Wednesday, May 21, 2008

#3: Snakes on a Moped

It always felt like something was missing from Sydney's beaches.

Turns out it was this guy.


Week 3, Thailand


AND YES: so, we're back in the 'Kok. It's been a long crazy week and we're just starting to settle into our new lives here. I start teaching tomorrow (crazy) and don't finish until June 20, which seems quite a ways off right now.


But the start of the week: so we cruised around Sihanoukville for a bit while the Khmers went apeshit celebrating their New Year's, which basically consists of sitting by the side of the road all day with buckets of water so that when a motorbike or pickup truck full of passengers comes past you can hurl the water right into their stupid unsuspecting faces and then laugh maniacally as they careen off the road and try to regain control of their motorbike / pickup truck.


(We made sure not to hire a motorbike during this celebration)


And then at night it consists of everyone getting these long rods - they look like magician's wands - that shoot fireworks out the end, so you can literally stand and point your stick at people and bright red sparkly burning fireworks will spew forth onto them. Which is basically what the Khmers do, all night, for the entire three days of New Year's - walk up and down the beach shooting fireworks at people, especially girls that they like. Why you'd want the girl of your dreams to end up as a burns victim is beyond me, though.


We loved our time in Sihanoukville, which was laidback and friendly and beautiful, but by Tuesday it was time to re-enter Thailand, taking the local bus through the mountains of Koh Kong province to the western border. And you know it's funny: come to Thailand from Sydney and your first impression is just the noise and chaos and smog and dirt. Come to Thailand from Cambodia, and it seems like an oasis of order and cleanliness and safety. Well, except the driving.


In Cambodia, the state of the roads combined with the state of the cars means that I don't remember us ever travelling at over 50km/hr. As soon as you cross the border though, it's 140km/hr, all day every day. Without seatbelts, and, in some of the pickup trucks, without any way of seeing what's going on outside the car. In Thailand, on the open road, you see a fairly gruesome accident scene every hour or so. The road toll from their three-day New Year's celebration was 324 dead, 4800 injured. In three days. The yearly road toll is five figures long.


(In Cambodia, of course, it's a fraction of that, but they make up for it in other ways. Like, their custom during New Year's of just shooting all their guns into the air (Cambodian men will take any excuse to shoot at anything. They even shoot at stormclouds to try and ward them away). Of course, what goes up must come down and quite a few of those bullets end up coming down on the heads of innocent bystanders. Tens of people die each year from falling bullets during New Year's.)


So we ended up at Ko Chang, which you can all see in your head if you close your eyes and say to yourself 'mysterious tropical jungle island with awesome beaches' - whatever you're imagining is probably pretty close to the reality. We hired a motorbike, got a little shack on the beach, and cruised through the next couple of days like millionaire playboys. I loved Cambodia, but it was unspeakably lovely to swim in water that wasn't punctuated regularly with plastic bags, half-eaten pieces of meat and used condoms, floating by like islands of scum.


So those of you who know Edie know that she had a deep-seated, intractable fear of snakes. She went on television, on ABC's Creature Features, and got cured by some psychologist who got her to hold a snake and everything, and that was the end of that. It had to be true - it was on television! Everybody saw it!


...well, not quite. As we rounded a corner on our little motorbike up in the mountains of Ko Chang we came right up to a five-foot rat snake, crossing the road at a leisurely pace. Edie went spastic. She started screaming and crying and doing some weird macarena dance on the back of the bike that had me swerving right into the path of the snake. Which, of course, sent her off more. So she's squirming, trying desperately to get off the bike and run away and at the same time trying to stay on the bike and drive away, and the bike comes to a staggering stop somewhere between the snake and the steep slope into the jungle. The snake turned and disappeared somewhere up the road (thankfully) and Edie cried herself all the way back to town. Afterwards, she would tell me several times how proud of herself she was, since she'd always assumed that she would simply projectile vomit and then faint clean away if she ever saw a snake in the wild. I guess I have to be grateful for small mercies...


And now here, to Bangkok, where we're living with Aaron, one of Edie's friends from uni, who's been living over here for a couple of years now. He's a great guy, this tall (a full head taller than me) skinny white guy with a good grasp of Thai and a great sense of humour. He's a film editor (he worked on 300, but don't hold that against him) and he's been so generous and kind to us, it's really been fantastic. He lives in a beautiful one bedroom apartment in Thong Lo, with a swimming pool and a gym and - I know I sound like the most foul and disgusting type of tourist when I say this but - he has Vegemite! Thank Dog Almighty!


[interesting note: in Bangkok, which is steadfastly Buddhist and which is kinda resentful of any and all attempts to Christian-ize it, alot of the cooler teenagers get about in t-shirts that say things like 'Thank Dog Almighty!' and 'I know Jesus loves me, but I just want to be friends']


And so we went and did the stupid insane shopping thing - inside tip: it really is stupid and insane. MBK and Chatuchak markets and Central World are just whirlwinds of people and stuff and more people and more stuff until you just want to projectile vomit and faint clean away. But they're fun. Anything you could ever want, and a million things you could never possibly need, are all at your fingertips in Bangkok.


And last night was party night. We went to Soi Cowboy, one of about fifteen billion sex districts in Bangkok, though undoubtedly the one most likely to induce epileptic seizures: the place is a dumping ground for every neon light that has ever been cleverly shaped to resemble a naked woman. It's more like entering an amusement park, or Timezone, than it is entering a 200 metre stretch of brothels and dive bars. We met up with Marino, one of Aaron's friends from working at at some film company in the states, who's been over here living it up for the last five weeks. Marino's a sweet Italian-American guy from Seattle, who married a Thai girl here after three weeks (he swears he'd met her at a bar in Chicago years ago, and it was fate). Crazy. So we drank, and talked, and drank, and walked and talked and drank. Marino was a really nice guy but just a bit too enamoured of that whole American gangster image - here are three excerpts of our conversation within one hour:


[walking past a street stall selling BB guns] Man, I was so thinking about getting a mean little BB gun to carry around with me. But then I was like, 'What if some guy comes up and puts a gun in my face? Am I going to shoot him with these little girly bullets?'


[walking past a street stall selling police-style taser guns] Dude, I was considering getting one of those killer tasers and carrying it around. But what if some dude comes up and points a gun at me cos he wants my watch or something? What am I going to do, throw it at him?


[walking past a street stall selling Japanese ninja stars] Oh man! I so wanted to get like half a dozen of those ninja shuriken star things and just fling them at people. But then I was like -


- but i think you get the idea. Anyway so we drank our way through Nana and Little Arabia, ending the night at a pretty sorry excuse for an Irish pub. Some shitty police crackdown over the last two years means that most bars close up at about 1am nowadays (as opposed to never), which sucks balls, but then everyone just heads outside and the street vendors start selling beer from eskis. The Beastie Boys said it best: you gotta fight for your right to party!


So we're living with Aaron for the time being, til we find a little guesthouse that suits us. which is a really nice luxury to have, I gotta say. Except that Aaron's been pretty sick with food poisoning so we're treated nightly to a symphony of squirts and grunts from the bathroom next door to the couch we call home (for now).


Anyway, gotta get ready for school. Love you all, hope everything's brilliant and all the rest of it.


Lachie



NEXT WEEK: Starting school! Waking up early! Coming home tired and shitty! Squirting! Grunting! Projectile vomiting!

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

#2: Stoned Temple Pilots


Um... Like, wow.
Week 2, Cambodia
BUT NOW: it´s getting past that sunset-y time of day when the shops start to close and the bars start to open, so no guarantees on whether I´ll get through all this...

Edie and I are, at this very moment, living it up on the narrow sunny beaches of Sihanoukville, on the coast of Cambodia. We´ve rented out a motorbike (for the grand sum of four dollars per day) and spend our days and nights wandering like smiling zombies from beach bar to beach bar, downing beer and curries and wading in water that´s as clear and warm as a bath.

So: Siem Reap. We hit Siem Reap last Friday, bunkered down in the bar district and waited for the heat to pass while we knocked back tequila sunrises and white russians. It didn´t pass. By Sunday we decided we´d better brave the Angkor Wat temples anyway, though in the end it became something of a disaster...

Okay, so the night before we tackled the temples we decided that we´d try one of the marijuana-laced ¨happy pizzas¨ that are available in every seedy district of every town in Cambodia - because, hey, when in Rome... - but when it arrived, we prodded it and sniffed it and nibbled it and eventually convinced ourselves that we must´ve ordered it wrong, that we´d gotten just a normal pizza. So, of course, being a disgusting pig, I stuffed my face with it.

As it turns out, we were right. We didn´t have a ¨happy pizza¨. I must´ve stuttered because instead we got a ¨happy special pizza¨, a pizza stuffed to the gills with magic mushrooms that left us both trapped and crazy in our airy little room at the guesthouse, convinced the walls were going to eat us. We giggled and screamed and talked shit all night, but when Edie dropped out of the race at dawn I was still thundering on, and spent the day at the temples as vague as a lobotomy patient, meandering brainlessly around the jungle and forgetting everything that was said to me within seconds of it being said. Being out of my head in a wilderness full of ancient temples and monkeys and elephants and wild boars, it felt like the entire country was being eaten by the jungle. I wasn´t entirely wrong about that.

Anyway as to the Angkor temples themselves: spectacular. There´s not a whole lot more to say, except that if you have even the slightest interest in archaeology or the slightest illusion that you may, in fact, be the reincarnation of Indiana Jones himself (does anyone else think this whole new Indiana Jones movie thing bears a striking resemblance to the plot of Weekend at Bernie's?)then they´re pretty much unmissable. Actually, scratch that: everyone should see this. We spent three days wandering up and down these temple staircases, staring at impossibly complex engravings and statues, suffering through the heat that by 11am just makes you dizzy and leaves your legs weak and useless. We would catch motorbikes in, watching these giant mounds of rubble in the distance gradually forming themselves into real shapes, watching the sun set from the central tower of Pre Rup temple.

And Siem Reap - the town closest to the temples - buzzes with life and movement, with sound and colour and taste... Oh the food! Yeah, apologies to those who don´t hold any great interest in food but I´m just going to rave for a paragraph or so: the food here is brilliant. Bangkok was pretty much fuelled by flavour; you could not walk anywhere, anywhere at all, without smelling some food at every turn: some delicious, some rotten and totally vomit-inducing, but always there lurking in the background. In Cambodia it´s different; the food isn´t always present, but it´s always cheap and yum. Yes, it´s true, they sell crickets and spiders on street corners, and fried frogs and snake barbeques are available at most restaurants, but that´s just the initial shock. The real shock is how good everything tastes. Khmer food is a bit different to Thailand or Vietnam; if it´s closer to either it´s probably Thai, but with less spices and a helluva lot less chili. They do a type of cooking called amok, where they cook fish or beef or pork or tofu - usually fish - with lemongrass and chillies and curry paste inside a banana leaf. I tells ya, it´s a magnificent thing to behold.

And hey, while I´m recommending stuff in Cambodia, check out the capital. We caught the bus back to Phnom Penh on... um... Tuesday? Maybe? Can´t really remember but in any case we stayed on the banks of the mighty Mekong river, watched elephants go by with their touts from the street corners, and just soaked it in. Away from the ghetto around Boeng Kak lake - where we stayed last time - Phnom Penh just drips with crumbling french villas and dark little bars with not enough fans. It feels like a forgotten city - nearly all the other westerners there seemed to be crusty French colonial types who just couldn´t let go - but it´s here and it´s alive and it´s exciting and shabby and friendly and hot. Catching an old cargo boat up the Mekong under a setting sun was just dreamy (which put me in mind to propose a boat trip down the Mekong from China to Vietnam for maybe 2009 or 2010? Anyone interested? It´ll be just like Apocalypse Now. I can even organize a big fat white man for us to kill with an axe at the end of it).

In the end, the heat beat us, and now we´re here. I say to you people: come to Cambodia, but probably don´t come in April. I mean, it´s not like you can´t do it (obviously), but that the heat just saps at your energy and motivation, and unless you´re one of those self-motivated, type-A personality types (and if so: what are you doing here? Go punch yourself in the face. You´re ruining it for the rest of us.) or you´ve got someone awesome like Edie to patiently prod you along, you´re really not going to make it past the first town, particularly if you find a place to swim there. Between the hours of eleven and two it´s just too hot to do ANYTHING. So on Thursday we came to the only real beachside town in Cambodia, Sihanoukville, and we´ve been swimming in the warm lusciousness ever since. And right now I´ve got an appointment with a kid named Sahm, who we´ve been playing pool with for the last couple of nights. He´s only eleven but I´m telling you: the kid´s a killer. I cannot get a shot past him. Anyway, I hope you´re all really well. I´m thinking about all of you, whenever I´m cool slash sober slash awake enough to think about anything much at all. Let me know how you´re doing.

Lachie


NEXT WEEK: Khmer New Year! Ko Chang! Islands! Monkeys! Malaria!











#1: Cat on a Curtain


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!