History Main / HolidayInCambodia

Compare FarEast, which borders this to the north and occasionally overlaps with it.

* Saito is implied to be a connoisseur of such vacations (the sexual side anyway) in ''Manga/{{Beck}}''.

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[[quoteright:349:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/apoc_hangover.png]]
[[caption-width-right:349:Come for the [[Film/ApocalypseNow war-torn jungles]], stay for the [[Film.TheHangoverPartII overpopulated run-down cities]].]]

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* ''Literature/TheQuietAmerican'' sticks to the cities of Vietnam, but focuses on the upcoming turmoil that will lead to the Vietnam War. Notably, it was actually written ''before'' the Vietnam War began, which can lead to a good deal of HarsherInHindsight for modern readers.
* ''Literature/TheUglyAmerican'' features the fictional country of Sarkhan (an {{Expy}} of Vietnam with cultural trappings of Burma/Myanmar and Thailand), but also contains scenes in those other countries.
* ''Literature/BurmeseDays'', naturally enough, is set in Burma/Myanmar, specifically during the late 1920s as a British colony and extension of UsefulNotes/TheRaj.

* ''Literature/TheBeach'', beginning with a seedy Bangkok hotel. Interestingly, the tourist industry around the Phi Phi Islands, where the bulk of the movie adaptation was filmed, seems quite proud of the movie and it is still possible to visit remnants of the set.

* ''Literature/AlexRider'': In ''Snakehead'', Alex has to inflitrate a Southeast Asian people smuggling ring. He travels to Bangkok where, in addition to to dealing with the people smugglers, he is forced to fight in an underground '' Muay Thai'' tournament.

* The title character of ''Series/{{MacGyver|1985}}'' served in the Vietnam War, as did many other characters in the show, and its legacy crops up in the series from time to time. Most notably in the season 5 episode ''Second Chance'', where his friend Jesse Coulton goes to Thailand to retrieve the son he had with a Vietnamese woman, who's now mixed up in a local black market ring run by former American servicemembers.

* Although not shown in the series, Daisy of ''Series/{{Spaced}}'' goes on a holiday in Vietnam. We only see vague photo snaps. She later gets caught out by a dole interviewer when she wears her souvenir T-shirt to sign on (he just ''happens'' to speak Vietnamese).
* ''Series/SerangoonRoad'' depicts Singapore in the mid-1960s, before it became a wealthy city-state, and had its share of seedy dives, unsafe back alleys, intercommunal violence and the odd terrorist bombing.

* Kim Wilde's ''Cambodia'' is about a pilot who returns from Cambodia with a ThousandYardStare. He doesn't return from his next mission.

* [[Theatre/{{Chess}} "One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster..."]]

* ''VideoGame/KaneAndLynch 2: Dog Days'' follows this trope in spirit, being centered entirely around the exploits of the titular duo as they attempt to oversee an arms deal in the most crime-ridden part of Shanghai, China before being chased through ever-seedier back alleys by just about every dude in the city with a gun (and [[TortureTechnician one dude with a box cutter]]).
* In ''VideoGame/WastedYouth'', [[DeanBitterman Mr. Stouffer]] breaks down into a "Vietnam flashback" while giving a speech, during which time he reveals that [[TooMuchInformation he slept with]] [[UnsettlingGenderReveal a transvestite]] while on vacation in Vietnam.

* ''VideoGame/JustCause2'''s Panau surely fits the definition.

* The Franchise/MarvelUniverse has the fictional country of Madripoor, a state so corrupt that a terrorist/assassin-for-hire served as its ruler. And then she was deposed by HYDRA, which means it's gone from one end of fresh hell to the other.
* Franchise/MarvelUniverse has also created the Siancong War, set in a fictional Southeast Asian country, to serve as the setting for the origin stories of various heroes like Tony Stark or Frank Castle.[[note]](These heroes originally had backstories in the Vietnam War, which were continually updated to the Gulf War or Afghanistan to keep the heroes' ages realistic. The Siancong War was created as a fictional [[TheWarJustBefore War Just Before]], existing in a floating timeline ten or fifteen years before the present day, so the writers wouldn't have to keep updating).[[/note]] The war is said to have started as a Cold War proxy conflict between the communist and capitalist blocs, but over time was extended through the machinations of Asian supervillains like the Mandarin, who had their own designs on the country and its resources.
* The Creator/{{Vertigo|Comics}} miniseries ''Vertigo Pop! Bangkok'' centers around two American tourists who are fully exposed to the seedier sides of Thailand's sex tourism trade.
* You wouldn't expect a Disney comic to take place in such a locale, but in Creator/CarlBarks' "The Treasure of Marco Polo", (written in 1966), Scrooge [=McDuck=]'s adventure in search of the eponymous treasure takes him to the war-torn, vaguely Vietnamese country of Unsteadystan, where he butts heads with warlord Wan Beeg Rhat.

* ''ComicBook/AmbushBug'' should be brought to Nuremberg for wanton cruelty to this trope. It destroys it like Agent Orange the jungle. Hukka Mandoraid!

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
* ''Film/TheKillingFields'', obviously. Played straight with Spalding Gray's ''Film/SwimmingToCambodia'', which talks about his adventures in Thailand between shooting days.
-->Farewell, to the fantastic breakfasts, free every morning. You walked down and there they are waiting on you with the papaya, mango, and pineapple like I'd never tasted before. Farewell, to the Thai maids with the king-sized cotton sheets and the big king-sized beds. Farewell, to the lunches. Fresh meat flown in from America, daily. Roast potatoes, green beans and roast lamb, at 110 degrees under a circus tent, according to British Equity. Farewell to the drivers with the tinted glasses and the Mercedes with the tinted windows. Farewell to the cakes, and teas and ices every day exactly at four o'clock. Farewell to those beautiful smiling people. Farewell to that single, fresh rose in a vase on my bureau in the hotel every day. And just as I was climbing into that first-class seat, and wrapping myself in a blanket, just as I was adjusting the pillow from behind my head, and having a sip of that champagne, and just as I was adjusting and bringing down my Thai purple sleep mask, I had an inkling, I had a flash. I suddenly thought I knew what it was that had killed Marilyn Monroe.
* The documentary ''S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine''. Rithy Panh, the documentary's director, makes a cameo in a French film set in Cambodia, ''Holy Lola'', specifically in order to provide a RealLife perspective on the nightmare that country went through within living memory.
* The ''Film/JamesBond'' feature ''Film/TheManWithTheGoldenGun'', where he travels to Thailand to question a possible associate of Scaramanga, the businessman Hai Fat.

* ''Film/TropicThunder'' is being shot in Vietnam, but when the director gets tired of the actors primadonna antics, he dumps them in the jungle. At one point the OnlySaneMan deduces they've passed the border, being in Laos or Cambodia.
** Though curiously, the opium growers the actors encounter and are eventually captured by speak poorly accented Mandarin Chinese.
** [[spoiler:This becomes a (hilarious) plot point: Kirk Lazarus is able to distract the gate guards long enough with increasingly crappier Chinese until they become suspicious of him.]]
* The VillainProtagonist of ''Film/AmericanGangster'' gets his drugs from Vietnam. The scenes there focus on the peasant villages with wooden huts and the general anarchy of the Vietnam War.
** Similarly, the Amsterdam Triad in the 80s film ''Film/ChinaWhite'' gets their heroin from guerillas in an unidentified Southeast Asian nation in exchange for rocket launchers.

* ''BangkokHilton'' (the real prison associated with that nickname, where Website/TheOtherWiki claims that Death Row prisoners have their leg-chains welded together, is all-male)
* ''{{Holly}}'' is about an American in Cambodia who discovers the sordid world of child prostitution, and decides to rescue a 12-year-old Vietnamese girl from that grim fate.
* ''Film/BangkokDangerous'': Politics in Thailand involve hiring hit men to dispose of troublemaking politicians.
* … while in ''Film/OnTheJob'', set in the Philippines, the ''politicians'' hire the hit men to dispose of troublemaking rivals.
* ''DienBienPhu'' is a film about the eponymous battle that sealed the fate of French Indochina.
* The 2011 ''The Lady'' is a {{Biopic}} of Burmese democracy activist (and now politician) Aung San Suu Kyi (played by Creator/MichelleYeoh), and as such, it depicts her struggle against the military junta in power in her native Myanmar.
* Referenced in ''ThreeSeasons'': An American veteran of the Vietnam War goes to Saigon in order to find the grown daughter he had with a local prostitute, and whom he left behind when he went back to the US.

* ''Film/ApocalypseNow'' is probably the TropeCodifier.

* ''Wish You Were Here'' is about two young couples of [[LandDownUnder Aussies]] who decides to go visiting, [[TemptingFate and partying]], in Sihanoukville in [[HolidayInCambodia Cambodia]]. They [[FromBadToWorse get into more and more trouble.]]
* ''Film/BadGenius'' is set mostly in modern, urban Thailand. While it doesn't focus much on Bangkok's urban squalor, as most of the action is set in reasonably maintained school settings, it does feature scenes in a huge dumpsite, where one of the characters is assaulted by paid thugs.
* ''Film/BuyBust'', set in the drug-addled underbellies of modern Metro Manila.
* ''Film/{{No Escape|2015}}'' focuses on an American family who holiday at a Southeast Asian country, only to end up having to fight for their lives when the country suddenly experiences an armed coup. Although the country is not specified to avoid offending anyone, the fact that it's an ex-French colony that borders Vietnam leaves only Cambodia or Laos as its only real-life candidates.
* ''Film/TheNegotiation'': Tae-gu is based in the Malacca Strait and sells arms to various criminal syndicates around Southeast Asia.

If you mix this trope with a strong dose of LatinLand and TropicalIslandAdventure, a shot of EastIndies, and in the major urban areas a sprinkling of {{Americasia}}, you'll get something like the UsefulNotes/{{Philippines}}, though for what it's worth, that country is mixed with ''so many and so disparate cultural influences''—owing to nearly 500 years of Western colonialism more pervasive than almost any other country in the region—that it's a challenge to even represent ''at all'', let alone accurately, in most media. Just for one example, there are no ancient temples anywhere in the Philippines—they're all [[ChristianityIsCatholic Catholic churches]], plus a few mosques left over from the days when Islamic kingdoms ruled there.

Compare EastIndies, which is a little further south, and FarEast, which borders this to the north and occasionally overlaps with it.

[[quoteright:349:[[Film/ApocalypseNow https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/apoc_hangover.png]]]]

* ''BangkokHilton'' (the real prison associated with that nickname, where Wiki/TheOtherWiki claims that Death Row prisoners have their leg-chains welded together, is all-male)

[[quoteright:350:[[Film/ApocalypseNow https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/apoc_hangover.png]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350:Come for the [[Film/ApocalypseNow war-torn jungles]], stay for the [[Film.TheHangoverPartII overpopulated run-down cities]].]]

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/apoc_hangover.png]]

Compare EastIndies, which is a little further south, FarEast, which borders this to the north and occasionally overlaps with it, and TropicalIslandAdventure, for the usually cleaner and more inviting other main Southeast Asian setting.

* The Music/DeadKennedys' song "Holiday in Cambodia" uses this trope for satirical contrast, with the vocalist inviting pretentious, insensitive American college students to take a holiday to Pol Pot's regime, to find out what it's like.

So, when a piece of media goes to Southeast Asia, it usually goes on a Holiday In Cambodia. The setting will either be little jungle villages with wooden huts or cities so seedy they leave marks on the screen. Vice will be both upheld and punished, with the main characters either being told "[[YouNoTakeCandle Me love you long time]]" by a woman (very often a [[AsianHookerStereotype prostitute]]) who [[UnsettlingGenderReveal may or may not have a vagina]], or being thrown in some {{hellhole prison}} on drug charges. If you venture outside the cities, expect your main means of transportation to be a [[EveryHelicopterIsAHuey worn-out old Huey]] or decommissioned River Patrol Boat leftover from "the war", or some sort of ramshackle, shoddily made vehicle "borrowed" from the locals. And someone, some time, is getting a gun in the face. [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Oh, and there may be elephants.]]

* Franchise/MarvelUniverse has also created the Siancong War, set in a fictional Southeast Asian country, to serve as the setting for the origin stories of various heroes like Tony Stark or Frank Castle.[[note]](These heroes originally had backstories in the Vietnam War, which were continually updated to the Gulf War or the Afghanistan War to keep the heroes' ages consistent. The Siancong War was created as a fictional [[TheWarJustBefore War Just Before]], existing in a floating timeline ten or fifteen years before the present day, so the writers wouldn't have to keep updating).[[/note]] The war is said to have started as a Cold War proxy conflict between the communist and capitalist blocs, but over time was extended through the machinations of Asian supervillains like The Mandarin who had their own designs on the country and its resources.

** The longest story arc in the original World War Two stories involved the heroes being shot down in Japanese-occupied Indochina while carrying secret documents, and having to trek through the jungle for weeks to return to their base in China. They have to do this while avoiding not only Japanese troops, but also Chinese pirates, hostile Hmong tribesmen, and a highly dramatized version of Japan's Black Dragon Society.
** In a later story arc, they were deployed to the fictional nation of Vien Tan, depicted as being in the midst of a civil war. On the one side is the friendly but ineffective monarchy the heroes are sent to support. On the other is a rebellion led by the king's nephew, supported by foreign mercenaries, and orchestrated by a NebulousEvilOrganization trying to control the nation's resources.

** Finally, the region's RuthlessModernPirates are a recurring villain in stories set after World War Two. They're portrayed as rich and powerful, allied with several regional despots, and very well equipped thanks to their access to dozens of hidden caches of weapons and equipment abandoned by the Japanese throughout the Pacific after the war. The North Sarawak story arc also reveals that the local pirate community have long been partnered with the international mercenary Lady X, Buck Danny's nemesis, whose wartime connections in the Imperial Japanese Navy allowed the pirates to locate those caches in the first place.
* The fourth story arc in ''ComicBook/LargoWinch'' has Largo traveling to Burma and seeking help from Chinese [[TheTriadsAndTheTongs Triads]] and Chan separatists to break his best friend Simon out of a jungle fortress after he's framed as a CopKiller. It turns out to have been a scheme by the Burmese secret police and a corrupt CIA station chief, with the ultimate aim of using Largo and the escaped prisoners to discover the home base of the Chan guerrillas. This would have allowed them to crush the rebellion for good... and left them in control of the opium with which the rebels funded themselves.

* The main characters of ''Series/TheATeam'' were the most successful American special forces unit of the Vietnam War, until they were framed by a corrupt superior for knocking over the Bank of Hanoi. They return to Vietnam in the season 4 finale, when General Fulbright (the officer who up until then had been responsible for capturing them) hires them to help save the daughter he left there.

** The almost literal backstory of lead character Harmon Rabb: his father was shot down during the Vietnam War, but never confirmed dead, and when he was 16, Rabb went to Laos to try to locate him or at least find clues to confirm that he was still alive.

* The title character of ''Series/{{MacGyver|1985}}'' served in the Vietnam War, as did many other characters in the show, and its legacy crops up in the series from time to time. Most notably in the season 5 episode ''Second Chance'', where his friend Jesse Coulton goes to Thailand to retrieve the son he had with a Vietnamese woman while serving in the war, now mixed up in a local black market ring run by former American servicemembers.

* The title character of ''Series/{{MacGyver|1985}}'' served in the Vietnam War, as did many other characters in the show, and it crops up from time to time. Most notably in the season 5 episode ''Second Chance'', where his friend Jesse Coulton goes to Thailand to retrieve the son he had with a Vietnamese woman while serving in the war, now mixed up in a local black market ring run by former American servicemembers.

* ''ComicBook/BuckDanny'' has the fictional countries of Viet-tan and Sarawak (the latter is in fact a province of Malaysia). The former is depicted in the midst of a civil war between a corrupt dictatorship and rebels backed up by evil mercenaries, and the latter is where the Mafia produces its heroin for worldwide distribution.

So, when a piece of media goes to Southeast Asia, it usually goes on a Holiday In Cambodia. The setting will either be little jungle villages with wooden huts or cities so seedy they leave marks on the screen. Vice will be both upheld and punished, with the main characters either being told "[[YouNoTakeCandle Me love you long time]]" by a woman (very often a [[AsianHookerStereotype prostitute]]) who [[UnsettlingGenderReveal may or may not have a vagina]], or being thrown in some {{hellhole prison}} on drug charges. And someone, some time, is getting a gun in the face. [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking Oh, and there may be elephants.]]

Compare EastIndies, which is a little further south, FarEast, which borders this to the north, and TropicalIslandAdventure, for the usually cleaner and more inviting other main Southeast Asian setting.

Compare EastIndies, which is a little further south, FarEast, which is a little further north, and TropicalIslandAdventure, for the usually cleaner and more inviting other main Southeast Asian setting.

Compare EastIndies, which is a little further south, and TropicalIslandAdventure, for the usually cleaner and more inviting other main Southeast Asian setting.