Quite Random

All the news is new and approved

I get to see the news every so often, not that often. The TV news is CNN or BBC World, so it’s quite US-centric, or in the case of BBC World a procession of B-team news readers and dull-as-ditchwater business reports I swear not a soul watches, interspersed with adverts for Rolex watches and how nice it is to do business in Bahrain. The advert about Bahrain made me laugh. A lady who runs a school here told me she left the school she’d run in Bahrain after she’d been called ‘infidel whore’ for about the millionth time.

The news here has been focussed on the food crisis. in Thailand, people have been working all day in their rice paddies and then staying outside at night, all night, just to guard their rice in case it is stolen from the fields. It is too precious. In Siem Reap, food prices and gasoline prices have gone up, even the contraband gasoline that you buy from Johnnie Walker bottles at the roadside. A short while ago the World Food Program dropped off a huge shipment of yellow peas at a school because there was no rice available, and then even worse turned up the next day and took it all away saying it had been a mistake delivering it there in the first place. Friends of mine who are working there were asking me if I knew any good recipes that used yellow peas, as the Cambodians didn’t have the slightest idea what to do with them.

Iain posted a link to a story on the Guardian website about the sale of Cambodian land to foreign property speculators - as much as 50% of the whole country has been sold off to Russia, Korea, China, the UK and elsewhere and people who thought they had legitimate property deeds have been booted off their land by the police and military. It has been doing the rounds and people have been talking about it, but it is a sad fact that we get this kind of news from media in the West as it is buried here. Though Cambodia is ostensibly a democracy, criticism of the government is not tolerated and many Khmers are very careful about what they say for fear of reprisals. When Global Witness published a report about illegal logging in Cambodia they were unceremoniously ejected from the country, and government officials who speak out about corruption are moved to jobs guarding lavatories in remote areas. There are elections coming up in the next couple of months, but the chances of the ruling elite losing power are slim to none, and even if they did, talk is that it would be contested, violently if need be.

And to think with the clear, fair democracy we have in the UK, people actually voted Boris into power.

Up and round and up and down again

Dave and I left Siem Reap on Friday afternoon to head for Northwestern Cambodia and the Thai border – a loop taking in Anlong Veng, Preah Vihear, and then back down to Siem Reap via Koh Ker. The entire trip was just over 550km, not exactly the Motorcycle Diaries, but still an arse-numbingly long distance in two and a bit days over bitumen, gravel, clay, mud, sand and rock. Cambodian roads are as random and unpredictable as the rest of the place, patches of sealed road appearing in the middle of nowhere for no other reason than the Cambodian army likes something solid to march on, then disappearing just as quickly to give way to Martian tracks that throw orange dust high into the air that gets into your eyes and gives you rusty bogies.

The road from Siem Reap to Anlong Veng goes past the holy mountain Phnom Kulen and the waterfalls at Kabal Spien – when being in Cambodia sometimes seems like living in Norfolk except with palm trees, it’s amazing how excited you can get over a few hills. The road was slippery red gravel, clay and mud, so we rarely got above 50kmh and spent the whole time nearly falling off, the rear wheels of our bikes dancing around behind us. Villages are dotted along the roads that cut through vast areas of forest, and the orange ice boxes of shops in the front of houses are welcome beacons, an excuse to get off the bike, get the circulation back in your buttocks, and inhale a bottle of water before carrying on, Khmers laughing at your lame attempts to ask how far to the next town, children staring at you like visitors from another planet.

We got into Anlong Veng after dark on Friday night having overshot the town, where we nearly climbed the hills into the Thai border. Insects were hitting our faces like a biblical plague, bouncing off our eyes or occasionally pulping on our faces, and the headlights of the bikes were totally inadequate in the night compared to anything else on the road. Motos and cars had headlights that practically illuminated the hills while our headlights were like cheap torches with weak batteries. Finding a guesthouse with a sticky floor and a smaller bathroom than you’d find in a cheap touring caravan, the landlord asked us if we’d like a girl (to share I assume), and after telling him no thanks we went into the Anlong Veng night to see what was happening. What we found was bugger all was happening, so we holed up in a restaurant with warm beer and ice cubes to watch Cambodian boxing (like Thai kick boxing but Cambodians will say they invented it). After two hours of watching four New Zealanders having seven shades of shit kicked out of them by four lithe Cambodians with evil looking tattoos, bed was pretty much the only option left.

Anlong Veng is famous for being the stronghold of the Khmer Rouge into the 1990s, the home of Pol Pot, Ta Mok and numerous other senior genocidal maniacs. The town is quiet and the Khmer Rouge appear to be a fading memory, but Ta Mok’s house is there, a looted and empty place, spacious though hardly palatial, with paintings of Angkor Wat and a map of Cambodia on the wall, and ‘Assassin Ta Mok’ spray painted on a wall. We headed into the hills marking the Thai border to find the safe houses of the Khmer Rouge leaders (right by the border so they could scurry into Thailand if government troops showed up), and weaving narrow paths through the most heavily mined border in the world, we found a stunning view back into Cambodia.

Heading over to Preah Vihear took us over more red gravel roads through vast swathes of forest dotted with villages, until we arrived at the base of the mountain that Preah Vihear perches on. The track up the side of the mountain was a mad mix of rocks and crumbling road at a 35% incline, and after a frantic twenty minutes we reached the top, us sweating uncontrollably and the bikes glowing red hot from the first-gear ascent, while Khmers doing the same trip looked as cool as cucumbers and made me wonder what all the fuss was about.

Preah Vihear, a long, narrow series of temples, draws a line up the hill until it reaches a sheer drop back into Cambodia. Arriving as the sun was setting, the view from the top was spectacular, Cambodia disappearing into the haze on one side, mountains either side ghostly figures in the twilight, and the rolling landscape of Thailand behind us.

A man who ran a food stall next to the temple guarded our bikes for the night while we found a guesthouse in the small, ramshackle market at the base of the temple. While Dave enjoyed deep fried frog and mysterious bits of animal with chilli and rice, my guts were giving me hell so I had to settle for Lays (like Walkers crisps). The people in the market were unfazed by the presence of two white men drinking beer and talking rubbish, hanging out in their hammocks watching Khmer soap operas or massacring karaoke songs (apparently the karaoke was different here, it was mountain karaoke according to one chap).

The final day’s riding took us down through a wildlife reserve that appeared to have no wildlife but did have fun roads that alternated between man-eating pot-holes, slippery gravel,and bone-shaking corrugated ridges. We passed through a series of small towns and villages to Koh Ker, another previously hidden complex of temples that we were too knackered to even look at. Dave’s bike was experiencing some problems, so after towing it twice, buying it two new batteries, witnessing about fifteen Cambodians in total scratching their heads and trying to figure out what was wrong with it and finally giving up, Dave abandoned it with a Khmer family 7km north of Highway 6, and I took us back into Siem Reap, caked with mud and craving pizza.

It is now Wednesday and sensation has returned to my buttocks.

Photos here.

Ghost town

Siem Reap’s a ghost town while everyone’s on their New Year holidays – they’ve all gone to Sihanoukville, Phnom Kulen, Kabal Spien and various other holy spots and party spots. About twenty Cambodians arrived at the guest house last night and piled into two rooms between the lot of them – must have been playing sardines, but at least they had cable TV. If just one extra person stays in a barang’s room overnight there are questions and a request for additional money to cover, I don’t know, the extra oxygen they’ve been using.

Cambodian TV has been playing classic movies based on historical stories – think of that epic Indian TV series Mahabharat crossed with Monkey Magic. Yesterday there was a story of a girl who was in love with a king, and became pregnant with his child. Somehow they became separated and the king married a new woman. The girl wore a ring which made everyone think she was a boy, before getting a job in the royal court to be close to him. The king and the girl became close even though he thought she was a boy (think Blackadder and Bob), and spent a lot of time together. The queen, jealous of her husband’s new friend, set up a situation where it looked as if the girl was assaulting her, before calling for the king. He came in, saw it all, went crazy, and had the girl beheaded in a fit of rage. The girl prayed to the Buddha before having her head cut off for mercy on her unborn child. She got her head cut off anyway, then gave birth to the child through her severed neck (baby feet wiggling out and everything, it was freaky). The girl’s head ascended to heaven. The king found out it was the girl he’d had executed and went crazy. It all ended OK - the girl, her son and her love the king were reunited in the forest. All to the soundtrack from Dune.

I know all this about the programme because a) there were subtitles, b) it was actually really good and I watched the whole thing.

Mumbo jumbo

A regime of accumulation, it has to be said, ‘describes the stablization over a long period of the allocation of the net product between the transformation of the conditions of both the conditions of production and the conditions of reproduction of wage-earners’.

What?

This OU course is very interesting, but sometimes I’m not sure if I’m having difficulty undertstanding what I’m reading, or if the person who wrote it is simply incapable of expressing themselves clearly. It really isn’t that difficult to articulate complex ideas in a reasonably straightforward fashion - sometimes it takes longer, sometimes it just takes less words, sometimes a picture would be nice.

But a picture would be too easy. Rule one of studying with the OU – read a chapter of a book and then as an activity draw a picture that demonstrates that you understood what the chuff the book was on about.

New Year approaches

Damned unreliable memory. I heard something really funny last night and I was going to blog about it but it’s gone.

One thing that happens when you’ve been here a little while, tourists approach you and ask you questions about Cambodia. Might be to do with having a telephone conversation with a mate and getting up on my high horse about something. I always answer their questions, but I still feel like I’m a fraud – always feel like a fraud in fact when anyone asks me about practically anything. Maybe studying, reading or living in a place is something people do just so they can bullshit more convincingly. After two weeks in Cambodia in 2005 I posed as the author of Lonely Planet for a Dutch girl after the real author, who I’d been drinking with, decided he didn’t want to play the expert for the night. This poor girl listened to me making up a load of utter rubbish for an hour. So recently I have been asked what is the best thing to do when you want to report a suspected paedophile to the authorities, why the Third World is called the Third World, and why they don’t have lasers in Battlestar Galactica. I have bullshitted convincingly about all three.

Khmer New Year is approaching, a big party to see in year 2552, offer prayers and respect for dead ancestors and elders, resolve disputes from the past year, wish for better things in the next twelve months, celebrate harvests, and have some fun before rainy season kicks in next month. I’m not going anywhere – can’t afford to, and I’m also fascinated to see just how much more chaotic this place can possibly get when a Khmer Hogmanay happens.

I also didn’t do such a good job of sticking to any resolutions I made at the end of 2007, so it’s good to get another new year and have another go.

Last weekend I went to Beng Melea with Dave, both of us on our bikes, me singing “Born to be Wild” inside my crash helmet while getting rattled to bits up Cambodian dirt tracks and gravel roads – the bike ride was fantastic, and Beng Melea was beautiful, a pre-Angkor Wat temple all but abandoned to the forest until the 1990s, bombed by the Khmer Rouge and now a leafy oasis 65km from Siem Reap. It’s my new favourite not least because I’m not tripping over thirty Japanese people who all think they’re Lara Croft.

Spider / human territorial dispute

He’s about two inches across, legs and all. Chunky little body, and thick hairy legs. I think I even saw his eyes glistening at me last night. There have been spiders in the bathroom before, but they all had scrawny stick legs like a harvestman. He’s got legs like an England prop, and I think he’s eaten the scrawny spiders because the other night he was snacking on something long and leg-like. I chose to accept him as my new housemate, because he’s not done me any harm. I’m used to living surrounded by small creatures – the geckos chirp reassuringly outside while they clumsily pursue moths around the porch light, the mozzies zuzz by my head in bed, and the occasional cockroach is seen off the premises with a can of Raid and a broom. The spider and I have been fine for a week. He pushed his luck the other day by clinging to the side of the toilet roll when I needed it but mostly he hangs on the wall eating stuff or twinkling his eyes at me.

Tonight, he pushed it too far.

I walked into the bathroom and was ready with the usual ritual – check to see where he was and offer him the kind of greeting that gentlemen acquaintances do in lavatories – a nod and maybe even a sideways-murmured something resembling ‘alright’. He was sat on the toilet. He might as well have been reading a paper and smoking a cigarette. I needed to use it but he stayed where he was, seemingly ignorant of my pleading expression.

Bear in mind at this point that the bugger is way too fast for the cup-and-postcard trick, and he’s on a curvy toilet seat. Khmer toilets come with a hose by the side, useful as a bidet or general hose type thing. I took it from the wall, aimed and fired. The jet of water hit him but stone me if he didn’t scuttle under the rim, wait a moment, and then disappear around the back of the bowl. Before I could see where he was, now he had done a disappearing act and had I been sat down he could choose to crawl under me and bite my arse at any time. I couldn’t take the chance. I hosed the toilet down, but no sign of him. I didn’t want to kill him, I just wanted him off the toilet and maybe washed down the drain to consider the error of his ways. Nothing. No wet spider.

He’d won. I had to make do with taking a pee from three feet away in case he jumped me, before closing the door behind me. Returning ten minutes later, there he was, back on the toilet seat, smugly victorious. The thing is, I feel a bit bad for him. I think I washed some of his dinner down the drain, and I am much bigger than him. But I still haven’t gone and if I get desperate, he’s getting the hose again.

Fashion faux-pas

Today I wore my Communist Party T-Shirt to work, a great Tom Burns design I first saw being worn by Declan a while ago. This was mainly because I was short of things to wear having stayed in a guest house last night to get away from another Khmer wedding next to my house. I slept like a baby without techno music rattling my teeth at two in the morning.

I didn’t realise it would get the director where I work worked up. He didn’t notice the visual gag but remarked about how the Communists (in this case the Khmer Rouge) had killed so many million people, and that the hammer was something Cambodians had been bashed about the head with and the sickle was something used to slash their throats. He said it with a smile on his face (he says everything with a smile on his face), but I wasn’t going to get into a discussion about how Pol Pot was a loony before a Communist and he wasn’t even on the T-shirt – I took it off and changed into the only other T-shirt I had on me. That was for the Angkor What Bar and had ‘promoting irresponsible drinking since 1998’ on the back, which didn’t seem to bother anybody.