Sights

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
8:15 PM ICT
Seat 12C, Bangkok Airways Flight 693
Somewhere over Phnom Penh

As the plane leaves the ground, and I leave the country I have called home (and called ‘very weird’) for nearly four weeks of my young life, I find myself becoming pensive, wistful, and perhaps a little excessively loquacious. And as I consider this electronic log I have been keeping, I cannot quite shake the feeling I have in some way failed to capture on these virtual pages the true essence of this country… the day-to-day of Cambodia. And so, to remedy this, I present a list of things I saw today while wandering Phnom Penh; and through this I hope to capture something about the country and the culture. My walk was unspectacular, uneventful, these things I list are everyday occurrences in this city, nothing spectacular.

Today, I saw:

• Five identical cell phone card shops, all the same chain (a monopoly in Cambodia), in a row.
• Two monks with shaved heads, wearing the traditional bright saffron robes, buying cellphone cards at one of these stores.
• Cute small children, wearing rags and begging.
• Several old men and women, horrifically burned and missing limbs thanks to landmines, also begging.
• An effeminate Cambodian street-side barber apparently checking me out. (There’s actually a lot of barbers on the sidewalks of Phnom Penh, and, coincidentally, a lot of human hair on the sidewalks of Phnom Penh.)
• A fat sweaty white tourist, who, while having a small Cambodian child polish his sandals for a couple thousand riel (about 50 cents), was yelling at the wait staff at the restaurant he (and, unfortunately, I) was eating; and all the while pretty much ignoring the sad, pretty, heavily made-up, and very young Cambodian woman who was sitting across from him.
• An item on the breakfast menu at the same restaurant called a ‘western omlet’, which was an omlette with either bacon OR sausage OR cheese.
• A market stall selling cut-up fruit to snack on, with one employee searching through the display of papayas to pull out all the ones with particularly large mouldy spots.
• A market stall selling touristy stuff (carvings, silks, handbags), right next to another market stall, set up almost identically, but selling car parts.
• A whole street where every single shop had a giant display full of durian fruit – outside the store.
• A cop, hassling an old lady who owned a fruit stall, almost certainly for a bribe.
• Many people pushing carts full of slowly-cooking sea snails on an open fire.
• Another open fire, this one blazing nicely on someone’s front lawn.
• A huge, bright, shiny building (one of the most expensive in the city) labeled ‘Ministry of Taxes’ (expensiveness of government ministry buildings is directly proportional to the level of corrupt power of said ministry).
• Many men, in order to cool off, pulling up their shirts and exposing their bellies (that’s just what the men do here, especially if they’re sweaty, fat, or old… few are hairy here).
• One man, approximately 45 and 10kg overweight, pulling up his shirt to cool off, and unintentionally revealing a back full of deep and ancient scars, clearly a result of the Khmer Rouge.
• A small statue of a Hindu asura (demon) that looked to be an actual 700 year old statue, sitting on public property, at the edge of a pool of garbage-filled stagnant water.
• A public park (mentioned in a previous post), with kids playing and food vendors selling barbecued miscellanea, that has, at the centre, Wat Phnom, a large temple that was built in the year 1373.
• A giant, shiny, 12-story glass office building being built, using scaffolding made of thin, and incredibly crooked, lengths of wood.
• A counter over top all the traffic lights at major intersections that counts down the number of seconds left until the light changes; which really only makes has the effect that, around 10 seconds left, everyone collectively gets impatient and starts moving out into traffic.
• A tuk tuk driver I owed $5 (a huge amount), agreeing that, because I was temporarily out of cash, I could leave without paying, and pay him later when I had change (which I did).
• A desk at the airport where, in what seems to be an incredibly institutionalized form of bribery, foreigners must pay $25 in order to leave the country.
• A security person at the airport, who, instead of being an unsmiling jackass, actually chatted with me for a good minute or so about whether or not I liked my time in Cambodia, and when, if ever, I was coming back. I smiled, and told him truthfully that I hope to come back as soon as possible.

East vs. West

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
6:36 PM ICT
Bangkok Airways Passenger Lounge, Phnom Penh International Airport
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

For a second, I want to discuss the selection of free food available at the Bangkok Airways Passenger Lounge at the Phnom Penh International Airport; and in doing so, I hope to shed some light on the prevailing cultural differences between East and West. You see, the lounge must cater to all passengers, no matter what compass point they hail from. And so:

In terms of drinks, nothing spectacular: tea, coffee, water, mystery fruit juice. All relatively culturally neutral. In terms of food, we have a selection of four items. The first two are similarly neutral: cake (everyone loves cake) and chocolate croissants (Cambodia’s history of French colonization means the croissant is well-established). So far, so good. It is in the final two items that the crux of my argument lies.

First, for the Easterners: wrapped in a banana leaf comes some form of dumpling thing. Outer shell is somewhat shiny, somewhat sticky, may have at one point been rice… or potentially noodle. Congealed, green-ish. A few oddly-textured black beans are stuck to the thing. Inside, some form of bean paste. Ever so slightly sweet, even perhaps slight bitterness. Very subtle, very strange flavor.

And representing the West, sausage rolls.

So do you want your bread perfectly square and infused with coconut… or would you prefer it deep-fried?

Poverty, corruption, and greed in Cambodia

Tuesday, August 26, 2008
8:59 PM ICT
Equinox Restaurant
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

***This is another post I've been writing for a little while, and an issue I've been thinking about basically since the moment I got to Cambodia. The post remains a little rough, and probably not as well thought-through as it should be, but whatever.


I think I’ve mentioned at some point that I planned to do a blog post about this, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while anyway… the issue, not the blog post. It should be noted that I’m writing this post while sitting in a restaurant that in Canada where a drink would probably cost 6 bucks each; but I’m drinking a pint of beer that cost $1.25 and I just ordered a sicilian pizza that costs $4.00. So in a way, if I say a civil servant here gets $40 per month, that figure can’t be considered in Canadian terms. Salaries must be considered in terms of cost of living is basically what I’m saying. That being said, when I say a civil servant’s monthly salary is $40, you must also remember that it’s been determined that a living wage would be $110 – so difference in cost of living only accounts for part of the difference in wages.

(Another way to think about it, and a bit closer to my area of expertise: One study comparing Canadian and Cambodian beer girls four that beer girls working in Canada made an average of $846.10 per month, while beer girls in Cambodia made an average of $58.30. They’re making a lot less, but they also need less per month: Canadian beer girls reported needing $433.62 every month, while Cambodian beer girls only needed $119.79. The problem is this: the Canadian beer girls, though they had higher expenses, made 267% of what they needed, but Cambodian beer girls only made 48.7%... it’s not how much they make, it’s how it compares to what they need. And it compares shittily.)

(Also, while most things are cheaper in Cambodia, not everything is. Anything produced outside the country remains expensive. So a meal at a nice Cambodian restaurant is 4 dollars, but a meal at a McDonald's is still closer to 6, and a bag of Doritos is still 2.50. That doesn't matter so much, but the fact that gas is the same price in Cambodia as it is in Canada does matter; and it also matters when Cambodian businesses try and compete on an international level.)

I should also mention that this post may sound vaguely like a left-wing rant. I should also mention I talk about economics, and use phrases like ‘GDP,’ ‘trickle-down effect,’ and ‘macro-level factors’ in this post. I also probably use the word ‘fuck’ somewhere.

Now, let’s consider the implications of the low civil servant salaries for a second. I want to do this because, even though civil servants are only one group facing economic difficulties in Cambodia, and though they’re not the group I know the most about; they are people like teachers, policemen, and judges. So if there’s a problem for them, it becomes a problem for the rest of the country. And the name of that problem is corruption. It is commonplace for teachers to charge extra fees to their students for ‘tutoring,’ for police to do random checks and to accuse people of imaginary crimes. The criminal justice system is a joke, because even the most serious criminal charges can be (and have been) dealt with, with a bribe to a judge (past examples of this have included a pedophile sex tourist who was arrested in Cambodia, but paid a judge $1000 and got off scot free). This is not corruption out of greed or malevolence, it is subsistence corruption. When you talk to Cambodians about government corruption – and people, including government officials, are willing to talk about it quite openly – no one blames those who demand or take bribes; it’s simply how they survive. But not only that; it actually allows the salaries to stay low, because it’s known that the money will be made up through bribes (sort of the same way the minimum wage for waiters is lower because they get tips, except that this destroys the rule of law and any chance of accountable social services).

(A side anecdote: Dr. Beat Richener, the founder of the Kantha Bopha hospital I talked about in a previous post, knew that, in founding his hospital, it was essential there be no corruption. So, he made the base salary at the hospital $250/month. And by base salary, I mean that’s what the custodial staff make. In a country where police make $40. And guess what? No damn corruption. Pay people enough, and they generally won’t often choose to be evil.)

But the low civil servant wages also have other consequences. For example, the beer companies, who pay the beer girls I have been doing work with, can brag about their high salaries (normally starting at $45, then increasing to $55 a month). So even though they provide only around half of what the women need to survive, they can legitimately claim they’re giving high wages! (And also, unlike civil servants, who have a degree of power that they can use in order to get bribes, the beer girls have no power, and so are forced to find other means of making up the difference, like selling sex.)

So who benefits from such a system? Well, clearly, those in power who are allowed to pay these obscenely low wages. In this country, that starts with the great prime minister Hun Sen – who has the unique distinction of being a member of the Khmer Rouge that terrorized Cambodia in the 70s, the Vietnamese forces that occupied Cambodia in the 80s, and being the prime minister ever since 1997 (when he staged a bloody coup, but since then he's been reelected twice, most recently earlier this year). Hun Sen is a key figure in this because he bridges the two groups that benefit. The first is high-up members of the government, who squander domestic resources and foreign aid and line their coffers in forms of corruption that could never be considered subsistence corruption. And the second group are foreigners who own businesses in Cambodia (Hun Sen fits this group because he’s been accused of slowly been selling Cambodia off to foreign multinationals). It is these companies (beer companies included) who are benefitting from poor Cambodians. That’s right, not only are the poor getting poorer in Cambodia, the rich are not getting richer, because there are no rich Cambodians, because everything is foreign-owned (hotels, for example, are largely owned by the Chinese and Vietnamese; and the genocide museum, housed on the site where thousands were tortured and died under the Khmer Rouge, was recently sold to a for-profit Japanese company).

I rarely root for the rich, but at the very least, as the rich get richer, there would be a trickle-down effect. Now I’m normally suspicious of trickle-down, but it’s real in Cambodia, for one reason: the $40 per month salary for civil servants was determined based on the country’s GDP (makes sense; taxes pay their salaries). So if there’s more Cambodian business, and more Cambodian profit, Cambodian salaries go up; and a new cycle is formed.

And this is what needs to happen. As Cambodia has entered the world market and tourists have flooded the country, cost-of-living is slowly increasing. My driver in Siem Reap (a very sharp guy who can talk about Cambodia’s social troubles for hours if you give him the chance) pointed out to me a new condo development that’s going up where the units will cost $200 000 each. He pointed to it with pride, as evidence of Siem Reap ‘on the go’, but also with a fair degree of consternation, aware that everything is getting more expensive, and soon, the 80% of Siem Reap’s inhabitants who live below the poverty line will be left without options.

But there’s a whole other set of problems associated with Cambodia’s rapid expansion… not micro-level expansion like new condos, but macro-level factors. Cambodia was reintroduced to the world stage in 1993, and changed in the space of 15 years from post-genocide borderline-agricultural society to tourism destination and free market economy. It’s not only that people can’t pay for their dinner; it’s that they’re being forced into a way of life entirely foreign to them within a very short period of time. Society needs time to evolve of its own accord; it can’t simply have such dramatic change forced upon it. When they’re feeling generous, foreigners comment on Cambodians as ‘relaxed’ and ‘easy-going’, but when they’re feeling capitalist and cynical, the words ‘lazy’ and ‘unambitious’ seem more to apply. These are people without capitalist minds being forced into capitalism hyperdrive.

And this is where my comments about the fishers and farmers in the countryside come from. They are living in unimaginable poverty, but, in general, I don’t feel sorry for them. Sure, I feel sorry for them if they need medical care they can’t afford, if the fields or the rivers become barren and they can’t buy food to survive, if natural disasters strike and they’re not prepared. But I don’t think that in general more money will make their lives better. They simply live outside the market system. This is what they’ve always done, and just because the UN came here in 1993 and brought McDonald’s, doesn’t mean they need to change.

And, going back to what I was saying in my ‘Phnom Penh – first impressions’ post, it’s not even simply that the people don’t have the resources to adapt, as evidenced by Phnom Penh’s rapid adaptation, it’s that government initiatives (welcome back Hun Sen) that could aid in this transition, fail to make it to the provinces. Those outside the large cities (and in general, anyone outside Phnom Penh), who are those who need to make the biggest adaption, are given the least support.

Goddamn this beautiful amazing country!

Alive and well

Wednesday, August 27, 2008
10:10 PM ICT
Tate Cafe, Suvarnabhumi Airport
Bangkok, Thailand

Hey I've been writing other stuff and that will get posted soon, but right now I'm on a crappy wireless connection in Bangkok Airport with limited battery life, so I just wanted to do a quick post to address something:

There's been news on CNN recently about riots in Bangkok that turned violent, and I thought I should just quickly say I'm fine. (You know that thing where you hear about some terrible international news, and you think of someone you know who's within 1000km of there, and you automatically assume they were killed?)

I am in Bangkok, but I only got in an hour ago or so, by plane, and I'm still in the airport, and I will be until my flight leaves tomorrow (about 10 hrs from now). As I understand, the rioting is at some government building, and not city-wide, and not likely to spill over to the airport. I'm fine. Bored, but fine.

See you all shortly!

PS: I also didn't die in the floods in Vietnam a couple weeks ago, or when that guy was knifed at the Olympics in Beijing. I assume you were all killed in the gas explosion in Toronto? Then who am I writing this for?

More fauna

Monday, August 25, 2008
6:36PM ICT
Angkor Phnom park
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

Hmm, third post today and I have yet to mention anything I've actually done today. Let's fix that.

This is the elephant that I rode today:

This is the monkey that bared its teeth at me today (though it may have been yawning... or pooping):

This all occurred in a park in the middle of Phnom Penh. And that’s really all you need to know about today. Also went to some temples and saw a solid gold Buddha that weighed 90kg and is covered with over 2000 diamonds, but fuck that... Monkeys and elephants!

Coooool!!!!

Post-Khmer Rouge

Monday, August 25, 2008
6:27 PM ICT
Room 29, Golden Sun Guest House
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

Early on in thinking about this blog, I decided I wouldn’t talk about one subject: the Khmer Rouge. The years of 1975 to 1979 were simply too destructive, too horrific, and far too present in the minds of Cambodians, and I simply think the blog format is not one respectful enough to confront the topic.

But I did give mention to it in the last post, and it’s simply too important a topic in this city not to discuss, if only briefly.

If Siem Reap is a city obsessed with the Khmer dynasty and the Angkorian temples they built, Phnom Penh is a city obsessed with the Khmer Rouge. The genocide museum and the killing fields are two of the top ‘tourist attractions’ in the city. Probably every social, political, or economic problem in the country today has some kind of roots in those terrible four years. Every single Cambodian you meet who’s over 35 has permanent scarring (mental and often physical) from those terrible years. And that’s all I’m going to say on the topic.

Phnom Penh – first impressions

Monday, August 25, 2008
5:11 PM ICT
Room 29, Golden Sun Guest House
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

I just realized that I’ve been in Phnom Penh almost four days now, and have yet to say anything about it. Also, it’s way too hot out and I spent the day sweating, so I’ll sit in the AC and blog.

Phnom Penh, compared to Siem Reap, is bigger, louder, dirtier (in places), much much cleaner (in other places), more Western, and much much richer. There’s a sense in Siem Reap (and, from my brief view of it, Battambang as well) of being removed, certainly from the Western world, but also from anything apart from it. It’s less of a city-in-a-country, and more of a lone village, the way much of the world would have been organized in an earlier era. City-states, tribal villages, nomadic tribes, that kind of feel. But no such feel exists in Phnom Penh. You’re clearly in a city-in-a-country, and not only that, but a capital city, a city-in-control-of-a-country. There is evidence of this in the size of the city (population is now over 1 million, which is huge here) and in the variety in the city (there’s actually separate industrial, residential, and commercial areas that are far away from each other). It’s also in the number of beautiful ornate temple-like government buildings, evidence of the rampant corruption in the Cambodian government. (Warning, this is a link to a dry US government report, but damnit, it’s an interesting dry US government report!) And it’s also in the embassies, which all have a fortress-like quality that attest the constant instability of the Cambodian political situation (at least one embassy – the French embassy – has actually become a battleground during at least one time of political upheaval – the rise of the Khmer Rouge).

Phnom Penh is not only a city-in-a-country, it’s also clearly a city-in-the-World. The influence of the West is everywhere, as billboards for KFC cover the walls around the construction sites where skyscrapers and casinos are going up. Unlike Siem Reap, the conversion to a market economy is almost complete (though, when we asked him to take us around the city, our tuk tuk driver still took us to the American-style shopping mall as a point of pride for Phnom Penh). When we went to the bar, it was last summer’s top-40s playing, as opposed to the stuck-in-the-80s selection in Siem Reap (and similar could be said of fashion). Phnom Penh is also a much more tourist-centred town. Almost all public employees speak passable English, the waterfront has been redeveloped to house a series of bistros and restaurants serving burgers and fajitas. It’s somewhat surprising, really, because it’s Siem Reap that really has a 90% tourism-based economy, while Phnom Penh has a much more diverse base (there’s a consistent pattern in Cambodia of any government initiative, be it economic development, traffic laws, or HIV/AIDS prevention programs, never making it out past the capital city’s border).

Phnom Pehn, crawling with tourists at dusk.

One tourist on a boat, in front of the Phnom Penh waterfront, shortly after nightfall.

It’s also somewhat frustrating, really, because the town is so tourist-y it becomes difficult to have an ‘authentic’ Cambodian experience. There’s no need to ever use the few Khmer words I've picked up, because everyone speaks English; and I never worry about doing some hand gesture that might offend a local, because all the locals have so much experience with westerners that they’re doing the same hand gestures themselves. The streets are in fact specifically designed to make it hard to find the areas where local, non-tourist-serving Cambodians are (it took me and Natalie accidentally wandering down a side street, through a temple courtyard, and down an alleyway to find a marketplace where Cambodians actually shop). You find yourself migrating to Western food restaurants, not because you want to, but because it’s hard to find anything else (a small obligatory ‘Khmer food’ section at the back of every menu and featuring the same five dishes notwithstanding). Even balut is hard to find in Phnom Penh!

However, I must admit that, despite myself, I do occasionally find it a relief to be able to find French fries that taste like French fries, or to be able to ask for a fork without restoring to a five-minute pantomime. I just sometimes wish the restaurant down the street didn’t have poutine on the menu.

Flora and fauna

Sunday, August 24, 2008
1:34 AM ICT
Room 29, Golden Sun Guest House
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

I just re-read my post on the boat trip, and realized that I kind of forgot to mention the natural beauty. Seems to be a pattern on this blog: I focus on people, on poverty, social issues, and nearly dying, while generally failing to mention anything about the plant and animal life. So, to briefly correct that, tropical plants are awesome... can't say much more, because I can't identify species, but lots of interesting vines, bizarre trees with winding trunks, and coconut trees that grow everywhere and actually produce edible coconuts (the hotel I stayed in Siem Reap picked coconuts from the decorative trees in the parking lot to use in their cooking). There are geckos everywhere, often indoors - they're similarly common to, I dunno, dragonflies in Canada. Also there's lots of chickens around, apparently wild, just hanging around. There were monkeys at the temples. I've seen elephants, but they're Asian elephants and are really disappointingly small.... I still want to go for an elephant ride, tho.

Anyway, some pictures:

Rooster, chillaxing outside a clothing store in downtown Phnom Penh.

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A gecko, blending into the scenery at Bayon temple. They do the same thing on the walls of hotels and restaurants.

Somewhere I have some pictures of monkeys. But I can’t find them. So here’s a picture of some dogs at Bayon temple. (Aww, puppy!!) This country has a lot of random dogs, not apparently belonging to anyone, but looking pretty healthy, and surprisingly quiet and well-behaved.

A whole bunch of tropical plants on the water, all with roots on the sea floor.

Very cool selection of tropical plants by the riverside.

Tree near Angkor Wat. It’s hard to see from this tree, but this particular species seems to die in sections, so you’ll see a tree where the bottom half of the leaves are dead and drooped over, but the top is green and perky.


A tree at Bayon temple.

And, of course, the incredible trees with spider-web-like trunks that are invading Ta Promh.

Dancing lessons from god

Saturday, August 23, 2008

1:59 AM ICT

Room 29, Golden Sun Guest House

Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

It was such a simple plan, really. Me and Natalie both wanted to get from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, and Dave (Natalie’s boyfriend, who recently joined us, and who has his own organization doing work in Cambodia) had a work-related meeting in Battambang. So we decided to take a boat to Battambang, then a bus to Phnom Penh later the same day. Get the scenic and the speedy, and see a bit of a new city.

Now the case of the Siem Reap – Battambang boat trip is an interesting one. Both myself and Natalie had heard good things, but Lonely Planet remained… cryptic. Despite seeming to recommend the trip, the guide spends a lot of time complaining about how expensive it is, and how you’ll simultaneously freeze and get sunburned. But whatever, we figured it would be an experience, at the very least. So Thursday morning, the shuttle bus that takes people to the boat to Battambang left our hotel at 6:15am, and we figured we’d be in Phnom Penh by 6pm the same day. But it’s now Friday, and we only got to the guest house (somewhere between a hostel and hotel, very popular for travelers in Cambodia) around 12:30pm. How did we go so wrong?

Now besides the other things it says about the trip, Lonely Planet also places the length of the trip, somewhat cryptically, at “three to eight hours long.” They explain that during the dry season, water levels are low and the boat has to waste a lot of time looking for deep enough water and slogging through mud. But the rainy season lasts May to October, so we figured it would be in the 3 hour range.

Since the boat left at 7:15am and only arrived at Battambang at 2:45pm, I believe that places the trip in the 7.5 hour range, and for those keeping track, 7.5 is closer to 8 than it is to 3.

And of course, after getting in, Dave had 2 hours of meetings, and the last bus from Battambang to Phnom Penh had already left at 2pm anyway, and we were sick and tired of sitting and travelling, so we spent the night in Battambang. Then this morning we took a taxi (a Toyota Camry with driver… every car here is a Toyota Camry) to Phnom Penh, and then Dave had another meeting that we tagged along to, and hence only got to the guest house arrived 12:30pm.

I suppose there were warning flags (which, I’m slowly realizing, are among the most popular types of flags in Cambodia) that the boat trip might be problematic. The first was the boat itself, which was probably 30 years old, if not more, and almost certainly had its original motor. It was long and thin, featuring two rows of hard wooden benches facing each other, and (thank merciful god) a roof. It was designed to hold maybe 15 people and some bags. We had 5 or 6 crew, a rotating roster of locals hitching rides, and 18 passengers, each with luggage enough to support a multi-week trip to Cambodia. The banister, which, from inside the boat, hit around your upper back, was maybe a foot out of the water, max. The boat also seemed dangerously close to tipping over anytime anyone moved. It is my growing contention that you cannot (or at the very least should not) travel within Cambodia without coming face-to-face with your own mortality at least once every… three days.

The official flag of Cambodia. Rank popularity among flags in Cambodia: 1st (tied).

Now without a doubt, the trip was incredible, in many ways. The sense of imminent doom was bad, the fact our boat broke down for 20 minutes in the middle of mosquito-infested nowhere was bad, the painful hardwood seats were bad, the fact we were squished together like sardines was bad, the fact the trip lasted 7.5 hours despite our relatively brisk pace was bad, but the rest of the trip was awesome, I swear!

First, the trip took me to areas of Cambodia I would have never seen otherwise. Rural Cambodia. Poverty even worse than in the city, but it’s not the same kind of poverty. It’s not poverty living in a capitalist city, it’s poverty living what is basically a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They’re fishers. Every day, they go out on the river in homemade canoes (some with motors, many without) and fish and gather fruits and vegetables that grow naturally. And to say they go out on the river is a bit silly, because they live on the river. Not in houses at the river, they live on the river. Floating villages. Houseboats, basically. Houses (again, homemade) on bamboo platforms, tied to empty oil barrels, then anchored to the sea floor. They do it because every year, during the rainy season, the river expands to several times its dry season size (and depth), and they would die otherwise. (This is as opposed to the strategy of the city dwellers who live near the river, who, in an effort to stay at road level, design for their houses a series of stilts made of unsupported, uneven, and generally not entirely straight, tree branches.) I hate to seem like I’m romanticizing such poverty, but for them it’s not a lack of wealth, it’s a removal from the wealth system. Does that make sense? (This makes sense in my head, but it might require a blog post of its own to fully explain.Man, even when I'm a tourist in Cambodia I wind up talking about poverty and social ills!)

Fisher, in high-tech fishing vehicle.

It’s kind of hard to see from the picture, but this is actually in the middle of a river, and all of these houses are floating (and all the trees have their roots underwater.)

Similar are the farmers who live further along the river. They have houses on land (though the houses are often made of little more than twigs, bamboo, and mud). And again, they live off the land, growing rice and other crops, generally using an ox to power their carts. I think much of it is sustenance farming, and the rest are family farms. This isn’t to say there aren’t corporate rice farms (there are, and a lot of them) but these are something entirely separate, something that completely doesn’t exist in Canada.

I swear to fucking god this picture was taken yesterday and not eight hundred years ago, and those are *seven* actual people living in that house (perhaps more).

Sustenance farmer kids! The kids seem to love the boat. Much time during the trip is spent waving to children on the shore. Much fun.

Second fun thing about the boat trip, and probably most dramatic, was an incredible section of the ride right in the middle. You see, most of the time, the boat is heading down a wide wide river. Most of the river is covered in floating vegetation and floating villages. But, there has been cleared a section in the middle probably 20 or 30 metres wide; like a highway down the middle of the river. But this particular boat has a route that passes through protected nature areas. And apparently in Cambodia, it’s fine for large motorboats to travel through protected nature areas at high speeds, as long as their route isn’t too wide. And too wide is any wider than the boat. The boat is literally brushing up against weeds on either side. And that’s fine (except when 2 boats need to pass, which happened once during our trip). What’s less fine are the trees. Because trees are essentially the shape of an inverted pyramid. So even if the tree won’t interfere with the boat at water level, there will be branches that interfere higher up… say, at the level of your neck. Moving at 30 or 40 km/hr. A sharp tree branch, protruding into the boat.

Seriously, boat width.

The solution, and it’s a rather genius one in how simple and effective it is, is a bright red curtain made of a light tarp that can be pulled down over the openings at the side of the boat. It creates an amazing effect in the boat, as you’re in a bright red cocoon, with branches and leaves and plants whipping and scratching along the outside of the tarp (what’s less fun is the part of the tarp that wasn’t secured at the bottom, and would flap in the wind, occasionally allowing a persistent and sharp branch in to attack the Spanish woman unfortunate enough to sit in front of it.) Still quite exciting, and a damn lot of fun.

View from inside the red cocoon. Also a view of Dave and Natalie, my partners-in-travel.

And finally, and I suppose this originates from the (in many ways) terribleness of the trip: the sense of community. I’ve felt this before, in overcrowded buses (or, once, a crashed bus), in classes with terrible profs, during huge storms. It’s a unique sense of group belonging that seems to only develop out of collectively surviving a horrible experience. You know, lots of joking, knowing looks, extra support for those not handling the situation well, getting excited if you see them out in the ‘real world’… But seriously, the trip wasn’t horrible… for the most part.

PS: Five points to the first person who can identify the source of the title of this post, sans google.

The weird foods post

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
10:46 PM ICT
Room 228, Salina Hotel
Siem Reap, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

I suppose we all knew this was coming. At some point, in going to a foreign country, everyone winds up eating some weird ass food, then either telling people about it later, or, for those tech-savvy 21st century travelers, they blog about it.

And generally, my trip’s actually been pretty disappointing on the weird foods front. I had heard such exotic tales, of insect eating, a dish called still-beating cobra heart, and, of course, balut. (PS: best balut reaction video ever here.) Balut is everywhere here (though I have not yet summoned up the particular combination of alcohol and testicular fortitude required to eat such a thing), but other than that, the food seems pretty normal. I mean Asian normal – curries, stir-fries, rice, soy sauce, a very strong Cambodian fish sauce called prahoc, lots of lemongrass, lots of amazing tropical fruit shakes.

Tonight was a bit different. It’s our last night in Siem Reap, so we went out for dinner with Kris, who runs the NGO from the administrative side. Kris is awesome… very quiet, but very funny, very sharp, incredibly organized. If it weren’t for her, the NGO would fall apart in a matter of days. Previous experience looking at what she eats for lunch threw up warning bells about her food choices, but it’s our last night and we wanted Khmer food and she knew where to find it.

Now a quick note: we had a fair bit of experience with Khmer food, but it mostly fell into 2 categories: either tourist-catering restaurant Khmer food (which tones down some dishes and ditches others) and street food (which normally keeps it simple: fried rice or noodles with veg and meat, and maybe a fruit shake). The restaurant we went to was a bit different.

Me and Natalie arrived before Kris and notice that not only is the patronage entirely Khmer, but the menu is too – a good sign. Aside from the names of Western beers, there is not one word of English on the menu. After a slightly tense 45-minute wait, Kris does show, and we let her order for us (we have little other option). She ordered 4 dishes. Dish 1 was French fries – I think partially as a joke, partially because of the other food that was coming. Like many Cambodian French fries (I’ve now had 3 or 4 experiences) they were shoestring fries, fried until crispy throughout, and served with a too-sweet homemade ketchup. Good, tho. Next dish was some kind of stir-fried chicken thing that was pretty good.

Dish 3 was where it got a bit odd. She described it as ‘beef’; a more accurate name would be ‘raw fermented beef salad’. Food is always a bit sketchy in Cambodia, but there’s a couple things you never eat unless you’re absolutely sure: first is uncooked vegetables, because they are likely washed in the disease-ridden Cambodian tap water. Second thing you need to be very very careful with is meat, because meat has diseases, obviously – and you NEVER GODDAMN EAT IT RAW, EVER. And the final thing you never eat without knowing for absolute sure – not just in Cambodia, but this is a good everywhere rule – is fermented stuff. Because you know other process bears a striking resemblance to the fermentation process? The rotting process. So that dish was a bit iffy.

Then there’s Dish 4. Continuing her streak of understatement, Kris referred to this dish as ‘chicken soup’. And it was chicken soup, a bit unfamiliarly flavoured, and the whole, oddly-shaped potato in it was a bit off-putting. But what I’m writing about is the rest of the soup, which would be charitably referred to as ‘chicken meat’, though there seemed to be a deliberate attempt to avoid any part of the chicken that westerners would refer to as ‘meat’. There were chicken feet, liver, some bits filled with shatters of bone like tiny shrapnel (damnit, Landmine Museum on the brain again!). Then there was this… thing, that I ate. It was rubbery and black and really weirdly shaped. Kris, who has ordered this dish before, when I asked her what it was, simply shrugged. We decided, in the end, it was an inside-out lung.

And I hate to say something so stereotypical, but you know what? It tasted kind of like chicken.

Sidenote: yes, I know I previously mentioned struggling with diarrhea and now I’m discussing eating fermented meat, but you know… shut up.

Second sidenote: yes, I did have some of the fermented beef salad. Not bad. It did not taste like chicken.

The Cambodia Land Mine Museum

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
10:03 PM ICT
The Cambodia Land Mine Museum
32km outside Siem Reap, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

Today, I visited the Cambodia Land Mine Museum, a small but amazing museum about Cambodia’s dark history of landmines. The wars of the twentieth century that ravaged Cambodia continue to affect Cambodian life in many ways. But among the worst of the reminders of war are landmines. Cambodia is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. The mines come from the Khmer Rouge, who primarily laid them along the Vietnamese border, to help prevent an attack from the Vietnamese (who were raging a separate war with Cambodia throughout the 70s). But the mines also come from the Vietnamese themselves, from the Soviets, and, of course, from the Americans. American planes dropped thousands and thousands of landmines over the countryside. Many of the mines are about the size and shape of a large hockey puck – easily disguised in tall grass, in the water in Cambodia’s many many rice paddies, or even mistaken as toys by Cambodian children.

It is estimated that, even today, there are somewhere between 3 and 6 million active landmines around (of course, there are no official records of how many or where they are). You do see landmine victims around a lot – the NGO where I’ve been working is right near a physical disability rehabilitation centre, and you see quite a few people – adults and children – missing limbs, scarred from old burns.

The Land Mine Museum itself – besides documenting the tragedy of landmines – is perhaps most impressive for its founder, a Khmer man named Aki Ra. Aki Ra was a child solider with the Khmer Rouge. He learned to shoot a gun at age 5, before he could read. He worked for the Khmer Rouge, then for the Vietnamese when they took power, then for the Cambodian army, working as a miner – laying mines. At some point, though, he realized the error of his ways, and since the mid 90s, has been working tirelessly to clear landmines, often using little more than a shovel, a screwdriver, and a long tree branch. He has since worked with UN agencies and NGOs, helping them with his considerable experience both laying and clearing landmines. He estimates that he has likely cleared over 50 000 landmines over the years.

The museum, besides a lot of very interesting information and pictures of Aki Ra at work, is full of diffused landmines - literally thousands of them, in addition to heaps of other military implements – mortars, giant guns, even Khmer Rouge uniforms. And the museum also operates as a school for two dozen disadvantaged Cambodian children. And they do outreach to teach Cambodian people how to recognize mines, and what to do if they see one.

As an added bonus, the museum (slash school slash outreach centre) is funded through a Canadian NGO (woo Canada!) called The Cambodia Land Mine Museum Relief Fund. It seems to be about as worthwhile a cause as you could find.

Four smiling beautiful faces

August 20, 2008
12:11am ICT
Angkor
near Siem Reap, Siem Reap Province, Cambodia

How many World Heritage Sites have you visited today?

Because for me it’s one. Angkor is the general name given to the hundreds (literally) of Buddhist and Hindu temples scattered around Cambodia, all built between the 10th and 15th centuries by the Khmer empire. This was the height of Cambodian culture, and the temples remain the dominant point of pride for Cambodians – it’s in the souvenir shops, it’s on the money, it’s on the flag for God’s sake! Of course, though great in their time, many of the temples were essentially lost for a good 500 years, until being rediscovered by the French when they colonized Cambodia, and though the temples are made of sandstone, some of them are showing their age.

This is the first and last photo with me in it – because shortly after this photo was taken, I became an unphotographable ball of sweat.

The central, most famous temple is Angkor Wat. This is the big one. It’s over 50m tall, and is surrounded by a 4km long moat. To enter is, you walk along a long stone path over the water, then you come to a huge building. However, you quickly realize the building is only 1 room deep, and is, in fact, merely the gateway to another long stone path, then the actual temple. Then, two floors up, there is a large rooftop area with five giant towers.

This tower starts on the third floor - yeah, it's big.

And everywhere are statues, beautiful complex carvings along almost every single surface, interesting shrines throughout, and lots of strange nooks and crannies to explore. It’s hard to explain Angkor Wat, except with superlatives – it’s the biggest, most detailed, most ostentatious, most badass Hindu temple you’ll ever see.

An example of intricately-detailed wall carving…

…and it continues all along this wall.

Next I went to Bayon, the central temple in the walled city of Angkor Thom. Angkor Thom, at one point many moons past, was the capital of Cambodia – a mecca of art and culture and religion. It’s still filled with temples in various stages of disrepair – some just crumbled piles of rock, others, like Bayon, much more put together. Bayon is odd though, because approaching it, it doesn’t looks like much more than a big pile of rocks. It’s only once you get inside that you find the complex network of corridors and tall tall rooms, each with an open roof to allow for a thin shaft of light to enter. The temple works on about 3 levels, though each level meanders up and down, and the design is open-concept enough that you can often jump down from a room into the hallway below. Bayon is also slightly falling apart (more so than Angkor Wat, which is immaculately preserved, but still relatively in one piece).

Bayon: It kind of looks crappy from far away.

The fact it’s in an early stage of decay is actually what makes it my favorite (of the limited parts I’ve seen). You’ll be walking down a corridor, the walls covered in detailed carving depicting hundreds of men and elephants riding off to battle, then you turn a corner and it’s a messy pile of stones – and often the stones still have a face covered in detailed carvings of a different scene, long since fallen apart.

The temple’s slightly dilapidated nature also brings up one of the oddities of Angkor – you can go anywhere. There are a couple areas roped off because they’re doing restoration work, and the highest tower at Angkor Wat has been roped off since some tourists fell down a few months ago, but other than that, tourists have free reign. The most there will be is an occasional sign (and I mean occasional – maybe a half dozen signs total in all of Bayon) saying ‘Climb at own risk’ or ‘Do not touch’. Maybe 2 staff per temple to keep an eye on things. I saw a particularly adventurous tourist walking around Angkor Wat, by use of a 5-inch wide ledge that runs the way around the building. It's a great sense of freedom, and very very fun.


But, the big thing that makes Bayon famous are the giant smiling Buddha faces that adorn the towers on top of Bayon. Each tower has four faces – one in each direction – and right now that totals 36 faces (I believe), though apparently it was over 200 at one point. Several of the faces are over 3m tall, and many are close enough (when standing on the roof) to reach out and touch (and of course, even though they’re eight hundred years old, you can reach out and touch, because as stated previously, no rules.)

The final temple I saw on my woefully short trip to Angkor (you can buy a weeklong pass to Angkor – and people often do) was the temple Ta Prohm. Now I mentioned Angkor Wat was carefully tended, and Bayon looked a little rough around the edges. When efforts were being made to restore the temples, someone – a genius, likely – had the idea to not restore Ta Prohm – to allow the symbiotic relationship between temple and nature to continue unabated. It’s a nice temple, don’t get me wrong, but what’s truly stunning are the trees slowly enveloping the structure.

I want you to stare at this picture for a minute, then think how rare it is to see a tree forced to adapt and change shape to fit the building around it. I want you to consider that many trees in this area are over 200 years old, and how old this building truly is.

It blows my mind.

Box art

I just remembered one of the fun side-effects of my digestive problems: So I've been taking an Immodium-like medicine called, subtly, Gastro-Stop (don't worry, it's not some weird Cambodian brand... it's a weird Australian brand that Natalie, the girl I'm working with, gave me).

Anyway, what's bloggable about it is the cover art. I'm posting a picture, and I'd just like you to consider, based on the fact that it's an anti-diarrhea medication, what is this picutre supposed to represent? It's like a surrealist representation of digestive problems... my digestive problems make me feel like a fried egg that glows blue.