Cambodia, Freehand

Not long after I had solved this moral dilemma within myself, I found a chance to put into practice my newfound affinity with the people. I was out on my nightly forage for food, in a sprawling jungle town, near the ruins of Angkor. As a matter of course I skipped past the air-conditioned cafes, from which the flabby tourist, clutching his Apa Guide, stares out into the forbidden night, and strode off into the darkness. Out here with the edge of danger it's more fun; I sniffed the air and headed for the night market (avoiding dark alleys). This is where the locals come to feed on rice and noodles after a day in the sun. I nosed around for a while among the food odors and smiling brown faces, until I found a well-fed, matronly lady in a soiled apron, standing behind a trestle table. She was serving up china-bowls of noodles to anyone who could afford the twenty cents or so that she charged. I elbowed into a space and watched her as she prepared a bowl for me. She dunked a handful of thick, white, doughy noodles into a bubbling vat, waited a minute or two for them to cook and then plonked them into a hastily-rinsed china-bowl. Then she dipped up a ladle-full of steaming stew and poured it over the noodles. I managed to stop a spoonful of MSG following in the stew and was salivating by the time she pushed the bowl in front of me and took away my twenty cents. The noodles slipped down easily as did the few leaves of cabbage, but the gristle and the bones floating among globules of fat in the brown soup had to stay in the bowl. This was good news for the urchin who had taken up residence under the table. As I elbowed myself out from the bench he leaped up from between my legs, grabbed at the bowl, and hungrily began slurping at the dregs. This came as a bit of a shock; I have met thousands of beggars in all kinds of situations the world over, but usually all they want is money: this kid was hungry. He was filthy and shoeless, his clothes were soiled rags, and a mop of matted hair hid most of his face. What's a man to do. I couldn't very well take pity on the waif in light of my recent liberation from feelings of charity. But I didn't even want to touch him; how could I have fun with a wretch like this? Compassion isn't charity I quickly decided, and I ordered another bowl of gruel, flipping twenty more cents at the smiling noodle lady.

Noise. I have been in and out of different countries for years and have been plotting a mental graph of poverty against noise; the further I venture along the poverty axis, the higher I reach up the noise axis -- with all its debilitating effects to my mental health and composure. Cambodia pushed me into unplotted territory, with its dollar-a-day poverty and streaming blast of noise. But, wait moment, I don't want to sound too negative about it, after all noise can have its good points -- I just didn't find any in Cambodia.

Angkor. Forget about Angkor Wat, that ancient architectural wonder. Sure, it is more than just a pile of stones in the jungle, and even inspired me to write a love-story, but the money-hungry developers are already Disneyfying it. The West comes east. Overrated. I'm just thankful that I got there before Mickey Mouse.

Language. I was exquisitely lazy with regards to the Khmer language, preferring the I-won't-be-here-for-long,-it's-not-worth-it approach, which I evoke whenever I'm in a place anywhere between a week and eight or nine years. I would never have been able to manage the intonation anyway -- all those squawks and grunts at seemingly irrelevant places in a conversation. It often seemed that those squawking, whooping women had replaced the conventional language with running yelps and cackles. Every sentence ended with a rising relish as the crescendo of speech built up to an almighty crow on the extended final syllable. Then the dialogue was picked up by somebody else as the original speaker rested her vocal chords. I just listened and marveled and had fun trying to guess the mood of the speaker. Just as I might be wincing at a torrent of rage, the speaker would crack a smile and start chuckling.

Anyway, I did pick up a few words and phrases, mainly to avoid being parted from too much of my money. Survival Khmer.

People. Stoic. Cambodians are the world's best stoics; even that morbid sect of ancient Greeks would have to concede defeat in any live-like-a-stoic contest with these people. But the average Khmer at life is a happy stoic, not a woe-is-me puritan who thinks that suffering is good for him. The country is desperate, and desperate situations usually spark desperation in people, at least discontent, misery even; come on, my western mentality kept telling me, it's ok to be pissed off, complain, why don't you. If this were England � To be honest they are not exactly bundles of joy, but given the shit that they have to live with, they cope admirably, always ready to accept the next pile of misery that is shoveled their way.

Travel. Cambodia is a small country, but if you measure distances by the time it takes to travel them, Cambodia suddenly becomes huge. For days on end, in trucks, pickups, trains, and boats, I would sit back on my bony, uncomfortable backside and observe people at their best -- enjoying life, even while under duress.

Getting from the country's second city into the capital gave me such an opportunity. It sounds like it should be an easy thing to do -- it is in most countries. There is a rail link, after all, and the Royal Cambodian State Railway, in its splendid entirety, exists solely for the purpose of shuttling passengers along this single route. But, as always in this country, nothing is simple. I spent a shaky fourteen hours on one of the squalid trains that ply this route, and I have to hand it to the guys at the transport ministry -- they're doing a great job: I got there. I do wonder how I killed those fourteen hours. I soon got tired of looking through the holes in the ceiling at the green grass growing on the roof of the carriage and the blue sky; likewise, looking at the sleepers through the floor was boring. Sleep was out of the question (I won't bore you with details of overcrowding, hard, broken seats etc.), and snacking on river fish and sticky-rice would have had me throwing my guts out of the window. But somehow it wasn't so bad; I didn't have to kill the time at all: I lived it. The scenery was beautiful and my fellow passengers were interesting. I kept my eye on one particular family of peasants having the time of their lives. Mother was missing but that didn't dampen anyone's spirits. Father had a huge cataract in one eye, rendering him half blind, and the daughter was totally blinded by two similarly huge cataracts, sitting squarely in each eye. The only able-bodied member of the family was the son, who worked happily as a guide for the other two. Whenever his sister wanted to piss, for example, he would stand in front of her, letting her put her arms around him, wait for the train to stop (which it did very often), and lead her off the train (there being no toilet onboard). She would squat and piss, with the other women in the grass beside the track, then amble back onboard, arms still lovingly looped around her brother. He picked out the juiciest barbecued river fish sold by the vendors who regularly boarded the train. And seemed to be describing the run-down villages that we passed through. All three of them wore filthy clothes and were obviously dirt poor, but as a loving family they were very much alive. Most of the other Cambodians I saw in a similar desperate situation had been reduced to begging, but not them; they somehow managed to maintain a little dignity.

Roads. The roads in Cambodia are horrible; I won't try to offer superlatives -- they are just horrible. An unsurfaced, orange moonscape after rain; dirty water filling the craters, the surrounding rims baked again in the blazing sun, becoming dry and dusty. This was the road to Kampot. Not too bad in a four-wheel-drive Land-Rover or a sport utility vehicle, but in a twenty-year-old Datsun family-car with thirteen other passengers it was hell. One of the passengers was a fat monk who made things even more difficult by refusing to sit next to a female (he wouldn't even have one in the front, were he had already grabbed the best seat). I had to accommodate his piety by perching on an inch of vinyl with the gear stick (and the driver's hand) perilously close to my scrotum. The driver was drunk and spent more time fiddling with the tape machine than he did on driving. The machine kept on eating his cassettes, which he would then have to extract, trying not to snap the spaghetti of tape that was hanging out. He managed to somehow wind back in the chewed up celluloid by balancing the cassette on the steering wheel and using his shaking fingers at the same time as he steering the car. This whole operation was repeated every ten minutes or so. The windows were broken and so the car was always filled with either billows of orange dust or bucketfuls of orange water, depending on whether the drunk driver had succeeded in skirting a crater or given up and driven straight through it. This mode of transport was called a shared taxi.

I traveled along a similar road through the jungle on my way to Angkor Wat, but this time in the back of a pickup truck, exposed to the elements, balanced on the two inches of metal that formed the sides of the back section of the vehicle. I had black and blue rivet marks in my ass for weeks after. I only mention this trip because I want to describe the local road tax in Cambodia. Villages (as in all third world countries), are strung out along the roads and if a local is lucky enough to live alongside a particularly bad stretch of road he can put his engineering and entrepreneurial skills to good use. It's not exactly road building and honest business: what they actually do is throw down a few planks over the broken road and then stand guard, extracting a toll from anyone who wants to use their planks. I'm sure that they purposely make the whole width of the road impassable, so the driver has no choice but to use the planks and pay the toll.

Conclusion. I survived, had a lot of fun in doing so, and finally got across to Vietnam, but that's another story�.

© Paul S. Davey, 2002

e-mail [email protected]

Top

Paul S. Davey is a freelance travel and fiction writer. He started life in the UK but now turns up in the strangest of places around the world -- usually with his notebook handy

novels:
Ghost Money first chapter of a new novel
Fei Azzis and the Water Table of Sa' An (coming soon)

travel:
Tryin' to Get to Mexico
Freedom in Cambodia
Saigon Gary
Pedalling Taipei
Tofu Culture
Urban Betel Adventure: Sex, Drugs, and Spitting
Hawking Carrot-Cake and a New President