The first time I saw the Foreign Correspondents Club in Phnom Penh was in August 1993 when it was in its salad days as a shop-house knocked together on Sisowath Quay.

Even then it was a social landmark in a town in grievous need of one. Its second-floor bar and restaurant was one deep verandah protected only by rattan looking out over the Tongle Sap river and its confluence with the Mekong.

On the quay below, streams of two-stroke bikes rasped by. A colony of motor-cyclo drivers on the doorstep waved up in the puzzling hope that patrons would abandon their drinks to be obligingly driven around for a dollar. At the back was a quieter terrace which looked across to the National Museum and the Royal Palace, both filigreed versions of what the French had considered to be Khmer architecture.

The club was opened by four Hong Kong-based British businessmen led by Steve Hayward, a lawyer with an appetite for the esoteric. He currently owns and runs the Fox Club, a private members' hotel in London's Mayfair. One of the original partners in the FCC Phnom Penh, Anthony Alderson, operations director, explained of the Cambodia operation: "This was hardly a widows and orphans investment. It was emotional, not financial at all.'' In short, they could afford to lose the lot.

Which was just as well because Hayward used the Phnom Penh base to go hunting for lost causes. They put something into Vietnam hoping for sunnier days. They opened the 50th Street bar in Rangoon but it was Phnom Penh he fell in love with and it has been the Cambodian operation that has laid the golden egg for the Hong Kong Brits.

Today, the FCC Phnom Penh has lost only a little of its frontier character to conformity. The jewel in the crown is still the second floor with its long U-shaped bar, the scattering of dining tables, the oddly attractive but uncomfortable Mackintosh School armchairs and the balustrade you lean over to watch the sun set on the rivers saying, "Ah, this is the real Indo-China!''

The club has become wider. Any unit around the premises that was remotely available was bought up.

People did not advertise their properties for sale. Alderson just knocked on doors. Cash-strapped inhabitants gladly ran with the money and the FCC smacked through the walls.

There is a bar and cafe on the roof now, the restaurant has more girth and there are rooms on the first floor, seven of them, all sizeable and decorated in dark woods with contemporary beds and shower heads the size of dinner plates. The FCC has become a hotel and backpackers or needy hacks need not apply. Rooms run from US$60 (HK$470) a night including breakfast. That is a fair rate for a boutique hotel on fashionable Sisowath where the bars and restaurants and small hotels now segue into a mash of street tables where once there had just been the FCC.

The title of the club is a cause of wonder and some ire. Hayward was a member of the FCC in Hong Kong and he saw the Phnom Penh property as a haven for journalists in Cambodia during the 1993 United Nations-aided elections and subsequent political turmoil. And so it became. There was even an advisory committee of corres-pondents who arranged professional functions, giving the place a sheen of credibility and causing many people to assume that it was, in fact, a club of foreign correspondents.

Diplomats, academics and poli-ticians also used the club and anybody with half a mind and a couple of bucks for a drink who came to Phnom Penh showed up. In a city of blackouts, muggings, murders and rapes, where the easiest way to steal a motorbike was to shoot the rider off it, the FCC was the best and safest place to be.

During the government inspired coup on the weekend of July 5-7, 1997, the club was forced to close its doors for two days. So much was it a touchstone of life in the capital that on the Monday the United States ambassador reported to Washington: "The FCC has reopened. Things seem to be getting back to normal.''

Some journalists, however, see the use of the FCC title for purely commercial reasons as something of a hijack, an insult to the "real'' clubs in Hong Kong and Bangkok. Alderson says those people just don't get it.

"It had to be a commercial operation. We were a small transient community in Phnom Penh which suddenly swelled when there was a disaster and everyone from overseas came. In a place like Phnom Penh we always preferred to be open to the general public.

"Journalists are still a category on their own, though. Show me a press card and you get a discount.''

After the 1997 coup laid down hard political lines, the turmoil subsided and most of the journalists left. Then the tourists arrived and you couldn't keep the Hong Kong Brit boys down after that. The country's biggest tourism draw card is Angkor Wat and they stumbled upon a piece of property in the nearby town of Siem Reap, next door to the King of Cambodia's summer residence.

I drove up to the FCC Angkor from Phnom Penh. When you consider that the air fare is US$72 one way, set against approximately US$70 for a car and driver, and the convenience of door-to-door travel, you may have a picturesque bargain on your hands.

The journey takes four hours over surprisingly splendid roads showing off the countryside and rural life, including cashew nut plantations. And do stop at the town of Skung, half-way, which specializes in fried tree spider.

In Siem Reap, the Hong Kong boys bought the former house and grounds of a French colonial official. They were a shambles. The house was gutted and the upstairs turned into a breezy, terraced restaurant-bar under ox cart-sized ceiling fans and trimmed with white shutters, making it everything the French colonialists would have wanted it to be had they had the kit.

Outside, around a reflecting pool, they put in an outdoor bar and populated it with art deco armchairs into which the Frenchman would have flopped with immediate familiarity.

Later, behind the restaurant, they built the hotel, 31 plain white geometric rooms strung around a saltwater swimming pool hedged in by the former resident's garden. The rooms' floors are polished concrete, the bathrooms open plan and there is Cambodian silk on the walls. The poolside wall of each room is a large, sliding glass door which can gnaw slightly at privacy if a guest unknown to you has bagged the pool chair just a few meters in front of it.

The partners are inordinately proud of the fact that the rooms (from US$90) are cunningly constructed behind the colonial building so that no one from the street can tell there is a hotel at all. I am not so sure about the marketing strategy in that but I can say, with certainty, that the FCC Angkor has discovered a style which could well have been accidental but is worn with confidence.

You have a sharply defined body of water with deco furniture at the front. There is a building containing all the flutes and trumpets of French Indochina at the center. At the back is a square of glass-and-concrete modernist suites. Everything is painted white and as you walk through, I defy you to see the join.

It could have looked different. The hotel wing was supposed to have been two stories. The palace had given assent to the development until it saw what it had wrought: A whole line of rooms staring into the royal garden next door.

Kings are not to be ticked off. Construction was halted for six weeks while the offending floor was disassembled.

The chaps are also proud of their spa, the Vasaya. It's not much to look at but then I have learned it is not how spas look, it is how they feel. And it felt fine to me when two women laid on the hot stones treatment: Hot basalt pebbles placed on your meridian lines to induce deep muscle relaxation and circulatory stimulation. I am none too clear about the details because I kept passing out in the most pleasantly possible way and had to be helped out of the room. A bit like a good bar, really.

Like most of the better hotels in Angkor, the FCC has also gone into the temple business. It offers five packages of two to three nights, one entirely for temples, another devoted to the spa and three of them a mixture of the two. Prices range from US$320 to US$800. If you have just a long weekend in hand and the prospect of Angkor's massive temple site amid layers of heat as thick as hot felt, throwing your lot in with professional organizers has its merits.

Wherever you go or wherever you stay, let me urge you to visit in the rainy season. Rates are lower, it doesn't really rain all day and the stuff falls ready warmed so it is a pleasure getting wet. Rain makes the region. Sit under cover on the verandah in Siem Reap and watch the bikes and the tuk-tuks squish past along the banks of the river. Better still, stand in the evening on the FCC Phnom Penh balcony looking through the sheets of hot rain, southeast down the river and watch a titanic electric storm battling itself out over the Mekong with fractured bolts of lightning cracking over the delta like the fingers of angry, arthritic gods. Now, that really is the real Indochina.

Stuart Wolfendale stayed as a guest of the FCC Cambodia in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap