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.
