Cambodia’s return to joy

In Cambodia, everybody is looking forward to Bon Om Touk. If your Khmer is a bit rusty, this means the mid-autumn New Moon Water Festival, celebrated in late October. This fervent, noisy, firework-banging festival has multiple, colourful meanings.

For a start, it marks the end of the endless summer rain – which turns everyone’s laundry mouldy and gets a tad annoying. It also marks the moment when the fertile Tonle Sap river, which rolls through the sprawling, youthful, trafficky, heat-struck, palm-shaded, jacaranda-adorned, busy-yet-languid, skyscraper-sprouting city, does a handbrake turn. That is to say, around that time of year, and for complex hydrogeographic reasons, the Tonle Sap reverses itself, flowing backwards into the jungly lakeland interior – supposedly the only river in the world to do this.

By some estimations, last year’s festival of 2023 – which I attended – attracted two million exuberant Khmer people from across the country to watch the starlit dragon boat races, the bright neon barges adorned with sacred spears and vulgar beer ads, the Cambodian king lighting the holy candles, the rockets ascending over the gold-lit royal palace and the glowing monastic pagodas – or just to sprawl on the green lawns of elegant French-colonial Sisowath Quay (great for Anglo-Khmer gastropubs, ex-colonial tapas restaurants, lofty but sometimes super-pricey sky bars, and widespread river views).