My first night sleeping in my guest house in Siem Reap was fine, for the first three hours. After that, jet lag set in and I was up looking at the clock every hour or so from then on. But I wasn’t fussed. This was Friday night, the next day was Saturday and all I had to do was a bit of shopping and getting myself organised for the two weeks of workshops that are due to start on Sunday. But Saturday was all mine and I had promised myself that I could be as slothful as I wanted.

I looked at the clock again. It was 5.45 am, but that was fine. Breakfast would be served until 11. I could sleep for another four hours. But then I heard drums, announcements made through a tannoy, cars honking. I had fallen back asleep and in the haze of coming around what I first thought of were the stories of the Khmer Rouge marching into Phnom Penh back in the Seventies at the beginning of Pol Pot’s terrible reign. It had started with early morning drumming, tannoy announcements, marching. I looked at the clock. It was 7.30.  My God — my first day in Cambodia and I was waking to a new revolution. Could it be?

I threw on my bathrobe and ran onto the balcony to see. The street outside my hotel was lined with Cambodian workers and a few bathrobe-clad tourists. Everyone was looking off to the street one block away at what I now saw to be an enormous procession — first, children in school uniforms, then older women in white blouses and long black skirts. Motorbikes lined either side of the parade — because that’s what it now looked like. A parade. But a parade at 7.30 in the morning? Flags were flying. There were more drummers and then the crowd of paraders became more mixed with men, women and children all walking together. Some  of them were carrying flags, but then I noticed that others were carrying single lily stalks clasped in the middle of two hands held in prayer position. This looked familiar from my research for A Clash of Innocents. I had actually written about something like it in A Clash of Innocents.  And then came the monks. The Khmer noises that were coming over the tannoy no longer sounded like announcements. They were now clearly chanting. Then it hit me.  This wasn’t a new revolution. This was  a funeral, coming from the direction of the monastery down the road. Soon I saw a black limousine with shaded windows moving very slowly.  It was clearly a hearse. The street grew quiet as the procession passed. The workers then went back to their early morning jobs. The tourists went back to their bedrooms. I sat in the chaise on my balcony and stared into space, marvelling at what I had just seen, and how incredible it was that it all had happened early on my first morning here. I tend to be rather romantic and mushy at the best of times, but this was off the scale on my romance meter. Indeed, I wasn’t in Kansas anymore (so to speak). In time I found myself dozing off and in my other-worldly state, I roused myself enough to get up and go back to bed. But as I turned towards the door to my room, what did I see behind me? A large tree overhanging from the forecourt of the neighbouring hotel just beyond my balcony, and stuck in its upper branches — a pair of pink panties, obviously tossed in a moment of passion and abandon by someone in the group who had been, I thought, a bit noisy the night before. Sublime to the ridiculous, indeed. And a writer’s moment if ever there was one. Welcome back to Cambodia, Sue.

I was in too much of a state to take my own photograph, but I found this  on the web. Thanks to travel mark.com