The Rambo Express usually docks in Phnom Penh in the early afternoon after a six-hour journey across the Tonle Sap, a massive lake that runs down into the South China Sea. Sitting on top of the long, tube-like boat are rows of tourists, sunburned and wet, craning their necks to make sure they're in Cambodia's capital.
The reason they're sitting on top is that once in a while, the Rambo Express flips over in the middle of the lake. Other times the boat is hijacked, as it was once when Tim Cousins '02 tried to take some friends to see the ruins of Angkor Empire in the north. Instead, he and the others spent the day drifting around the Tonle Sap with their hands tied behind their heads.
The hijackers, it later emerged, were students at the tourism college.
As the Rambo Express approaches Phnom Penh's low skyline, thatched, platform houses along the river appear more frequently, and, closer in, more are made of cement. In the city, the boat passes under the long arc of the Japanese Friendship Bridge, which was built for the second time by the Japanese some years after the Khmer Rouge blew it up and left it in pieces: a monument to their madness. In the four years before Vietnam invaded and kicked the Khmer Rouge out, the city stood as a ghost town.
Today there is little evidence of the Khmer Rouge horrors along Phnom Penh's waterfront. The bridges are whole again. There is a nice park along the river lined with the flags of the world. The streets are paved, the shops are full, and the Internet cafes are busy. The Khmer Rouge prison and torture chamber is a museum, and the old colonial army officer's house is now a restaurant.
So where the French officer in charge once put his boots on the balustrade, sipping wine and surveying the natives in his charge, tourists from the Rambo Express now set their drinks and look down on the waterfront and feel a warm, new breeze that blows across the water into the city.
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