Pub Street Nights

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I get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again

- by The Who, a rock band

The toughest thing about writing is when the events that happen all around you are so boring that you would rather not write about them at all for fear of producing work that’s uninspiring, unimaginative, and completely dull. Aspiring fabulists who are unable to capture the magic out of an ordinary mundane situation of every day living should not waste their time with the written arts. The reason that I’m writing all of this down is because writing, for me at least, is an antidote to boredom. But day in and day out, whenever I put ink on a blank piece of paper, what comes out is usually uninspiring, unimaginative, and completely dull, just a bunch of chicken scratches, barely legible, completely random in thought and order, and barely passable as a work of someone who does not belong in an insane asylum. The trick is then to create inspired, articulate, and fabulous thoughts without the use of the written arts as the medium of promulgation. But all I have at my disposal is a pen and a little notebook that I carry around with me because boredom inevitably occurs in the act of traveling. Such is the conundrum at hand, and I am one hundred percent sure that this little piece of an introduction has served the purpose of adding more clarity to a body of work that is already crystal clear to the many readers and avid followers of my critically acclaimed and award winning travelogue.

Dream Weaver

I dropped my backpack, kicked out my hiking boots, pulled off my shirt, and jumped into the cool waters of the blue-tiled pool of the FCC hotel. FCC means Foreign Correspondents Club. I had said earlier that it meant Foreign Correspondents Center. I was wrong and this is the correction to the errata. Not to belabor the point, but belaboring anything is the only thing that I am really good at, so I am going to belabor this FCC topic a little more, perhaps much more than any human being could possibly tolerate. There’s also a FCC in Phnom Penh. There are FCCs everywhere in Asia. They have become such an institution that they don’t even bother to spell out Foreign Correspondents Club anymore because everyone knows them simply as the FCC, so people sometimes forget what the last C stands for - is it Center or is it Club - and thus the reason for my confusion earlier, and the source of the errata. But most of them are not hotels where ordinary Joes like me stay and eat and drink alcohol at night with other guests. Usually it’s a liaison office for foreign correspondents. In Cambodia it’s a hotel and sometimes a liaison office for foreign correspondents. Now that’s belaboring the point, if I’ve ever seen one.

Outside of every suite in the FCC is a sitting area with a soft and comfortable sofa where guests can lounge around out in the open, especially late in the afternoon before dinner, after many guests have returned back to their suites from a day of sightseeing at the Angkor area. I made a loud splash as I jumped into the pool, loud enough to startle anyone within the vicinity of the pool and the spa, and would have certainly brought the guests lazily lounging around their sitting area out of their afternoon stupor, but no one noticed. I had spent all day at the temples, seeing both Angkor Wat from sunrise to noon and the Angkor Thom compound all afternoon. After my tuk-tuk driver dropped me off at the FCC I headed straight for the pool and plunged right in to cool my whole body off. I was sweaty, dirty, and grimy, so a dip in the pool was definitely what I needed, a refreshing remedy from the heat and humidity. I floated around the pool for a good twenty minutes, exhausted after a long day of temple touring, and my mind was completely blank, totally devoid of any thought whatsoever, comfortably numb, and in a major state of vegetation. Perhaps this is what it feels like when your brain is in a state of conscious coma, whatever that means. A hotel attendant came over to ask if there’s anything I wanted, perhaps a drink, a snack, or what not. I said no. There’s nothing I really want right now other than to just float right here in the pool and look at the patchy cloudy blue skies up above and let my mind completely shut down. The hotel attendant smiled and walked away, not really understanding my mindless mumble. I’m not sure I understand what I just said. It doesn’t matter, really, because at that point nothing was on my mind.

After a few more minutes of floating like a log I finally got out of the pool, walked to a stack of fresh towels sitting on a table beside the pool area, and toweled off. Then I picked up my backpack and the rest of my belongings on my way back to my suite. The suites here don’t have room numbers. They have names instead. My suite for example is called Aloe Vera. Other suites are called Plumeria, Bougainvillea, or things of that sort. After a brief shower and a bit of personal tidying up I laid down on the king size bed for a two-hour power nap before dinner.

I left the overhead fan on while taking a nap and turned off the air conditioner because the overhead fan is quieter and perhaps more refreshing than the cool whir of the air conditioner, like a cool breeze blowing on a steamy hot tropical night on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, except that I wasn’t on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, I was in a landlocked little town in the heart of Cambodia, dozing off and watching the overhead fan rotate at approximately forty five revolutions per minute, which is kind of slow, too slow to be refreshing, so I got up to turn the dial and kick the speed up a little bit to about fifty revolutions per minute, fast enough to fan the air to a cool refreshing breeze. The human eye can distinguish forms, shapes, and any distinctive character of an object sharply if the object in question is moving at a speed that is less than the frame resolution speed of the human eye. Eighteen frames per second is the frame speed where objects can still look sharp to our human eyes. After that things become blurry or “fluid”, as they say in the filmmaking business. Thus, as I lay in bed and looking up at a fan of eight blades rotating at fifty revolutions per minute, with each blade equivalent to one frame, I see four hundred sharp and distinctive shapes of each blade per minute (eight times fifty revolutions per minute), or a little less than seven frames per second, which is much slower than the human eye limit of eighteen frames per second, and the sharpness of the image of each rotating blade hypnotizes me into that soft divide between the conscious and the unconscious, and stayed within that gray area of existence for a couple of hours or so, constantly being pulled towards the boundaries of each extreme within that gray area. The sound of the rotating blades going whup whup whup pulls me ever so slightly to consciousness while exhaustion, and perhaps satisfaction, tugs my senses a little deeper onto unconsciousness, but not deep enough into the state of slumber. I roll. I notice rolling, yet I feel like I’m floating, dreaming, with blurred images appearing in my mind. I appear in unrealistic situations, and my actions, my movements, seems constrained, like I’m walking on quicksand. I certainly wasn’t walking on sunshine and it didn’t necessarily feel good in the same vein as Katrina and the Waves back in the mid-eighties. Instead, I was walking down a dark and cloudy tunnel, which is odd because tunnels aren’t “cloudy”. Skies in the daytime are can be cloudy but not tunnels. Tunnels are simply just dark. But that’s the beauty of dreams. Perceptions and senses can be combined and intertwined. Reality is thrown out of the window. Anything and everything is possible and allowed, perhaps necessary, in an imagination that you have no control of. The walls of the tunnel walls of the tunnel are filled with bas-relief carvings but only one image appears clear, everything else is blurry. The clear image is of a Khmer warrior holding in one hand a short and sharp object, a spear, high above his head, while the other hand is around the throat of an Apsara Dancer, on her knees, with her palms closed in a praying position. I am holding a camera at chest level high and pointing it at the bas-relief carving of what appears to be an execution of the Apsara Dancer. The push button of my camera clicks loudly and with certainty, like an old plunger being pushed down a water tank. A young girl drops a bag of Cheetos on the ground. How she suddenly appears in my light dream is a mystery to me. Her mother yells at her for making a mess.

Yeah, go ahead, make a mess, this place is only two thousand years old

, her mother chides her. Her sudden appearance in my dream is also a mystery to me. The young girl snottily walks out of the tunnel and jumped into a body of water that looks like a pond or the moat of Angkor Wat.

Don’t you leave your mess here young lady

the mother scolds her as the young girl, holding hands with an orange robed young monk of about her size and age, jumps into the green lily filled water, both giggling and laughing while jumping. I hear laughter. The loudness of the laughter pulled me completely out of the gray state and into the certainty of the conscious realm. The laughter I heard was real. It came outside, from a group of tourists as they passed by my suite. I lay still in bed for a few more minutes, trying to decide if the dream I just had was worth recollecting and writing down on paper. Five minutes later I pulled my notebook out of my backpack and wrote everything down, so now there they are right in front of your very eyes.

A Walk On The Wild Side

The whole town of Siem Reap is small enough to be seen in an hour’s walking tour. Most people don’t even bother to do a walking tour or to get to know the town at all. Their main purpose for being here is to see the temples of Angkor. It’s eight in the evening and I am walking around the general vicinity of the Royal Residence in the corner of Airport Road and Pokambor Street. There doesn’t seem to be any royalties present at this time inside the residence. Compared the magnificent sights of the temples of Angkor, the Royal Residence seems unremarkable to my eyes. Across the street is the Royal Garden, an acre of green grass and flowers, with a central plaza, and lighted with bright lights in the evening. Just farther ahead is the spacious and swanky Grand Hotel D’Angkor. Down the road is a small temple with a group of devout Buddhists burning incense and giving offerings. In the middle of the narrow intersection on Airport Road next to the temple is a tree, which obstructs free passage such that motorists have to go around it. Like everything I’ve seen so far in Cambodia, it’s a tree that seems out of place in the middle of a busy street. I walk past the odd tree in the middle of the road until I reached Sivatha Street, where I turned left and kept walking. This street is parallel to Pokambor Street on the other side of the river. It is lively and busy with many shops, restaurants, and guesthouses. I walk past massage parlors and travel agencies. At night it looks somewhat wild and dangerous, the kind of atmosphere that I’ve always imagined a Southeast Asian city to be, but appearance can be deceiving, for I felt no fear for my safety at all while walking down the street until I reached Hospital Street near the old market area, the Psar Chas, where many of the restaurants, pubs, and other shops cater to tourists.

There are throngs of tourists walking around or dining in one of the many restaurants in the area. I walked down every little alley in the area just to have a look and see if anything will pique my interest. Pizza seems to be the most popular item on each restaurant’s menu. There are lots of bars and pubs blasting rock music on Pub Street. None of the western style restaurants intrigued me. I was looking for authentic Khmer food. The little stalls in the corner of Sivatha Street and Pub Street looked the most interesting to me. I bravely sat down in one of the tiny tables next to the stalls. A guy came up to me and started speaking Khmer. There was a great deal of miscommunication, misunderstanding, and general confusion going on. I point to the noodles enclosed in a heated glass box in the stall. The proprietor nodded. A few minutes later he came back with rice and noodles with some stir-fried sweet and sour fish. I made a gesture of wanting something to drink and said beer. He understood perfectly. The food was tasty, honest, and unpretentious. It filled me up and satisfied my hunger. But my interest for coming here was not the food but the scene.

After I finished my meal I stayed around a little longer to people watch and observe the chaos all around me. There are tons of tourists browsing and there are tons of touts enticing the tourists to take a dare. One tout near where I was asked every Westerner who passed by if they wanted a girl. “Lady Sir” was his pitch. When that got no response he augmented it with “Young Lady Sir”. That got a little bit of interest from some of the passers by, but not enough to be intriguing. I see no “Lady”, the operative word for prostitute, young or old anywhere in the vicinity. This is no red light district and thank god for that because there are families, couples with young children in tow, walking around the area. Other touts were simply offering services of tuk-tuks, massages (the legitimate kind), and things of that nature. I did not find this place wild and full of vice. All I noticed was a scrappy little town with a distinct Southeast Asian characteristic. After thirty minutes I left and walked back to the FCC, taking Pokamber Street this time. Lots of touts where chirping all kinds of services at me but I have no clue what type of services they were because I ignored them all. I finished the night with a couple of drinks at the FCC bar while talking to a husband and wife from Thailand.

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Photos

Young Khmer Girl
Perhaps the daughter of a Khmer Rouge cadre

Royal Garden Blues
From the Dukes of Dixieland

Grand Hotel D'Angkor
The granddaddy of them all

Sivatha Street
In the corner of Hospital Street and Sivatha Street near the old market

Psar Chas
The old market on Pokambor Street