Cambodia has never been on my radar. I have looked seriously at Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Cambodia never made the list, and I never asked myself why not. That omission is the actual starting point for this piece, because an omission that goes unexamined for years is either a very good instinct or a very lazy one, and I wanted to find out which.

The honest answer, after several weeks of research, is that it is a bit of both. Cambodia has real, documented reasons an affluent Canadian would rationally rank it behind Thailand and Malaysia for almost every serious use case. It also has a genuine, underrated case as a place to watch, and in a couple of narrow respects, a place to use right now. What it does not have is the thing that would justify treating it as a final answer rather than a chapter.