I decided to revisit Pailin after 43 years to see if I could recognise anything. My wife and I stayed in a hotel in the centre of town, near the market. In the morning, armed with the old photos, we walked around hunting for old people who might have been there in 1974. None of those we asked had been in Pailin for such a long time, but they enjoyed looking through the pictures. A particular favourite, especially with one guy who was ex-Khmer Rouge (according to his friends), was the one of the B52 Café. “Not there any more!” he said. A girl in a nearby coffee shop was very interested. She could hardly believe these photos were really taken such a long time ago. She said she didn’t know much about the history of Pailin, and wondered if all the bad things she had been told about the KR were true.

We walked to the foot of Phnom Yat and found the lower gateway was still there, slightly modified and decked out in funerary style because the abbot had recently passed away. In Wat Khaong Kang across the road, we found the temple guardians, a little worse for wear but intact…except that the one with the AK47 had been disarmed and given a rather harmless-looking assault vegetable in exchange for his automatic weapon. The head monk spent some time browsing through the photos but couldn’t tell us why and when that happened.

On top of the hill, elderly nuns chuckled and chortled over the old pictures but had nothing to tell us. Finally, our efforts to find the bridges and the river which had been full of panners in ’74 were futile, since the whole character of the watercourse has changed due to hydro-development. However, we did find a great crowd of about 5 panners near the vestiges of an old suspension bridge.

Still, the sunsets were glorious, and the butterflies very pretty