Quite Random

Panic on the streets

It’s official – there’s a 48–hour alcohol ban in Cambodia this weekend to coincide with the elections. People have had a nasty habit of getting drunk and shooting each other in past elections, so all pubs, clubs and shops have to hide their booze. Watch out for panic buying from the liquor stores on Friday afternoon and confused-looking Westerners wandering the streets on Saturday with only watermelon shakes to comfort them.

It’s going off at Preah Vihear. When Dave and I went there it was as peaceful and quiet a place as you could wish to be in, but now the Thai and Cambodian military have hundreds of troops building up on either side of the border, AK-47s hanging off shoulders, and people even talking about mounting machine guns on the road to Siem Reap in case of some last stand against a Thai invasion of Cambodia. This kind of thing is nothing new – Siem Reap means ‘Siam Defeated’ after all – but when the Thais have F-16s and thousands of soldiers on their side, and practically all of Cambodia’s tanks are sat in museums, the Thais appear to have the upper hand. That won’t stop Hun Sen saying he saw the Thais off with their tails between their legs by writing to the UN, which obviously means he needs to be reelected in case anyone else thinks about invading Cambodia.

I’m due to leave Cambodia on 2 August – that is, if there aren’t tanks on the runway of Siem Reap airport and Thai soldiers burning the hotels of Siem Reap to the ground.

Election

Biking to the Sangkheum Center the other day, I rode past about a thousand Funcinpec supporters on all manner of trucks, pick-ups and other vehicles, all dressed in yellow t-shirts and yellow baseball caps. All of the pick-ups had Funcinpec logos on the side, and every other truck had fifteen-inch speakers hanging off it, blaring out Khmer pop music and ear-splittingly loud voices chuntering on, presumably, about how great Funcinpec was.

Riding back into town after work I passed the same vehicles riding out of town, still blaring. It’s election time and the Khmer way of election campaigning is to pile as many people as possible, and then about ten more, into a pick-up truck and drive around town creating a noise that would constitute a health hazard and subject of a 500,000 signature petition in England.

Everything comes to a head towards the end of this month in a country that’s only just getting used to elections after years of American bombings, Khmer Rouge atrocities and Vietnamese occupation. Only ten years ago now, Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier who defected to the Vietnamese in 1977 and was installed by them after their invasion of Cambodia, staged a bloody coup against his co-prime minister, and he has been in power since. He’s done well. Depending on who you listen to, he’s worth between several million and several billion dollars, with his fingers in everything from illegal logging to the sale of half of the land in Cambodia to foreign property speculators.

It’s highly unlikely that Hun Sen is going anywhere – his ruling Cambodian People’s Party is expected to win this election. For all of Cambodia’s problems, life has got better for many over the last ten years and few might want to rock the boat. Nevertheless, nervous noises have been made about potential violence in the wake of the elections, even the dissolution of the monarchy, and a journalist for an opposition newspaper was murdered in Phnom Penh recently, along with his son. The murder may have had nothing to do with the election, but this is the perfect time for conspiracy theories. The latest is that food being imported from Thailand has been poisoned by Thais embittered at the naming of the Preah Vihear temple, located on the Thai-Cambodian border, as a World Heritage site after a diplomatic balls-up which has forced the resignation of the Thai Foreign Minister.

I now have less than three weeks left in Siem Reap, and then it’s time to go back to England and pick up whatever passes for normal life for a while. Again.

Quickie to Borneo

Travel misconception number 316 shattered – I got off the plane in Borneo and there weren’t bowl-cutted natives blowing darts at me, my luggage wasn’t stolen by a wasp the size of a poodle, my transportation to the guesthouse wasn’t a dugout canoe but a five-door Proton, and I didn’t have to hunt my own dinner.

I should have read Lonely Planet before I went, but then not reading Lonely Planet before you go somewhere is part of the fun.

Kuching, the state capital of Sarawak, the Malaysian part of Borneo, is quite a beautiful place, a mix of Chinese, Malay and Indian people, in a town of less than half a million that sits languidly around the Sarawak River. There’s a Hilton Hotel, a Holiday Inn, nice air-conditioned shopping centres, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonalds, and even a Body Shop. A Body Shop. It’s a sign I’ve been in Cambodia long enough when I get excited about a Body Shop. We have at the time of writing no KFC or McDonalds in Siem Reap. The global money machine has not yet fully reached Cambodia (never mind that the global money machine isn’t prepared to bribe all the people it needs to to do business here), though a KFC is opening soon. I say I hate fast food as much as anyone who pretends to have principles about these things, but I was straight into the KFC when I got to Kuching. A Zinger burger is an illicit pleasure after months of Siem Reap food.

Kuching is clean and comfortable to walk around, unlike Cambodia where taking a walk in the evening sometimes feels like wading through insect soup. Carpenter Street where I stayed is a sleepy, shady strip of Chinese shops selling bikes, books, buns and dumplings. People are decidedly unpushy – no hawkers, no-one beckoning you into their shops, no ‘sir you want T-shirt?’, just relaxed people who couldn’t give a monkeys if you went into their shops but were very friendly if you did. I felt like I was on holiday as soon as I got to Kuching.

If I’d read Lonely Planet apparently I would have been warned that Royal Rum, the local spirit, is evil and should be avoided. Just in case you don’t read it either, stay away from this stuff. After eating fantastic fried mussels, steamed crab, chicken, beef and pork at the brilliant Top Spot dining area Billy, Dave and I headed back to the guesthouse with Tiger Beer and Royal Rum to finish the drinking we’d started at dinner, and I was left for the whole of the next day with a hangover that just made me want to lie down, maybe curl up a little bit, and weep pathetic self-pitying tears. I can now confirm that Borneo’s Royal Rum, Cambodia’s Mekong Whisky and India’s Captain’s Choice whisky are all evil and should be outlawed. Except they’re cheap and occasionally the only thing on offer.

After relaxing in Kuching for a day I headed out to the Semenggoh Orangutan sanctuary to see the morning feeding of the orangutans. Sarawak has a conservation program for orangutans whereas in Indonesian Borneo many have been shot for encroaching on farmland. As over a hundred tourists tramped through the woods to the feeding area, the orangutans crashed through the trees above us, shaking the branches to shower people with foliage and swinging nonchalantly from vine to vine like primates without a care in the world. The dominant male came along to feed, entering the clearing like an articulated lorry with wings, and the park rangers dutifully informed us that if he was in a bad mood we should all be prepared to sprint into the woods and hide. This is all very well but I was stuck behind a Chinese woman who moved at the pace of a snail with a nasty limp. Bloody tourists are always getting in the way.

As great as it was to see orangutans, the highlight of the trip, short as it was, was Bako National Park. An hour’s bus ride and a boat trip outside Kuching, Bako is a beautiful place, the first time I felt truly like I was in Borneo. Visitors included a school group on a trip, an evangelist, a National Geographic photographer and a French family. Locals included proboscis monkeys, wild boar, long tailed macaques, cobras, hermit crabs, mudskippers, fireflies, 2 centimetre long ants with deep red abdomens and countless other creatures that hid in the foliage and clicked, grunted and whistled. The French family had their packed lunch stolen by a team of fifteen macaques in a flash raid, the evangelist sat in the cafe talking at top volume about how in love with God she was, and the National Geographic man photographed proboscis monkeys with a camera so serious looking that the lens sat in two different time zones. The school trip blundered through the forest looking disgusted, whinging about leeches and treading on the ants, followed by their teachers who all wore an expression a little bit like the one you’d wear if you were contemplating whether anyone would notice if you buried your students somewhere in the trees.

I was hardly amazed but pretty disappointed by how many people walked about the place as if they were on a shopping trip to Ikea. The students and others didn’t seem to get that in order to see anything, you had to move slowly and quietly and look up, and down. The proboscis monkeys sat eating in the trees or leapt from branch to branch but scattered at the slightest noise, and the ants, hermit crabs, lizards and other creatures all hid in the leaf litter at your feet. I suppose the school trip could say they encountered nature, but only in the respect that they went home with a lot of it stuck to their shoes.

Coming back, I spent the night in Kuala Lumpur (or KL as everyone calls it) airport, sat in a cafe, pacing around, falling asleep on a bench, and trying to get money out of numerous ATMs. Mehran Karimi Nasseri spent about eight years living in the departures lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport, yet I was in KL for six hours and thought I was going to crack up. He was either very patient, or he actually cracked up.

Dave and Billy hired a car and headed east from Kuching with a Dutchman called Marco. Nothing has been heard from them yet. I don’t know if they took a tent but Billy nearly took an electric rice cooker.

Linky linky

I’ve been doing a tremendous amount of surfing the web lately, what with having a college assignment to do and wanting to do practically anything I can to avoid it, and I have found some groovy stuff I’d like to share if you’re of a geeky disposition as I am…

• Firefox Personas is a nice way to ‘skin’ Firefox with different colour schemes and images. Plus I recommend trying Firefox 3 – only a release candidate but really good.
• Google Calendar Sync synchronises your Outlook calendar with your Google Calendar.
• Remember the Milk for Gmail is a very handy way of adding task management from Remember the Milk to your Gmail account.
• I’m trying Twitter and am using Twhirl to update my status. I think I might be starting to see the point of Twitter.
• Digsby is a multi-platform IM client and email / social network notification tool that has done away with a few applications I was using previously.
• The Filter, a new project backed by pixie-bearded pop loon Peter Gabriel, is a recommendation service for music and films, which uses your ratings to give you titles it thinks you’ll like.
• Amazingtunes is a new music service with a focus on new and unsigned bands. You can stream tracks online and buy them if you really like them, and the artist gets a decent cut of the money. Listen to Rob Marr’s Lighthouse Keeper’s Cottage or Upsidedown by Belle Humble.

Questions I still don’t have answers to

• Why do missionaries always come in gangs? Don’t they like to bang tambourines alone?
• If someone asks you if you have accepted Jesus Christ as your personal saviour, is it rude to laugh and run away shouting ‘nutter!’?
• Do all tourists leave their manners at home?
• Why does the Internet stop working when it rains?
• Where do the fish come from that Khmers fish out of puddles after it rains?
• Why do Koreans wear such shockingly bad trousers?
• Why do tuk tuk drivers ask if you if you want a tuk tuk even while you are in the process of dismounting your motorbike?
• Are Dragonfruit the most overdressed fruit in the world?
• Are rambutans worth the effort?
• What the hell is football and why do so many people watch it?
• Could the monkey on Wat Bo Road steal my sunglasses?
• Is buying the Bangkok Post expressly for toilet training the puppy without reading it ignorance or simply pragmatism?
• How the hell did I rip my boxer shorts last night?
• Am I my own worst enemy?
• Is there anywhere in Siem Reap I can work in peace?

Keep in touch

I haven’t blogged in ages so I thought I’d blog the lunch that Eve bought me the other day.

A lot of good friends have left Siem Reap in the last few weeks and I am all goodbyed out.

Cambodia and death

A comment that gets made here occasionally is about how you could write a book on the Khmer psyche, maybe a bunch of books. I’ve heard it a few times and said it a few times. Ray Zepp compares Cambodia to a Russian doll (open one up, think you have it sussed and then there’s another one inside, and then another…). Too often the only response to the sheer weirdness of this place is to say ‘welcome to Cambodia’, with a smile of resignation.

Even setting aside the Khmer Rouge atrocities and the subsequent famine and civil war, people still die needlessly here every day. Few Cambodians wear crash helmets, many ride small motorbikes, and cars and trucks give no quarter, so fatalities are a daily occurrence on the roads. It’s a sad fact that, riding to work on highway number 6, somewhere along the way you’re likely to see either the immediate aftermath of a collision, or nothing more than broken glass, a pool of blood, and scattered shopping. In an English class a short while ago I gave the students the beginning of a story along the lines of ‘today I was walking to school when…’, expecting them to use their imagination and write whatever came to mind, no matter how strange. One did - the rest of them all wrote about witnessing a crash between a truck and a bike, one even talking about the motorcycle driver’s brains being scattered on the road. It’s just a fact of life here. People will refer to this person or that person having died as easily as if they’d described them having gone to the shops. You can’t judge people for having that attitude to death given what has gone before, and I don’t pretend to know nearly enough about this place to understand how grieving works here.

We just ran a session with the young adults as part of their personal, social and health education course, talking about reactions to change and loss, and they used lots of words like ’sad’, ‘tearful’ and ‘heartbroken’. They’re aware of the words, so I have no reason to believe the kids are any more emotionless automatons than any other Khmer, but I was aware of a fine line between helping them talk about their emotions and programming them to react to loss in what some people might see as a more appropriate way. It would be, apart from anything else, incredibly patronising to tell these people to react in a certain way when they have already dealt with loss and deprivation I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Nevertheless, if people can articulate their feelings they’re less likely to bottle them up, and bottling up is something many Khmers do very well, until they release the pressure by beating their wives, children and dogs.

You often pass funeral processions if you’re in the vicinity of a pagoda. A column of people walk slowly with the deceased maybe carried upon a large float. Funerals, like weddings, appear to vary widely in their opulence or size depending upon the income of the family. Some richer people may be buried for a few years before being exhumed and cremated. If a richer person commits suicide, their house (assuming they killed themselves there) will be destroyed. A suicide by hanging I heard about recently happened to a family that weren’t well enough to knock down the whole house, so they knocked down one wall of the room where it had happened. Friends who taught at the school where this person had worked were a little shocked when they arrived for class and asked what game the students would like to play, and one of them, with a glint in their eye, suggested hangman.

In a way, reactions to death here are quite refreshing. People may grieve in private but you don’t often see Cambodians crying about anything much - there seems to be a bigger reserve of cool, or maybe a desire to maintain dignity. Compare that to the histrionics in the West when Diana Princess of Wales died or people’s preoccupation with ignoring death unless it’s in CSI and happening to someone else, and you’ve got to ask who’s acting more strangely. Maybe here there’s just a recognition that with death and difficulty a part of everyday life, there simply isn’t enough time in the day to be wringing your hands and wailing.