By: Anthony Bourdain
I am a total whore for a grand, old, colonial hotel in Southeast Asia. In my early, adolescent fantasies of what it might be like to be a writer and what land such exotic creatures might occupy, I imagined a place where Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene would look at home. Pierre Loti, Norman Lewis. In short, it would look like this:
Le Royal in Phnom Penh, the smell of jasmine flowers and burning coal, the occasional waft of jackfruit. Gin tonics by the pool, fiery noodles in broth for breakfast, and the history bearing down as heavily as the humidity.
