MONIKA Warnenska, with a firm, bright voice, doesn't require prompting as she talks

of her recollections of 17 trips to Indochina since 1962.

From witnessing the return of people from the countryside to Phnom Penh in 1979,

to meeting Ieng Sary's mother in southern Vietnam, she has memories of many of the

main events in 30 years of turmoil in Cambodia and Vietnam.

A Polish journalist-turned-novelist, and author of three books on Cambodia, 79-year-old

Warnenska was recently back in the region and - as ever - couldn't resist another

visit to Cambodia.

With gray hair and eyeglasses, she willingly settles back into a chair to recount

her many travels, helped by her position as a journalist from an eastern European

country.

"My first Asian encounter was with North Korea, during a trip organized by the

writers' association. North Korea was not as crazy as it is now," she says with

a smile.

But it was in Vietnam and Cambodia that she spent most time.

She first went to Vietnam in 1962 as a writer for the now-defunct Polish weekly Perspectiv,

with the aim of getting permission to travel through the jungle from the North to

visit the partisans in the South.

"In the sixties, I was mostly interested on the issues of the division of Vietnam.

I could compare that to what was happening in Europe, but the division in Vietnam

was even more strict."

She remembers how simple matters such as sending mail between North and South Vietnam

was no easy task.

"I was asked several times to take letters out of the country. For example,

a letter from Hanoi would go through Warsaw, Paris and the United States before being

able to get to Saigon."

It wasn't until another trip to the North three years later that she got the much-wanted

clearance to visit the Viet Cong guerrillas in the South.

In May 1965 she set off down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a "good lesson" as

she puts it. "I so desperately wanted to do to the south that all the obstacles

were not so important. Before I went, they taught me the basics of living in the

jungle."

She spent six months with the Viet Cong, trying to set up an education and cultural

unit for them, in the Vietnamese jungle.

On her return trip, going along the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Cambodian territory,

she took a detour and visited Phnom Penh.

Granted an audience with then Prince Norodom Sihanouk, "I had to excuse myself

for having entered the country illegally."

"In Phnom Penh I was in a country with peace. In Vietnam the war was really

furious and it was a great chance for a country to be able to keep calm when the

war was at its borders.

"Sihanouk prevented his country from falling into war for several years,"

she says.

On her next trip to Phnom Penh in 1969 - after being able to visit Saigon as part

of an international monitoring mission - she says she felt distinctively uneasy.

She feared that something bad was going to happen.

Six months later, she returned a few weeks after Sihanouk had been overthrown.

"It was the first time I felt afraid. There were anti-Sihanouk banners and people

had changed their minds very fast."

Warnenska pauses and says sadly: "But I saw how war entered Cambodia."

During another trip to Hanoi in 1970, the Polish journalist met with Sihanouk in

exile.

"He was really pleased, because I gave him a picture of an anti-Lon Nol demonstration

in Phnom Penh," she recalls.

From Poland, she asked for permission to visit the Khmer Rouge areas in 1974, but

was refused. Today, she reckons she was lucky.

"I would not be here with you if I had gone," she says with a smile.

In 1975, after Phnom Penh had fallen to the Khmer Rouge, Warnenska received a call

from Saigon. Saigon was also about to fall to the Viet Cong, she was told, and invited

along to witness it.

She spent four months there, initially hopeful that peace had finally come to Indochina.

"I thought the war was over, but in fact I had to come back to cover the war

again in 1977 and 1978.

"Every year, I thought this would be the end of the war. But after the big war

against the United States, there were small wars with China and Cambodia.

"I love both [Vietnam and Cambodia] and I thought they would have cooperation

after the war, but they did not. In fact the struggle was really cruel."

In the late 1970s, she went to see Vietnamese villages attacked by the Khmer Rouge.

She recalls meeting Heng Samrin - a former Khmer Rouge who was later to lead Cambodia

under the Vietnamese occupation - in a camp in Vietnam.

When Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Warnenska was one of the first outsiders to arrive

in Phnom Penh in 1979.

"The first day it was crazy. To see this town was even more terrible than to

see the places bombed by the Americans in North Vietnam. The city still existed,

but it was dead.

"I went straight from the airport to Tuol Sleng [torture center]...the torture

tools were still there - as well as the blood.

"I spent twelve days in Phnom Penh. I was staying at the Samaki [Royal] hotel

and I saw the people coming back into the city. They told me their stories,"

she said. "They were not afraid, except for the kids."

She remembers meeting one man in particular: "He was old and very dignified.

He asked me 'Can you have this letter sent to my wife who lives in France?'

"I asked him about his life and he said: 'My name is Sisowath. I am member of

the Royal family and I have come back from forced evacuation in the countryside.

I was hunting birds in the rice fields to eat'."

Year after year, Warnenska returned to Cambodia to check on its slow rebirth from

tragedy and trauma. She compared it to the revival of the Polish capital Warsaw after

World War II.

On her latest trip, her first since 1989, the continuing plight of the people still

haunts her.

"It slowly moves forward, but people are so tired. I wish for the situation

to improve. It is always better than death camps, but still they have to fight every

day for their living."

It was as a novelist, not a journalist, that she has come here on her recent trip.

But she concedes she would have liked to have gone to Phnom Malai and interviewed

Ieng Sary.

Had she done so, she would have had some personal questions - and a message - for

him.

"I interviewed Sary's mother in 1980 in Kampuchea Krom [southern Vietnam]. She

asked me whether I had met her son. For me it was as if I were asked whether I had

met with Hitler.

"She showed me his wedding picture," she recounts, adding that Sary's mother

did not understand what people held against her son.

"I do not know anything about him. The police keep on asking me about his whereabouts,"

Sary's mother told her.

"'If you see him, just tell him that I am old and alone. All the neighbors have

families - I don't,' she told me," Warnenska says.

"You know, if I still worked for my newspaper, I would go to Malai and ask this

guy why he didn't even sends news to his mother," she says determinedly.

Sary's mother is now dead, and Warnenska doesn't have a newspaper to write for anymore.

But she doesn't mind. "It would be too difficult to explain" she says of

Cambodia today.

So rather than report, Warnenska is writing a novel: a love story between a Polish

archeologist and a Khmer woman set in the 1970s.

"I need to check a few things in Phnom Penh for my novel," she says of

her visit, adding that she went to the French embassy to have a glimpse of the place

where expatriates were kept in April 1975 before being shipped out of the country.

She also went to Angkor and recognized the first image she ever saw of Cambodia.

"It was during the Second World War. I was sixteen and I looked at an old paper

from before the war. There was this picture of wood and stone: temples in Angkor

captioned 'Cambodia'. That was the first time I saw Angkor."

Warnenska doesn't know when she will give up traveling- in November she was in East

Timor - but hopes to return to Phnom Penh again.

In the meantime, there's a novel to write from her home in Poland, decorated with

ornaments from the many countries where she has witnessed history in the making,

particularly Cambodia.

"I'm going back to my imaginary Cambodia," she said before her departure.