How cool is this? I just found this slide my mom took of the arrivals and departures board at the Phnom Penh airport on 25 June 1965. Brilliant.
There’s so much going on here. I just love it.
(My eight years of French finally paid off, as I can read two-thirds of the languages printed on this board.)
As I’ve posted before, I’m fascinated by the various ways Asian cities have been spelled over the last fifty or so years. Djakarta (now Jakarta), Canton (now Guangzhou), and no one can decide here how to spell Hong Kong (one word or two).
Reaching back into the depths of my memory, I think the following airlines are represented here:
RC (Royal Cambodge Airlines)
UT (UTA or Union des Transports Aériens)
CX (Cathay Pacific)
VN (Vietnam Airlines)
GA (Garuda Indonesia Airlines)
Because this slide was included with dozens from Angkor Wat, I assume my mom was flying to Siem Reap that day, probably on the RC 9:00 departure.
It’s both eerie and exciting to think she could have boarded a plane thirty minutes later and traveled to both Hanoi (not too far from where Americans were secretly bombing North Vietnam at that time) and then continued on to China, which didn’t have relations with the US and was just a year away from the start of the Cultural Revolution.
love it!! there were some fairly primitive boards at kai tak but nothing quite like this 🙂 the lettering is sui generis too – the wacky ‘j’ in jakarta from garuda. amazing your mum had the foresight to snap some daily shots like this for the annals of posterity
Thanks so much! When I first found this, I couldn’t sit still. I wish I’d taken such shots in SE Asia even back in 1991. I have a feeling this board may have still been there.