2009-2012 - A South-East Asian Odyssey

Photos: A society wedding & KL trip

fimc — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:45:00 GMT

Happy new year (again)

fimc — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:41:00 GMT

See the gallery A society wedding & KL trip for photos from this post.

Happy new year! April is here which means three things – the ASEAN summit, hot season and Khmer new year (our third new year in three months: the 'international' one in January, the Chinese one in February, and now the regional one, also new year in Thailand, Laos and Burma). Khmer new year heralds one of the biannual trips all Cambodians make to their home province, and so Phnom Penh empties and lots of things get put on hold. As part of my new personal psychological maintenance plan, I organised myself and my fabulous friend Depika to go to KL for a few days, to bask in the ubiquitous air-conditioning and to scoff as much delightful food as possible. More on that later.

Living around the corner from the prime minister it's not unusual for me to get caught up in motorcades when I'm on my way to or from work, or just getting around. As Chair of ASEAN for 2012, Cambodia hosted the annual meeting at the beginning of April, which meant motorcades galore as the numerous officials and representatives of the ASEAN nations were ferried around the city with wailing sirens and as many black SUVs as could be mustered up. This also meant major traffic disruptions and whistle-blowing aplenty as every police officer and military man (not many women represented in these ranks) planted themselves on the streets blowing their whistles for all they were worth, holding traffic against the lights and waving it off to the side, until the precious cargo had passed. I fluctuated between highly amused (mostly at the whistle blowing) and disgusted as the holdups were often to allow the unhindered passage of just one official. One such delay became a bit tense one afternoon when a guy on a motorbike just ahead of me started giving out to the military police officer blocking the road next to us, and the MP started shouting back at him. Not surprisingly, the military police carry weapons and for a few moments I was a bit worried that this guy might pull out his gun and shoot the mouthy guy to shut him up. Thankfully the motorcade whizzed by and the traffic was allowed to move on. You might think that no one would shoot another person with so many witnesses around, but this is Cambodia. Check this out http://www.icem.org/en/78-ICEM-InBrief/4950-Cambodian-Governor-Confesses-to-Shooting-Strikers-but-No-Arrest-Made

Anyway, with all the extra motorcade activity I found out at least one thing that goes on in the Department of Logistics and Technical Materials which is at the end of my street. It's where the cops that ride the big-ass motorbikes for the motorcades have their bike depot. I've seen them streaming in on their shiny white rides trussed up in their fancy uniforms, and then back out again on their personal motos wearing regular poor-people clothes and flip flops, which makes for a strange montage.

As rainy season gets closer, and everyone rushes to tie the not before wedding season draws to a close (I'm not making that up - it's tricky to have a wedding in your rice paddy when it's full of water and rice), I've been getting my fair share of wedding invitations. I was invited to attend a very chichi affair, which I went to just for the gawk factor. Last year I managed all of the local aspects of a fairly large and signficant international conference on civil society developement effectiveness, and the manager of the hotel which was the venue for the meeting got married recently. His father is an Excellency, as is the father of the bride, and the main wedding dinner (the final part of the two or three day event) was held in three halls of Phnom Penh's convention and exhibition center. Estimates put the number of guests at around 2,500, and included the prime minister for some earlier part of the day's festivities. It was quite something. Banners on the stage (about a hundred meters away from my table) with giant photos of the happy couple, video cameramen dotted around the room capturing live-to-screen images of the party, bottles of 21 year old Johnny Walker on every table (retails at $150 a pop at Dan Murphy's – I checked it out), and a new outfit for the bride and groom every hour or so. Even the invitations were over the top – pink card with diamantes, gold embossment, and pink lace for the envelope, and inside, numerous cards, instructions, apology for not delivering the invitation in person, and agenda for the full two day program. Oh, and of course the obligatory envelope for guests to put their financial contribution in. The standard across Cambodia is currently $20, although I'm not clear if this is per guest or per invitation. A new piece of information that I have found out is that even if you don't attend a wedding that you are invited to, if the bride or groom (and I suppose their family) is someone you see often (e.g. In my case, the finance guy at work) you are still expected to send the $20 in the envelope. This is part of an ongoing remittance system, whereby you have to invite to your wedding every person who has ever invited you to their wedding. When you went to their wedding, you gave them $20, now they will go to your wedding and give you $20. Books are kept. Tallies are made. I'm definitely the loser in this equation, as A) I don't want to go to the weddings in the first place (except for voyueristic reasons as above, and even that was boring), and B) I won't be getting my $20 back.

A little while ago I realised that pretty much every time you order food in any type of restaurant here, it's served on a lettuce leaf. I'm anti the lettuce leaf. It serves no real purpose as far as I can tell – I guess that it's supposed to be a sort of garnish, but it's just annoying. It gets in the way of the food you are actually trying to scoop up (pretty much everything is eaten with a spoon), is either soggy before or immediately after the food is put on it, doesn't actually add any aesthetic to the dish, and isn't really something you would want to eat. I think it's one of those things that nobody questions – some time ago, someone said that food should be served on a lettuce leaf, and so it shall be for ever more. It's like PowerPoint presentations. Every PPT that you ever endure in Cambodia is accompanied with a printed handout of the slides. Someone (or some NGO) came to Cambodia once upon a time, and behold their word – presentations should be accompanied by PPT slides, and these should be accompanied by printed handouts. And so this was duly adopted, and reams of paper are handed out at meetings and events, so that everyone can have their copy, because this is the way that it is done. I've started a revolution – I've convinced my organisation to stop printing PPTs. This is no small feat, and if it is my only contribution to Cambodia, then I'll be happy with that. Of course, as with all revolutions we are meeting with resistance – participants at our events are demanding the handouts, but we are sticking firm – the PPTs can be downloaded from the website – no handouts.

Actually I've started another revolution. A salad revolution. A while ago I started taking a salad to work for lunch. Most people go home for lunch, but there area few who bring theirs from home and eat at work in a group. They all share whatever they have brought, and it's a very nice, social, egalitarian occasion. I don't share, I just want to eat my salad, no rice, chicken feet or watery fish bone soup for me. Cambodians don't eat salad. Even though I've been bringing my salad to work for a while now, it still, every time, elicits a discussion about the contents of my salad on that particular day, how it might differ from the last one that I had, and for anyone joining that lunch who is not a 'regular', there will be an explanation (not from me) of the types of ingredients I often have in my salad, along with the justification for salad dressing, and what that is. This has evolved into discussions on healthy eating, balanced diets, and informal lectures (given by me) on carbohydrates, protein, and high and low GI. A couple of weeks ago, one of the lunchtime regulars snacked on a carrot. Some of them have started bringing salads to share for lunch. So perhaps I will make another contribution to Cambodia after all.

I think that I've probably got the message across by now that a lot of strange things happen in Cambodia. While many of the once eye-popping things like babies being transported on motos, or traffic driving on the wrong side of the road, now no longer earn a second glance from me, I'm amazed that that I am almost daily still amazed, befuddled and bewildered by some of the things that I see here. Many of these are traffic related. I was part of a rather surreal experience recently when on the way to work one morning, we (my morning moto driver, Meng, and I) turned the corner into the street where my office is located, to discover a funeral tent had been erected and was straddling the whole width of the street. This in itself was not the peculiar thing – this is one of the 'normal' sights - but when we proceeded to drive straight through the marquee, between the banquet tables while the funeral breakfast was underway, it was a first for me. If you've got eight minutes to spare, here's a video that I made of parts of a fairly typical ride to and from work. Not many amazing sights, just a window into what I see every day, set to a soundtrack of some classic 1960's Cambodian psychedelic rock. (It's kind of a big file so might take a bit of buffering)

http://vimeo.com/40841256

So Depika and I went to KL for the new year, to escape the heat, eat fantastic food, and generally get out of town. KL is famous for its shopping, but I really had no idea just how BIG shopping is there. We were like the country cousins visiting the big city - looking up all the time and marveling at all the tall buildings, looking around and being in awe at the excellent roads, pavements and landscaped greenery... There are more mega-malls there than I know what to do with, and when I say mega, I really mean it. Westfield Bondi Junction has got nothing on these places. And there are countless numbers of them with every international brand you can think of. Neither of us are 'shoppers' but we both had a couple of things on our list, so we knocked that over on the first afternoon, along with a hit of sushi – oh how I miss sushi! After a super-cheap dinner on the street we splashed out on a cider (it was Strongbow and expensive despite being 'happy hour', but oh how I miss cider!) on Bukit Bintang, and called it a day. Note: I am spoiled forever more with regard to drinks prices after living in Phnom Penh. With $1 being the standard price for a draft beer here, and $4 expensive for a cocktail (this is happy hour price at Raffles), the idea of paying $6 for a beer is a mind-bender. In a jazz club that we went to one night, it was $8 for a vodka – I pay $5.50 for a bottle of Stoli in PP. Needless to say, we didn't spend too much time in bars in KL.

KL has some fabulous architecture and over the next three days we checked out some of it – some examples of moghul architecture dating from 1894, art deco shophouses and market in KL itself, saw some amazing buildings in Putrajaya – Malaysia's Canberra, and wandered around the UNESCO world heritage city of Melaka. Melaka is very quaint and we had a delightful time wandering around its streets, touring museums and being entertained by the outlandishly decorated bicycle rickshaws that often have very loud sound systems on board, so that everyone (and I mean everyone) can enjoy the JLo.

Of course weird things aren't confined to Cambodia, and we had our fair share of peculiar experiences in KL – a taxi driver who sucked his thumb (and delayed changing gear for as long as possible to extend his thumb sucking intervals), a shop assistant bursting in on me in the change room and insisting on rearranging a dress I was trying on, a boat load of tourists from Lebanon wearing very questionable makeup and fashion choices – but the cake-taker was the choice of venue for a really interesting exhibition on loan from the da Vinci museum in Florence. We really paid our dues to get there – an exhibition centre out in the sticks that required a couple of train changes and a taxi from the station – and when we got there was almost completely deserted. It must have cost a fortune to bring the exhibition to KL, and when you consider how cutting edge da Vinci was, you would think that you would want to display it in a cutting edge kind of environment, but this place looked like it hosted its last exhibition in 1985, and really, no one knows that it's even there anymore. Such a shame – it had some amazing displays but was let down by the atmosphere.

On the afternoon of our fifth day we set off back to the airport for our 3pm flight back to Phnom Penh. All was going according to plan until we had an unexpected half hour wait for our train almost to the airport (it's a bit of a stretch to even call it an airport - for the Air Asia shed – worst airport ever – you have to take a train then a bus transfer to the actual airport). This threw off our timing significantly, and by the time the bus pulled up at the airport we had only 20 minutes until our gate would close. We jumped off the bus and double-timed it to the entrance, at which point I realised that I had no idea where the international check-in was (unlike the rest of KL, it isn't clearly signed). I heard Depika call out 'this way' so I stopped and turned around but couldn't see her anywhere. I stood there and looked and looked, but she was nowhere to be seen. So I thought that she must have turned right and dashed inside so I ran in there but then there were people everywhere and I couldn't see her so I looked for the board with the check-in counter numbers and could see the sign where the check-in counter was but I couldn't work out how to get there so I ran around for a bit and eventually worked out that I had to go through security and expected to see her at the check-in counter but when I got there she wasn't there and because I was so distressed that I couldn't find her I didn't think to ask if she had checked in already, I just assumed that she had and had gone to the gate so I checked in and ran off and then realised that I couldn't work out how to get to the gate so I ran back to the check-in counter and the guy told me to go 'over there' but I still couldn't work out how to go 'there' and eventually he told me I had to exit, so I ran around the security things and toward immigration while my shoes kept falling off, expecting to see her there but I didn't see her there and I went to the front of a line and asked the guy if I could go ahead of him because I was going to miss the plane, and because I had spent so much time running around like a goose I thought she must be at the gate already but I got there and didn't see her so when I got to the front of the line I asked how long until they closed the gate and was told five minutes so I stood there until the last possible minute and then I asked an Air Asia person if Depika had boarded the plane already and she said 'can you wait a minute?' and I said 'not really - I'm going to miss my plane and I've lost my friend and I don't know if she's on the plane already' and she said 'well I just have to do my job' so I stood there and waited until time was up and I didn't know what to do - I didn't know if I would be even able to find her if I decided not to get on the plane and then I thought it would be a bit stupid to be standing at the gate and miss the plane if she was already on it so I went and got on the plane and hoped that she was there but she wasn't and then a flight attendant came down the back and called out her name and I said 'that's my friend, is she not on the plane?' and she said 'no - she checked in but hasn't come through the gate'. And then I swore a lot and felt really really bad because that was the last flight back to PP for the day. I was busting to pee but of course couldn't because the plane was about to take off and then when the plane took off I thought 'I wonder if this is one of those things that people talk about when they missed a plane but then the plane crashed so it was lucky that they missed it?' and then I thought 'great, I need to pee so much that if this plane crashes I'm going to pee my pants - what a way to go', so as soon as the seat belt sign was off I went to the bathroom and then we hit some bad turbulence and the plane was shaking and I had to hold on to the handle in the bathroom and then I thought 'great, the plane is going to crash and I'm going to be in the toilet'. But we didn't crash.

Depika spent 15 hours in the airport waiting for the first flight the next morning. I will remind you that it is the worst airport ever. What a way for a holiday to end.

Photos: A New Year

fimc — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:49:00 GMT

A New Year

fimc — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:43:00 GMT

See the gallery A New Year for photos from this post.

So now its 2012. A lot sure has happened since my last job in Sydney came to an abrupt end in January 2009 – three years ago! Some of it pretty funny, like recently when I was at the checkout at the supermarket paying for a mop, one of the squeezy sponge ones. A man came over to me and asked me to explain to him how it worked. I did, marveling at how something so banal can be so completely fascinating to another. Maybe that's how the eight people who live downstairs think about them sharing the same size space that I have upstairs, just for myself.

A few days before the Pchum Ben holiday in October when it felt like I had the whole of Phnom Penh to myself, some men started to dig up my lane. No machinery, just some poor buggers with a sledgehammer, some hoes and shovels (getting paid $3 a day my landlord told me), hacking away at the concrete and then the hard, compacted earth below, creating a ditch in which to put some large-ish concrete pipes, aimed at improving our drainage. This whole project was instigated and paid for by the residents of the lane and not a city council with anything as fancy as an infrastructure budget, so sometimes there was money to keep the work going, sometimes not. Like the week and a half when there was just a gaping ditch, mountains of dirt crowding the lane, and no workmen. From the day it started in October I kept waiting for the day when it would start to get better, but every day for two months, it just kept getting worse. I'd been watching so expectantly the whole time not only because it was unpleasant to pick my way through the mud every day, and annoying because of the typical lack of any apparent actual plan, but because I wanted to get a new mattress and a wardrobe but couldn't get either delivered until the lane was once again wide enough for anything apart from a motorbike to get through. Anyway as with all things, it too did pass, and the lane has returned to semi-normal. Next they will resurface it, I'm told. Can't wait for that.

Around the same time as this I was beginning to feel as though I might be in a bit of a rut – not really motivated to go anywhere away from Phnom Penh – so I gave myself a kick and joined a couple of others on a trip to Ratanakiri, the most north-eastern province of Cambodia. It's a long way on Cambodian roads – about 12 hours by bus, so I decided to break it up with an overnight in Kratie, a nice little town on the bank of the Mekong. Most people (foreigners) go to Kratie to try to see Irrawaddy dolphins, or like I did, to rest ont he way to somewhere else. The ride to Kratie was slow and un-noteworthy, unlike the next afternoon when I resumed the journey to Ratanakiri which had a lot more in store for me. The bus had begun it's day in Phnom Penh, and when I joined the road-weary passengers at least one person had already vomited and the only seat outside of the spew zone that I could find was broken and permanently fully reclined, so that my head was practically in the lap of the man who was sitting behind me. He was not hot. It was not an opportunity presenting itself.

After a couple of hours the bus broke down, but thankfully (small mercies and all that) this happened only a few hundred meters from a roadside market where there was shade to wait in and sugar cane juice to drink while the driver and his offsider removed hoses from the engine and washed them in a bucket of water, as well as possibly doing some other things that I didn't observe, which eventually resulted in the bus working again. The driver's six year old son was the one to triumphantly turn the key and after the one hour delay, we were off once again.

Ratanakiri was ok. People go there for the scenery, but after living in Sangkhlaburi I'm a bit ho-hum about less impressive mountains and greenery. The main drawcard seems to be a volcanic lake with a reputation for having crystal-clear water, and according to a friend of mine, probably her favourite spot in Cambodia. Big snaps indeed, so it was with what I think to be a justifiable amount of disappointment that a few days before we arrived the lake had turned cloudy green from a blooming algae, and swimming was not advised. We went to have a look anyway, on the day that we hired drivers to show us the sights (mostly ho-hum waterfalls) of our surrounds. It was nice, shame about the swimming.

My companions had a disastrous time with their accommodation (told on arrival that their room was cancelled; beds covered in ants falling from a massive nest in the collapsing ceiling the next night so they camped out in my room), and they moved to a different guesthouse for the third night, from which I picked them up in a crappy minivan the next morning for the ride back to Phnom Penh. They did not take it well when A) it was 30 minutes late picking us up, then B) did laps around the town, doubling back to pick up people (locals) who had not been ready when we called for them the first time around, and C) when we stopped at a place of indescribable function in a backstreet, waiting for other people to arrive and fill up the van. So, two hours after I was told to be waiting for the minivan to pick me up, we set off for Phnom Penh. I couldn't help noticing that after two and a half years of experiencing this sort of debacle I was not phased, the other two (new to Cambodia and with a thing to get to in Phnom Penh) were not in good humour.

There are other things for me to adjust to, living in my new home, apart from the ditch saga. Smacking of the same pitying assistance I got with the padlock at my old apartment, my new landlords came bursting in from the verandah one weekend morning when I had been here for a few weeks, wanting to help me because 'we think you might be having some problem with the bathroom.' I assured them that I was not, but they couldn't believe that this could be so. The cause of their concern was the shower drain, which gets clogged with hair. Standard. I told them that I know all about that, and clear it out every few days. This amazed them and they had to see it for themselves, so I let them rush past me into the house so they could inspect my free-flowing drain and see that it really was true. There was no point in ting to explain to them that at 41 years of age, I have used many showers, all of them with a drain of some sort.

Of course there are ants. My nemesis. So far I have defeated them in their ploy to inhabit in great numbers, first the bathroom, then the spare bedroom, and the kitchen after that. It involves a lot of insect spray and unrelenting determination (plus sweeping up a lot of piles of dead ants). For a few weeks they were even scouting out my water filter as a potential new home. No insect spray in there, just drowning. I don't want to kill the ants, but more than that I don't want them taking over the house, and more than that I do not want them to bite me. They have brought war and made themselves my enemy. They ate my jeans. One bit me in my sleep one night and I woke up to a spreading red welt on my upper arm (have a look at the photo) which burned and itched for days until a friend who has also developed an ant allergy put me onto a magic antihistamine get which I now go nowhere without.

And then there's the prahok. Prahok is fermented fish and don't let anyone tell you that the national dish of Cambodia is Amok or Lok Lak or anything else – it's prahok and they love it. A friend of mine once described the process of producing prahok and since it's the best one I've heard, I'll repeat it here: Grind up a pile of fish, leave it in the sun for a day, add salt, put it in a huge vat (don't worry about a lid), stir every month for two years, enjoy. So, the aroma of prahok being heated for meals wafts around Cambodia catching you unawares, driving itself into your nostrils with a swiftness and completeness that is all at once shocking, and not – oh, of course – prahok. It wafts in through my bedroom window from downstairs at 6AM, midday, night time, insinuating itself into my life uninvited and unwelcome. Unlucky.

Much better than prahok is chocolate. I decided that it would be a good idea to find out which restaurant in Phnom Penh makes the best chocolate fondant, and recruited some likeminded friends to join me on this mission which has manifested itself as a weekly activity named 'Chocolate Cake for Dinner.' Not with it, or after it, but for. The main reason for that is because one of our quorum said that the problem with chocolate fondant (or any dessert) is that you are often too full after eating dinner and can't fit dessert in. Easy way around that is to have dessert for dinner. So far we have officially sampled (and photographed) five chocolate cakes for dinner. While only two of these have turned out to be actual fondants, a third (described on the menu as flourless chocolate cake) is possibly the best chocolate cake I have ever eaten.

Being that we are in the northern hemisphere, we are currently in our winter season. This is usually a laughable concept, but we had what I would describe as a cold snap around the end of December. It started out just with having the fan off overnight. Then I had to get out my Air Asia blanket because even a sheet wasn't warm enough. One early morning I was dreaming that I was on an icebreaker ship in a frozen sea, and when I woke up I realized that it was because I was so cold. The next night I put my spare mattress protector on my bed as a quilt! (Quite effective I must say.)

The year ended in a rush, my parents bought me a bicycle for xmas, a Sangkhla friend who now lives in Bangkok came for NYE, then Megan who has been my friend since I was 17 visited. It turned out that all this time (since the recognition of the potential rut) I was having a bout of Cambodia-fatigue, which had stuck with particularly bad timing as far as work was concerned, and I was not especially liking things very much. Everything made everything else worse – work was stressful, I had no patience (required in droves here), I'd get home to the hopeless going nowhere ditch in my lane, everything was too hard, and everything her (poverty, corruption, general hopeless) wears you down after a while. By mid-December I was cracked. It was my own fault, really. I should have known that it would happen – I should have planned for a break. So I told my boss that I had cracked and I needed some time out of Cambodia. The timing was still bad but I couldn't wait until the timing would be better (March). So when Megan went back to Australia, I went to Thailand to decompress.

The journey to Koh Chang started at 7:15AM with a tuk tuk through the cool morning Phnom Penh streets to the bus that was to deliver me, seven hours later, to the Thai border. The straightforward process of getting stamped out of one country then into another was only notable (or not, given where I am and that no one is ever in much of a rush) because of the snail's pace at which the line to get stamped into Thailand moved. Next, more waiting. I had bought a ticket in Phnom Penh which said it would take me all the way to Koh Chang. I knew that numerous vehicle changes would take place, and I was interested to see just how far this ticket would actually get me. So, once through Thai immigration it was over to what looked like might be the place to hok myself up with the minivan to Trat. I showed my ticket to a guy who looked like he might have something to do with minivans and he told me to wait over there. Wait over there for what, I asked him? Just then a more helpful guy came along who asked me if I was going to Koh Chang. He pointed me toward a small, crappy-looking minivan, in which I sat for about an hour, doing the usual waiting for it to fill up. Finally we set off at the pace required of all minivan drivers in Thailand, fanging it along the twisty road so that we made it to Trat just in time to wait for another 3/4 of an hour at the ferry ticket-issuing place, where I exchanged my trusty coupon for the next-to-last mode of transport for the day. After the wait, we changed into a different (bigger, less crappy) minivan for the ten minute drive to the pier, and sped off at 6:30PM, patience-wearyingly the same time as a ferry departure, which put us at the pier for 50 minutes while we waited for the last ferry of the day. At 7:30PM the car ferry shunted off the dock and we crawled across the dark water toward the so-near-yet-so-far island of Koh Chang. One hour later the minivan rolled off the ferry and with every fibre of its being, at the merciless hands (and lead foot) of the driver, groaned its way over the mountain, finally releasing me at White Sand Beach. At 9:15PM, fourteen hours, one tuk tuk, one bus, two minivans and one ferry after leaving my wooded house in the lane, I walked into Rocksand resort. You can't say that I wasn't motivated to get there.

After dumping my stuff in my bungalow I ventured back out to the resort's terrace (it's a bit of a stretch to call it a resort) on the beach, and looking foward to getting my teeth into some Thai food, found myself a table. I heard one of the waiters speak Khmer to someone. I spoke to him in Khmer. He is Khmer. All the staff are Khmer. How's the irony? Desperately needing a break from Cambodia, I pick an island in Thailand where as it turns out, pretty much all of the staff are Khmer. Eventually I fell into my bed, into the exact same sheets – same pattern, same colour, exactly the same -as I have on my bed in Phnom Penh and slept.

My first morning after the long journey was slow to get started. A late breakfast on the beachside terrace with a new shift of Khmer staff to entertain (they think it's hilarious that a foreigner can speak any Khmer) was under an unseasonably grey sky but who cares. The water was calm and crystal-clear and I had a stack of books to read. So me and a book spent the next three hours in a hammock, listening to reggae and occasionally looking up to check on the steady stream of Germans and Russians parading along the water's edge in their amusing (if I'm being kind, alarming if I'm not) beach attire: eurotrunks for the men, bikinis with or without excruciatingly tight and short shorts for the women, bloated bellies all 'round. Escaping from their frozen winter they come in varying degrees of tan, with no shortage of man boobs and camel toes to frighten me back into the pages of my book. Of course there are sexpats too, it's impossible to go anywhere in Thailand now and not have them in your face. They're in Cambodia too of course, but I can avoid them there. I heard a man on the beach congratulating another, 'Man, you are living the dream! A woman at home waiting for you and a princess here – you are my hero!' And that about sums it up.

I absolutely picked the right place to stay -at the end of the beach, accessible only from the beach (or by water if you have a boat), far from the Dr Fish and souvenir shops, and the crowds that they attract. Before the boxing day tsunami in 2004, Koh Chang was relatively off the map. Since then the island has seen a boom in hotels and people to put in them, and 7-11's of course. White Sand Beach isn't that white, Lonely Beach isn't that lonely, but at least it hasn't yet become the travesty that is Koh Samui. Yet.

One day I ate cheesecake for lunch.

The view transformed itself many times every day. What might start out as a grey morning holding its breath, with no horizon in sight – just a grey slick, smooth ocean that smudges into an equally grey sky, becomes a midday of green water reflecting the bold green mountains that it meets, and end with a horizon as sharp as if it were drawn with a knife, separating the bluest sky from the bluest water, with the sun a blazing ball of orange fire falling into it, leaving the sky blushing pink from the memory of it all. But the sun, not yet done, throws back a last triumphant burst of gold defiantly glowing in the sky long after it has sunk.

Even the sunset changes every day, even though it is the same sun, setting in the same place at the same time. Other times it's a deep, show-off red, and others a demure gold, sinking elegantly into the waiting ocean.

Forgive me all the sappy twaddle, but there wasn't a lot else in my line of sight that I haven't already described, apart from the books that I was tearing through. Apart from the bored, sullen, hungover Thai consorts of hairy-shouldered farangs, and I've already exhausted that topic, I think.

At night I saw no moon, but there were two unblinking stars that my somehow remembered lessons from school remind me must be planets, that shine so fiercely bright that I kept checking (every night) to make sure they weren't the lights of approaching planes. I was caught out by plane lights once before, in Chiang Rai. Having been marveling one night at squadrons of fireflies, I mistook the lights of a plane to be a group of fireflies (get this) flying in formation. My error was quickly pointed out to me and I accepted my foolishness with good grace and a fit of hysterical laughter.

Which, I wonder, is this how the German couple aged in their mid-sixties who seated themselves near me one night on the terrace of Rocksand, wearing complementary outfits (3/4 sleeves, knee-length shorts with fringing around the knees) – a leopard print (the actual animals with faces and paws) for him, and tigers for madam, would react, should their foolishness be pointed out to them? Doubtful. My mirth however, could not be contained. What happens to us as we gaze into a mirror in middle age and beyond? Do we really think that tiger outfits with fringing are a good look? Do we loose the ability to see things as they really are? Is that how the complementary animal outfits get out the shop door and onto an oceanside terrace?

Anyway. It took three or four days for me to calm down (lots of angry with the sexpats etc), but lots of sleeping, walking, reading, and bobbing in the green sea later and I was feeling much better. And now I'm ready for the next seven months in Cambodia. With breaks planned.

Photos: New House

fimc — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:58:00 GMT

The Flexible Approach

fimc — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:52:00 GMT

See the gallery New House for photos from this post.

Cambodia's adeptness at flexibility is nowhere more evident than on the roads. Actually I've been thinking the the roads here are a metaphor for the way that Cambodians live life: don't look back – just forward; not much good at planning but great flexibility to adapt to new situations...

And so the flexible approach has turned up a great result for me once again; my contract has been extended for another 12 months, so I'll be calling Phnom Penh home for another year. I decided that this called for some change, so I hooked myself up with a load of estate agents and home-finders, and spent a lot of time chasing them up, and less frequently, looking at places to rent. It's not that different from looking for a place to live in Australia; you look at a load of junk and eventually find somewhere you like. The situation is made a bit more tricky here, A) by the language barrier and, B) the assumption that all foreigners are looking for something 'modern'. 'Modern' isn't all it's cracked up to be, though, and in my book, lots of shiny tiles do not a good apartment make. Eventually I was shown a traditional Khmer wooden house which fit the bill about as closely as I was going to get. So now I live at the end of a quiet lane behind the royal palace, walking distance to almost everywhere (except work, which is now a moto ride every day), and as one of my work colleagues put it so beautifully in an email recently, smiling face getting on me!

Big news in Phnom Penh; we now have not one, but TWO cinemas! Actual cinemas. With popcorn and 3D! So far there's been a fairly heavy roster of rubbish movies, but a few of us mobilized one Sunday afternoon recently and took ourselves to see Thor 3D. Now this isn't the sort of movie I'd usually go to see, but it had been about three years since I last sat inside a cinema, and besides, it's $6. It was brilliant. Not the movie of course, but the whole thing of choosing our seats, buying stuff from the candy bar (this needs work; so far there's really only popcorn and drinks and some weird Asian snacks, but popcorn and a drink costs $2.50!), and sitting in a proper cinema for an hour and a half had my entertainment meter peaking out at 10/10. I can't wait for the Fast & the Furious, Cars, and Kung Fu Panda to finish and something good to be on. I might be waiting a while. Oh well. Patience is something well worth practicing in Cambodia....

I've now celebrated a second birthday in Cambodia. I had a horrible moment (it actually lasted a bit longer than a moment) the day before, when I had the alarming realisation that that was to be my last day of being 40. I had been feeling so smug for the past year, happy to have crossed that threshold with the comfort blanket of calling it 20:20... I hadn't given it any thought whatsoever that once I got beyond that, I am always going to be more than 40. MORE THAN 40. God. What a blow. However, one of my excellent friends provided me with the very useful idea that in fact it is only 20:20+1, so that is what I'm going with. It makes me feel better. The HR unit of the NGO that I work with has recently decided that each month it will acknowledge and celebrate in some way the birthdays of everyone for that month. September was the inaugral month for this group birthday party, and each of us birthday folk were presented with a gift. I had to leave early (meeting with the new landlord to discuss price etc) and missed the bit where the other people were given their gifts so I don't know what they got, but mine turned out to be a white towel. This is the second white towel that has been bestowed upon me by my colleagues – the last one was at Khmer New Year. I really appreciate the gesture, but a white towel is just not something that I would buy here; the washing machines don't have hot water, they don't do a very good job, and the water is a little bit on the brown side... Not great for white towels. Anyway, that's what I got and I'm grateful for it.

That same week, the Australian Ambassador threw a cocktail party at her residence for the volunteers working in Cambodia under the Australian government-funded volunteer programs. The thick card stock invitation with the gold-embossed Australian coat of arms arrived at my office by courier a couple of weeks before, announcing that the pleasure of my company was requested to celebrate 60 years of Australian (government-funded) international volunteering. It was all very swank, the Ambassador and her husband were marvellous hosts, she gave a delightful speech, and much food and drink was had. It had started at 6:30pm and at about 8:30 the Ambassador and her husband positioned themselves by the front door. This went wholely unnoticed by pretty much everyone, and so after about half an hour they gave up and came back to the party. Really, they should have known better than to invite a bunch of Australians, especially ones whose limited incomes don't usually include canapes and bottomless wine, and expect them to leave at 8:30!

I have only two animal incidents to report for this post... One is that my ant allergy seems to have kicked up a notch... a recent bite on my arm produced a swollen red welt the size of my hand (my whole hand - from finger tips to the heel of my palm), and while the swelling and redness went down after a couple of days, antihistamines and slathers of hydrocortisone cream, the whole area was sore to touch and felt like a bruise for days. The other involves actual, very unattractive bruises, caused by a half-hearted attack by an Alsatian that seems to live in a big house around the corner. I was cheerily walking home from an excellent coffee shop near my new home when a black Lexus pulled across the footpath blocking my progress (this is nothing unusual). While I waited for the huge gate to be slid open so that the king of the road could enter, a huge Alsatian ran out of the gate and straight for me. Next thing I knew it was on me, scratching my foot and one leg with its oversized claws, and doing a very good impression of biting my other leg. I whacked it with my umbrella and screamed at it, while the woman who was standing at the gate and had something to do with either the Lexus, the house and/or the dog just stood there, motionless and expressionless (a very Khmer response to anything). The dog backed off for a second but then came back before deciding to instead go and see what the Lexus had brought. I looked incredulously at the woman who in response just shrieked at me 'ot mutt, dei' (not cut, no?), which on inspection seemed to be true, so I made a noise which I hope expressed my dissatisfaction with the entire affair and walked around the corner to home. I realise that it was only a half-hearted attack; if it really wanted to it could have taken my leg off, and as it was it didn't break the skin (yay, no rabies, although I don't think that Lexus dogs have rabies...), but some pretty decent bruises started to come up pretty fast.

The last week of September was the Pchum Ben holiday. This a big deal: everyone stops work and goes to their familial province, spends a lot of time going to the wat to make offerings to their dead ancestors and to ask them to help them to get money, love, luck, or whatever. Last year over Pchum Ben I went to Sangkhlaburi for a visit, but this year because I had just moved house and wanted to get settled, I decided to hang in Phnom Penh. At the time of the water festival (in November) the provinces empty and Phnom Penh fills up; Pchum Ben is the opposite of this and has the amazing effect of turning the place into a quiet and peaceful city. Admittedly it makes it a bit more challenging to find a place to eat, but oh the serenity! I totally blissed out on sleeping, reading, pottering, and walking around without having to do the usual dance around the many obstacles that usually crowd the footpaths. Pchum Ben this year hasn't delivered much in the way of luck for tens of thousands of Cambodians. The country is experiencing the worst flooding in decades, and at last count, 247 people have lost their lives due to the flooding, since September. It makes Australia's floods in January seem a bit less dramatic.

Cambodia constantly provides opportunities to practice making the most of every day and enjoying what you have while you have it. If you see Fantastic rice crackers in the supermarket – buy them – they might not/probably won't be there the next time you look, or possibly not ever again... Ditto buy the sugar cane juice from the lady on the corner, the roast pork from the one particular old woman at the market, and the restaurant or bar you like/want to check out – go there – it might not be there for long. The same goes for people. The tide of people flowing into and out of my little world has been more on the ebb lately, with three good friends finishing their contracts and returning to Australia. It's funny how such small number of people can create such a hole, but I guess that's the way it is when the circle is small to begin with. But they were here, I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with them, and now they're gone. Like Run DMC says, it's like that, and that's the way it is.

Photos: December to July

fimc — Tue, 2 Aug 2011 22:18:00 GMT

Expect the Unexpected

fimc — Tue, 2 Aug 2011 21:58:00 GMT

See the gallery December to July for photos from this post.

The last time I wrote a proper update on this blog was eight months ago, which seems to fit the haphazard pattern of chronicling my experiences and observations of the last 2 and a bit years and sharing them with whoever cares to read them...

As it happens, the last time I wrote I had just spent a week in Thailand, and it is from Thailand that I am writing these words now. I have come to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai for a week of recuperation from those eight months that have lapsed without a return to fill these blank pages, while the hastily scribbled notes to remind me of the things I knew I would want to write about when I eventually got around to it have continued to multiply on random pages in my notebook.

So now, the question I have asked many times in writing this blog over the past two and a bit years, where do I begin? If I'm calling this a chronicle, and being a Virgo or whatever it is that makes me favor order, I suppose I'll stick with chronological order.

Shortly after my last post I saw a very cool performance by Tiny Toones; a local NGO that works with vulnerable kids in Phnom Penh using breakdancing, hip-hop music and other contemporary arts to achieve amazing things. I LOVE this organization and encourage anyone who has an opportunity to see them perform to do it! (I think they're planning some performance dates in Melbourne in October). Plenty of international hip-hop artists (music and dance) who pass through Phnom Penh spend some time with Tiny Toones teaching and improving the skills of the talented kids who have found some luck in their mostly unlucky lives, and become involved with TT. Also check out their Youtube channel

Cambodia observes twenty-six public holidays annually. Yep, five weeks. On one of them in October I went to the highly regarded seaside town of Kep, planning to cycle around the town, eat crab (famous from Kep), drink wine, read, swim in the guesthouse pool (Kep's beach isn't exactly on TripAdvisor's top ten list). Alas this was the start of the rainy season; it rained cats and dogs from the moment I arrived, was cold (COLD!), and generally quite disagreeable. The road from my guesthouse to the main road had been "widened" the day before, so this unsealed track became a river of red clay sludge, kiboshing the bike riding plans and pretty much relegating me to the guesthouse for the whole weekend. I did read a book. I did drink wine. I did get to the crab market once to eat crab, but I didn't see Kep's charm. Maybe it went on holiday for the long weekend. There is nothing, and I pretty much mean nothing to do there. Nothing to see. Maybe there is and I just couldn't see it through the rain... People rave about Kep, and so now whenever someone tells me that they love Kep, I press them; "what do you love about it?", I ask them. It always boils down to the guesthouse. The truth is, Kep is rubbish, but if you have a fabulous guesthouse and it isn't pouring with rain, and you can maybe take a leisurely cycle down to the crab market a couple of times, you'll probably say that you like Kep.

November to February I was kept busy with a stream of international guests, starting off with Caty then Andi visiting from Thailand, then Claire from Sydney over Christmas and (Western) New Year, then my mum and aunty made a return to Asia to check out this new place on my life itinerary. This was also a very busy time for me at work as I set about designing, researching, writing, laying out and putting together the annual report for the organization I'm working with. Short deadlines, competing priorities for my colleagues that kept them from keeping to their end of the annual report bargain, and shall we say "different creative approaches" between myself and my Director, all made for a rather challenging project which somehow I seemed to be the only one who was especially concerned about (deadlines and end product). High standards can be a pain in the arse. Anyway, the thing got done, people who care about me visited, I spent some time with them to see some parts of Cambodia that I hadn't been to yet, and I lived to tell the tale with an annual report under my belt.

The 5^th of December every year is International Volunteer Day, so our country manager hatched a plan for us to celebrate our volunteerism by joining a 30km charity bike ride around the Angkor temples held annually to raise money for a Cambodian charity. There were about 15 of us in our gang, joining the group of 400 who assembled at Angkor Wat in the dark, and when the starter's pistol fired at 6:00am rode off into the sunrise through the trees surrounding the ancient and beautiful temples of Angkor. Here's a link to some video of our ride!

Unfortunately for me, the bed I slept in the night before the bike ride was home to a small colony of bed bugs; my first ever encounter with these nasty little creatures. Luckily (?) there must not have been many of them, because I had only a few bites on my face, and more than that on one arm, but JEEZ are they itchy little buggers! As soon as we got back from the bike ride I moved to a different room, but I was worried that I had moved bed bugs with me in my bag, and when I got back to Phnom Penh I boiled all the clothes I had taken with me (tricky when the biggest pot I have is a 2 litre saucepan...it was a slow and tedious process...) and threw my bag out. I was still paranoid for months afterwards that the little buggers had come home with me, and hidden in a power socket (they do that – I did the research!) just waiting for the time to infest my bed. It seems that they did not, and so my sleep is no longer hindered by thoughts of the gross little blood suckers feasting on me during the night.

About mid-way through December and just before Claire arrived, I joined the thirty-four people that I work with on a three-day staff retreat on the coast. This was mainly a lot of eating, some workshops and activities that I just watched (and sometimes someone translated so that I could understand what was going on, but often not), and at night; karaoke and dancing. As with most staff get-togethers, this was where the real work got done, and I made leaps and bounds with the bonding by giving everyone a good laugh at my attempts to follow the wrist twirling and forwards-backwards-sideways steps around a table with flowers on it that is traditional Cambodian dancing. I also got plenty of time to swim in the gloriously clear, calm ocean, and to stock up on some beach soul-nourishment to take back to the dusty concrete of Phnom Penh.

It was also around this time that some friends introduced me to their new secret addiction; shopping for ultra-cheap fabric at Orussey Market and then whisking it off to the tailor to get whipped up into whatever takes your fancy. They're quite good; you can take clothes to get copied, or pictures downloaded from the internet, or even photos sneakily snapped of someone on the street wearing something that you like, and the tailor can make all of it. Most things need a couple of fittings to get them right, but at around $6 for tops, $12 for dresses, $5 for a skirt, it can become a bit addictive. I've only had a few things made, mostly relatively successful, and it's probably only lack of time that's stopped me from getting as hooked on the whole thing as some of my friends, but I have spare time now, and think that there are a few trips to the tailor on the cards for me.

Claire was here for Christmas, which we spent at a fabulous restaurant with a pool, champagne, wine, great food, cards and friends, then cocktails and tapas on a rooftop terrace. I took the next week off work and went with Claire to Kampong Cham; a province next to Phnom Penh. We spent a night at a guesthouse in the town, and then two nights at a family homestay in a village outside of town, walked through the rice fields and rode bicycles through the village. The popular opinion in Cambodia seems to be that the best cotton kramas (traditional scarf) are made in Kampong Cham, so I was pretty keen to find a house somewhere with a loom and a lady weaving kramas to buy. We managed to track one down and although the woman was working on a big order that she had been commissioned to make, she agreed to sell us a few for peanuts (ok, not actual peanuts, but as I remember they were about 7,000 riel; less than $2 each). I also think that I remember her saying that it takes her about two days to make one. That sounds about right. About $1 per day. Kramas, by the way, are possibly the world's most versatile piece of cloth. They come in various sizes, but that's really just for tourists; the genuine article is about 60cm wide by about 150cm long, and are used for everything from a hammock for babies, to a towel, neck scarf, head scarf, keeps you warm, keeps you cool, you can bunch it up and use it as a neck pillow, men wear them as a sarong, you can spread one on the ground and use it as a picnic blanket, or as a tablecloth if you have a table, curtain, the list is apparently endless.

In January, a bout of suspected anaemia turned out to be a dose of intestinal parasites, my brother's house came to within about a hundred meters of succumbing to the swollen Brisbane river in the worst floods in forty years, my parents' house somehow survived the worst cyclone ever to hit Queensland, and my mum and aunty arrived in Cambodia.

With the annual report at the printer's, I took a week off and joined mum and Rusty in Battambang, a north-west province bordering Thailand, for a couple of days before we headed south to Kampot, a quiet riverside town famous for its pepper. We wanted to do the whole journey from Battambang to Kampot in one day, and the quickest way to do that is by taxi. We found a good driver to take us from Battambang to Phnom Penh, and then had arranged for another driver who had been recommended by a friend, to take us from Phnom Penh to Kampot.

We were some way into the second leg before I discovered that our driver wasn't the recommended driver, but a friend of his. The recommended driver couldn't make it so sent his proxy. This one as it turns out, was terrible. He spent most of the time on the wrong side of the road, one hand on the wheel while he repeatedly took his glasses OFF for many minutes at a a time, to wipe his sweaty face with a KFC towelette, with a degree of attention and fervor that was quite compelling to watch. Anyway, it beat watching the road; I thought we were done for on one of these glasses-off, face-wiping episodes, when the oncoming car (we were on the wrong side of the road and overtaking a truck) started flashing its lights at us to perhaps alert our driver that we would in all likelihood be colliding in a head-on kind of way in the very immediate future. He casually slipped the car across in front of the truck we had been passing, almost close enough to clip its front fender, put his glasses back on, and gave a merry little beep of his horn. Actually, throughout the three hour journey, he gave frequent, presumably perfunctionary, but perhaps jubilant blasts of the horn; for his own benefit or that of others, it was not clear. When he wasn't occupied with taking his glasses off to wipe his face, he was busy splintering his way through a handful of toothpicks as he gouged around in his false teeth, seeking out with gusto some unknown irritant or perhaps just passing the time.

We somehow arrived in Kampot in one piece, and after depositing our bags in our rooms, I very quickly deposited myself in the bar and made short work of a couple of happy hour drinks; very happy indeed to have arrived there at all. The fabulous Rikitikitavi is possibly the best place to stay in Kampot. I'll test this theory in September when I'm there again and will stay at the only contender for top spot, Les Manguiers. I LOVED Rikitikitavi; the rooms, the service, the food, the bar overlooking the wide, quiet river and the mountains beyond. And Kampot is so lovely; beats Kep with a big stick. While we were there (beginning of February) the mango trees were in flower, and I've never seen anything like it. The trees were so loaded with flowers that in some cases the leaves weren't even visible; just a halo of mango flower fuzz...

While we were there we took a day trip to Rabbit Island which was ok, but not up to the hype, and I got attacked by some incredibly nasty ants. Always with the ants.... I've had it with them. These ferocious little feckers left me with grape-sized welts on my legs that actually came up with a tiny blister on the top, and itched like I have never itched before. Even worse than the bed bugs. Anecdotally (well, technically this is all anecdotal, but semantics aside....) , these itchy welts kept flaming up for months afterwards, from the slightest irritation, like my skirt brushing against the skin while I walked somewhere.... the histamines went crazy. I think I've developed an ant allergy.

After Kampot we spent a couple of nights at the homestay in Takeo province that I stayed at in August last year with the other volunteers that I arrived in Phnom Penh with. Once again the family treated us to amazing hospitality, even though they were preparing for a family wedding which was to start on the day we were leaving. In fact, Cambodian wedding season was in full swing at that time, and the music blaring across the dry rice fields from one wedding was only briefly replaced with the music from a funeral nearby before the wedding of our hosts' niece began. Poor mum and Rusty didn't get much sleep (weddings last for three days and go full steam for all twenty-four hours of each of those days). Actually our hosts insisted that we participate in the wedding ceremonies, but we had only a couple of hours in the morning before our bus to Phnom Penh. This gave us just enough time to join the procession of guests (traditionally the groom's family) across the dry rice fields as we each carried a tokenistic gift (mostly beautifully arranged fruit on small pedestals) to the bride's family home. There was a bit of a hold up as we neared the house and the people at the front were handing over the gifts and finding a place to sit, which was when I discovered that of all the places to be stopped, I was standing on top of an ant nest. Great. More of the angry little nasties (ok, I get it, I was standing on their house) crawling over my feet and biting me as much as possible. I nearly dropped my fruit in the rice paddy, which would have been very bad luck for the wedding (we were warned at the start of the procession not to drop anything!), but I somehow managed to keep my tray balanced and the bad luck was contained to me and my encounter with the ants.

Back in Phnom Penh, mum discovered that a swarm of bees had decided to make the outdoor light on my balcony the centrepiece of their new hive. Great. Mum helpfully suggested that all I needed to do was to find someone in Phnom Penh who knows what to do with bees. Yes I said, that should be straightforward enough...(!) When my landlord next came around to collect the rent, I showed him the hive outside that was growing by the day, and not really making me want to open the balcony door. No problem, he says. Do you have a lighter? It turns out that during the Khmer Rouge years he was tasked with collecting honey, and knew all about what to do with bees. This is one of the unsolved mysteries of Phnom Penh; how is it that something that as far as I could tell was going to be quite the challenge to sort out, just gets fixed so easily?

There are innumerable unsolved mysteries here. Including why can I buy a Mars bar that is made in Australia at my corner shop in PP for 70c, when it costs around $2 in Australia? Why does no one in PP seem to own a house key? Instead, they sit outside and beep the horn of their car or motorbike until someone inside opens the gate to let them in. And why does it cost two to three times more for things in the PP airport duty free shop, than it does to buy the same things at the shops in town?

Mum and Rusty went home and after a week or two of not so hectic work, the beginning of March put me right back in it again. The organization I work with won its bid to host a fairly significant international conference on development effectiveness, so guess what I did for the next three and a half months? It was incredibly challenging; when I work on events in Australia, not only do I not have a language barrier to contend with, but my colleagues understand the concepts that are involved, the suppliers understand the concepts that are involved, the venue understands the concepts that are involved, but on this one I was at square one, with everyone and everything.

As if time wasn't an enemy from the get-go, Cambodia shut down for a week in April for the (Khmer) New Year, promptly followed by Belgium (where the client is based) taking a week off for Easter, and Cambodia had to have the last word with another five-day break for the King's birthday and something else in May. While I worked through most of the holidays, I did take off to the beach for a couple of days over Khmer New Year, A) because April is hot and Phnom Penh is deserted at new year, and B) because I needed some time out with just me and the ocean. Lesson re-learned because I didn't pay enough attention last year for the Pchum Ben holiday – the other one where everyone vacates the city and heads to the province – you HAVE TO BUY YOUR BUS TICKET MORE THAN ONE DAY IN ADVANCE. Or else you end up in the back seat of a poorly-airconditioned bus getting squashed by a fat barang who takes up half of your seat, severely limiting the amount of air circulation available between him, you, and (making wild assumptions) the sex worker you are sandwiched in between. But once I got to the beach, it was great.

Somewhere in there I was treated to my next close encounter with one of nature's beasts... One morning I was woken up by something landing on my leg, I looked down and saw in my blurry, awake-for-a-millisecond state what looked like a frog on my bed. I jumped and it jumped up and flew off. I yelped and ran out of the room, and it joined my in the hallway, tearing up and down and generally going ballistic. I found the key for my balcony door and yanked it open, and waited for the flying creature to get back outside where it belonged. I didn't see it for a minute or so, so I went back into my room to start thinking about getting ready for work, seeing as I was clearly up now. And there it was, hanging upside down from the top of the curtain; a bloody bat! Now that I was back it decided to go nuts again and started flying around and around the room like a, well a bat out of hell. After a bit of this it flew out into the hallway again and I promptly shut the door and wondered what to do next.

That was answered for me pretty quickly when the little missile snuck in through the holes in the decorative bricks at the top of the wall between the kitchen and my ensuite bathroom, straight back into my bedroom again. Ducking to avoid it kamikaze-ing into me again, I opened the door and it flew out and was not seen again. That night when I got home from work I crept into every room, gingerly opening doors and peering behind them to see if it was hiding somewhere, but I didn't see it so went to bed feeling relaxed about being bat-free. Until 1:00am when I was woken up by the friggin thing going nuts around my room again. Around my head, actually. I nearly had a heart attack, commando-rolled out of bed and pulled a pillow over my head, it was flying that closely to me... and then it was out in the hallway again, pulling laps up and down like something very fast on speed, or something faster than speed. Like some kind of moron I've got a pillow over my head and I'm crouched as low as I can get because it was alternating high laps with low ones and seemed like it was going to fly straight into me – I had a pretty good view of it as it came straight at me in the almost dark hallway lit only with a faint glow from the street light outside the window. I opened the balcony door and sat on the floor with the pillow still covering my head, while I tried to make myself as small as possible. The bloody thing's sonar must have been on the blink because it continued to terrorize me, flying very low around and around the room for quite a while longer, broken up with a few more sprints up and down the hallway before its whereabouts became unknown. I waited, with the pillow on my head for what seemed like hours (probably more like ten minutes) until I felt as sure as I was going to that it had gone.

I would like to report that that was the last of the bat, but alas, a week or so later it was up to its middle of the night terror antics again, and I repeated the whole commando role out of bed, pillow on the head routine, all the while desperately trying to work out how the hell it was getting into my apartment. I checked and re-checked for holes or open windows, but there were none. Eventually I came to the not that hard to reach conclusion that it is a crafty little opportunist, sneaking in through the balcony door during any short time the door was open, so now I'm ultra-wary of opening it, and especially vigilant about keeping it firmly shut after sunset. And have developed a strong aversion to bats.

My Director and I clashed many times during those couple of months of organizing the conference, while I fought to get him to understand where I was coming from, and he advocated for me to lower my standards... Mostly it wasn't any fun, and the week before the conference I was actually scared. I don't remember ever feeling scared before an event before, but this one was BIG and if anything wasn't done, it was because I hadn't done it.... So after many tests of my resolve and ability to describe things by metaphor, mental exhaustion, regular Friday night dinners with friends where I struggled to make any contribution to conversation (or demonstrate a reasonable command of the English language), a five-day trip to Australia for my brother's wedding squeezed in two weeks before the conference, and many new grey hairs and wrinkles later, everything came together and I think we can call it a success.

This is what has earned me a trip to Thailand for some R&R. The pancake-flat dusty concreteness of Phnom Penh has had me craving green and mountains for a while, so Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai seemed like the obvious place to take myself to dial back a few notches, so that is what I have done. And it has been wonderful. For two days I marvelled at how fancy Chiang Mai is, spent time with friends, and breathed deep restorative breaths while gawping like an idiot at the mountain that was practically at the end of my soi. And then the three hour bus journey through the mountains and green rice fields to Chiang Rai, where most things are as they were when I left there a year and a half ago, including friends who have stockpiles of great hugs. I slept and walked and ate and spent an afternoon in a Hmong cushion-making workshop, and drank Thai whiskey and updated my blog.

When I last updated this blog the rainy season was coming to an end, and now it is rainy season again; the fine layer of dust that for six months coated my feet on the five minute walk to my office each morning has transformed into a fine layer of mud, which is equally as efficient at getting into my shoes. Sudden, drenching downpours punctuate most afternoons, and Phnom Penh's streets become rivers for an hour or two until the water finds somewhere else to go. My contract is up in four weeks and my future beyond that is up in the air. My organization and I both want me to stay for another 12 months, and we are in the process of a second attempt to get that approved by my volunteer agency. Well, this is Cambodia, so I'm not worrying too much about the planning, and am going instead with the flexible approach.

Photos: Water Festival

fimc — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 01:23:00 GMT

Grieving Kingdom

fimc — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 00:51:00 GMT

November 23^rd has been an incredibly sad day, with the news of the terrible tragedy of the deaths of almost 400 people in Phnom Penh, at the closing of the annual water festival, one of Cambodia’s biggest celebrations. Every year around three million people from the provinces come to Phnom Penh to enjoy the festival marking the end of rainy season, the reversal of the flow of the Tonle Sap river, and to give thanks to the river which gives life to the people through its fish supplies and irrigation of the surrounding farmlands. Three days of dragon boat races on the river and nightly concerts held in several outdoor locations around the city’s riverside area provide the entertainment and festivities which usually are defined by a carnival atmosphere. All was going to script, until something happened which caused thousands of people to panic at the end of the third day. Reports state that people were pushing to get on and off the bridge to Diamond Island, a small piece of land just offshore from the main riverside area, and at around 11:00pm something changed and there was a stampede. Women and teenagers being the most vulnerable because of their size and strength, made up most of the numbers of the dead. A doctor at the hospital which received the bodies of the dead and dying, made a statement to the local English language newspaper that the cause of death of most of the people he had attended to was suffocation or electrocution. There have been reports that after the stampede started, military police fired water cannons onto the bridge, connecting with unsafe lighting, and some of the crowd were electrocuted. The bridge looks great at night, with festive lights strung across from end to end. It’s difficult to think about, but it doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a scenario where thousands of people are trapped on a bridge, panicked and trying to get off, some over the sides of the bridge into the water, some of those people becoming electrocuted, and those people crushed against thousands of others…. A dark day indeed. I am thankful that none of my work colleagues, nor the friends I have been able to talk to, and even the tuk tuk driver I use often who said he would go with me to the final night, were not there, and are all ok. The streets of Phnom Penh have had a sombre mood today, with the conspicuous absence of the usual busy-ness, not many people around, and a definite sense of emptiness. What a tragic irony that a festival staged to express gratitude for giving life, has taken so much away. Tears have filled my eyes many times today; as I listen to the radio broadcast of the grieving woman who lost her entire family during the Pol Pol regime and had only a son left, only for him to die in the crush last night; as I read the news updates online and learn of the bodies piled one on top of another in the tents of the makeshift hospital morgue; as I imagine the teenagers in their party clothes, dressed for a night of fun; and on the walk to the evening market near my apartment to buy dinner, seeing on the footpath outside house after house, offerings of food, water, incense and candles for those lost. I feel incredibly sad, and really wonder, when the Cambodian people are going to get a break. Still, the young kids are out as usual, playing badminton in the street outside my apartment, and they, better than anything, serve as a reminder that life goes on.

This past year and a half of working in Thailand and Cambodia has taught me a lot about many things, and by default, about myself. I have also discovered that I feel a deep connection with humanity, and perhaps this is why I feel like it is here that I really live.

Sua S'dei!

fimc — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:42:00 GMT

See the gallery and now, Cambodia for photos from this post.

I’ve recently come home from Thailand, but it’s not what you think…. I was only there for a few days, and “home” is now Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Somehow, something unbelievable happened, and the thing that I hoped for actually happened - only better than I imagined. After a very long five months of application rigmarole, I was offered a one year contract with a Cambodian organisation as Communications Advisor, and in total contrast to the long vetting process, I was given two weeks’ notice of my departure date, and so here I am. The trip to Thailand was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up ; an added bonus of the outrageous number of public holidays observed in Cambodia, but I’ll come back to that.

A quick recap of the months (somehow seven!) since I left Sangkhlaburi…. I had a week on Koh Pha Ngan to assist with my transition from the jungle to the rat-race, and then returned to Sydney in the first week of May to find winter descending and everything really difficult to relate to. Two weeks was more than enough of that, although it was great to catch up with friends, and especially lucky to coincide with visits from some U.S.-dwellers who happened to be in town at the same time. Winter-proper I spent in Queensland, which was no doubt my best option, climate-wise, but was still a serious challenge for my equator-warmed blood. My real challenge, however, was to find a way to sustain myself when my rapidly-dwindling financial resources expired. It was a constant source of amazement to me that I had managed to live for a year in Thailand on around $10,000, yet in three months in Australia, without paying for accommodation, or little else, I ploughed through $5k at an alarming rate. With the piggy bank empty and no success with the jobs I’d applied for in Australia, I was offered this role in Phnom Penh, and before I knew it I was on the plane heading back to Asia.

Again time has passed at supersonic speed, and it’s been three and a half months since I arrived here. The first four weeks were consumed with Khmer language classes, which was like having vocabulary hurled at us like tennis balls from one of those training devices for four hours each day, and other Cambodian-context learning; gender and disability inclusion, corruption, child protection, just the day to day stuff. I don’t know if it’s possible for a foreigner to ever really understand this place, and most days I just have to shake my head and accept that I just don’t really get it.

For those initial weeks I was staying at a hotel, and when I wasn’t trying to learn things for eight hours a day, I was looking for somewhere permanent to live. We (me and four other volunteers who arrived at the same time) were lucky enough to share this in-country orientation with a Cambodian-Australian man, now in his early sixties, who happened to be originally from Phnom Penh and was at the university on that fateful day in April 1975 when the Khmer Rouge barged into the city and overthrew the government, heralding the beginning of the darkest years of this ravaged country’s history. In the forced total evacuation of the city, he and some of his family were relocated to a distant province until 1979, when he managed to make his way into a refugee camp on the Thai border, and was eventually sent to Australia in 1981, arriving (as he says) with a flimsy shirt and speaking scant English with a French/Khmer accent (zee cat, zee dog!), courtesy of the French colonization of his country before all this other business started. It is unbelievable that someone who has been through so much, would have the capacity to return (not only to the country but to the very province he was forced to) to offer what he can to try to help to rebuild his scarred homeland. Anyway, he’s a real comedian who when asked where he’s from, responds in his still substantial Khmer accent (not so much French anymore) that he’s from the outback, and phrases like “cost an arm and a leg” roll off his tongue in a way that can’t help but make me laugh. I am privileged to know him and am grateful for the insights he has shared.

My weeks at the hotel were seasoned with the interactions with the front desk staff, some of whom made it their personal project to help me with my Khmer language studies. The same two young guys always seemed to be there, no matter what the time of day, and when I asked them about it they told me that they work from 5:00pm to 8:00am seven days a week. “We enjoy it!” they said. I just shook my head and accepted that I don’t really get it.

Cambodian people have an uncanny knack of being able to immediately assess whether another person is older or younger than them when they first meet, and this forms part of the process used to determine who has the higher status and how they should address each other. Somehow I seem to be older than most people, and so am “bong srei” (older sister, or older woman) to just about everyone I encounter – market sellers, tuk tuk drivers, whoever. It’s a matter of just get over it, shake my head and accept it. It’s a term of respect, but a bit challenging to get over the fact that pretty much everyone is acknowledging that I’m older than them, and one of those cross-cultural differences that can take a bit of getting used to. I quite like it when I tell myself they’re calling me “older sister”, but “older woman” is a bit harder to warm to.

While we were doing our four weeks of in-country training we were lucky enough to be shuttled off to Takeo province, about an hour and a half southeast of Phnom Penh toward the Vietnam border, to spend two days and nights at a homestay with an incredible family at their beautiful home surrounded by a coconut grove in the rice fields. Our language teacher came with us so our morning classes weren’t interrupted, except by the chickens scratching around in the dirt nearby, and the afternoons were spent visiting the local primary school and pagoda, and the market to try with embarrassing results, to practice our atrocious Khmer language skills. Next to their house is a huge crater, formed during the US’s covert carpet bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war, when a B52 bomb exploded in their backyard. Somehow surviving that, the family then endured a terrible fate during what a lot of people call “the Pol Pot years”; a story they generously shared with us one night when we sat around after another amazing meal. And still I shook my head.

It’s funny sometimes how stuff works. In “developed” countries we pay a premium for produce grown without pesticides or other chemicals, yet in Cambodia, this is what you get by default because Cambodian farmers can’t afford to buy the stuff. Regardless of whether or not you could call it organic, it’s absolutely seasonal eating, which is such a revelation these days. Cambodians turn their noses up at produce imported from Thailand and Vietnam (neither of whom, coincidentally do they like very much at all, owing to their long and confrontational history), which is often cheaper, but always (they say) grown with chemicals. When you’re talking about a dollar for a massive bunch of bananas, I’m happy to get the locally-grown stuff, but no doubt it makes a big difference to Cambodian people, most of whom live on less than less than $3 a day (um ,that’s for a family, not each person. And the vast majority of the rest manage it on less than $1).

So between all the learning and my personal attempt to eat in as many different places as possible (and when you live in a hotel you get to do that three times a day), I found an apartment, moved in (easy to do in a tuk tuk when all you have is a backpack), bought the essentials (ice-cube tray, water filter, mop, furniture etc) and called it home. I was looking for a one-bedroom place, but was shown this two-bedroom and decided that it was in a great location for me, and signed (well, red thumb print – that’s the way you do things here) on the dotted line. It’s a five minute walk to my office and practically on top of the Russian Market (one of the better-known markets that tourists visit), but despite this is much less touristy than some other parts of the city. It’s quite amazing; after a year in Thailand with really not even a sniff of what I now think of as “luxury”, I have my own apartment with a balcony, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, both with hot showers and flushing western toilets, a kitchen with a sink and running water… yin and yang, I suppose.

To mark the end of our four weeks of language classes, we went out with our teacher to a sort of nightclub called Riverhouse for some Friday night dancing. The music was a bit (ok, a lot) questionable, but we gave it a shot. I gave a few tequilas a shot too, hoping that might help, but it didn’t really. I persevered until 2:00am then ran the gamut of waiting tuk tuk drivers and tasked one of them with delivering me home. Security here is a big deal, and to get into my building, which is accessorised with razor wire, as most are, I go through a gate which is secured with the biggest padlock you’ve ever seen. So on this night I put my key in the padlock, turned and, snap, the key broke off in the lock. I stood there looking at the broken key in my fingers, with nothing but disbelief running through my mind for a good minute or so. Then came denial. I’m not sure what the rest of the classic stages of trauma processing are, but my next thoughts were along the lines of how I could get through the gate without a key. Clearly the whole place is set up exactly so you can’t do this, so then I quickly moved on to what am I going to do? No, really – WHAT am I going to do?? It was 2:30am, the neighbourhood is a ghost town, and even if it wasn’t, what good would that do me. I tried calling out to the people who live on the ground floor, but they were having none of it. So then it was back to what am I going to do? Then I got a text message from my language teacher, asking if I got home ok. Ah ha! I called him and told him what had happened, and he then got on his bike, rode 20minutes across town and picked me up, and took me to a friend, Paula’s, who I had phoned, woke her up obviously as it was now almost 3:00am, and asked if I could spend the night in her spare bed. Of course that wasn’t the end of it. When I got back to my place the next morning and showed the landlady my broken key, her eyes widened with recognition (the culprit! – how they got out of the gate in the morning is beyond me), lots of head shaking and lots of things in Khmer that I didn’t understand… She sent someone out to get me a new key, which was brought up to my apartment a short time later. Next came an exercise in humility, as the young girl, who brought the giant padlock up to my apartment with her, proceeded to give me a lesson in padlock unlocking. This was quite detailed and lasted for at least one minute. I could see the pitying thoughts going through her mind…. “poor barang….doesn’t even know how to use a key….” I received continued support in the art of padlock unlocking for some weeks – every time I came home after about 9:00pm when they put the padlock on the gate, I would get my keys out but before I could even get them anywhere near the padlock, someone would rush out and do it for me. No doubt to save me the embarrassment of not being able to operate the key, but possibly so they didn’t find themselves with a key broken in the lock again. It looks like they now believe, due to the extensive training and support they have provided, that I have now got the hang of it, and they pretty much leave me to it.

It had to happen sometime, but it turns out that I’m now forty. As in years old (more head shaking, but this time nothing to do with Cambodia). I decided well in advance to take a leaf out of my friend, Andi’s book and call it 20:20 instead. Much more manageable. So for the 20:20 I was joined by twelve new friends for lunch at the incredible Romdeng restaurant (they train former street kids in the restaurant trade) and followed by happy hour (well, four hours of happiness every day) at the fabulous Raffles Hotel for cocktails. And then it was home for an early night in preparation for the start of my new job the next day.

Why was I somehow not surprised when the 4^th day of work saw me rolling into a national conference at 7:30am? The more things change, the more they stay the same…..The organisation I work for was presenting and exhibiting at the 2010 Development Research Forum, so I went along to see how this kind of thing works here. Much the same as everywhere else, apparently, although the ballroom had a mini shipping container parked to one side, to house the translators who would convey the presentations from Khmer to English or vice versa, obviously depending on which language was being spoken on stage, into the headphones of those of us not quite non-bilingual yet.

The conference clashed with a regular meeting of the team I’m working with, so to accommodate everyone, a boardroom was booked at another (slightly less 5-star) nearby hotel, so we could all meet over lunch. While the team leader and I waited in the frosted glass-walled, Japanese themed boardroom for the others to arrive, the recessed ceiling speakers hummed with Jack Johnson and I had to keep reminding myself where I was.

Every day I venture out for lunch, and quite often go to a place I call Red Corner (it’s opposite a place I call Green Corner), and one day there I shared my table with a man who quite enthusiastically struck up a conversation with me. It turns out that he’s a missionary from the Philippines, compelled to come here after a group of American missionaries in the Philippines alerted him to “the need” as he put it, here in Cambodia. He told me that he’s a pastor at home, but he’s moved his family here to address “the need”, which happens to be a race of sorts. It seems that they (the Christians) have it under good authority that “the Muslims” have a goal to convert 50-60% of Cambodia’s population (almost entirely Buddhist) to Islam in the next 5 years. Ambitious. So, in a counter-move, the Christians have decided that instead the population must be converted to Christianity, and so they are earnestly teaching people English through the Bible, and no doubt praying overtime that they beat the Muslims to the punch. Funny how people often don’t bother to ask the people involved what they want. To be left to their Buddhism, I would imagine.

After a couple of weeks I went with two of my colleagues to Siem Reap, to observe a presentation they were making to an NGO network there. We drove up on the Sunday, arrived in the late afternoon, checked into a hotel, then drove out to the Angkor temples. At 5:30pm foreigners are allowed to go in for free (Cambodian people can go for free anytime – rightly so!), so we casually drove around in our car, checking out the amazing ancient ruins, in much the same way as people cruise up and down Campbell Parade in Bondi, looking at the beach. It was a surreal experience. When I was there in March, I had my list of temples to visit and duly inspected each of them with the reverence you reserve for viewing eight hundred year old ruins, was suitably awed, and went on my way. Somehow, driving around them so casually in the fading afternoon light was a different experience all together. I realised that if you lived in Siem Reap, you could do that all the time. Just drive out to the temples, and enjoy them like you’d enjoy your back yard. It was weird.

One Sunday, a few of us decided that we would take the boat over to Silk Island (Koh Dach), hire bicycles and ride around for a few hours checking out the silk weaving that goes on there, and hence the name. We followed the instructions we were given – go to Nagaworld (a massive casino complex on the river), turn left, after about a hundred meters find the ferry, pay 800 riel each, take the ferry over the river, get off the ferry and walk straight up the road until arriving at a bike hire place, ride around. We did all of that, but didn’t see any silk weavers, went the wrong way, got really sunburnt, and were greeted more times than I have ever been in one day. For four hours children called out to us from every house “hello! Hello! Hello!” It was lots of fun for a while, but once the sunburn and lack of places to buy anything to drink set in (about the three hour mark), the novelty wore off a bit and our responses were less enthusiastic. However, we enjoyed the day, seeing donkeys in fancy headgear pulling carts (standard mode of transport), a wat with a big prawn at its front gates (see my photos), and just getting out of the city. I just about fell off my chair laughing the next day when I got an email from one of the friends who had come along, telling me that she had done a bit more research online, and doesn’t think we went to Silk Island. So I checked it out, and indeed we had not. No, we just went to the peninsula in the river, and Silk Island is about 15km upstream. I don’t know what it’s called, but in memory of the not-potato in Sangkhla, I’m calling it not-silk island.

Cambodians and Thai people like to think that they are very different from one another, but in many ways they are very much alike. For example, they have the same three favourite pastimes – sleeping, eating and shopping. Eating has featured quite highly on my activity list since I’ve been here, and I’ve done my best to try as many different places and things as I can. I’ve found what is quite probably the best roast pork I’ve ever eaten, I’ve become quite a fan of fried frogs, especially stuffed ones, and tree ants and their eggs are ok too. I remain unconvinced about tarantulas and bee eggs/larvae, and am yet to hear an argument compelling enough to persuade me to give them a go. Eating here is often quite a noisy affair. Whoever marketed the idea in the west of eating quietly being polite didn’t make it to Cambodia. Soup, noodles, rice, all drinks, BBQ, whatever, there’s lots of slurping, sucking, lip smacking to accompany every meal. I forgot about this when I offered gum to my three travelling companions in the car going to Siem Reap…. You’ve never heard anything like it and I could barely keep a straight face.

For the Cambodians who don’t have to support their family on less than $3 a day, pursuing education is a popular activity. Most of the people I work with have, at the very least, a bachelor degree and one masters, and many continue to study for further qualifications while working full time and raising young families. Qualifications don’t always equate to great pay, though, for example, many university lecturers have other full time jobs to enable them to live, as their university salaries often earn them around $50-$100 per month. Primary school teachers generally make between $25-$50 a month, and charge students 500 riel a day to come to class, to enable them to make enough money to live. So for many children, this is where they first learn about the culture of corruption that pervades almost every part of this country. High school teachers might make between $50-$100 a month, but my rent is $300 a month, so I’m glad I’m not a teacher. These are some of the reasons that pretty much everyone lives with their parent/s or in-laws.

So I started off by saying that I had just returned from Thailand. One of the very many (I think 23) public holidays celebrated in Cambodia is Pchum Ben, or festival for the dead. The whole thing goes for about 15 days, and everyone takes offerings for their ancestors to the pagodas every day, prays (I’ve read that they pray for the spirits of their ancestors, but someone told me that they pray to their ancestors to help the living person in whichever way they are requesting, probably to become rich), the monks chant, and everyone leaves Phnom Penh and goes back to their home province to spend time with their family. My closest thing to family around here is in Sangkhlaburi, so I endured two days of bus travel to get there which was really quite vile, but I got there eventually and had a beautiful 4 days in the jungle. Travelling through the Cambodian landscape for a whole day then in the same day swapping it for Thailand, it becomes very obvious how much more together and affluent Thailand is than Cambodia, and this even trickles down to the number of rotund kids you see in Thailand. The welcome I got from everyone in Sangkhlaburi was a bit overwhelming, and really drove home how much genuine love some people are willing to give you, just for showing them a small amount of kindness. It was so great to see the kids again, and to spend time with my friends there.

And now I’m quite settled into my busy life in Phnom Penh. Work is frantic but rewarding, there are always more eating and drinking places to try, and my spare bedroom is getting booked up for the coming months. Time is flying by, and I have only 9 ½ months of my 13 month assignment left. I just don’t think it’s going to be long enough.

Photos: and now, Cambodia

fimc — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 02:30:00 GMT

Photos: Sangkhla & Cambodia

fimc — Sun, 4 Apr 2010 19:34:00 GMT

Jungle Life

fimc — Sun, 4 Apr 2010 19:26:00 GMT

See the gallery Sangkhla & Cambodia for photos from this post.

It’s been two months since I last sat down to write an update for this blog, so it feels like a big job to start now. After three months here I’m well and truly settled into life in the jungle, and from being here feel a deep sense of real life and a feeling that exists here of freedom to just live life, which is kind of hard to explain.

The most prominent features of the first couple of months in Sangkhla were dogs, dengue and roosters. Dogs and roosters outnumber people here by about 2:1, and the night time noises here are ridiculous. It’s a myth that roosters start to get noisy just before dawn. The roosters here often like to get started at around midnight, which sets off the other roosters around the place. This wakes up the dogs, which start howling in a cacophonous riot that I like to think of as the Sangkhla Symphony. This can go on unabated for 45 minutes to an hour. Then when it all quiets down, a rooster starts again, and you get the picture. Earplugs are essential. And then there’s the dengue which was running rife for about six weeks, and is really the thing you don’t want to get. Fever, pain throughout your body like all your bones are broken and millions of tiny needles are piercing your skin, delirium, and a weakness that makes it difficult to even sit up….. and there’s nothing you can do to prevent it or cure it. Add to that the possible complication of hemorrhagic fever setting in, at which point you can expect all your organs including your brain to start to bleed ending in certain death, and you see what I mean. There are four strains of dengue, and the good news is that once you’ve had one kind, you’re immune to it. But the problem is that the more times you get dengue, the more chance there is of the hemorrhagic complication, and so the immunity thing seems like a cheap payoff. Touch wood, I’ve managed to avoid it so far, and hope to get through the next two weeks the same way. The only way to avoid this is to cover yourself in a cloud of eau de deet every day, and have fast showers, because the little suckers even try to get you there.

On the second weekend in January I went to Bangkok to catch up with friends Leo and Petch who were visiting from Sydney. Petch is from Bangkok and so every year they come to Thailand to visit his family and I was really happy to have the chance to see some old friends. So only four weeks after arriving in Sangkhla I headed back to the big city. The drive in and out of Sangkhla is considered to be one of the most scenic in Thailand, and climbing the mountain out of town with the sun reflecting a surreal golden glow through the thick blanket of fog that covers Sangkhla in the mornings at this time of year, then breaking through it into bright sunlight and blue sky, is breathtaking. Between Sangkhlaburi and Kanchanaburi there are four police checkpoints with military guys toting large automatic rifles. At each of these the mini van stops and the border police get on and want to see everyone’s Thai ID cards or travel documents. Usually they don’t bother with us farangs, but with tension building on the border in anticipation of the Burma elections which are supposed to be held this year, I guess there’s an expectation of increased numbers of people crossing the border illegally and trying to move away from the border region, so sometimes we get asked now to show our passports. The Thai government is somewhat tolerant of these migrants, but only to the extent that they will allow them to stay close to the border, and has no patience for illegal migrants trying to go to Bangkok or wherever to find jobs. Of course this whole thing is very complex and complicated, but in a nutshell, if you don’t have the paperwork, you can’t go anywhere. Between Kanchanaburi and Bangkok there’s a town called Banpong, which I now look out for every time I make this trip – they have an arch over the road at the entrance to the town which says in English “Welcome to Banpong, City of Nice People”, and it always gives me a chuckle.

So I arrived in the Big Mango (as opposed to the Big Apple), checked into my hotel and went to MBK (a big shopping mall) to meet Leo and Petch. I had been having massive cravings for sushi, having not had any for at least eight months at this point, so we went to a sushi and suki bar and stuffed ourselves, and then I wandered around with them while they continued with their annual shop-a-thon and I stocked up on some dvds. The next morning they picked me up in a minivan they had hired with a driver for the day, with the whole family on board. I made fast friends with Petch’s mum who was impressed with my Thai language skills, and we headed off for the tiger zoo which is on the way to Pattaya, of course stopping for something to eat on the way (one of the three favourite pastimes of all Thais – eating, sleeping and shopping). The zoo has a great number of tigers, some elephants, hundreds of crocodiles, and throughout the day has scheduled shows where the animals perform for the applauding crowds. This isn’t really my kind of thing – “training” animals to do cute tricks for people - but for me it was about spending the day with the family, and definitely not about the zoo. On the way back we stopped at a temple so they could pay their respects to the Buddha, and to take the chance to explore this famous and beautiful temple built in the Chinese style. There was much banging of enormous drums and ringing of gigantic bells to let the Buddha know we were there, and then it was off to nearby Bang Saen for a seaside seafood dinner. Bang Saen is very popular with Bangkokians and also with hundreds of monkeys who seem to have taken over the town. The shopkeepers walk around with slingshots in their pockets ready to fire at the crafty little creatures that climb down from rooftops to steal food or whatever they can get their hands on, and then run away at lightening speed. Amusing for visitors to watch, probably less amusing if you’re just trying to sell bananas.

I’d been panicking a little bit before that weekend in Bangkok because I was almost finished reading the one book I had with me and had no idea where or when I’d be able to get my hands on something else to read. The Bangkok Post doesn’t even make it to Sangkhla, so if no one you know has something you want to read, the only real option is to hunt around in the Baan Unrak library to see if there’s something there. So after breakfast the next morning I tracked down a secondhand bookshop I’d read about and splashed out on two books to keep me going for a while. When I was in Bangkok in 2008 I discovered that one of the big shopping malls that has a food hall with loads of imported food, was a purveyor of my favourite ice cream in the world – Ben & Jerry’s. I was cutting it a bit fine to make the minivan leaving at the time I wanted, but decided that a taste of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia would be worth being late for, so a quick skytrain journey later and I was soon expectantly scanning the Ben & Jerry’s freezer. I felt disbelief wash over me as the realisation dawned that although the freezer was still there, the product was not…… NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! I felt like the kid in Home Alone.

A week or so later I finally managed to find the time to buy a couple of tools from the shop that sells everything, take my bike out of the box I had posted from Chiang Rai and put it back together. This turned out to be much more straightforward than I had expected, and before I knew it I was on my way into town to the bike shop to get them to put a new basket on it (the one I had in Chiang Rai didn’t fit in the box), and I was mobile again. The road into town is a bit insidious. It’s not very long; probably about a kilometer and a half, but it’s a gradual uphill slope the entire way, and a real killer. Around this time was also friend, Andi’s 40^th birthday (or 20,20 as he prefers to call it) and a bunch of us headed out onto the lake on a houseboat for some food, drinks, music, and a game called the noun game, which kept us all amused for a while. It’s the not having TV that does it…..

The following week brought Australia Day, and so the five Australians in town got together at the one Kiwi’s house to see what we could do about it. Beer, check. Lamingtons (homemade), check. Vegemite sandwiches, check. BBQ chicken, check. Marinated beef skewers, check. Sausages, well, it’s usually better to avoid the sausages in Thailand. Exclusively Australian tunes, check. I even had a stubby cooler and the brilliant Aussie hat my friend Nicole had sent to me in September for my birthday, and all in all we called it a success. We even had a grassy lawn to play badminton on. Bewdy.

Two days later I got a phone call from Caty in Chiang Rai, which even now is hard to think about. Samraan, a boy who from the home in Chiang Rai who had just turned 15 in September died instantly when the motorbike he was riding to school collided with a much larger truck. He was like a younger brother for Caty; they were very close, and there are few things more impossible than trying to find something to say over the phone to someone who has just lost someone like this. I also felt very sad for Samraan’s two sisters – one older and one younger, who I know very well. The tragedy of his young life cut so short, never having the chance to fulfill the promise that new opportunities in his life would bring. The devastation for the people that loved him most and their never-ending, always unanswered question, “why?, is hard to reconcile.

A couple of weeks later it was unanimously agreed by all the female volunteers in Sangkhla, that it was time to get out of the jungle, so we headed off to the big smoke of Kanchanaburi. Trying to order dinner on Friday night was fraught with indecision, first in choosing where to eat, and even worse, what?? So many choices of places and things….it was quite comical. Then we settled in to the 10 baht bar; a sidewalk stall with upturned empty buckets of paint for seats, and empty cat food tins for ashtrays, and worked our way along the line of Thai whiskeys atop the bar. The next day we went out for breakfast, had great coffee, then spent the afternoon drinking cocktails and reading by the pool before surrendering to a two hour massage and another night at the 10 baht bar. Just what the doctor ordered, really.

One of my favourite times of the day in Sangkhla is when I’ve finished work and am on my way home. I always have my iPod out of my bag ready to take my mind off the killer hill (not the long one into town, but a very steep one between the home and the bakery) and baking heat I have to look forward to on my walk home. Almost always I am hijacked by at least one child who wants to listen to my iPod, and most often before I know it I am surrounded by children all clamoring for a turn to listen. The pulling and tugging on the earphones by eager children who can’t bear to wait a moment more for a go has put a new set of earphones on my shopping list, but the payoff of watching their faces when they hear something they love, or have never heard before, is more than worth it. There is one little girl here who I feel especially close to. She’s three years old and her seven year old sister lives here too. They were brought to Baan Unrak by a man who said he is their uncle, and that their mother, a prostitute had run away. The three year old had burns from where someone had been using her face for an ashtray. Anyway, from the time I arrived she seemed to sort of assign herself to me and she is always making me laugh with her cheeky grin, and the look on her face the first time she listened to my iPod was pure gold. She seemed to swell up, her eyes slowly widening and an expression coming over her face of amazement and joy. Whenever she puts the earphones in her ears I see something happening to her, like she wants to dance but doesn’t know how or if she can. It’s brilliant and often makes my day.

There are so many children here who have stolen my heart. Another one is a little boy who is five but is the size of a three year old, and also has a brother a couple of years older than him living here. Their father was killed in a work accident, and then the now oh-so-familiar story, their mother remarried and the children weren’t welcomed by the new husband. This little boy is the biggest showman at Baan Unrak. I often catch him watching me, and then he puts on a little show, just for me; pulling faces, a funny walk, or something that has me shaking my head and laughing out loud. It’s not only with me of course, he does this with everyone, but the show you get is just for you. Lots of the kids have very cool names, like the twin sisters called Bee and Cee, the six year old girl named Dream, the little boy called Chopper and another one named OK. Then there’s a teenage boy named Baby, and a teenage girl who’s name is Pretty. It wouldn’t work in our culture, but here it’s brilliant.

The reason it’s taken me so long to update this blog is that I only get one day off a week, and it gets difficult to fit in chores, relaxation, out of town trips and writing all into one day. From the beginning of February also demanding some of this time was the need to sort out transport and accommodation for my impending visa run at the beginning of March. I’d decided to go back to Cambodia and wanted to spend a decent amount of time there, in Phnom Penh to get the new visa, Siem Reap to visit the Angkor Temples, and the south coast to get some beach time in. I thought I had this pretty well sorted, and planned to buy a Bangkok Airways Airpass, which is a voucher system that requires the purchase of a minimum of three flights, and is supposed to save you money. The idea was to make the trip from Sangkhla to Bangkok early in the morning, then fly to Siem Reap, then fly a nice neat journey south to Phnom Penh, bus down to the coast, then back to Phnom Penh to fly to Bangkok. When I contacted Bangkok Airways with my dates and flights, they replied to say that they no longer fly between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. No problem, I decided I’d just take a bus between the two, and book single flights from Bangkok to Siem Reap, then from Phnom Penh to Bangkok. Until I found out that the 45 minute flight to Siem Reap monopolised by Bangkok Airways, costs $250. This turned into a saga that bored everyone to tears, including me, for weeks on end while I tried in my spare time to work out what to do. I looked into every possible option to fly into Siem Reap; from Laos, Vietnam, Singapore….Air Asia flies from KL to Siem Reap for $77 Australian dollars, but the times meant I would have had to overnight there and didn’t really want to spend the time. It went on and on, around and around for weeks.

I’d also resigned myself to the idea that I had better start getting on with thinking about what I might do for a job when I leave here. So, I signed up for email alerts from a bunch of different websites and duly began scanning them as they arrived in my inbox; days off were spent in front of my laptop, planning Cambodia and trying to transport my mind out of the jungle and into some sort of future workplace. This quickly revealed itself to be more problematic than I had thought it would be. An unexpected side effect of this past year in Thailand has been what my clever friend Susannah predicted before I left Australia; that I would end up with a completely different perspective on everything, and this makes the idea of returning to life in Sydney difficult to wrap my head around. When I imagine myself there all I can see is a superficial culture that encourages people to live self-obsessed lives without much purpose….. And I’m not so sure that corporate events is any longer the area that I want to direct my energy toward. I will try to not be the world’s biggest bore about this when I get there. So if not Sydney, then where? Queensland? Not for me. Melbourne? I can’t bear the thought of the weather. The north coast of NSW? Quite possibly, but what kind of job would I find there that would satisfy me? So I push the thought away and spend time instead thinking about the Cambodia trip. I wrote after my last visa run to Phnom Penh that I feel a strong attraction to this city, and this is part of the reason I’d decided to go back again. I find it very easy to imagine myself living there, and so I decided to throw the idea of working in Cambodia into the ring.

I spoke at length about this with Andi, who’s job here is through an Australian organisation called AVI (Australian Volunteers International) which facilitates placements for professional positions with various agencies and projects doing development work around the world. He put me in touch with his boss who is the AVI in-country manager for Thailand and Cambodia, and we arranged to meet while I was in Phnom Penh.

My good intentions as far as intentional exercise were put on hold in February, partly due to an ongoing feeling of general unwellness which had me constantly wondering if I might have malaria or parasites (both entirely possible), followed by a couple of local festivals which were completely exhausting. The extent to which people like a party in this part of the world should not be underestimated. On the Mon side of the lake there is a large monastery and for the abbot’s birthday they threw a massive festival that lasted for five days. This incorporated stalls selling everything imaginable (including the Baan Unrak stall where we were selling some of the 7,000 pairs of jeans - yes,7,000, that had been donated the week before), carnival rides, and five stages with around the clock entertainment. So while my brother was going to a music festival in Brisbane to see Faith No More, Placebo and Jane's Addiction, there was something completely different on the bill where I was going. Below are some links to video that I took so we could compare notes. The Baan Unrak volunteers took turns at taking groups of children there, and involved a couple of very late nights for me. The music could be heard from my place at the Bakery, and went on until 6:30 every morning, although it didn’t keep me awake, I could just hear it when I got up. Two late nights in cool damp air inadequately dressed left me with a sore throat and actual unwellness that was shared by a lot of Baan Unrak folk. After a two day break a smaller version of the festival moved into the grounds of the temple across the road from the Bakery, and went on for three nights. This one did keep me awake. At first it was funny…”oh those crazy Thai people….” But by the third day of no sleep, even with two sleeping tablets, earplugs and a pillow over my head – the music from the three stages sounded like it was in my room, the novelty had definitely worn off. I can see why sleep deprivation is used as an instrument of torture. The no sleep turned into the inevitable migraine, that even the never-been-known-to fail prescription medication I have couldn’t fix. So no early morning running for me.

http://vimeo.com/10819573 (password : festival) These are not our kids

http://vimeo.com/10821000 (password : festival2) These aren't ours either

http://vimeo.com/10820026 (password : festival yoga) These are ours

And so on the first weekend in March, completely exhausted, I rolled out of Sangkhla a little after 6:00am en route to Bangkok and my completely rearranged Cambodia itinerary. I arrived in Phnom Penh late in the afternoon, this time with my accommodation already sorted, checked in and went straight around the corner to Om for their specialty back and shoulder massage…. After this and a $9 (ahem) wax the next morning, I was on the road to feeling and looking a better version of my 3-months-in-the-jungle self. One of the great things about returning to a place is that you already know where the good stuff is. I’d booked a place to stay that has a fantastic bar/restaurant with a pool just around the corner, so after doing whatever was on the cards for the mornings, I could spend the afternoon drinking mojitos in the shade by the pool with a book, escaping from the afternoon heat and contemplating where to go for happy hour and dinner. At all times of the day in Cambodia, it’s hard to not drink beer when it’s cheaper than soft drink or juice, and it was also difficult to pass up the chance to try one of the local stouts from the fridge at the corner shop; Black Panther. At 8% alcohol, more than one and you would start to know about it, but I gave it the thumbs up as I chatted to the old man I bought it from, who was enjoying one himself.

There are many great things about Cambodia. One of them is the proliferation of sidewalk barbers; literally a guy with a chair on the footpath, surrounded by mounds of black hair, busily cutting and clippering away everywhere you go. Another is the ridiculously cheap price of booze. I decided to do some research on this when I was in a supermarket stocking up on a few things, and found out that a bottle of Stoli costs $8, Makers Mark bourbon is $18, and your standard bottle of Veuve/Moet/Feuillatte can be had for $55. Brilliant.

With my new 60-day Thailand tourist visa in my passport, it was time to head north to Siem Reap. Bumping along the narrow highway for three hours through a flat, dry landscape and past thatched shacks, towering haystacks and millions of plastic bags blowing abandoned by the side of the road, we eventually arrive in Khompong Thom, I think officially in the middle of nowhere. Pulling up outside a large Chinese restaurant commanding an authoritative corner position, and host to a formal parking system. Two guys in military-style uniforms rush to guide drivers into a spot, waving their parking batons about (I don’t know if that’s what they’re called?), like a pair of misplaced airport ground crew. Once in position and with driver and passengers disembarked, a flattened cardboard box is placed across the windscreen and fastened with string to the side mirrors. Similarly disgorged from the bus into the waiting arms of the restaurant, my fellow passengers follow the script and pile inside to order their sweet and sour pork or whatever is on the menu. I took a short wander down the road through what looks like a war zone but is actually the town market. For 2000 Riel (50c) I picked up a peeled and sliced mango, and as I sat eating it on the steps in the shade of the Chinese restaurant, I wondered why in Australia, whoever is responsible for such things has spent who knows how much time, effort and money to develop the haled R2E2 super mango, when what I was eating was every bit as delicious, non-stringy, and fleshy as the grafting or genetic engineering boffins could have hoped for with the R2E2. Just to give us something else overpriced to want, I guess.

A few hours later in Siem Reap, I was met at the bus station/dusty parking lot by tuk tuk driver Ra (you roll the “r”), who took me to my (again, pre-booked) hotel, and after settling in to my new room, a swim in the pool and a lounge in the shade, I was once again met by Ra when I was on my out to check out the night market and get something to eat. Ra wanted to offer his services as my driver for the temples and of course we had to negotiate the price for the planned three days. After discussing the schedule I’d already worked out (to avoid the exposed temples during the hottest parts of the day and the thronging crowds at various times), we agreed on the price ($50) and he dropped me off at the night market on his way home for dinner. I wasn’t 5 meters into the night market when I stopped to look at a skirt. The seamstress was out of her seat in front of the sewing machine quick as a flash and urging me to agree with her on how beautiful her things are. Before I knew what was happening she was wrapping the skirt around me and then her friend came to get in on the act to expound on how beautiful the skirt is and how slim I am. Now this I know to be an outright lie, because having just had the first opportunity in three months to view myself in a full-length mirror, I have noted with alarm that I’ve expanded by approximately two sizes over the past ten months. Bugger. This first big clue I had to this was about a week before in Sangkhla when I decided to wear jeans out for dinner one night. Ok, they were freshly washed, but they’d never been that much of a struggle to get on before. Maybe it was an extra hot night….well, yes, but as soon as I started to waddle up the road into town to meet my friends, I knew a corner had been turned, and the view wasn’t all that pretty. Needless to say, those jeans did not get packed to go to Cambodia. So, the moral of the story is (or one of them anyway), that while wearing fisherman pants to work everyday may well be comfortable, it tricks you into not realizing the rate of knots that you, or more to the point, I might be stacking on the kilos. And of course then I was back in Cambodia where after months of limited choices in the jungle, I was once again faced with all sorts of (mainly French) temptations that can not be expected to advance my cause at all, but the size of my arse on the other hand, is likely to advance without question. Oh well, pass me a croissant….

But I digress. After a quick bit of negotiating with the seamstress, we agreed on a price ($5), whereupon she gave me a big hug. Best deal-closer ever.

Later on when I was sitting outside a restaurant on the periphery of the main tourist drag(which is hideous in a way-too-western kind of way), I was minding my own business, enjoying my bowl of steaming lemongrass, garlic, chili, lime leaf, ginger, galangal and chicken soup, when I had my first encounter with one of Cambodia’s infamous child street vendors. He must have been about 11 or 12 and was selling books. I didn’t want one. He told me he was having a slow night and wanted me to buy just one. I stood my ground while he slouched off to lean against a tuk tuk parked at the curb. After throwing me dirty looks for a while he muttered, just loud enough for me to hear, “madame, you are a fucking bitch.” I told him I was sorry he felt that way and went back to my soup.

The next morning after breakfast, Ra picked me up at 9:30 and we set off for Banteay Srei, about 30 kms out of Siem Reap, and one of the furthest away. Made from pink-tinged sandstone and with amazingly well-preserved carvings, this is often said to be the jewel in the crown of the Angkor temples. The set-up of the way out of the temple area to the carpark seems to have been designed by Westfield; the path forcing you to pass every stall selling every kind of Cambodian souvenir you can think of, with vendors shouting out to you “cold water! Lady, you want cold drink! Lady, you buy postcard! Have Cambodian silk!”.

It turns out that I’m Ra’s first customer in his new job as tuk tuk driver. He used to work as a driver for one of the hotels, but after two years and no increase in his monthly salary of US$90, he resigned and bought a second hand tuk tuk carriage for US$450 to try to make some more money. He almost died of embarrassment when, on the way to the next temple he ran out of gas, and had to flag down a passing local and convince them to go to fill a bottle and bring it back. That day I also visited Prah Khan, Neak Peon, Ta Som, East Mebon, and Pre Rup for sunset. This place has a lot of very steep steps which lead up to ever-higher spots to ponder how the hell they built these temples. Going up was one thing, and going down, it turned out, was going to be quite another. Seeing me trying to work this out, one of the temple kids who was selling postcards piped up “madame, this is easy way” and showed me a much better way than negotiating the more than 45 degree angle steps. He was selling the worst postcards I’ve ever seen, with terrible quality pictures that even I could have done better, but I bought a set from him anyway, figuring that his advice had been worth a dollar. My heart broke a little bit with every child I saw; at the temples and around town, the level of poverty here is shocking.

Ra was waiting in the dark for me at 5:15 the next morning to take me to Bayon for the sunrise. He was quite pleased that I had the place all to myself, but I realised afterwards that this was because we were on the wrong side of the temple…. Oh well. His next customer will get the benefit of his new experience. No matter, the Bayon turned out to be my favourite of all the temples, and after spending a couple of hours looking at the Elephant Terrace and the Terrace of the Leper King, Preah Palilay, Phimeanakas and the Baphuon, I went back to the Bayon for another hour. This was all done and dusted by about 10:30am, and I went back to Siem Reap (only about 8 kms) for a sleep, swim and lunch, before heading back out to see Takeo, Thommanon and Chau Say, Preah Pithu and finally the Kleang in the golden glow of the late afternoon light.

I had one more sunrise in me, and Ra was there again to whisk me off to Sra Srang. He hadn’t even stopped the tuk tuk before two children appeared, imploring me to have a look in their shop or buy their breakfast or coffee. I told them it was too early for breakfast, but maybe I’d have coffee later. They didn’t blow in with the last tour bus though, and were having none of it. “The coffee will warm you up!” I told them I was already warm enough, but asked what kind of coffee they had. “I have white coffee and black coffee!” This wasn’t what I meant so I expanded, “is it instant or fresh?” This was met with puzzled looks, but like lightening one of them piped up “it’s very hot coffee!” Gold. How could you not buy coffee with a sales pitch like that?

The sunrise was a bit of a fizzer due to the amount of haze in the sky, but the beautiful Banteay Kdei was next on the list and just across the road, and I was very lucky to have this amazing place almost to myself. By the time I’d seen Prasat Kravan and Ta Prohm (with a Hollywood profile since scenes from Tomb Raider were filmed here) it was only 9:30am so I got Ra to drop me into town so I could have breakfast and a look around. I have to say that everything I ate in Siem Reap was mildly disappointing, the opposite of Phnom Penh where pretty much everything is great. And I’ve still only found one place that makes a good coffee in Cambodia; the FCC in Phnom Penh.

I’d saved my last afternoon for the biggest of them all, Angkor Wat. The vast scale of this place is phenomenal and very impressive, and the bas reliefs are incredible, but I have to say that it wasn’t my favourite; this title easily goes to the Bayon, then Preah Khan, Banteay Kdei, and the carvings of Banteay Srei are astounding in their detail and beauty. Angkor Wat reminded me of the Vatican in that it’s so beautiful but there’s so much to take in that after a while my eyes started to glaze over and beauty fatigue started to set in, until I couldn’t really look at it anymore, or take any more in. After watching the sun sink behind this behemoth symbol of a king’s devotion to his gods, utterly exhausted I rode with Ra back to the hotel and declared the temples of Angkor, done. I apologise for the number of photos of the temples that I’ve put up on this page, but I took 300 and this was the best I could do at editing them down. God knows what people did before digital cameras.

Another early morning, this time to the airport for my flight to Phnom Penh, so I could find a morning bus to take me south to Sihanoukville and the beaches beyond. I thought I’d catch up on some much-needed z’s, but the first hour of the bus journey was characterised by slow-going on the way out of Phnom Penh accompanied by the driver tooting his horn every 20 meters to warn whichever vehicle was in front to move over so we could pass, and by the girl next to me vomiting her breakfast into the clear plastic bag she had bought it in. She then placed the bag in the elasticized net pocket on the back of the seat in front of her. Lucky I had the window seat. We stopped after two hours for a rest break, and I thought that she’d take the bag of vomit off the bus and put it in a bin, but she didn’t. Rather, she got off the bus and joined her traveling companions for a bite to eat. When she got back on the bus she had with her a bag of sliced mango to snack on for the next two hours to Sihanoukville. As we drove on with the sun beating in through the side window (my side) and the driver allergic to air-conditioning, the temperature went through the roof, slowly cooking the 45 people and one bag of vomit on board, and I could not wait to get there.

I’d read enough about Sihanoukville to know that I didn’t want to spend any time there at all, so got off the bus, onto the back of a motorbike and went straight to Otres beach. I’d also read enough to know that the other beaches around Sihanoukville are like the Costa del Cambodia, with the added bonus of filthy sex tourists just to really top it off. Otres on the other hand, doesn’t even have electricity. Along the beach are just enough thatched grass bungalows, where generators are run for a few hours at night. I found a room at a place called La Casa for $12/night and decided to call it home. First on the agenda was a swim and then a late lunch (funny that I’d lost my appetite on the bus…..). La Casa doesn’t do food so I took a wander down the beach and stopped at Sea Garden to see what was going on there. I pulled up a stool at the bar and found myself talking to the owner, an American guy called Mike, who reckons that the chicken curry they do is the best in the world, and if I didn’t like it, I didn’t have to pay for it, he said. Who can turn down a rap like that? When I’d finished my glass of Anchor Draught he asked me if I wanted another one, and when I answered yes, he told me that it was on him. And so it was that I sat at the bar for the rest of the afternoon and most of the night, talking with whoever came along and was drawn into Mike’s thrall. This was when I met Bjorn, who announced himself by leaning on the bar across from Mike and said “You know, I’ve been trying to work out if there is a more perfect place on earth….” An excellent question, I thought.

I spent the whole of the next day lying on a beach bed under a thatched grass umbrella, wondering myself, if indeed there was a more perfect place on earth at that moment. All day the women and kids who sell stuff along the beach dropped by to see if they could convince me to buy something; bracelet, manicure, pedicure, necklace, key ring, hair band, fruit, massage, lobsters….. I only managed to fend them off for a few hours until along came a woman named Mom and I heard myself agree to have the hairs on my legs threaded; a process more painful, it turns out, than getting a tattoo. The thing with getting a tattoo is that as soon as the needle stops, the pain stops, but this threading business is like having a hundred tiny needles being smacked onto your skin, and stings like a bitch until the job’s done an hour later. Mom had only had me whimpering for a short time before her younger sister, Thear came along and started on my other leg, and this is was the start of my relationship with the women and kids on the beach. By the time they were finished with me we had gotten to know each other a little bit, and my raw legs were in no shape to go in the sun for a walk on the beach that I’d thought I might do, and so I surrendered to the confines of my beach hut (ha!) and soaked up the day. In the late afternoon I wandered down the beach to Sea Garden for what had apparently already become my routine way to spend the rest of the day.

Otres is a small beach and although each of the operators have their own style and personality, Mike is definitely a unique character, and the place he’s created reflects that. He’s fun, his staff are fun, they have fun together and with the guests, and hopefully the guests have fun too. Before arriving in Cambodia six months ago Mike had been living in Las Vegas for the past ten years, and frequently went to the casino to play poker with 20k in his pocket. His friends are big-shot poker players who are on the world series poker tour and I’m guessing he was living a fairly different lifestyle to now. He contacted his family and friends and told them he wasn’t coming back, and now he spends his days bantering with his staff, buying beers for his guests and generally making sure everyone is enjoying themselves.

So after two nights sleeping at La Casa I thought I might as well move into Sea Garden, and migrated down the beach. Every day was filled with talking with the beach kids, many of which are very smart, have wicked senses of humour, are sharp as tacks and really interesting to get to know. I think a lot of foreigners probably don’t engage with these kids at all, because they don’t want to get hassled to buy stuff while they are busy lying on the beach, but really, if you’re not going to engage with the local people, then maybe you need to ask yourself some questions…. I loved it. And by the way, if you’re turning down the chance to have a lunch of lobster, peeled and seasoned to order, and a bag of freshly cut fruit salad of mango, watermelon and pineapple for the grand total of $4, then you really should ask yourself some questions. On my last night Mike had invited me and Bjorn to go to a private opening party for his new nightclub in town. I had dragged myself off the beach and got ready to go out, and was even looking forward to having a boogie as my friend Skye would say, and rolled up to the Sea Garden bar to meet Bjorn. When I arrived he told me that Mike had crashed his motorbike and was being rushed by private ambulance to Phnom Penh, and then possibly by helicopter to Bangkok. Of course I couldn’t believe it, and we just sort of sat there, stunned for a while wondering what had happened and if Mike was ok. We decided to give the party a miss, not feeling right about going to a party when Mike was in who knows what kind of shape. It spoke volumes about the loyalty his staff have for him, when one of them who had been at the accident scene arrived back at Sea Garden and with tears in his eyes told us what he knew about it all. I’ve emailed Mike a couple of times since then and he’s recovering ok, and is back at the beach, although I’ve also heard that he’s played down his injuries quite a lot and it was actually much worse than he was making out from his hospital bed.

The next morning I was up early to get the bus back to Phnom Penh, and my flight to Bangkok. I had a couple of hours to kill so took myself to Om for one last back and shoulder massage, then to the FCC for lunch with a glass of wine and the last decent coffee until who knows when, and reflected on what an amazing two weeks it had been.

Back in Sangkhla, rested and restored, the morning run was back on and so were the Sangkhla moments; running past an old woman sitting on the bridge pricking her gums her an oversized safety pin to heighten the effects of the betel nut she chews; an old Mon man in his traditional lonjee giving me the thumbs up as I run toward him (in direct contrast to the women I encounter who meet my smile with a scowl); rust coloured splatter all over the roads and footpaths from the constant chew and spit of betel nut…. This is a place that has a very strong, unique personality, and as my time here grows shorter and shorter I’m starting to feel quite emotional about leaving it behind.

I’ve just found out that it’s Easter. The weather is sticking to its guns and has turned into its very aptly named, Hot Season. I have no idea what the temperature is, but it is ferocious. It’s now really uncomfortable to try to sleep at night – my pillow is too hot to put my head on, and it’s sweltering before 8:00am. Also, the morning run is back off. I was walking to my room a few nights ago and kicked a brick which was just lying randomly about in the middle of nowhere, and broke my toe.

A few people know about some unusual things I’ve done in my sleep from time to time; changing the time on my alarm clock (more than once); taking a framed picture off the wall and trying to peel the backing paper off…. Well now it looks like I’ve added to this repertoire. One night last week I woke up at 3:00am and could hear a noise, and after a few groggy moments realised that it was music. It sounded like it was in my room, and when I listened closer, it seemed to be coming from my bag. I crawled out of bed and dug out my iPod which was on, and tried to turn it off, but had to take the lock off before I could do this. The next morning when I was about to leave for work, I dug out my iPod and when I turned it on, it restarted where I’d turned it off during the night – half way through the second song of an album that I had not been listening to the day before. So it seems that in my sleep I got up, got my iPod out of my bag, took it out of its sock, unlocked it, selected an album, locked it again, put it back in its sock, then back in my bag and went back to bed, then woke up a song and a half later. I did it again last night. Maybe it’s the heat.

And I think that about brings me up to date. In two weeks I’ll leave Sangkhla and will attend an ANZAC day dawn service at Hellfire Pass, then travel on to Bangkok and then down to Koh Phangan to sit on the beach for a week and try to prepare my mind and my heart as as best I can to both leave here and go back to Australia. It is hard to imagine that this year is almost over, and I’m reluctant to let it go. The mixed emotions I feel about returning to Australia aren’t helping, but I’m doing my best to take into account that this might just be my perspective from here, and that it might be very different to how I imagine it once I’m there. I’ll find out soon enough, I guess.

Photos: First month in Sangkhla

fimc — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 20:41:00 GMT

First Month In Sangkhla

fimc — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 20:33:00 GMT

See the gallery First month in Sangkhla for photos from this post.

An early morning taxi to Bangkok’s southern bus terminal and a bit of confused wandering later, I found myself on the number 81 bus heading north-west to Kanchanaburi. An easy two and-a-bit hours later I arrived, with an hour to wait for the next mini van to Sangklaburi. A couple of hours out of Kanchanaburi the landscape started to get quite scenic; twisting around mountain ranges, limestone hills, past rivers, streams and waterfalls, but I hardly dared to turn my head to look out the window for fear my neck might snap as the driver fanged it at god knows how many kilometers per hour, onward and upward. I think the questions on the application form for mini-van drivers in Thailand must be: 1) do you hope to qualify to become a professional racing car driver in A) less than one year; B) 1-2 years; C) more than 2 years? 2) In each hour of driving, approximately how many minutes (total) is it possible to spend at less than 100kms/hr? Eventually I got my first glimpse of the “lake” and knew I wasn’t far from my destination. Almost literally the end of the road. Sangklaburi (or Sangkhlaburi) is a border town, snuggled up close and personal with Myanmar, and while you can’t go much further past Sangkla (the border crossing Three Pagoda Pass is only about 20 clicks away), making it the end for anyone traveling west, for many people fleeing Myanmar, Sangkla is the first stop, rather than the last.

The original township of Sangklaburi was drowned in 1983 when the valley was flooded to create the dam (which people like to call a lake) around which the town is now built. Being a border town, there is a big mix of ethnicities that makes up the population; Mon, Karen, Burmese, Thai, and pretty much all of them about as poor as you can get. Border towns hold host to all sorts of problems; human trafficking, refugees, poverty, and with these problems come more like prostitution (either as a sex slave or because no other options seem available, or to support a drug habit), abandonment of children and/or women, children being orphaned due to all the above, banditry, general lawlessness borne out of pure desperation or anger at all of the above, and pretty much any type of exploitation you can think of. Sangkla is pretty tame as far as border towns go, I’m told, but there is definitely something in the air here that’s different to anywhere else I’ve been in Thailand. There are also a bunch of pretty interesting people here, because of all the above. There are two refugee camps, one about 80kms away in one direction which is home to about 4,000 people, and another about 60kms away from Kanchanaburi storing about 2 or 3 thousand people, as well as a few organisations quietly providing food, shelter and other basic stuff for untold numbers of others. The children’s home I’m now volunteering at has over 140 kids, from babies to, well kids who’ve finished school and want to stay, so work for the home doing the many, many jobs that are needed to keep an operation like this running. And this isn’t the only orphanage in town…. Children are obviously the most vulnerable people in the picture in a place like this, and women don’t fare that much better. There are also people (foreigners) here working for NGO’s and various advocacy groups, all trying in earnest to improve the health and opportunities for whichever group they’re fighting for. So for such a small place in the middle of nowhere, there’s some pretty interesting folk around.

The day I arrived I caught a taxi bike up to the orphanage (well, 2 taxi bikes – me, my laptop and handbag on one bike, my backpack on the driver of the other one) and found my way to the office. There I met Didi Devamala, the Italian woman who started this place 20 years ago. She took me to her office where I had a three hour briefing that crammed in a lot of information – all my tasks and deadlines and responsibilities as the new Volunteer Coordinator, as well as some other things to look after while Didi was away in Malaysia for eleven days, starting the next morning! So there I was, in the thick of it again. Oh well. The last proper volunteer coordinator had left a couple of months ago, and from the look of it pretty much everything had been on hold since then. On second look it became clear that some other stuff has always been on hold, such as managing the six, yes, six email accounts, one of which (I’m not exaggerating) has over 4,000 messages in the inbox. Most of them have been opened, but no one has ever thought to maybe, delete the spam or other useless messages from the inbox, let alone file them into folders….. oh well.

So, the next morning, Didi left and I got stuck in. I had to work out how to prioritise three groups of short-term volunteers arriving over the following two weeks, including developing programs for each of them; uploading the twice-yearly newsletter to the website and emailing it to a database that had not been maintained; and working my way through the mess of email accounts to try to work out if there were any other long-term volunteers due to arrive soon, so I could create a calendar for their (and my) placement.

We eat early here – lunch is at 11:30 and dinner at 4:30. A few hours after lunch on my first day, me and a couple of other volunteers took an early mark and headed into town. I needed to pick up a few essentials (bowl and spoon for eating at the orphanage, pillow, stuff like that), and so it was that I was introduced to “the shop that sells everything”. The term “everything” is used quite loosely, but as far as stuff that you need, and can get in Sangkhla, this is probably the place to get it. We’re in a pretty remote part of Thailand here, and progress (or maybe I should say “westernization”) is slow in arriving. The best way I can illustrate this is to say that “town” consists of three streets, and the 7-11 opened less than six months ago. Stocked up with my purchases I headed back to my new digs behind the Baan Unrak Bakery, which is a fifteen minute walk from town, and halfway between town and the orphanage. The rest of the female volunteers share a house on the next street over, and the rooms behind the Bakery are officially for male volunteers. However, when Didi took me to the women’s house the night I arrived, the only available room is kind of tacked onto the front verandah with a dodgy lock that anyone with a screwdriver could open, so she showed me the rooms at the Bakery. Seeing as there is only one male volunteer at the moment so no high demand for these rooms, I opted to call this home, at least to start off with. It’s not a house; just a building with two rooms downstairs and two rooms up a set of external stairs, all with their own entrance door. My room’s ok, as far as rooms go; it has concrete walls and wooden floorboards, four windows with screens and glass louvers, a plywood ceiling, and a fluorescent light. A mattress on the floor and a small table are about it as far as furniture goes. All I need, really. The bathroom is the hurdle. My room is upstairs; much better to be the one creaking around on the floorboards than being below and driven to distraction by someone else doing it, so the bathroom is outside and down the stairs. It’s the public toilet for the bakery, which is also a small café, internet shop and clothing store, all proceeds going towards the orphanage. So my bathroom is a public toilet with a shower (cold, of course) on the wall. I have to say that I’m struggling with it a bit, but as I’m writing this I’ve already been here for four weeks, so if I keep thinking about my time here in chunks of four weeks, it should be do-able. The other problem with living at the Bakery is trying to resist the chocolate cake, pineapple or apple pie, cinnamon swirls, croissants and banana bread every day…. The gluten thing is getting out of control…

Sangkhla is a pretty social place for all us foreigners, and just about every night there seems to be something going on somewhere, so it didn’t take long to get to meet everyone. Mostly people seem to hang out at a place called the Tea House; a cute little café with free WIFI and alright food, and is a handy five minute walk from the Bakery. Wednesday night is pizza night, and is attended by pretty much every foreign volunteer and aid worker in town. The pizzas are limited though, so if you can’t get there early enough, it’s best to phone someone who you know is there to order one for you, or drop in earlier in the day and ask them to save you one. I tell you, they’re pretty good pizzas….

There is NO bar or pub in Sangkhla. That’s right – none. The Tea House doesn’t even serve alcohol (but they do let us BYO). Some of the other restaurants around the place serve beer, but that’s as close as it gets. Over the wooden bridge (the longest wooden bridge in Thailand – Sangkhla’s claim to fame) on the Mon side of the lake, alcohol is not allowed at all, so I guess in comparison, things are pretty loose over here.

After toiling away for six days I took my day off for the week, and it all started off quite nicely, thank you. I got up at 8:30 – best sleep-in for weeks, and put on my trainers for the first time since being in Thailand, and did my first bit of intentional exercise in nine months. Surprisingly this did not kill me, and after a shower I decided to check out the breakfast at P Guesthouse down the road, which has a great view over the lake. The breakfast wasn’t as good as the view, but it wasn’t bad, and you have to try these things. Next on the agenda were some domestic chores, and then a walk into town to withdraw some cash and have a bit more of a look around. Arriving at the bank I stuck my card into the first of two side by side ATM’s, and after futilely pushing buttons resulting only in error messages, I cancelled the transaction and tried the one beside it. I kept getting some kind of error message with that one too, so after a few more goes I took my card and went inside the branch. Here I stood in line for the teller for at least twenty minutes (there were only three people ahead of me), who, once I reached the counter, told me I should try the ATM again. I tried to explain (tricky when they don’t really speak English, and I really don’t speak Thai) that I had already tried both of the ATM’s again, several times, and tried to ask if I could do a manual withdrawal inside the branch. I got the message that this would be possible, as long as I had my passport. Of course my passport was in my room, and the teller insisted that I try the ATM again, and if it still didn’t work, I should come back inside. So, I tried the ATM’s again, and of course they didn’t work, so I went back inside, and waited in line for the teller, again. Eventually I got someone’s attention and managed to get my message across that I wanted to make a manual withdrawal, and I was ushered along to the foreign exchange counter. After waiting a while I eventually handed over my card, and then was asked for my passport…. I explained that my passport was at my accommodation, but they insisted that I needed it, so off I went to find a taxi bike to take me back to the Bakery and wait while I got my passport, then take me back to the bank. Actually, before I did that I went in search of another ATM that was rumoured to be somewhere near the hospital. First I had to work out where the hospital is (not that hard in a town with three streets), and then find the ATM. A nurse pointed me in the right direction and I thought my problem was solved, until I saw the ATM…. The only bank in Thailand that won’t accept my card is the Government Savings Bank. Their ATM’s won’t take my card in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, nowhere, so I nearly cried when the ATM near the hospital came into view; the hot pink Government Savings Bank….. So then I took a taxi bike back to the Bakery then back to the only bank in town. Of course I had to wait a while at the foreign exchange counter (I can’t work out what actually goes on there because I’m damn sure there aren’t that many locals exchanging currencies), but eventually the guy took my card and my passport while I waited and enjoyed the airconditioning. Not for long. He came back to the counter and told me that I didn’t have any balance in my account. I told him there was plenty of balance in my account and he should try again. He disappeared for a moment, then stuck his head around the corner and motioned for me to go into the back room with him, where I observed him swipe my card through an EFTPOS machine onto the screen of which appeared the word “declined”. Declined??? I asked him to try again. He did. Declined. I couldn’t believe it. I asked him if he could make a phone call to his head office or something to find out if there is some kind of problem between his bank and my bank, and he told me that he was too busy working. Incredulous I stood there thinking, “actually buddy, I’m a customer, so I fit into the category of your work”, but said to him “so you’re not going to help me?”. This seemed to strike a (deeply resentful) chord somewhere within him, and after rolling his eyes and grunting he trudged off to get a phone. I went back out to his “foreign exchange” counter, where I had by now lost my spot at the front and had to stand behind a couple of people whose business at the bank somehow necessitated them taking up a position at this counter. After two phone calls which included a lot of derisory use of the word “farang” and a few snorts and chuckles, he put the phone down, handed my card and passport back to me and shaking his head said “no”. NO WHAT????? When it became clear that I wasn’t going anywhere without a bit more of an explanation, he muttered something to one of the people at the counter in front of me, and they said something that I took to mean that this bank and my bank aren’t talking – much like my bank and the pink Government Savings Bank. Oh great. So down to my last 50Baht I trudged back to the Bakery to pick up my laptop and headed to the Tea House to use the free WIFI and come up with a plan.

A couple of hours later one of the other Baan Unrak volunteers turned up and offered to loan me 1,000B to tide me over. So I decided that the following day I would take the 8:00am mini van to Kanchanaburi (three hours away), withdraw cash, and come back. Because of the high fees I’m charged to withdraw money, for the past eight months I’ve been in the habit of trying to take cash out only once a month, to try to keep the fees to $10/month. This has now moved onto a much more advanced level, involving trying to work out a way that I don’t have to use my one day off a week, once a month to go to Kanchanaburi to withdraw money. Tricky.

Two weeks after I arrived in Sangkla it was Christmas, which I couldn’t manage to get very excited about. In the morning I walked up to the home to see the kids get their presents, which were various things saved from donations over the past months, and then back to the Tea House for a late breakfast. Baan Unrak practices a philosophy called Neo-Humanism, which in a nutshell means love for and connection with everything in the universe, so no eating meat or eggs, and not eating other things that they reckon stimulate certain glands and inhibit spiritual growth, including mushrooms, onions and garlic. I’d say eight times out of ten the food at the home is really good – there’s always a selection of at least three or four dishes, and the other times it’s just ok. One thing that isn’t ok looks like potato, but it isn’t potato. We don’t know what it’s called, so we call it “not potato”. The only protein we get is tofu, which is ok because the tofu in Thailand is really good, but without even eggs in the diet, you really feel that something is missing…. Other high-protein things like pulses or nuts or whatever are too expensive, and a not completely balanced diet is really just a fact of life in a Thai orphanage. So, on Christmas morning I was really craving some protein and had a cheese omelet at the Tea House, which was pretty good, then went off to meet up with some new friends (an Australian from Adelaide and a German/Kiwi from Auckland) for the rest of the day. We took off on their motorbikes to the Three Pagoda Pass to stock up on some cheap Myanmar whiskey (100 baht for a 700ml bottle – much better than 100+ baht for a half bottle of Sang Som Thai whiskey!) and then spent the afternoon lolling about in a bamboo hut on the side of the Songkaria river, which is absolutely stunning and the perfect place to spend a lazy afternoon. The water is frickin freezing, and definitely not my minimum swimming temperature of 21.5 degrees, so we all made do with dangling our feet over the edge of our hut and watching the river tumble over rocks, with the occasional Thai teenager floating past on an inner tube. At around 5:30 we packed up and ordered some food from one of the cafes that line the track that runs down to the huts along the riverbank, and took it with us to join some other folk at a place called Generation Journey, which provides a fairly self-sufficient long-term living solution for some people who need it http://www.generation-journey.org/ Everyone was asked to bring a plate and we shared all the food around a campfire in the jungle. And that was Christmas.

The next morning it was back to work for another seven days, including new year’s day, which turned out to be very difficult indeed. Our constant hosts at the Tea House had invited all their friends, personal and professional, to join them for dinner around a campfire (popular theme out here in the sticks) down by their jetty on the lake. It was as good a way as any to bring in the new year, so after watching the sun go down on 2009 at another spot on the lake, we moseyed on over to the Tea House and planted ourselves next to the fire and drank our way through quite a lot of whiskey. In fact, by my reckoning I consumed my entire quota of alcohol for 2009 and 2010, so the rest of the year should be fairly sober. This did not for a fun day make, when the next morning it was back to my group of eighteen high school volunteers from Australia, and setting them about various tasks such as building a fence and digging the foundations for a new guesthouse. By 2:30pm I had to call it quits, which I think is an alright effort for new year’s day anyway.

My fourth week in Sangkhla has been categorized by ridiculously hot weather. It’s supposed to be winter here and I came all prepared with a hoodie and lots of layers, but apart from a few chilly nights in my second week, it’s been absolutely stinking. Google weather tells me that the daily maximum in Kanchanaburi is in the low to mid-thirties this week, and I’m not sure how close to that it is here, but it feels very close. I must see if the shop that sells everything has a thermometer.

Photos: Koh Kood & Phnom Penh

fimc — Sat, 2 Jan 2010 17:45:00 GMT

Goodbye, Chiang Rai

fimc — Sat, 2 Jan 2010 17:39:00 GMT

See the gallery Koh Kood & Phnom Penh for photos from this post.

Arriving back in Chiang Rai from Luang Prabang on Friday the 13th November, I headed for the now-familiar Orchids Guesthouse to meet up with my friend Maddie, an Australian volunteer who had been with me during the September crisis, and who had been traveling through Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for the previous 6 weeks. She had come back to Chiang Rai for a few days to catch up with me and Sara, and to see the kids at the Center again before heading back to Australia, and I had decided to share a room with her in town during her stay. I was going to be hanging out in Chiang Rai until 22 November when mum and Rusty were due to arrive, and was really looking forward to just enjoying the town and spending some time with the kids that didn’t involve me shouting at them. Carol the founder and CEO of IHF was arriving the following Monday and I was looking forward to finally meeting her. Little did I know that everything was about to go so completely and utterly to shit. En route to Chiang Rai from Bangkok Carol emailed Caty and told her that she didn’t want anyone not “officially” part of the Centre to be there when she arrived; she wanted two of the older boys to meet her off the bus, then spend some time alone with them before going to the Centre to spend time with just her and “her” children. When she got there she told the new Director and the volunteers, two of which had been there only a week, that she also wanted them to leave and they would have to stay somewhere else for the night. So Maddie, Caty, me and the ejected others met up at Coconuts to look at each other and wonder when we’d be given the green light to go to see the kids.

The next day I was doing some stuff around town; finding out about posting my bike to Sangklaburi, sorting out things to do while mum and Rusty arrived, stuff like that, when I decided to get a coffee from the coffee shop next to the bike place. Imagine my surprise when I walked in, to see a woman who I instantly knew to be Carol, with the gone-away-to-Chiang-Mai-boy, and my nemesis Brett and Kitt. Of course Carol didn’t know who I was so she didn’t look my way, but I made eye contact with Kitt as I walked past, smiled and mouthed “hi” at him while my mind was saying “WTF?????” as I casually walked up to the counter to order my espresso. No green light that day, and Caty wasn’t getting any response from Carol by email, so she and I decided we’d just go up there the following afternoon.

We arrived at about 3 o’clock and when I introduced myself to Carol I got a cool reception to say the least. I was a bit surprised, especially as she’d been sending me emails a couple of weeks before telling me how she was looking forward to thanking me in person, and if there was ever anything that she could do for me blah blah blah…. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t going there looking to get a medal or anything, but she had been so effusive by email that it just seemed weird. It was about to get a whole lot weirder. Caty and I were just kind of hanging around in this odd atmosphere when Carol invited us to sit in on a meeting with one of the new volunteers (who had been allowed to go back after being barred for a day) to talk about the finances. This discussion was very brief and somehow turned into something else all together. Carol started talking about how “her” children were unhappy and how she’d never seen them like this and that something was wrong and she didn’t know what it was but whatever it was it was probably her fault and probably having so many volunteers coming in and out of the home for so long was a bad idea and that she needed some time alone with her children to work it out and she didn’t know how long that would be but that the volunteers that were there at that time might be the last volunteers that IHF has and that she didn’t blame us she blames herself and she needed to fix it and she can’t do that with outsiders there and so she thought that maybe it would take three months for her to “huddle” with her children and that it would be best if we weren’t involved with the children at all during this time. Caty was leaving for the US in three days and mum and Rusty were arriving in four. Mum had got the Queensland Basketball Association to donate twelve basketballs because I’d mentioned how much the boys love basketball, and she was already in Chiang Mai, having lugged them from the Gold Coast on the train to Brisbane, to Bangkok, and then to Chiang Mai, so I asked Carol if Caty and I were going to be able to spend any time with the children between now and then, and was told that she thought it would be best if we didn’t. I asked if I would be able to visit on Sunday with mum and Rusty and explained about the basketballs, and was told that that would be ok, but we really should be leaving now because the children were starting to arrive home from school and she thought it would be confusing for them to see us there. Didn’t see that one coming. I have some thoughts on Carol which I had started to form in the previous six months that were all confirmed there and then, but I don’t want to get caught up in any slanderous litigation, so I’m not going to write about them here. Anyway, it seemed to make perfect sense to her that these children, many of which already have severe abandonment issues, would be more confused by seeing me, and Caty who has been the only stable and consistent presence in their lives for the last two years, and us saying goodbye to them, than by us simply disappearing. Wouldn’t they wonder where we were? Why we left without saying goodbye? If we were coming back? Didn’t we care about them….? But we didn’t have a choice and had to leave immediately. I was speechless and Caty was absolutely devastated, as she has chosen to live in Chiang Rai, entirely based on wanting to be exactly NOT the person who would leave them.

Over the coming days all the volunteers decided to leave permanently, Carol went to Indonesia to sign some papers and there were NO adults sleeping at the Center apart from Kunu, man about the house, who wouldn’t know how to deal with any kind of kid issue, nor is it what he is there to do. WTF????? At least Carol wasn’t there when I went with mum and Rusty on the Sunday, and I had a chance to say goodbye to all the kids. It was really hard, and even though I was leaving Chiang Rai anyway, not being able to spend the time with them that I had planned to in the previous days made it feel like I hadn’t wanted to. It felt cold and I know they felt it too. As with all the dramas that had played out during my time there, this one has a very long back-story that I couldn’t possibly write about because it would take too long and I don’t have the skill to make it sound interesting to anyone who wasn’t involved in it, but I believe that I know why Carol treated Caty and I as she did, and it has a fair bit to do with that meeting in the coffee shop that I accidentally walked in on. It also has a fair bit to do with my thoughts on Carol, as well as the actions of the eldest boy to whom Carol listens without question, and who has been manipulated by adults who should know better. Like I said, long story, and I suppose I shouldn’t really be surprised that this would be how things would end for me here, going on how the past months had played out.

And so it was that I met mum and Rusty off the bus from Chiang Mai and I set about the business of showing them Chiang Rai. For the next couple of days we ate the best food Chiang Rai has to offer, drank at Coconuts, looked around the night bazaar, visited the White Temple and some working monasteries, spent two nights in an Akha Hilltribe village, I shipped my bike to Sangklaburi, and before I knew it we were on the bus to Chiang Mai for a flight to Bangkok. A quick overnight in a very flash hotel in Sukhumvit close to the eastern bus terminal made for a short taxi ride the next morning to catch the 6:00am bus to Trat (five hours), where we would connect to a speed boat which would whisk us to the white sands and crystal clear, warm water of Koh Kood in just over an hour. Koh Kood is one of the last of Thailand’s islands that is virtually untouched by tourism. That isn’t to say there aren’t tourists there, just that it’s a little bit further, a little bit more expensive to get to and stay on, and not really a whole heck of a lot to do. Perfect. By 3:00pm I was in the ocean and can’t remember ever having enjoyed it more.

We were staying at Ngamkho Resort, owned by a very chilled Thai man called Uncle Joe and his wife, smack bang on the most perfect section of the most perfect, palm-fringed, postcard-perfect beach. We each had a bamboo bungalow with hammock strung across the balcony, looking straight at the water. Did I mention that it was perfect? We’d brought a bottle of Thai whiskey with us, so dug it out and organized some glasses and ice for happy hour on some deck chairs we dragged onto the beach. For the next four days and nights we barely left Uncle Joe’s, and why would you? We did venture out one day, to visit a fishing village built on stilts over the water, purely because we read that they have good fresh crab. It was true. As much as I like the idea of eating crab, and love how it tastes, I usually can’t be bothered with all the work, and of the crabs I’ve eaten in Australia I generally think “to much work for too little reward”. Not so these. With Rusty’s expert tuition on how to crack the little suckers open we discovered enormous chunks of sweetness that came away easily and were very rewarding indeed. God it was delicious. I picked up another bottle of whiskey to replace the one that had already done its bit for the past few happy hours, and we rattled our way back past the rubber and banana plantations to Uncle Joe’s in his pickup truck in time for the late afternoon massage we’d booked the day before. Just off the shore there’s a small reef, and Uncle Joe loaned us masks and snorkels so we could check out the little bit of live coral, loads of tropical fish, and my favourite – clams with the most amazing colours and patterns on their velvet cushion lips. Our time here was over far too quickly and before I knew it we were heading back to the mainland and another five hour bus trip (which turned into nearly seven in the interminable Bangkok traffic) back to Bangkok. We made it just in time before the kitchen closed at the Lotash Seed restaurant, where I wanted to introduce mum and Rusty to some amazing dishes that I’ve eaten there before, and they weren’t disappointed. Back at our guesthouse I picked up some documents that had been sent to me there by Baan Unrak to support the application I’d be lodging in Phnom Penh in a couple of days for a new 90-day Thai visa, and spent a couple of hours online sorting out a few things that had been left hanging while I was hanging in a hammock on Koh Kood, and mum was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

A few weeks before going to Phnom Penh I’d done some research on accommodation, and narrowed my findings down to a pretty good-looking short list. No one told me that the pick of hotels and guesthouses gets snapped up early during the high season (maybe during the low season, too?), so when I tried to book about a week before I was traveling, I was shocked to be told that all the places on my shortlist were fully booked.

I thought I had plenty of time before my flight from Bangkok at 3:30 in the afternoon to find somewhere decent to stay when I arrived, so we had a fairly leisurely breakfast, then I set about printing my ticket and searching for guesthouses to contact. It turns out that the celebrations for the King’s birthday, (the big day was 05 December) were continuing for 9 days, and so the various road closures around Bangkok meant that there could be delays getting onto the expressway to the airport, so I was advised to get a taxi at 12:15. This, and the very slow wireless connection put me in a slightly stressed state, and still without anywhere to stay in Phnom Penh that night, I said goodbye to mum and Rusty, and sped off to the airport.

Once I’d cleared immigration at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport I went in search of one of the free internet kiosks they so brilliantly provide. There were two of them at my gate, so I picked one to stake out and waited, and waited, and waited while the guy checked every email and social networking account he has… Eventually he got off and I jumped on, hoping that one of the hotels or guesthouses I’d emailed earlier had replied with positive news. My inbox revealed no good news, but it wouldn’t be the first time anyone has turned up in a place without somewhere to stay, and I was happy to work it out once I got there.

An hour later as the plane descended out of the clouds, preparing to land in Phnom Penh, I was struck by how absolutely flat-as-a-tack the landscape is. In every direction – flat. When I entered the terminal building and jostled along with the rest of the passengers in the line to get a visa on arrival, I was struck by a unexpected feeling of heaviness low in my guts; a feeling familiar to many travelers in foreign lands.... After a quick assessment I decided it was nothing and continued on through immigration and to the luggage carousel; and there it was again. Was it really something? I didn’t think so, so I picked up my bag and headed outside to the slew of waiting tuk tuk drivers, hoping one of them was about to become my new best friend and help to find me somewhere to lay my hat.

And so began the next hour, rattling around in the back of a tuk tuk, each bump in the road making that “nothing” in my guts into something, after all. First he tried to take me to a place on a busy intersection, and from what I had observed of Phnom Penh traffic on the journey from the airport, busy was going to equal noisy. And difficult to cross the road. I told him to take me somewhere near the river, but on a quiet street. He took me to a dump that would be a great location for a scene in a movie that calls for “seedy – very old and never renovated”. I looked just to be polite, and by now the gurgling in my guts was getting serious, but told them no thanks, and back to the tuk tuk it was. Next he took me to a place that had a very nice-looking lobby, and they told me the room rate was US$50. More than I wanted to pay, but this driving around was getting old, so I looked at the room. This turned out to be one of those places where they hope to lock you into paying for a room before you’ve seen it, based on the flashness of the lobby. The moment I stepped into the creaking lift with frayed and worn carpet, I had a pretty good idea of what the room was going to be like, and I was right. US$50 I was not going to pay for a room that smelled like it had been holding a Marlboro conference for the past 20 years, and the sagging bed looked like it would make me into a human taco. I told the smiling receptionist no thanks, but could I use the bathroom please? I could tell the tuk tuk driver was getting a bit over this whole driving around thing, and wasn’t really wanting to be my best friend for much longer, but I told him we needed to keep looking. I told him the address of a place I wanted to look at, but he insisted that it was very far and he knew a good place for $20. I had to keep telling him that I didn’t need to pay $20; $40 was ok, but he didn’t want to keep driving around and wanted to offload me asap. I had the address of a place on the riverfront that I’d read about so we drove up and down the quay a couple of times without being able to find it, and him starting to get insistent about taking me to this $20 place. Another stop found a place with a room available but $70, but they didn’t take American Express, so the answer had to be no. Back out onto the quay I recognized the name of a place I’d read about online, so went in to check it out. No, they didn’t have a room available, but they would phone their sister hotel just up the road. Could I use the bathroom while they called? Great news! They have one room available – the Director’s Apartment. How much? Usually $165 but they offered it to me for $110, and yes, they take American Express. Sold. At only 3 times my budget. And so it was that I paid my tuk tuk driver and was driven in the hotel car to the FCC (Foreign Correspondents’ Club). It turns out that the FCC is a bit of an institution in Phnom Penh (or “the Penh” as I’ve heard it called). Occupying an enviable spot on the quay overlooking the river, the FCC nowadays incorporates a ground floor café, hotel, bar/restaurant and rooftop terrace. Once I’d checked in I was lead back outside and up a steep, dark staircase and for a few moments started to wonder if I should have asked to see the room first. But I shouldn’t have worried. The door opened into a long hallway, which after several meters dog-legged to the right, and continued along for several more meters. Eventually we came to the bathroom, and after several more meters we arrived at the bedroom, where the porter offloaded my backpack, and then spun around to give me the rest of the tour. Back down the hallway toward the river, we turn a corner to the left and a couple of meters down this hallway, the room on the right turns out to be the living room, with a balcony overlooking the river and the quay below, which wasn’t bad at all with the just-past-full moon hanging heavy and golden in the sky, reflecting in the water…. The living room was appointed with a massive leather sofa, wall-mounted plasma tv, huge desk, and mini bar with full-size bottles of spirits and wine; no gone-in-one-drink mini’s here. Should have been called the maxi bar. Looking back through the living room toward the hallway, I noticed that there was a doorway leading to another room… oh, of course, the second bedroom…. This place was ridiculous. My gut was on the move again & I couldn’t get the overjoyed-to-be-showing-me-around porter out fast enough, so that I could ahem, make myself at home. After a long (hot!) shower I ordered room service and planted myself on the brilliant couch for a couple of hours. I think it’s easy enough for anyone who hasn’t been without the option of hot water in their shower for over 6 months at a time to imagine how great it is to have a hot shower, but I’m not sure if I can convey how amazing it is to sit on an actual couch after half a year of nothing but concrete benches or tiled and wooden floors. There has been the occasional triangle cushion, which definitely serve a great purpose, but in terms of comfortable seating, I have been almost totally deprived. Thus, the prospect of having an enormous one all to myself was quite terrific. Hot shower, room service, movie viewed from fabulous couch, nothing from maxi/mini bar due to dodgy stomach, the only thing left to do was go to bed. I should have guessed – the most comfortable mattress and pillow, ever….

Unfortunately a sleep-in wasn’t on the cards, so after the extravagant breakfast included in my room rate, I hot-footed it off to the Thai Embassy to lodge my visa application, then back to the FCC to spend the rest of the morning back in my living room using the free WIFI to search for somewhere else to stay, and telephoned the new shortlist to see if they had any vacancies. Before grabbing a tuk tuk to take me to check out the potential new digs for my remaining nights in Phnom Penh, I even managed to find a place that would swap my long-held 400,000 Laos Kip at a terrible rate, but you get that with the black market. My new shortlist had only one place with availability for that night, and it would have to do, and after a quick squizz at a couple of others I had signed myself up at yet another place for the following 3 nights. So, back to the FCC for lunch, then I moved to the new hotel. Happy hour at the FCC, like most places in Phnom Penh starts at 4pm, and they had New York band, Ratatat playing that night, so I showered and changed and took myself off to get happy. It’s pretty easy to while away a few hours with a good book and $2.50 margaritas, and before I knew it the place was packed with expats and tourists, crammed in to see the band. At 2am it was definitely time to call it a night and I tuk tuk-ed back to my hotel room with no windows, where I slept unsoundly on my mile-high, rock-hard, not the most comfortable pillow ever. When I woke up I thought it was still the middle of the night (being no windows to let in the telltale pesky daylight), but a quick check of the time revealed it to be 8:30am. A quick check of my head revealed a hangover, so I decided to pass on the standard finish-at-10:00am hotel breakfast and opted to stay put for another couple of hours after a paracetamol breakfast in bed. Of course then I had to check out and change hotels again, finally happy to have somewhere decent to stay that wouldn’t break the bank. Back to the FCC for dinner that night with my new Swiss friend who was keen to check out I heart Hiroshima, an Australian band playing there that night. Another 2am finish for this out-of-practice drinker had me renouncing breakfast again the next morning, but at least this time the pillows were comfortable. This turned into another lazy day, reading, watching movies, and only venturing out for a massage across the street. The movies (apart from Michael, with John Travolta playing the role of the archangel which was on HBO – hey, I was hungover…) were at least relevant – S.21, a documentary, and The Killing Fields, to prep me for my impending visits to these important Phnom Penh sites.

Ravaged by civil war until very recently, Phnom Penh seems to be a city of contradictions. The 15km drive south west to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields bears witness to the desperate poverty of its people, far worse than any I’ve seen before, is in such stark contrast to the shiny new Mercedes and Lexus 4WD’s jostling for right of way with the bicycles, motorbikes and tuk tuks in the insanity that proves the chaos theory and is the reality of Phnom Penh traffic.

I spent a devastating morning visiting Tuol Sleng; the former top-secret prison (S.21) where the Khmer Rouge systematically and brutally tortured and subsequently killed an estimated 20,000 teachers, intellectuals, traitors of the Democratic Kampuchea party, children, or anyone considered to be an enemy of Pol Pot’s regime, and then the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. Entire families of so-called dissidents were arrested and interrogated to extract their “confessions” of crimes against the regime. If not accidentally killed at S.21 due to some over-enthusiastic interrogating, prisoners who had given their confessions were then sent to Choeung Ek to be killed. Babies and children were not spared for fear that in the future they would seek revenge for their slain family members. In this way over 2 million Cambodians were executed in the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Prior to 1975 the Khmer Rouge had been infiltrating and taking over rural villages, recruiting children as soldiers, who would come to denounce their fellow villagers, even their own families, who were then arrested, interrogated and killed. Many villagers had relocated to Phnom Penh, lured by the prospect of jobs and lifting themselves out of the dire poverty they found themselves in. In April 1975, Phnom Penh was “liberated” by the Khmer Rouge and the city evacuated, foreigners ejected and it population forcibly sent to rural areas to work on the land.

I felt apprehensive on my way to S.21; a former high school converted by the Khmer Rouge into its secret prison in the heart of the city. With the city emptied of its people, there was no one in the surrounding streets to hear the screams of the prisoners, or to witness what was taking place there. The Khmer Rouge were meticulous documenters, photographing and keeping detailed files on all of its detainees, and these records were revealed when the Khmer Rouge was ousted by Vietnamese forces in January 1979. Of the estimated 20,000 people who had walked through the doors of S.21, seven male prisoners were found alive by the Vietnamese. There are many hundreds of these photographs on display, the expressions on the faces and in the eyes of these men, women and children range from fear to hatred, despair and disbelief. Some even smile, perhaps not realizing what lay ahead of them. Some can’t even bring themselves to look at the camera lens, perhaps more certain of what lay ahead.

The school buildings were transformed into a variety of cell types. A few were kept as individual rooms for interrogating and torturing former high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials who were suspected of betrayal. Others were made into long rooms with many tiny cells crudely constructed of brick or timber, where the prisoners were shackled for the duration of their imprisonment. The front of this building was gift-wrapped in barbed wire to prevent any prisoners who may have had any such opportunity, to jump over the railing to commit suicide. The dried pools of blood on the tiled floors and splattered on the ceiling doesn’t leave much unsaid. The words keep going ‘round and around in my head, what happened here?? How could this happen? Once these “traitors” of the Khmer Rouge had “confessed” to their treacherous activities, their confessions carefully documented, they were told they were being moved to a new home to work for the Democratic Kampuchea Party. Don’t worry!, they were told. Blindfolded and wrists bound they were then shipped off by the truckload to the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek. On arrival, loudspeakers blared the cheerful song of the DKP, as one by one they were lead off the truck, their identity noted for the accuracy of the records, and then through the field to a ready-made pit. Sometimes they had to dig their own pit. Few were shot as ammunition was expensive, so after being made to kneel on the ground at the edge of the hole in the ground, most were clubbed across the back of the neck or on the head. This didn’t usually kill them straight away, so they then had their throats cut before being kicked into the mass grave. Babies were held by the legs like a cricket bat, so their heads could be smashed against a tree (with the inspired name The Killing Tree) next to the pit. Another large tree, mysteriously named The Magic Tree had loudspeakers also blaring the DKP song, to drown out the screams of those being killed. There are an estimated 350 or so killing fields across Cambodia, and at this particular location just outside Phnom Penh, about 8,975 skeletons have been exhumed from 86 of a total 129 mass graves. The largest, 5 or 6 metres deep, contained 450 bodies. This is a deeply disturbing place, where you walk – literally – on the bones, and clothes they once covered, poking out of the eroding earth; the remains of innocent people who came to a horrific end.

I couldn’t bring myself to photograph either of these terrible places apart from a couple of signs at S.21, as I wondered what sort of souvenir they would be. I don’t need a photograph to remind me of images and imaginings that I won’t be able to forget. My guide at Cheoung Ek was a young Cambodian man who grew up 200 metres from the site. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him how people can live there, or anything about his family’s history. Instead I told him his English was excellent.

It confounds me that the Cambodians I meet as I venture around the city are smiling and warm, when this recent atrocity is all around them and must touch all their lives in some way. I suppose life has to go on. The long-awaited Khmer Rouge trials are currently underway in Phnom Penh, but many Cambodians as well as outsiders are skeptical about the way they are being conducted, and many question the impartiality of the judges and what the outcome will be. Almost comically, there is no death penalty in Cambodia, so the surviving members of the Khmer Rouge who directed and committed the unspeakable 30 years ago, will at worst spend the rest of their days in prison. Pol Pot died under a supposed house arrest in 1998 after continuing to run the Democratic Kampuchea party from the jungle for the previous 20 years. It’s also pretty hard to get my head around the idea that he simply got away with it. That it took so long to rustle up a UN-sanctioned trial. It’s impossible for me to convey how confronting and absolutely devastating S.21 and Cheoung Ek are. I don’t have the words to describe how it affected me; how sad and angry it made me feel, and my overwhelming sense of disbelief and lack of comprehension that these things really happened here. I guess they’re a couple of those places that you just have to see to believe.

New visa in passport and back in Bangkok, I realise that I haven’t been to backpacker-central during the high tourist season before, and I don’t think I want to do it again. Soi Rambutri, usually a sort of sea of calm around the bend from the insanity of Khao San Rd was awash with backpackers; it’s usually salubrious atmosphere transformed into an annex of the carnival side-show that is Khao San Rd. Every stackable plastic chair in every restaurant and makeshift street-side bar had the arse of a “same-same but different” t’shirt-wearing backpacker planted on it, sculling Beer Chang and polishing their stories of “doing” Thailand, for their captive audience of new travel buddies, who were just waiting for the current narrator to stop talking so they could jump in with their own version of crazy stories from the road. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

Photos: Loy Kratong & Luang Prabang

fimc — Sat, 5 Dec 2009 18:56:00 GMT

After Phuchaisai

fimc — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:22:00 GMT

See the gallery Loy Kratong & Luang Prabang for photos from this post.

I think it’s fair to say that once I got back to Chiang Rai after my few days in the mountains, I didn’t really completely throw myself back into the job of directing the Center again. It was a bit like a quiet shift in a restaurant; when you’re flat out, turning table after table doing the busiest service the restaurant has ever done, you’re completely switched on and you somehow get through it with few mistakes and a lot of happy customers….when you’ve got one table in the restaurant you lose focus and your mind wanders; you forget to call away their main course and leave their digestives off the bill…. It was a bit like that. Maybe I felt that I’d given everything I could already and now I was just going through the motions.

Anyway, having help meant that I could take a day off every week, and some weeks I even took two days off. It was a revelation. Every week in October, I cycled out of the Center by 9 or 10 in the morning and checked myself in at a guesthouse in town. I breakfasted like a tourist – late and western style, and spent my days getting a massage, visiting places I hadn’t yet been to, and even having an afternoon nap. It was fabulous. The end of the first week of October heralded the arrival of the mid-term school holidays for the kids, and after a week of having them at home every day, most of them went to their villages to spend the next 3 weeks. It was like a ghost town with only 5 kids at the Center for the first weekend, and a bit of a challenge to find things to entertain them with, with them being different ages, or teenagers who don’t want to do anything….

A few of the kids from the same village come from less than ideal conditions there, so although they wanted to go to their village to visit, this was only to be for a few days; so on the Tuesday morning we went to pick them up. Heading toward Chiang Mai there is a town called Wiang Pa Pao – great name – and a narrow lane off the highway here winds its way through paddy fields and ends up in the village. This is not a journey you would want to make during the wet season, or after dark…. The “road” is little more than a deeply creviced dirt track, requiring more than a little off-road driving skill from our volunteer at the wheel. Constantly (and I mean each and every moment of the alarming hour and a half on this treacherous path), having to make a decision about whether to veer to the left or the right to keep the wheels out of the deep gouges in the red earth that pass for a road; it was a hot and exhausting trip, and I was just a passenger. When we finally arrived, we pulled up in front of a fairly large building, which as it happens is the family house of one of the young girls who had decided to leave the IHF Center a few months ago, and serves as the town brothel. She didn’t come out to say hello. So then it was on with the job of tracking down the kids we’d come to collect. Setting off up a steep and still deeply rutted dirt track, we saw the houses of a few of the children who weren’t going back with us that day, as well as a few of the girls, who were doing what young girls do in these villages – minding the babies while the adults and boys were out working in the fields. There were plenty of mangy-looking dogs around, but in these parts dogs can equal dinner, so I think the multiplying of these sorry creatures is more welcomed than lamented. When we got to the top of the hill we stopped at a bamboo shack much like the rest in the village, and were greeted by a decrepit-looking man of indeterminate age and a limited number of teeth. In response to our enquiries about the young girl we were there to pick up, he motioned us inside, so we climbed up the rickety ladder to the bamboo-floored porch and went inside. A quick scan of the one-room shack revealed that the girl was nowhere to be seen, but there were various young men lying about asleep or passed out on the floor… After looking quizzically at one another for a few moments, we went back out to the porch where the dentally-challenged man, who could have been anywhere from forty to a hundred years old reappeared, offering us each a drink of water from filthy-looking glasses which had possibly had the remnants of the previous night’s (or even that morning’s) whiskey rinsed out for the purpose of serving us. Aware that this was the best he could do and of the likely offence refusal would cause, I accepted and politely drank, all the while wondering what gastrointestinal effects might follow. While we waited, a bunch of people came up the track to look at the visiting farangs, so we just stood there being stared at, and a few minutes later the girl appeared on the dirt path we had arrived by, and without much by the way of acknowledging us, went inside to collect her things. It didn’t seem like much of a good place for a fourteen year old girl to be staying. I had assumed that this man was her father, but I later found out that he wasn’t. As for the rest of the men asleep on the floor….who knows.

Then it was off to find the two boys we had come for. We heard Darid’s distinctive voice before we saw him, and after a bit of shouting for his younger brother, we set off back to the truck with both boys in tow. Along the way another one of our boys appeared and said that he wanted to come back with us, and then we started off back the way we came, sometimes getting up to a top speed of 10kms per hour along the unsealed road more defined by its clefts than its drivable surfaces.

For the previous five nights, another of our boys had been away training for a sporting tournament which would be taking in all of the northern provinces the following week, in which he would be representing his school in petanque. Petanque (or boule) has always seemed to me like an old men’s game, so you would think that there would be a sort of disconnect imagining a twelve year old boy playing (and indeed loving and excelling at) this hundred year old sport. However, Somchai seems like an old man. He’s tiny for a twelve year old and has a voice like a sixty year old, two-packs-a-day smoker…. He has a very outgoing, mischievous personality and after my stint at being the sole disher-outer of discipline for a couple of months, he is not my greatest fan, but it’s impossible not to like him regardless. Anyway, Somchai got back from his training camp the same night we brought the kids back from the village, so our numbers doubled overnight, from five to ten.

In the weeks that followed I was heartened to see the Aussie dollar rallying in the world economy, reaching and holding firm at just over 90 cents to the US dollar. This was great news as I had decided that I would call an end to my time with IHF in Chiang Rai at the beginning of November and take a week’s holiday in Luang Prabang, Laos (I also had to exit Thailand to get a new visa), so I would be needing all the Kips I could get. It didn’t dawn on me until the week before I left that I would be on “holiday” for the coming month, and so would also be needing all the Baht I could get as well. The news continued to be good, with the Aussie dollar back up to around (and sometimes just over) 30Baht, when it had sunk to an abysmal low of 25Baht to the dollar when I arrived in May.

Anyway, the following weekend we had a unique opportunity to take the kids to see a performance by the Chiang Rai Youth Orchestra. Who knew that such a thing existed? (They even have a website http://www.chiangrai-youth-orchestra.com/ ). So on Saturday night after our customary 5:30 dinner, we piled into the truck and headed off to a fancy resort out of town for this free concert. It was entirely possible that none of the kids had ever heard classical music before, let alone seen anyone play a violin or cello, so it was a great opportunity to be able to introduce them to something new. Of course this was also a bit of a risk; how the kids would behave was an unknown quantity, but they did us proud, applauding after each piece and being generally well-behaved. Somchai was even sitting forward in his seat for most of the performance (we only stayed until the interval, then everyone had had enough new culture for the night), watching with a keen interest. I later found out that one of his friends from school was part of the orchestra, and this no doubt proved to be a fascinating revelation for him.

Before we knew it, it was the end of October, and one morning without any warning, I awoke to a chill in the air that hadn’t been there the day before. There really are just two seasons here, with no gradual change from one to another. The humidity vanished overnight and sent morning mist and a lingering dawn in its place. The end of October also meant it was time for all the kids to come back to start the new school term. Over a few days the Center filled back up again, and returned to its noisy, chaotic self. I’ll be the first to admit it was good to have some peace and quiet for a few weeks, but it was equally as good to see all their (usually) smiling faces again.

The first day back at school coincided with the Loy Kratong festival, one of the most-loved celebrations in the Thai calendar. Although not an official public holiday, held on the night of twelfth full moon of the traditional Thai lunar calendar, it pays homage to the goddess of rivers and waterways, Mae Nam. Loy literally translates to "float", while Kratong is the Thai word for a sort of tray made out of banana leaves. Loy Kratong is celebrated by floating elaborate kratongs decorated with flowers, candles and incense on just about any waterway in the kingdom. Falling around the same time as Halloween, Loy Kratong is also an excuse to let off fireworks at every given opportunity, so the week leading up to these dual events I was constantly having crackers and bungers lobbed at me, threatening on more than one occasion to unwillingly dismount me from my bike. Being a veteran of two Loy Kratongs already, Caty bought supplies for the kids to make kratongs after school, and after dinner on the night in question we piled into the truck and two motorbikes (this was no mean feat with 26 kids and 6 adults) and headed down to the river to join the party. A strong afternoon wind had filled the sky with clouds, but these obligingly cleared in time for the rising of the full golden moon, which along with the lanterns and candles glowing outside every house and business we passed along the way, made it seem like a very special night indeed. The spot by the river where the Loy Kratong festival is held in Chiang Rai had been transformed into a giant carnival, with rides, stalls selling everything from food to full-size mattresses (I’m not kidding), and a multitude of stages with all sorts of entertainment. One of the smaller satellite stages didn’t have much of a crowd, and the poor girl I saw performing had pulled out all the stops, even going so far as to sport a pair of gold hotpants, a la Kylie Minogue…. The sky was filled with literally thousands of glowing lanterns (khom fai) released in the belief that they will rid the launcher of troubles, sailing across the full moon reminiscent of the famous image from the movie, ET with ET in the basket on front of the bike riding through the night sky. It was brilliant and beautiful. And then, like everyone else in Chiang Rai, we tried to leave. Stuck in barely moving, wall-to-wall bikes, trucks and cars, Caty killed the engine of the bike 3 of us were on and literally walked it (with us on it) over a kilometer until the roads somehow cleared.

I spent the rest of the week tying up loose ends and attempting to hand over to the new director who had arrived to take over from me, and before I knew it I was packing up my few belongings and grabbing my passport to head off to Luang Prabang. Some places you fall in love with the moment you arrive; Luang Prabang is one of those for me. A UNESCO World Heritage site carefully preserving both the traditional Laos and colonial French history is taken very seriously by everyone here, with strict laws about restorations and new buildings, and there is no litter in this immaculate town (and forget about McDonalds or Starbucks; there isn't even a 7-11 in LP...). I wanted to photograph everything. It is a place of impossible beauty. I never thought about that term, “impossible beauty” before, but now I realise that it means it seems impossible that it could be so beautiful. Clearly, tourism is number one here, and it’s a bit of a moral dilemma to find myself so in love with a place so full of foreign, ie Western, tourists, but there, I’ve said it. Arriving in the late afternoon I didn’t have much of a chance to explore too far from my guesthouse before it became dark and I was drawn into the main tourist strip because, once again in Laos without a guidebook or even a map, I didn’t yet have any idea where I was. Searching for an early evening glass of something French, as I so fortuitously stumbled upon in Vientiane, I came up empty-handed, so settled instead for a Beer Lao with a fabulous meal of fresh spring rolls and fish steamed in banana leaves for the grand total of AU$8. You’ve gotta love Asia for that.

On my first morning I rented myself a bicycle for the day so I could case out the town, and stopped for a coffee shake at a place called Utopia perched high above the river. The setting may indeed be idyllic, but the background music is questionable – hits of the ‘70’s including Neil Diamond, Dr Hook, Harry Chapin, but I didn’t notice anyone complaining. By the way, they drive on the right hand side of the road in Laos, which makes it tricky to negotiate corners at intersections on a bike. Anyway, restored after my coffee shake and Dr Hook I set off on the path of further discovery. This led me (not very far), to a pub at lunch time where I employed a Beer Lao to wash down the national dish du jour – laap with sticky rice. Delicious!

Later that day, continuing on my quest for a glass of something French, I thought I may have found success with a wine list serving something called L’Elephante, that purported to be from France. I asked to see the bottle and was dismayed when a five litre cask was produced for my inspection…. I resolved to keep looking, but as my room had a mini-bar, it occurred to me that my shot at getting hold of anything French from a bottle may very well involve buying one at a restaurant and plonking the un-drunk plonk in my room for the next day. After six months of drinking little and rarely, there is no way I could contemplate finishing an entire bottle in one sitting, even over many hours… I’d be passed out face-down in my plate of laap before I got to the bottom.

The biggest drawback of Luang Prabang, which is also its lifeblood, is the number of tourists, which of course I am also one. We’re everywhere and it makes the place feel a bit like a UNESCO world heritage theme park. Everything here, guesthouses, restaurants, internet cafes, tour companies, literally everything (seemingly even the wats and the monks’ morning alms collection, although not really – this has just become a spectacle for gawking, SLR-toting tourists to photograph) is for the tourists. But you’ve gotta love a place where a large espresso costs more than a large bottle of beer.... Oh, and the markets. I’m tempted to buy art, a quilt cover with matching pillow cases, cushion covers lightshades, tablecloths, but I remind myself that I have no walls to hang it on, no quilt nor cushions to cover, lights to shade nor tables to cloth… and it seems pointless; a vision of a future I don’t know if or when I’ll have, to buy these things to adorn a wall, room or table I might never have. This consumerism is harder than I thought to resist. Out of sight is definitely out of mind.

The kid craze of the moment in Luang Prabang is those whacky skateboards with two decks, connected by a central bar, and some investigationing has led me to discover that these are called Waveboards or Ripsticks. It seems like every kid has got one, and they all spend the two hour school break between 11:00-1:00 every day, as well as after school and the whole weekend, hurtling down every street and laneway in Luang Prabang. I wasn’t quick enough to get any action shots (not carrying an SLR camera around my neck at the ready like the majority of my fellow visitors), but there a couple of not great photos in the Luang Prabang photo gallery on this blog.

Much more serene is the beautiful, melodic chanting by the monks in all the wats around the town. Every evening at sundown, they all gather in their respective temples to perform their prayerful duties to the Buddha, and while (once again) this is not a “performance” for anyone, it is an oft-enjoyed feature of a visit to Luang Prabang.

The downside to going to a place without first finding out much about it, are things like not knowing in advance that the ATM’s dispense a maximum of 700,000Kip (just under AU$100) per withdrawal. You can make up to three withdrawals every day, so this in itself isn’t the problem….the problem is that on top of the Laos banks 20,000k (just less than $3) fee, my Australian bank gets their mitts on $4.50 every time, making a one hundred dollar withdrawal quite an expensive exercise. Of course, if you were a twenty year old backpacker you’d probably be budgeting $100 to last a few weeks, so it wouldn’t be so bad, but for those of us who value comfort and cleanliness (and the occasional glass of wine) over the cheapest room you can find, more than one visit to the ATM is called for to get through a week. Especially when most guesthouses below the top end of the scale don’t take credit cards. And more especially when your visa card has been cancelled because somewhere along the line some crafty bugger has nicked your visa card number and has been using it to try to book flights in the USA and unknown things in France, and no one in Luang Prabang accepts American Express… Oh well, at least I brought enough Baht with me to almost cover my accommodation so it’s only spending money that I need. Luckily eating is easy to do on a budget, with, as is usually the case in places like this, some of the most amazing food to be had is at the night market. Whole fish stuffed with lemongrass and cooked over hot coals, ditto chunks of salty pork ensnared in two thin strips of bamboo, or chicken BBQ’d whole and snipped into finger-lickin sized pieces (but don’t actually lick your fingers as this is considered bad manners), any of these can be had for less than $4, and you’ll be lucky if you’ve got enough room for coconut balls stuffed with banana afterwards.

A climb up the 328 steps to the top of Mount Phousi in the middle of town to view the sunset is a must-do on the checklist of the tourists crowding to Luang Prabang. I’m sure it’s very nice, but having timed my ascent about an hour too late (going by the throngs that had already claimed every vantage point, as well as amost every available bit of standing room by the time I got there), I gave up in disgust and promptly took myself back to street level for an hour foot and leg massage. At $5 I figured I’d earned it on the 328 steps….

Apparently "Luang" comes from the word "Leng", which means dragon, and I think it was with this in mind that they came up with the idea for the local "whiskey", Lao Lao. I read somewhere that this dragon fire concoction is aged in a matter of minutes, and from my one encounter with it, this is an estimation with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Having checked out plenty of Buddhist temples in my many visits to Thailand over the years and particularly the last six months in Chiang Rai, I don’t feel compelled to spend my days here beating the very well-worn tourist path trailing in and out of the forty-something wats in Luang Prabang. That’s probably just as well, as they all seem to want to charge 20,000K for the privilege. Fair enough I suppose, this is a poor country and for places like Luang Prabang the tourist coin is what keeps it afloat, but they’ll have to count me out. I guess these admission fees help to support the many hundreds of novice monks, who from a very young age – around ten years old – are sent from their villages in droves by their parents who are too poor to support them, let alone consider an education for them. As novice monks they receive varying degrees of education, which is (kind of) good news for the boys, but what hope is there for the girls for whom no such option for an education exists?

It turns out that there is yet another downside to traveling to a place without knowing much about it, for example, arriving back in Thailand and discovering that nowhere in Thailand will exchange your Lao Kip. Unfortunate when you’ve got 400,000 of them, which now seem only useful for wallpapering a wall that I don’t have…. Sounds of the forest…..