I was greeted with the smell of lemongrass. After a night flight to Bangkok, and a dawn flight to Phnom Penh, and a car-ride through the chaos that is the Cambodian capital in rush-hour – a chaos full of miracles, like entire families perched on mopeds and apparently surviving – we arrived in an oasis of calm. There were mint cocktails waiting for us, and giant, carved elephants and men in pointy hats and purple knickerbockers, and grand staircases that you could imagine yourself swishing down, in evening dress, before meeting some Ernest Hemingway-type figure for martinis in the bar.
A SCIENTIST from Cambridge has been given a royal honour by the government of Cambodia – for saving one of the world’s rarest crocodiles.
The Siamese crocodile was believed to be extinct in the wild, but several years ago Dr Jenny Daltry, from the Cambridge-based conservation charity Fauna & Flora International (FFI), discovered a tiny number were still alive in Cambodia.
