Turns out the mosquitos here love my ass even more than the people do
Week 1, Cambodia
AND SO: here we are. It's been a week since I left now, and I'm writing to you all from beautiful, stifling Siem Reap in Cambodia. I thought I'd started to acclimatize by the time I left Thailand on Thursday but here I am sweating a small lake onto the floor of the internet cafe. The staff can see I'm struggling; they've brought me two small fans already and they keep shooting glances at me like they're wondering how many people it's gonna take to lift me after I pass out from heatstroke.
Yeah, it's hot here. Not so much in Phnom Penh, where there were nice breezes over the lake into our ramshackle cabins. But here and in Bangkok, whew. Like in Good Morning Vietnam: "it's HOT and WET. Which is okay if you're with a LADY, but it's no good if you're in the JUNGLE...".
But I'll stop bitching. Bangkok is magnificent. It opens out as far as the eye can see in every direction, and then it folds up into such intricate detail that every city block has more to do and see than entire suburbs in Sydney. I'm going to be teaching in a school that's a little bit out of town, but still fairly easy to reach on the subway (which, by the way, is fantastic - I hope I get the chance sometime to write about how awesome the subway is, but I don't have the stamina right now), only thirteen kids in the class, swimming pool and gym for staff to use as well as free lunch daily - I'm laughing. The teachers are all in their late 20s and British, but the kids are almost all Thai (though a lot have one white parent - I'll give you three guesses as to which parent is white).
We drink Chang beer from giant bottles at every meal and wake up with hangovers that could kill lesser beings. We sleep in small dark rooms with fans and no mirrors and paper-thin walls, with empty bottles of water accumulating hourly. We wander the streets through Chinatown, Huamlaphong, Banglamphu - we catch longboats up the river, Bangkok rarely looking better than from the water. The signs on the longboats - on all the public transport - say "Leave space for monks", and people do, though it's funny seeing the young fashion-conscious monks who have bought orange Havaiana thongs to match their robes. We eat at little stalls, pad thai, green curry, other things that have no english labels. We eat fresh fruit each morning, pineapple and mango with sticky rice and guava and paw paw and dragonfruit and durian (which is most delicious of all, I think). Occasionally, it goes wrong and we come within inches of shitting our pants, but hey, that's Bangkok. We wander from temple to temple, because despite the hustle and the hustlers and the ping pong shows, Bangkok is very very Buddhist.
So why then are we in Cambodia? Mainly because Jetstar made us - told us at the airport that they couldn't let us go to Thailand unless we could prove that we were leaving Thailand. So we had to run from Melbourne airport to the Hilton and book a flight to Cambodia. And so on Thursday we jumped a cab in Banglamphu who then raced us to the airport, topping out at 145km/hr on a crowded freeway - which left Edie sweating and crying, but didn't bother me so much after The Melbourne Incident...
The Melbourne Incident
Okay, so: we left Albury for Melbourne on Sunday, planning to get there in the afternoon at which time I'd hang out with an ex-girlfriend of mine for a little while, not having seen her in several months. Meanwhile, Edie would see her ex-boyfriend in Melbourne, or so the reasoning went. But of course the train got trapped in the hideous village of Violet Town for some two and a half godforsaken hours, so we were very late and my ex was pretty shitty. I went to hang out with her and we chatted for a while but things degenerated fairly quickly and next thing she's storming back to her car to drive off. It's at this exact moment that I suddenly remember that my passport is in my backpack and my backpack is in the car, where I left it because, well, I'm lazy. I run to the passenger side door and pull it open, just as she hits the reverse and comes straight at me. I do the only thing I can do: I jump onto the open door, clinging like a cat to a curtain. Either she doesn't see me or she was really angry at me; because she then pulls out into Melbourne's main street doing 80k/hr, with me flapping back and forth against the car screaming "Ohgodpleasestopstopstopohshitpleasestopohgodstop" before we finally come to a halt, some two hundred metres later. No injuries, but I did cry like a little girl.
But back to our main story...
Anyway, we fly to Phnom Penh, which is a whole different ballgame from Bangkok. Dusty little streets full of crumbling old french villas, the roads awash with a sea of motorbikes, bicycles and pedicabs going every conceivable direction. We found a little guesthouse down by the lake (well, okay: we got out of the cab and were physically pushed, by by two competing mobs of touts, into a completely random guesthouse on the lake) which had a rickety old pool table and a well-stocked bar and a deck overlooking all the villages. We put our stuff in our room while our host, a rather camp Cambodian named Jerry, told us about the place, about the check-out time and the restaurant and then -
"And, of course, just tell me how much marijuana you want with the room and I'll go get it for you."
and then -
"Tomorrow maybe I take you down to the shooting range and we shoot AK-47s and M-16s? We can shoot targets, plates, beer bottle, maybe a duck or a chicken or a cow?"
and then -
"If you go to our restaurant and pay $1.50, we put magic mushrooms on pizza for you, my friend."
Welcome to Cambodia: the land where anything goes. It's a harder, crueller place than Bangkok - we've been ripped off twice already - but the people are beautiful and it's all extremely pretty and as we sat out on that hazy deck and watched lightning peal down across the other side of the lake, the geckos barking in short yelps and the children next door laughing and screaming, for a moment in our wretched little lives we were perfect, immaculate beings in the jungle, on the lake, under the stars.
Lachie
NEXT WEEK: Angkor Wat! Sihanoukville! Beaches! Buses! Diarrhea!
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