Inside k11, Phnom Penh's notorious child brothel.

Speeding along the two-lane blacktop on my driver's motorbike through five miles of Third World suburbia, my curiosity starts to flag. I'm on my way to see K11, a place of hearsay from the sleazier alcoholics I've met in backpacker Southeast Asia. Like scenes on the Thai and Vietnamese borders, I expect to see flashing lights and towering casinos amidst the squalor of shantytown Cambodia.

But tonight there are no decadent street scenes, no overly made-up girls swinging handbags under street lamps for passing scooters and cars. In fact, the area around this notorious underground haunt is a ghost town. I couldn't imagine being here without a chaperone.

K11 is in the village of Svay Pak, its name derived from its 11-kilometer distance from downtown Phnom Penh. Its birth was timed with the reopening of the country a decade ago. It isn't a secret to locals, or to casual followers of local media from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok. It's been the site of some of Cambodia's highest-profile child-prostitution cases. Although most of the prosecuted have paid their way out of the porous Cambodian legal system, pressure is now building to extradite captured K11 patrons to their home countries. Police sporadically put the clamps down on the neighborhood, but this has only pushed the trade deeper into the shadows and barricaded it behind thicker padlocks.

Put off by my Khmer companion's earnest nonchalance and the campfire-lit streets, I decide to call the operation off. But Mr. Yo, my driver for the night and the concierge of my guesthouse, rebuffs the request to turn back. He assures me that Svay Pak isn't just for foreigners, but for locals as well. Relax, he says. The idea of an iced coffee at a sidewalk cafe and casual observation is dashed by the dead, unwelcoming silence of the humid Svay Pak night; in a dark instant, I realize I'm in no position to go running off into the mined periphery or hail a cab out of here. I remembered the seemingly harmless traveling acquaintance that was so fascinated with this place that he couldn't stop talking about it. I now shared his adrenaline but not his excitement.

I am led into one of the larger buildings in a dilapidated factory complex; a series of gates, doors and locks fasten behind me. I've already got handcuffs on in my mind, as the feds smash through the corrugated metal walls to sting me. My thoughts are not slowed by the knowledge that the government has neither the will nor the money to prevent what miniscule profit comes out of K11.

Ushered into a sort of makeshift living room, I am told that in the daytime the neighborhood is a typical Cambodian slum, full of street vendors and the thick, mysterious flow of motorbikes. On the walls are several signs in Vietnamese, local beer ads and Backstreet Boys posters. I sit on a crusty sofa, across from the Vietnamese pimp speaking broken Cambodian to Mr. Yo.

Four young Vietnamese girls enter the room. The pajama-clad quartet storms in like the kids they are, all giggles and restless energy amidst the boredom of the metal and concrete room. The girls, who look about 10 to 12 years old, climb over the pimp like he's their father, tweaking his ears and messing his hair. One sits down next to me. There is no sign of fear or physical abuse. I try to get my head around the family atmosphere and keep the noticeably sexualized youngsters on the other side of the room.

Mr. Yo expects me to indulge. Apparently, I hadn't made myself clear.

"You don't think?this is what I wanted to do? Do you do this sort of thing?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"Because they are Vietnamese it doesn't matter," the Cambodian Yo states simply. "We wouldn't let our girls do this."

I look at our bemused host, who has no clue in his furrowing brow what might be holding up the transaction. He urges me to pick one of the girls. There is some tension in his face when Mr. Yo explains that I want to go without taking a girl into one of the side rooms. I flash money and indicate he will be compensated for his time. I just want to know where these girls come from, and how they end up here.

Svay Pak, he says, has developed into a ghetto for Vietnamese refugees, full of Viets who prefer the relative rural peace and freedom of Cambodia to the collective farming in the impoverished Vietnamese countryside. The girls at K11 are sold by their families into indentured servitude for $1000 apiece?a lot of money in these parts. The value of a daughter will often be weighed against four beater motorbikes, an older relative's passage to America or perhaps some cattle. The girls are then smuggled into the country and have no passport or legal identity. School is a distant dream.

Despite admittance to the World Trade Organization in September, Cambodia has a long way to go before being competitive with its neighbors or seeing widespread economic progress. In the rural areas such as Svay Pak, there's very little opportunity to make money. Perhaps there would be a moral response from the local population if the girls were Khmer, but they don't seem fazes by the foreigners who spend five dollars at a time to debase young Vietnamese children. That money will sustain five girls for days.

Leaving the building, the black economic pact between K11 patrons and the people of Svay Pak swirls in my head as we speed back into the bustle of Phnom Penh and its wild- west two-wheel circus. Everywhere, the Buddhas stare back at us.

The next day I ask a saffron-clad monk in front of the Royal Palace how we should approach the things we know are unjust but cannot change. He says you can never trust Hindus, women or politicians. And like everything else, you just have to let it go.

"Free yourself from greed and desire and you will be enlightened," he repeats from the script, as I wonder if there are any monks in Svay Pak.

For information on child protection efforts in Cambodia, visit [Friends International's website].