Thinking fast, the visitors defuse the situation by telling the angry pimp the pictures are for their business - organizing sex tours out of Thailand. But when a photographer who has accompanied Majumdar begins to take some pictures, the pimp and his bodyguards draw guns, thinking Majumdar and the photographer are undercover informants. Shaking, the 6-year-old mumbles, 'no boom-boom, just ngam-ngam' (Vietnamese slang for oral sex). The pimp slaps one on the back of the head and the girls begin to awkwardly and unenthusiastically flirt with Majumdar. At first, the girls stand silently and rigidly together. Just awakened, they're wearing cotton pajamas and rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. Within seconds, two girls, who claim they're 6 and 8, join him. Inside, Majumdar takes a seat in a creaky metal chair beside a stained mattress. After a brief conversation in Vietnamese with a rough-looking brothel manager, the boy leads Majumdar and three others down a narrow pathway to a small cabin. Majumdar has brought me to Svay Pak to show the scale of the child-sex trade, and he knows that children as young as four are available but kept hidden by their pimps in an attempt to avoid police raids. He leans out his window and lies, telling the boy he wants a girl much younger than those on the street. Sitting in another car is Shuvaloy Majumdar, co-chair of The Future Group, a Calgary-based non-profit organization fighting the sex trade.

'You want girl?' he asks in broken English as the scent of cheap perfume wafts in. A shirtless boy, who is maybe 10, pushes himself to the front and gestures for me to roll down the window. None of them looks older than 14, but they come on like seasoned streetwalkers, licking their lips and thrusting their tiny chests forward.

Wearing tight clothes and bright lipstick, several sashay over to the car. What look like rundown garages lining a back alley are really brothels full of young girls.

Our car turns right down a steep and bumpy hill, and at the bottom we are jolted back to reality. Back in March, the government had closed most of the 50-odd Svay Pak brothels - known for housing underaged Vietnamese girls - in an effort to clean up the country's growing image as a pedophile's paradise. Perhaps the Cambodian government's crackdown on the child-sex trade is having an effect. Promisingly, there doesn't seem to be much activity along the road on this hot summer night.

It's very dark - there are no street lamps and the only light comes from flickering candles set in small Buddhist shrines on the roadside. IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT and we're cruising slowly along the potholed road that leads to Svay Pak, Phnom Penh's infamous brothel district.

Cambodian complete 2h40m fatman