Holiday in Cambodia

I’m still trying to adjust my bodily functions to the local time. I haven’t quite adjusted yet although I’ve been in Southeast Asia for almost a week now as I’m writing this entry into my little notebook while complaining about bodily functions not adjusting to the local time. Thus I have this tendency to fall asleep at odd hours of the day, like at nine o’clock in the morning, and be totally revved up at three in the morning when most of the populous have already rested for the night. It’s quite frustrating, really.

I have been traveling off and on for the past couple years, at three to four weeks at a stretch, in intervals of six to seven months or so, but this is the first time in about a year or so that I have had to dig up my little blue notebook and write something down while traveling, and that’s not a good thing because usually it only means one thing; I’m bored to tears and have nothing better to do but write while on travel. Most of my travels in the past year or so have been painless and comfortably numbing. They were as comfortably numbing as a vacation, if you like that kind of stuff. Such things can cause writers block. Writers block occurs when you are satisfied with your life, when you’re fat, dumb, and happy. Complacency is a writer’s worst enemy. Pain is its best friend because pain, agony, and suffering induce great and wonderful thoughts. People become philosophical under suffering. They also develop some spine under suffering. This is one of the reasons that I am not a good writer. I haven’t suffered enough, and thank god for that. That’s like selling your soul to the devil for a chance at immortality.

From Changi International to Da Nang

I am now at a Changi International VIP lounge, waiting for my flight to depart from Singapore to Siem Reap via Da Nang. I had no idea that the Silk Air flight made a brief stop in Da Nang. Not that it bothers me, but if I had known, I probably would’ve taken the opportunity to stop in Da Nang for a couple of days and see the sights. I have never been to Vietnam and I would like to go there someday, and that someday might have been now, except I was not prepared for it, so it will have to be next time.

There is hardly anyone here at the VIP lounge. I see two Chinese people reading Chinese newspapers, a Haole guy in polo pants and shirt reading the Straight Times, one of Singapore’s soft daily newspapers that is censored by the government for language and content, and a Malaysian barista who served me the designer latte of some sort. It’s sweet, foamy, and full of pretension, not worth the ceramic cup that it’s served on. But then again everything in the VIP lounge is free to passengers waiting to board their business class flight. What the hell is a barista anyhow? Has that just been added to the lexicon of Americana in recent years with the popularization of Starbucks and these other disgustingly splashy coffee shops that specializes in designer lattes? Maybe the TV show Friends invented the term. Maybe not. Friends is another one of those TV shows that had me wondering about the fate of Western Civilization. As I write this passage that you see right in front of you, Van Morrison wails out his bluesy tune “And it stoned me”. Stoned me just like Jelly Roll.

And when I thought that Friends was as low as it could ever go, a deluge of “reality” shows sweeps over the UHF spectrum, completing the destruction of the civilized world as we know it. One thing is for sure, there is absolutely no hope for the recovery of the Western World. The fall of the West will be attributed to the rise of reality TV shows. The Eastern World better take note of this trend or they too will go to hell in a hand basket as swiftly as the West is plunging down that abyss. China knows this. That is why they are clamping down on free expression. From the Chinese point of view, freedom, or at least too much of it anyway, leads to decadence and therefore destructions of societies. Westerners disagree, and they better for their sake. The whole idea of liberty and freedom is being turn on its head, and China is eager to prove it.

Without freedom of expression, idiots like me would not be able to write thought provoking articles and publish them in my critically acclaimed and award winning travelogue for everyone to see, for free, at no cost to those who enjoy reading critically acclaimed and award winning thoughts. You can say all you want about Americans. Call them loud, call them brash, call them arrogant, call them ignorant, call them every four letter word that exist in the English language, but don’t ever tell them that their First Amendment rights will be taken away from them. Worse yet, don’t ever tell the Americans that they are not free because they will do everything in their power to prove to you that they are indeed the freest people in the face of this here planet Earth, even if that means tying you up and dragging your body on the asphalt with a Ford F350 pickup truck, with the whole town cheering while your body is being dragged down on Main Street.


I am still sitting in the VIP lounge with absolutely nobody in sight except for the lounge attendants. Perhaps I came to the airport too early, eager to get on with my trip and get out of Singapore. I am having some difficulty coming up with wonderful and entertaining thoughts while sitting here in this wonderful VIP lounge, drinking designer latte, with CNN on the tube. There’s another sign of the apocalypse for you, CNN all over the world, dominating the TV news industry. There is this pressure that once you become a critically acclaimed and award winning author, you want to keep producing critically acclaimed and award winning thoughts. But that’s impossible. Even the Beatles didn’t produce platinum selling albums throughout their career. Even Mark Twain didn’t always produce whimsical and hilariously entertaining satire every time he put ink on a blank piece of paper. But you have to keep producing, no matter how uninspiring, because if you don’t it prolongs and exacerbates this disease we call writers block. Athletes, musicians, artists, and big money traders on Wall Street go through extreme highs and lows throughout their careers. But it’s impossible to recreate those highs naturally outside of the arena where they perform, so they try to recreate those highs artificially with mind altering drugs, and plunge directly into the abyss of drug addiction, alcoholism, and other nasty diseases like that. Accountants and other working stiffs never experience extreme highs and lows in the arena which they perform, the cubicle. Cubicles are for steady eddies, really boring people like accountants and financial planners. Thus, they tend to be blessed with stability. I am one of those really boring and stable people, although I am not an accountant or a financial planner. I will never tell you what I do for a living because it’s boring, quite a good cure insomnia actually, if you like that kind of stuff. As far as I, and you, are concerned, I am a writer and a casual traveler, nothing else, and that’s good enough for me.

A Brief Stop at Da Nang International

Much of what I write is repetitive, but that’s how I get rolling with literature, repetition, hyperbole and the like. Much of what I write may not make a whole lotta sense to a whole lotta of novice readers of my writings, but to the dedicated followers of my critically acclaimed and award winning travelogue, my writings evoke a sense of passion and energy combined with deep and meaningful thoughts that’s unique to the genre of travel writing. So here am on Silk Air flight MI 636, ready to land in Da Nang Vietnam. I have no idea what to expect in this part of the world that is completely unfamiliar to me. I look out the window and it seems nice and clean and full of green, not some war torn communist country ravaged by civil war and local village infighting.

The plane lands safely in the small Da Nang International Airport. Only one runway. But it looks fine and well kept, not some ramshackle looking airport from a poor third world country like the international airport Rangoon, Burma. It’s got a few years to go yet before it becomes completely modern. They don’t have an accordion attachment to connect the plane’s fuselage directly to the concourse. Instead they have the old fashion ladder. You step down the ladder to the tarmac and walk your way to the immigration check. About twenty to thirty people disembarked in Da Nang. The rest of us who were headed to Siem Reap had to stay on board. The pilot tells us we will be here for forty minutes. I asked the stewardess if I could step out of the plane and look around. She told me yes but only on top of the ladder, I couldn’t step down onto the tarmac. That was fine with me because I just wanted some fresh air and have a look around of Vietnam.

The airport in Da Nang has only one runway. That’s all you really need for an airport unless the airport itself is a hub for a major airline, like Dallas - Forth Worth or Chicago’s O’Hare. There is only one other plane in the airport as well, a Vietnam Airlines 737. As I look towards the back end of our Silk Air plane a yellow petrol truck pulled around to refuel the plane. A few minutes later a Swedish guy and his ten-year-old kid joined me on the ladder platform to have a look and see. He introduced himself to me and told me he’s from Sweden, so that’s how I know that he is Swedish. Nice guy, although I didn’t understand his need to tell me who he was and where he was from. So I told him my name as well and that I was from Frisco. “Huh?” he responded. I said “California”. “Oh, yes, I see”. Then a few minutes later a few more passengers came on board, most headed for Singapore. You see, the Silk Air flight is making a round trip for the afternoon, Singapore-Da Nang- Siem Reap, and then back to Singapore again, except all passengers must disembark in Siem Reap and have to go through security check-in again, which is ridiculous. For me, I got off in Siem Reap and so do eighty percent of the passengers on board.

That was about all I saw of Da Nang. Then we’re off again at 33,000 feet. The landscape of Vietnam is indistinguishable from Cambodia. After being up in the air for barely twenty minutes the pilot tells us that we are crossing the border into Cambodia. At 35,000 feet above a few scattered cumulus clouds below us are shading the flatlands of Vietnam and Cambodia. It’s a relatively short plane ride, about one hour or so, and after passing over a few nameless provinces of Cambodia the plane starts to descend in preparation for the approach to Siem Reap International. The airplane pilot tells us in his thick Vietnamese or Cambodian accent that the temples of Angkor can be seen to the right of us. I could barely see it but it was there, the familiar corncob towers that I’ve seen and read about in books, and that’s where I was headed.

Siem

Pokambor Street in the morning
The most common modes of transportation are these two stroke motorcycles that spew out a tonnage of pollution.

Reap

Cambodia and Vietnam are both one hour behind Singapore and the rest of peninsular and achipelagic Southeast Asia, which is odd, because in terms of longitude it is farther east than both Singapore and Malaysia, both of which are +8 Hrs ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, the center of the time keeping universe. Siem Reap International, like Da Nang International, has one long runway, which is more than enough for a city of its size, except it draws a gazillion tourist every year. Its small ,neat, and relatively modern, but like Da Nang International, it doesn’t yet have an accordion attachment to the airport concourse, so you have to step down the ladder and walk on the tarmac from the plane to the airport immigration check. It is better looking than ninety percent of the small town airports you’ll see anywhere in the world. The reason for this is because Siem Reap draws a ton of tourists everyday, and the authorities have taken it upon themselves to make sure that the housewives from Georgia get a good first impression.

We step down the ladder and walk on the tarmac to the immigration checkpoint. The building is modern but accented with Khmer architecture, really quite stunning for an airport of its size. Before passing through immigration we have to apply for a tourist visa. For $20 they’ll give you a 30-day visa. Everything in Cambodia is in US dollars or Cambodian riel: $1 = 4100 riel. Cambodians prefer dollars. Wherever you go, kids will chase you down, hawking their wares “for one doughla onlee”. “Sir, one doughla okee”. They may not have much in their English vocabulary, but “Sir, one doughla” is a phrase they’ve mastered. After the visa application, right there at the airport, which takes about five minutes if you’re the first in line, then off you go to immigration, another five minutes. Then to baggage claim and finally, out of the airport.

I flagged a taxi for the ten-minute ride to downtown Siem Reap for about five dollars or so. You can take a tuk-tuk for less but I was an idiot, to I took a taxi. These tuk-tuks are little carts pulled by little two stroke engine motorcycles and spews out tons of pollution. They are called tuk-tuks because their two stroke engines sounds exactly that, “tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk…” when they run.

We drive out of the gates at the airport and head east towards the western entrance of Angkor Wat. On the way we pass a DHL balloon, a similar type of balloon that they have in Singapore near Bugis, and for “ten doughla onlee, sir” it will take you up 1000 feet up in the air for an aerial view of the temples in the area. It’s near sundown as we approach the western entrance to Angkor Wat, the magic hour where the lighting is near golden perfect, the stuff that photographers and filmmakers talk so much about. Throngs of tourists and hawkers, most of them under the age of ten, are swarming the area. The heat and humidity outside is overwhelming from what I can see inside the comforts of my air-conditioned taxi. Haole women in tight shorts and halter-tops are sweating profusely. Foreign couples in tuk-tuks are heading home for the day, probably all templed out. We turn right and drive along the moat that separates and guards the Angkor Wat compound from the rest of the world, and head south towards the small town of Siem Reap. The road is dusty and bumpy. We pass by plenty of townsfolk heading out or heading back to the city in their bicycles or their two stroke motorcycles. This is very much a third world country, ravaged by a civil war and an American war that was thrust upon them, a war that they did not want and did not ask for. Although Siem Reap was unaffected by Nixon’s and Kissinger’s napalm bombing of Cambodia, the after effects from the Khmer Rouge era is evident in its backwardness.

The contrast between third world living side by side with five star hotels is also very evident here. As we approach the edge of town we pass by the enormous Le’ Meridian Angkor Spa and Resort, a place that looks like it belongs more on the island of Maui instead of a third world country. Something about its unabashed opulence makes my stomach churn. People who struggle everyday just to survive should not be subjected to a sight of such wasteful extravagance. The compound is gated, of course, so that the privileged tourists can be shielded from the appalling poverty outside of the compound. So that they won’t have to look at vendors selling boiled and roasted peanuts and dirty little kids selling whatever their parents are making them hawk, their guilt inducing sad little faces causing a sympathetic impulse to buy by obligation and pity, not by desire.

The taxi driver drops me off at my hotel, the Foreign Correspondents Center (FCC) at Angkor. Now, you might take me for a hypocrite after all I’ve said about opulence and the depraved class having to endure such sights of opulence while they starve. Actually, the Cambodians aren’t starving. They’ve got enough to eat. They just don’t have the resources to be able to live like Westerners do. The FCC at Angkor is an elegant compound centered on an old French Colonial mansion that once was the residence of the French Governor-Colonial Master, or something ridiculous like that. Thankfully the Khmer Rouge didn’t ransack the place during their reign of terror, one of the few civilized or cultural structures that they didn’t destroy. They destroyed everything else, including parts of the Angkor Wat complex. The old colonial mansion is now a bar and restaurant on the second floor. The first floor has a few shops, boutiques, and a travel agency. At night the bar and restaurant gets filled up by tourists and people like me who are staying at the FCC.

Although the FCC has certain elements and characteristics of opulence, it is couched in a low key and unimposing manner such that the observer is awed more by its elegance and sophistication than by its sheer extravagance, unlike the Le’ Meridian Spa and Resort, which is loud, brash, and obnoxious. If you have some cash to burn and want a good place to stay in Siem Reap, the FCC is the place to be. The rooms are spacious, the bathrooms are superb, and I especially like the overhead shower that hangs from the ceiling.

By the time I checked in to my room the sun had come down below the horizon and darkness fell quickly throughout the flatlands of Siem Reap, which is common enough around these parts of the world. I spent the next couple of hours getting situated and comfortable in my abode for the week. Then I headed out of my room, out in front of the mansion, and out for a walk into town. The minute I walked out of the FCC compound a tout approached me and asked if I wanted tuk-tuk.

Sir, one doughla okee.

No thanks, I’ll ride my shoes, I replied. The tout laughed, and kept laughing for the next several seconds, surprised and perhaps unaccustomed to my brand of humor.

Sir, walking very tiring, the tout said back to me, still laughing. He said this to me with a hand to the forehead motion, mimicking wiping off a sweat, a gesture of exhaustion.

One doughla, two doughla okee too, the tout added.

I was wondering how “two doughla” suddenly became “okee too”. When you up the price on a customer, that’s usually not okay, but it’s good for him, the tout, so maybe that’s what he meant by “okee too”.

From the FCC I crossed the street towards the river side of Pokambor street with the trail of the tout’s laughter, saying “Sir, two doughla okee, ha ha ha…” I have no idea what he was so amused about. Perhaps my suggestion of me riding my shoes still tickled him. Anyway, from across the street I headed south along the river, which is less of a river and more of a creek or a rivulet. It’s muddy, dirty, and smelly. There’s a cemented walking path alongside the rive and stone made benches every twenty yards or so where young lovers sit and listen to the chirp of crickets at night and the rhythmic chugging of the tuk-tuks on the road beside them. The air is thick and humid, wrapping my whole body like a blanket, which causes sweat to seep out of the pores of my skin after walking along the river path on Pokambor street for fifteen minutes. After the intersection on Achamean the street begins to curve westward as it winds down to the Psar Chas market area. At this point my stomach began to growl, begging for food. Thus, I decided to head back to the FCC for dinner. It’s my first night in Siem Reap, so I wanted to play it safe, and eating at the FCC restaurant is as safe as it could ever be.

The roads in Siem Reap are not necessarily in the best condition, but they’re adequate. You have to be careful walking on the pavement though, especially at night in the dark, because there are potholes and cracks which if you happen to step on inadvertently could snap your ankles and put you in crutches for the next couple of months. As I reached the entrance to the FCC my friend the tout was there waiting at the entrance, touting tuk-tuk services to unwitting tourists. As soon as he saw me I was greeted with a hearty “Hello brother, like tuk-tuk sir, one doughla okee, ha ha ha…” He was still laughing. He just couldn’t get over the “riding my shoes” bit.

I took a table on the second floor and had dinner. I ordered some Khmer cuisine and a beer. This place, especially at night, looks very romantic. Down below on the grounds by the shallow pool a few dozen tourists are having a candle light dinner in the early evening hours of this hot and humid Cambodian night. This is the type of atmosphere that housewives from Georgia would absolutely adore. There are plenty of them here, not necessarily from Georgia, but housewives from everywhere else; France, Germany, England, places like that. The Khmer cuisine that I chose for dinner was somewhat uninspiring. After dinner I lingered around for a little bit and drank some scotch on rocks out on the porch as thunder and lightning began to emerge from the dark skies. It was getting late and the candle lit diners were just wrapping up their romantic Cambodian evening. The wind started to blow quite hard and within five minutes the rains came pouring down.

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