I can't help being reminded of those mail-order brides that you can get from Thailand or the Philippines. Kulikar, with her tiny, fine-boned body and waist-length black hair, looks the very model of an Asian beauty. A few days before I had read in the South China Morning Post that soon up to 10 percent of Cambodians could be HIV positive. The report said that 'the disease was spreading alarmingly among married women ... one of Cambodia's greatest at-risk groups', adding 'Cambodian women have few rights in the home, where the husband assumes almost king-like status and where social conventions give tacit approval to a male's 'right' to enjoy multiple sexual partners ... On any given day as many as 50,000 Cambodian men visit brothels, where commercial sex workers suffer infection rates of up to 50 percent.'

I know that Sotho has mixed feelings about her daughter marrying a foreigner, but at least Kulikar is unlikely to be exposed to this particular danger.

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