When I was in Cambodia, our little travel group was joined by an alumni who had been living in Taiwan (and had taken the same tour years before, when Cambodia was not on the list.) She had a fairly awesome writing job and a wonderful travel guide, and she came to Phnom Penh with several destinations, one of which was the FCC -- The Foreign Correspondent's Club. Now, it helped my excitement that the FCC had been mentioned in one of our readings -- disscussed later -- and I happened to be a big fan of the romance of journalists past.
And the fact was, journalists in Cambodia in the 70s were badass. A lot of them moved there after the fall of Saigon (the badass ones who couldn't stand to go home and leave the oddly beguiling romance of Indochina). And Cambodia wasn't excatly a garden of roses either, in the 70s. In fact, it too went all too heck -- in a bigger way than Vietnam, but we don't learn that because Western Powers were not involved. But where governents would not go, some really badass journalists went. And their stories are amazing, awesome journalistic tales. Old-school journalism, where the writers face danger to seek truth, and all those platitudes. And they're definitely worth checking out -- The movie The Killing Fields and the book River of Time are just two examples of these badass journalists.
And they all hung out at the FCC -- which not only has an amazing view of Phnom Penh and the Mekong (of which I do not, unfortunately, have a picture -- this was in the days of the broken camera) and classy interior -- but was once the haunt of some really brave badasses.
I didn't get any good pictures, as my camera was broken, but here's my awesome FCC T-Shirt!
The journalists overlooking the Mekong make me make the awesome face!
Gold Star to the lovers of yellow journalism tales of bravery.
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