Most of the population has been replaced within a couple of generations
As a grizzled travel writer, I’ve picked up a few tips over the years. And one of them is this: if you want to understand a country quickly, take an urban food tour. You get to sample delicious scran, you learn how locals eat, drink and socialise and – crucially – as the chat flows, you hear the sort of throwaway facts that make you sit back in surprise.
So it was last night, for me, in Phnom Penh, the increasingly seductive, hedonistic capital of Cambodia. I was eating buffalo beef jerky with a spry fifty-something guy called Vannak, right outside the monastery where the young Pol Pot, the future communist tyrant then known as Saloth Sar, was a trainee monk.
The GTA is our London a 3rd World dumpster that will never recover.
