Grand tradition in Cambodia

Elephant rides cater to a booming tourism industry at the Angkor Wat temple complex. [Photo by Matt Hodges/Shanghai Star]

Neutze is explaining a sticker inside the Somerset Maugham Suite, one of Hotel Le Royal's four "personality suites", urging residents to keep the balcony doors closed "to avoid any inconveniences from Mother Nature (monkeys & mosquitoes)".

We meet inside the hotel's iconic Elephant Bar, where war correspondents like Sydney Schanberg - protagonist of The Killing Fields - whiled away the nights during the days of the Khmer Rouge. The hotel was also used by the Red Cross as a refuge center during that heady period.

Raffles took over management of both hotels from the Ministry of Tourism in 1997 and built identical-looking second wings, replete with 1920s-style telephones and period flourishes.

Over the decades, Charlie Chaplin, Jacqueline Kennedy and various current heads of state have spent the night at one or both. Check in and you can dine exactly as they did, courtesy of menus dug up from the national archive museum.

Chaplin even spent part of his honeymoon with Modern Times co-star Paulette Goddard at the Grand Hotel d’Angkor in 1937.

Although Chinese investors are snapping up hotels around Siem Reap to cash in on the tourism boom, those who can afford it head to places like Raffles. A sunset dip in the pool is hard to put into words.

"It's a royal experience," says hotel manager Charles Demange, speaking broadly of the property and the Royal Khmer cuisine rustled up by executive chef Wade James from Australia.

"I can guarantee that you are never going to bump into another swimmer. It’s too big," he quips.

Spending a few days enjoying one of the Hotel d'Angkor's cabana suites and old-world oddities, such as its antique-looking "birdcage" elevator operated by bell boys in white keban, feels like a throwback to the decadent days of colonial fiction.

If you liked Wed Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel, you'll go crazy for all the history and luxury on display here. The service, as at Hotel Le Royal, is gentlemanly, chivalrous, and from another time.

Siem Reap is getting busier but daily power outages are all part of the fun at what still feels like a sleepy gateway to Angkor Wat, the former seat of the Khmer Empire that has sat in the stomach of the jungle like undigested food for eight centuries.

French colonialists began digging the temples out in the 1860s, 140 years before Angelina Jolie helicoptered in and Tomb Raider-ed them. Tourist numbers are climbing at a rate of 20 to 25 percent a year, to a projected 4 million in 2014.