Quite Random

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.

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.