The Phnom Penh Post

Arun Sok Nhep, 56, is among Cambodia’s most prominent evangelical Christians. After fleeing the Khmer Rouge to Vietnam, he was imprisoned and deported to Laos

Through the window of the slow-rolling Mandalay express train, a mango seller on a station platform deftly throws a packet of young green mango slivers –stained with sweet, orange turmeric– into my hands.

It is late morning in 1971, Times Square, New York. Eighteen Cambodian women, the youngest aged in her late teens and the oldest 36, are being photographed in classical Apsara dance position: one leg bent behind the other, hands flexed in a disciplined freeze.

In her myrtle-green surgery scrubs, Dr Sann Channa strides purposely through the entrance of the Phnom Penh Municipal Referral Centre and into the women’s department. She passes a heavily pregnant woman, hands draped across her belly, and a nervous-looking couple and beckons me into her office.

More than 3000 tuk-tuk and motordop drivers work the streets of Phnom Penh today. The vast majority are male: there are only a handful of women who work what is widely regarded as man’s work

In 1971, when the civil war in Cambodia between the Lon Nol government forces and Khmer Rouge was in its early stages, Australian Spencer Dale was in his twenties and working as a flight attendant for Qantas.

I love sushi. While attending college in an isolated Indiana town where chop suey was considered exotic, my ex-girlfriend and I made a point of blowing our limited incomes on sushi whenever we visited her parents at her posh hometown near Detroit. I also enjoy a good pizza.

At two meters tall, thin, with straight back and proud posture, long white hair tied to a ponytail, Philippe Decoux, 72, cuts an unusual figure.

In the last six years, the amount of beer per year consumed by Cambodians has risen steeply, according to brewmaster Bernd Kirsch, 45, Cambodia’s self-dubbed “ambassador of beer”.

When Soth Yun realised she was a lesbian at age 20 her family told her it was her punishment for sinning in a previous life.