I’ve never sat overlooking the Mekong River before, never seen its people this close, never breathed its heavy wafts of raw sewage before.

Happy Tours motors tourists in lazy loops this side of the Japanese Friendship Bridge. The wake gently jostles the boat people, in their long fishing crafts, strung up with nets, hammocks, small covered areas in the centre where the family cooks, sleeps, rests, cleans their catch, seeks shade. This is home and work and play-space and yard and mode of transportation, docked as they are in the garbage heap that overflows down the concrete banks into the water, the boat people scavenging among the street kids, krama (the ever-present, endlessly versatile, traditional Cambodian scarf) tied around their heads and faces – to keep out the stench, the flies, the dust, the sun that beats even in this, the “cool” season. Debris and garbage drift slowly beside the docked families, among the double-decker tour boats, as children swim and splash and bathe and urinate, as others dip their feet, catch their supper, wash their clothing.

Fifteen meters away, along the crowded boardwalk, sits a small pagoda, host to some sort of ceremony: tinny music, mounds of food, extravagant traditional dress – rich, fiery colours, metallic silks that catch the sun and ripple into two and three tones.

Foreigners stroll and linger, gawking, gawked at, sun burnt, saddled with cameras and rip-off hiking gear. Old women hawk their goods, families with connections – Lexus connections (these SUV’s are notorious here as an indicator that the driver has access to big government money, and therefore quite likely corruption as well) – wander with their children, dae-leenging (“walk-playing” as they say in Khmer), snacking and chatting, as small boys, barefoot and covered in dust catch birds among their feet to be sold for use in religious ceremonies.

These are the contrasting faces of Cambodia – of Phnom Penh at least, which I am coming to see and touch – taste a little more each day – the many faces which overlap and interlay, falling into each other, jostling for my attention – so much so that I can barely look away to keep my pen moving across the page…

… I really can’t get over the falling together of faces that happen in this dusty, bustling city. Everything is falling in on itself, growing over itself, the privation neck in neck with brand-new prosperity – this city overflows and interflows with startling contrasts and beautifully dissonant juxtapositions…