#29: The River

Week 29 - Battambang Province, Cambodia

PHNOM PENH: came and went before our tired eyes in a whirlwind of heat and orphans and hardness and lightning and poverty and wild-eyed men chasing us down the street screaming "Tuk-tuk! TUK-TUK!". I still love Phnom Penh, though nobody else seems to share my viewpoint: it's an awful fucking city, admittedly, but it's wild and unpredictable and full of that crumbling French elegance which I find myself becoming more and more attached to. This city, for example, has far more beautifully maintained green parks scattered across the city than Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur combined, despite the fact that most Phnom Penh residents couldn't afford to even use the toilets in either of those cities. The people, too, maintain a little of the old French arrogance - try ignoring the endless parade of tuk-tuk drivers and drug pushers and you'll get a stream of abuse: "No, thankyou! That's all you need to say sir - NO, THANKYOU!". It matters not that they're harassing and exploiting you - there's no excuse for bad manners.

The riverfront against which Phnom Penh pushes like a tide was experiencing a major construction project - to stop the river overflowing into town each wet season - which meant that the city's best asset was covered in a three-metre tall green fence, which didn't help our experience. So we jumped a bus for Siem Reap, and spent the next six hours in absolute misery. In the van from the Thai border to Phnom Penh, the trip took twelve hours rather than the five that were advertised; it was crowded and hot and they spent an hour stuffing palm-oil machinery weighing several hundred kilograms into the back while the other passengers stood around eating icecream sandwiches. But none of that mattered because it was fun. Buses, as a rule, aren't fun. I hate air-conditioned buses for the same reason I hate planes: they're squashy and poorly lit and either too hot or too cold or both, and unsociable and somehow deadly silent at the same time as being deafeningly loud; it's the same way that chicken carcasses and human corpses are transported. What's the point if there's no breeze on your face? Fuck air-conditioning. Open your windows. And throw rocks at Australian buses and trains until they re-open theirs.

So:

Siem Reap buzzes; I think I wrote that last time I was here but there's really no other word for it. We were the only people staying at our decaying wooden guesthouse so we had the run of the place like we were in The Shining or something; but two blocks away the bars and pubs heaved - Siem Reap, more than any other town, serves as the nexus of the Thailand-Laos- Vietnam-Cambodia travel circuit. We spent the days and nights chatting with Italian lion tamers and French journalists; Scottish vixens and British RAF soldiers fresh from Iraq and Afghanistan, over games of pool or rounds of 75c beers.

Adam went off to Angkor Wat to poke around the ruins; Erin and I spent the days doing... very little, except wandering here and there, like leaves blown about before a storm. Eventually we made our way down to Phnom Krom, a peaceful and deserted Buddhist temple placed elegantly atop a hill staring out in all directions at Tonle Sap, the biggest lake in South-East Asia, a magnificent blue haze that reaches out to the horizon and is specked with stilt villages and floating villages that change location depending on the water level and currents. It was a brilliant view, but an awful climb - the Cambodian sun is a cruel beast; it doesn't care that even Bangkok has started to cool, recently, it's still a daily 38 degrees out on the Cambodian plains.

After a good few days in Siem Reap, we woke at some ridiculous hour - 5:30am, or so - to catch the riverboat to Battambang, to the west. In a low-slung longboat we pushed out across Tonle Sap lake, through the wetlands and up the river. It was spectacular: in the wetlands we had several hundred birds - white storks and others - pushing ahead of our boat like a vanguard heralding our arrival. Up the river naked children playing in the fields waved and screamed and threw each other in the water, while serious-faced adults looked out silently from their floating huts. In the narrowest sections, we crashed up against other riverboats and had to wedge slowly past each other while the splintering wood of the creaking boats screamed as if in pain. And out on the lake, we could look out at nothing at all; just water pockmarked by reeds, as far as the eye could see.

...But...

...but after seven hours on a narrow wooden bench with no room to move, water slowly seeping through our pants and backpacks, we were very goddamn happy to see the end of that boat. And that is how we find ourselves in Battambang, a large town full of colonial buildings eroded by a half-century of disrepair, about which we know absolutely nothing, but of which I can make four observations: 1) everything is very cheap 2) it rains alot. Not just alot. An insane amount. Biblical proportions, and all that 3) electricity is, at best, unreliable here 4) the kids are very cute, but have a habit of trying to take things from your plate while you're eating or standing by with a plastic bag waiting to seize your leftovers. Which is crushingly depressing, and guilt-inducing, and makes me want to cry.

In a couple of days we will re-enter Thailand so that Erin can complete her work commitments in Bangkok, and that will be the last of the ties that bind, severed and forgotten. Then to the north, in a race with the Tibetan winter. We will either win or end up as icy-poles for the vultures.

Our videos are slowly getting better: episodes two and three will be up shortly. We're still trying to find the right site, so at the moment their are two addresses for your delectation:
www.pingpongkapow.tumblr.com
www.pingpongkapow.wordpress.com

Lachie

#26: Good Housemates

Week 26 - Bangkok, Thailand

AND WE'RE: out, out of our nice little apartment with our shit stuffed into baskets and backpacks, and on into Adam's apartment, where we sleep on the couch and eat all his food and piss in the bathtub and play the music too loud and set fire to the rug and drink the milk straight from the carton and generally just make good housemates of ourselves. Erin's very sick with the flu and spends most of her time expelling greenish-tinted bodily fluids at high speeds across the room. It's great.

It's nearly over, all this Bangkok stuff: we leave next week. It's the most confused schedule of all time: Erin finishes work today (the 3rd) but has to restart on the 3rd of November and finish again on the 5th; I finished on the 19th but started again on the 1st and finish on the 10th (possibly the 8th); Adam finishes on the 7th (possibly the 4th) but starts again on the 12th and finishes on the 15th... Good times. But we are going to Cambodia, and that's all that matters.

Of course, as is the way of things, everything gets good the moment you're ready to leave; I'm now working at a wonderful school with fantastic teacher and absolutely no work to be done. They sit around and talk shit all day until they think they've stayed in the staff room long enough to go home. I tells ya, it's a revelation.

We have lived a pretty charmed life here, for all my bitching, but the stasis keeps us miserable. We came over here to move, continuously, and more and more we've found ourselves bound to Bangkok because of money or friends, and though it thrives during the night, this city, during the day it can be a very dull place to be, little more than an unpleasant melange of humidity and traffic noise and crowds and cracked pavements. Having to wade up to your knees across a streets when it's raining: that kind of thing is awesome fun when you're here for a holiday, but when you're coming home from work it's usually just frustrating and kinda gross. And so you get petty and notice the little details (like the peculiar Thai habit of stopping for absolutely no reason at the top and bottom of crowded escalators) and forget the big picture.

The big picture is that this city is surreal and fantastic, a never-ending carnival dedicated to the gods of paid sex and cheap whiskey. Nothing about it makes sense, and so at times you fail to notice just how ridiculous the whole thing is. Like: a telegraph pole exploded above me today while I was on the motorbike ride to work. And when I say exploded, I mean it; a massive blast of light and sound, followed by the burning sensation on my neck and shoulder as a fountain of sparks poured down upon my un-helmeted head.

That doesn't happen elsewhere, right?

And: Adam's disembodied voice haunting us each day on the train. Somehow, a few months ago, Adam sort of fell into doing a voiceover for a commercial. How? Who knows? In any case the ad was picked up by the SkyTrain company, who have televisions on all their carriages playing ads. Now, every day we get:

Paul (Adam's boss): Your talent is a gift! The whole world is depending on you!
Adam (in a deep, throaty yell filled with sincere longing and desperation): I'll never do this to you again!
Thai lady whom we don't know, but apparently represents Kasikorn Bank: Yaht min koo doo let min khat...

This kind of thing is odd, right? It shouldn't be the case that in a city of ten million people who all speak another language that our friend should be the one on television, right?

Last week I was electrocuted by an egg (long story, the moral of which is not to pour eggs into a sandwich press, even if they do make awesome triangular shaped eggs). Erin is being stalked by a girl who is trying to force her to take a well-paying job at a Thai university (long story, the moral of which is never to be nice to anyone. Ever.). Wait, have I mentioned the being-chased-by-wild-elephants-while-hitchhiking-with-a-gun-toting-golf-player story? What about the nearly-dead-through-tropical-fever-induced-liver-failure story?

This stuff is happening, every day. Except this week, for some reason, which is why this is such a meandering email with no real point. Next week we will be gone! I'll write again then. Hope you're all well.

Lachlan

#28: The Sizzled Lizard

Week 28 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia

SO WE: trundled back into Cambodia yesterday, rolling over the border in the early morning. Then we argued with the van drivers until midday, trying to get a reasonable price to Phnom Penh. After an hour or two I finally realized that for the whole argument I'd had the exchange rates mixed up in my head and had been offering them just over a dollar to take us some three hundred kilometres. So I felt like a knob and spent three hundred kilometres getting sniggers and icy stares from the Cambodians in the car.

Whatever: the drive was spectacular anyway, over mountains and rivers, as empty of people as any place in Australia. The occasional labourers walking home in their rags were the only people for several hours, then a few ox-carts, carrying fruit, then a town on the bank of a river, where an old lady was lugging a large, freshly-caught shark up to her stall. And then Phnom Penh: the giant, spastic, chaotic, rambling dustcloud disguised as a city, where the troubles began. In the space of an hour we were harassed, ripped off, driven in circles, given free beer by the Thai Minister for Justice (?), and offered endless amounts of drugs we couldn't afford, and we ended the day tired, hungry and shitty, in a guesthouse over the lake while a massive lightning storm played out in front of us. Apparently a couple of months in Thailand has softened us up quite a bit.

Or perhaps it was starting our travels with a week on a tropical island, which is about the most softening travel experience you can go through that doesn't involve a cruise ship or actually physically transforming yourself into a sponge. We spent the days on Ko Chang waking up late and lolling about in the warm clear water until lunchtime, when we'd join the other travellers getting happy shakes at the Treehouse and return hours later blissful and double-glazed. Glassy-eyed, we'd sit around staring at the geckos chasing flies across the ceiling or hold meandering debates about the relative merits of The Cosby Show versus Saved by the Bell. And then it would be nighttime, and some bar along the beach would have a full moon party, or a half moon party, or a three sixteenths moon party, and that would carry us through until it was time to wake up and go swimming. It was, without hyperbole, the toughest experience of my entire life.

The beaches were filled with fish and frogs and giant beetles that flew into my back at such high speeds that I thought I was being punched; up the road from our bungalows, a troop of monkeys hung out on the power lines, having gladiatorial contests to knock each other off the poles and racing each other along the thick black cables. At one point while swimming a large lizard surfaced only a couple of metres frome Erin and I. We watched it dive for fish among the rocks - an amazing experience until the Thais on the beach spotted the lizard as well and immediately dropped everything they were doing to pounce on it. The lizard ended up on the barbecue at the bungalows that night.

It's been about six months since we last came to Cambodia and I'd completely forgotten the massive amount of difference between the two countries, which is obvious from the moment you cross the border. The difference is simple - Thailand has money, Cambodia doesn't - but it's profound nonetheless. Seeing the naked toddlers playing in the toxic goo that fills the gutters, the pavement hairdressers, the razor wire around poles to stop people stealing the power cables for cash, the ox-pulled carts, the large cauldrons along the main roads that serve as public bins and which are burned each night, the way people driving down the road will just fling bags of garbage out of their windows as a matter of habit - this is the naked life that goes on in Cambodia, disgusting and thrilling and miserable and ecstatic. And addictive, which is why we've come back for more. Tomorrow we head to Siem Reap, which Adam has not seen before, and then we head into lands unknown - Battambang, Sisophon, rivers, jungles and bamboo trains.

Hope you're all well and enjoying the warmer weather (Phnom Penh is, as ever and always, stifling) - oh and the first episode of our TV show is up and running: www.pingpongkapow.tumbler.org!

Ping Pong Ka-Pow,

Lachie

#27: Bangkok Sinking

Week 27 - Koh Chang, Thailand

AND AWAY: we go...

There's blood in the streets of Bangkok again, and once again you'd never know it unless you read the paper and / or received frantic calls from friends and family. Two people are dead this time; eight more had limbs blown off from ping pong bombs or tear gas canisters. The leader of the PAD is in prison; the prime minister says he wants to quit; the police are getting malicious; and the army chief - who, bizarrely, has assumed the role of The Voice of Reason - is being bullied into another coup.

It's time to leave Bangkok and never look back.

Two days ago Ronald, one of the teachers I work with, got drugged and robbed. He went to a coffeeshop, pulled out his paper to have a read and next thing he knows, it's morning, and he's awake face down in the gutter several miles away with no wallet. Worst part is, he's already lost everything once: he used to own a hotel in Phuket, pre-tsunami. Now he's working shitty teaching jobs just to get by, and he's lost everything he saved. He spent the next couple of days vomiting copiously after the massive dose they handed him.

Telling the story brought on an avalanche of other desperate tales. Marvin, another teacher I work with, took a girl home to his apartment. They were stark sober, but after one bite of his dinner he lost all memory and woke to an empty apartment. Security cameras showed that she had remained in his apartment for an hour and a half, rigorously cleaning the apartment of every one of his belongings.

Maxwell, one of Clarice's friends, also took a girl home. He didn't get drugged, but did fall asleep. He woke to find her swiping his laptop, and chased her out through the corridor, catching up with her in the elevator. Whereupon she promptly stabbed him in the chest, puncturing his lung.

Also: it's time to leave Bangkok, and never look back.

Aaron left a few days ago, on the bus down to Ko Chang, and waited out the week swinging in a hammock with an evil grin on his evil face, clutching a cocktail with an evil claw and cackling his evil cackle, evilly, as he thought about us slaving away at our braingrinding jobs.

And now we're gone too, off on the Grand Adventure. We've met up with Aaron in Ko Chang, which is, if anything, more perfect and idyllic and sunny and warm and gorgeous than the last time we were here, in April. If all goes well we should be in Cambodia in a week or so. And then: onwards and upwards.

Hope you're all well,

Lachlan