SE ASIA 2000/01 Jets to Bangkok A Low Xmas Smoking Monks & Slow Boats in Cambodia The Seventy-Five Cent Saigon Crewcut Sortie Inevitable

Bangkok - Battambang / Thailand Siem Riep - Phnom Pehn / Cambodia 28 Dec 2000 - 04 Jan 2001 The ferry back to Trat is calming, beautiful. I'm listening to Low and sitting in the sun, writing in my journal as the island scenery washes past. The mini-bus is hot, and seeing an overturned bus in a ditch on the way back to the city is an unsettling site. Later, meeting other travelers I hear stories of viewing dead traffic casualties in graphic display. This is only a damaged vehicle, with its injured (or dead) probably carted off hours ago, or even a day or two earlier. Bangkok doesn't seem as overwhelming this time, but it is still pretty mad. That night I stumble around Th Khao San in a semi-daze, after another visit to the alley-tucked trance bar behind my guesthouse. The young punky barkeep seems happy to see me back. Fruit shopping monk. Siem Reap. The next morning I wake at 4 a.m. and head to the train station. The train to the Thai border town at Arana-Prathet with the locals is good-- I see the sun rising on the industries outside the city. After arriving to Arana-Prathet, I bargain hard with the pick-up taxi drivers and get a short ride to the border. After two hours of typical official hassle, I'm wandering around the dusty crowds knowing there are another six to ten hours of the most hellish roads I have ever heard about, either straight to Siem Reap in a truck, or as I decide to do, since the day is getting late-- to Battambang, from where I can catch a boat down the river to Siem Reap the next day and spare myself the agony of a few hours of the worst stretch of roads-- at night. It's here at the border negotiations that three groups of travelers and myself converge-- three women from Ireland and one from Wales, an adventurous mother and son from New Zealand, and two young women from Australia. For $5 a piece we share a six hour ride across Cambodian chaos to Battambang. The road is like nothing I've seen-- possibly only comparable to the roads to the safari game parks in Africa-- but worse. We're all riding atop our bags in the cramped back of a pickup truck. It's bumpy, exceedingly dusty and dirty, long, and arduous. I count that three times along the way we are stopped by young, informally uniformed gunmen, who are handed a few dingy notes of Cambodian riel lest they search our entire car load. At one stop, several of us venture to the edge of the road to relieve ourselves. At this point I see that one of the passengers from inside the cab of the pick-up truck is an orange-robed monk, smooth shaven head and all. He's leaning against the truck smoking a cigarette. I resist the temptation to jokingly ask him if he wants to get a drink with me once we get to Battambang. A place to hang my hat and whip? We arrive an hour after night fall. The hotel we slip into is remarkable. $2 for my own room with a tiled bathroom, large ceiling fan gracing a 15-foot ceiling, and an enormous wooden doorway. I feel like I am in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Exhausted, I fall into sleep at about ten p.m. Battambang balcony view. 6 a.m. After a simple breakfast and excellent iced coffee sitting at the edge of the bustling six a.m. streets of Battambang (this smallish town which is actually the second largest in Cambodia) I meet up with the others to go to the boats to negotiate passage to Siem Reap. On the river north to Siem Reap. Oh, I am certainly in Cambodia. And it is not disappointing me. The boat ride is gorgeous. I'm taking photographs and gazing excitedly for four hours down the river and its villages and boats. The children, particularly, wave to us enthusiastically. When we get to the docks at Siem Reap there are about five touts for every one of us. There is an officer with a stun-prod holding back the touts. We already have the ride arranged to downtown Siem Reap, so we bypass the aggressive crowd and head to the boat driver's known guesthouse in a small van. The sun rising on the thousand year old ruins of Angkor Wat. Waking early before sunrise, I'm driving a rented motorbike out to the jungle city of temples and palaces, Angkor Wat. Built starting in the 9th century, these staggering ruins of the eclipsed Khmer empire were lost to the world for hundreds of years. When the sun rises it's spectacular and humbling. Every square inch of these miles of temples is carved elegantly-- the first few hundred years worth w/ mostly Hindu influence, the latter architecture predominantly Buddhist inspired. We spend the entire day exploring and riding between temple to temple, one complex to another. Ragged children roam the grounds, selling postcards and soft drinks. I meet a young girl who can't even be seven, yet she can sell postcards, count, and exchange greetings in six different languages. Every where I turn, I hear "One Dollar." A Cambodian's first two words of English. Upsetting. Instead of dishing out money, I focus on trying to talk to the children, in whatever limited Khmer I can manage, but mostly a combination of smiles, gestures, and simple English. For fun, sometimes I go through the whole introduction dialogue with a child in Spanish or German. Khmer girls at Angkor Wat. I find a grand pool of lotus reflecting the gorgeous scenery of ancient architecture and overgrowth. My favorite temple is probably the third visited, lost into the more thick of the jungle, overtaken by massive trees and roots, the walls and stones of the complex crumbling in many areas, fallen into piles of disorder. Towards the end of the day, sweating, and exploring through one of the other massive temples' ruins, I come upon a group of Khmer women in an elaborate state of preparation for a traditional dance performance. I don't stay around for the tourist's show, instead I watch silently as they put on their costumes and make-up, stunned by their beauty, and then I motor off into the closing daylight back to Siem Reap. Nature reclaims a thousand year old palace. Make-up and costume preparation for Khmer Dance. It's here that I get to talk more with Edwin. He's an amazing character, and he provides great company in the next few days as our itineraries prove remarkably similar. He's from New Zealand originally, but been living in Tapei, Tawain for the last three years teaching English. His mother asked if he was coming home for xmas, but he instead asked her to come see him for the holidays-- going overland in Cambodia. She agreed. Amazingly adventurous. I stay in Siem Reap for New Year's Eve. Edwin and I are transfixed by a meal at the tellingly named "Happy Herb Pizza." For some reason, the geckos on the walls keep us interested for hours. We bring the others here later, and they are similarly amused. And the pizza isn't half bad for Cambodia, where I'd typically be much more trusting of a curry or a noodle dish. Must be all the lavishly paid NGO's demanding quality imported cheese. We were going to go to the apt to be touristed Angkor Wat Khmer Dance Performance, but instead, opting for lower key, the Eve itself is spent primarily at a bizarre english pub, before retiring to the spinning fan and cold shower of the guesthouse room. - - - The primary options for crossing Cambodia to Phnom Pehn, the capitol, consist of another back-breaking truck ride, taking a small airplane and seeing nothing in-between, or the "fast-boat" which is so called because it is a boat that looks like an airplane with no wings, two hundred seats, crash helmets, and gut-wrenching velocity down the river to Phnom Pehn in a record four hours, villagers and fishermen be damned. All these sound incredibly unfavorable, so a mission is assembled to go to the docks to inquire about the elusive "slow-boat" journey. Now, this is difficult, because as much of the less-chartered parts of the world with respect to tourism, anywhere you try to go, the established tourist moneymakers will convince you best they can that there is no conceivable way to do things any other way than their way-- at their monetary gain, obviously. This means if you ask anyone about "slow boats" they will deny they exist. (After all, if you can manage to find a cargo boat that will take you down the river, they cannot sell you an absurdly profitable $25 boat ticket, and get their commission, similarly to air passage rackets.) Going to the docks to negotiate one's self with the cargo boat operators is a tricky affair-- the touts hang out there, eager to corral you off for their own devices, or to run ahead of you (yes, a running race establishes) to try and convince or bribe the boat drivers to not take you. So, with four of us and an elaborately concocted story about how we already have airline tickets and really just want to photograph the people and the huts at the docks, we manage to find a cargo boat that is leaving for Phnom Pehn the next day. We think, I emphasize-- we think-- it will arrive the following day, and we are pretty sure what time we need to be at the dock. After all, international gesture language, scribbling diagrams with chaulk, and a phrasebook dialogue in the shoddiest possibly Khmer leaves much for speculation. We return at the appointed time the following day. Each of our party-- there are seven of us-- have enough food and water for three days, and a cheap hammock and mosquito net from the old markets. (Bargaining heavily I managed to buy a complete lot of hammocks and nets for less than $20.) I've also brought enough reading material to last me. The boat pulls out of the inlet. It's made almost entirely of wood, looks like Noah's Ark; it's mammoth. I think there were four Cambodians of the crew and the seven of us, plus one other traveler, from Canada, that finds his way into passage with us. The boat is suspiciously deficient of cargo. I am not sure if this is because at $9 a head, the eight of us are more valuable as cargo than a load of bricks, recycling metal or glass, or because we will pick up the cargo half-way, or more likely, the cargo will be picked up in Phnom Pehn for the return. Or maybe there is something going on here. The fear heightens when, only an hour out of port, we anchor in the middle of a bog at the edge of the lake opening into the real passage of waterway. It's (roughly) explained to us with gestures that we sleep here and then leave at three in the morning. That seems good and fine. We climb into our hammocks at 9pm and try to sleep. We've tired of playing cards, and they've finally shut off the generator and lights, so I can't read. At about eleven p.m. I awake to the growling sounds of a boat approaching, spotlights bright on us. I'm thinking, this is terrible. I'm in Cambodia, I've read about this, they are going to rob us blind and leave us floating in the river-- if they are kind about it. Of course I can't understand any of the conversations yelling back and forth between our boatsmen and the others on the approaching vessel. I'm assuming the worst. Our folk are running all around. Have they set us up? What the hell is going on? After twenty minutes of speculation, and my sighting of a young motherly dressed Cambodian woman on the deck of the other, now anchored to us boat, I'm realizing that their intentions can't be piracy. All the lights go off and I assure myself they are just docking to us for social, perhaps ironically, -safety- reasons. Slow Boat 32 hours down the Tonle Sap river to Phnom Pehn. The sunrise on the boat is as amazing as the previous night's sunset was. Little else can match the beauty which I can scarcely even describe of motoring so slowly down the most rural of Cambodian scenes, elegantly down the Tonle' Sap river toward Phnom Pehn. I split time between sitting in the sun on the massive roof of our vessel, the Cambodian flag flapping above me, or lying peacefully in my hammock listening to Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. I can't decide if its George Harrison or John Lennon that is the real genius. Or maybe it's Paul, which I have inheriantly suspected. But everything is perfect and meaningful in an unconcerned way. It's rare that I can ever find such moments of tranquility and peace. I knew I would have to find this mindset to comfortably endure an indeterminable amount of time's passage on a slow river cruise with boatsman I'm unable to communicate with. Ironically this peace is found in the most anarchic, uncivilized, and insane country I've ever been in, and only half a day after falling asleep in the aforementioned tension of wondering if I was going to be a victim of an ugly mutiny. Cyclos and Motos. Downtown Phnom Pehn. Phnom Pehn isn't quite as insane as I've read about it to be (mostly in "Off The Rails in Phnom Pehn") but it sure is a wild place. It's beautiful in it's way, and I'm enjoying zipping down the boulevards on the back of a taxi-motorcycle. I stay at the Royal guesthouse, which isn't that regal, but after sleeping in a hammock on a riverboat, any bed and walls seems pretty noble at this point. Finding an available room was a task, strangely, as the first three places I go to are full. A bright teenage girl who works as the receptionist at a hotel offers me a room-- her room, complete with her music collection, frilly pink bed, and sparce wardrobe rack. I'm pretty sure that she means she'll be sleeping elsewhere, though I am not sure, but I decline the room on principle anyway-- it just doesn't seem right to be sleeping in her personal bedroom. However, I marvel at the beauty of trust inherent to any person who would, with nothing else available to provide, be willing to offer their own room to a foreign stranger. It's things like this that force me to understand how different our cultures are... and how things like the civilian population being totally subverted, enslaved, and massacred by the authorities they initially trusted was possible. Royal Palace. Phnom Pehn. On that note, two of my first outings in Phnom Pehn the next day include going to the Tuol Sleng (S-21 Prison) Museum, and Choeung Ek (The Killing Fields.) Asides from the obvious disorder of the city, the poverty, and the disheartening frequency of one-legged landmine victims all over Cambodia, little prepares you for the cold history lessons to be found here. An hour from the city, out at the Killing Fields, where overgrown, partly disinterred pits still evidence stray bones and clothing fragments, I find myself overwhelmed by the reality of all of this. I've read about the Khmer Rouge, but now it is really starting to sink in-- that all of this madness can and still does happen in the world. If a book's worth of lesson isn't enough, staring at a monument of human skulls formed into a glass-enclosed stupa should drive the issue home. I approach this glass case. It's open, the stacked, sorted skulls right in front me: A poor face surrounded this once, their soft brain enclosed by this white mass of aged bone. Against my better, more respectful judgement, I grasp it timidly in my hand, lifting it from the shelf. It's heavy in my hand. I'm assuring myself that the disrespect this does is outweighed by the psychological reinforcement, and my fumbling attempt at understanding such inhumanity repeating itself over and over again. Chilling lessons in Humanity. Choeung Ek Genocidal Center. In the fields, children from the nearby school and homes are running, playing, singing and begging to the few tourists. Its incomprehensible. Similarly, at S-21, there were homes built literally right against the fence and barriers, barb-wire still intact. Is there really any true understanding here, a respect, and a determination to fight against further such atrocity? Or am I seeing the jaded, hardened, sadly accepting apathy of a victimized culture and people? It reminds me of the people of China, who I came to believe accepted the reality that any day they might be crushed by a tank or battered by the police for their political or religious beliefs. I'm thinking about this over each meal, as I watch the mother fathers sons daughters babies, all without helmets, zipping down the streets, an entire family of five on a single 125cc motorbike. Or as I watch the elderly men chain-smoke unfiltered cigarettes. As I see the soldiers, barely 17, standing at their post with assault rifles and machine guns. I'm almost embarrassed for myself, my last night in Phnom Pehn, eating a lavish $10 meal at a remarkable upscale Indian restaurant. A 24-hour security guard stands out front of the restaurant, eyes to the street, holding tight his assault rifle. "The prince eats here often," the co-owner smiles to me, proudly, batting her heavily made-up British eyelashes. 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