In 1967, Jackie Kennedy made a private pilgrimage to Cambodia to see the temples at Angkor. The wanderings of the wife of the recently assassinated US President John Kennedy charmed the world, with Life magazine chronicling her tour in photos that have since become classics. Those pictures show an ever-stylish Kennedy in a post-colonial idyll, a place yet to be ravaged by the horrors of the Vietnam War, the Killing Fields of Pol Pot and the devastation of the Khmer Rouge.
One of Kennedy’s stops was the iconic Raffles Grand Hotel d’Angkor in Siem Reap, with its six hectares of lush gardens and glorious, glistening centrepiece, a 35-metre swimming pool that is almost as wide as it is long.
