Unkie Herb

I couldn’t believe it. We’d run out of gas. On a dusty dirt road five kilometers from the last town, and another eight or so to the next, we were stranded. As I swung my leg over the bike, the Irish girl I had been riding with looked at me in desperation.

“No, there’s no way we’re empty,” she said.

I tried to appear calm and in control. “No worries,” I said. “I’ll just walk back to town and grab a bottle of gas and you wait here.” In Cambodia, streetside vendors are everywhere with old school glass Coke and Fanta bottles full of diluted gasoline. How different can Vietnam be?

Miriam wasn’t convinced, and so I popped the seat open, unscrewed the cap and we peered inside. A thin film of gasoline sloshed about in the bottom of the tank, so I tried one more time to start ‘er up. As if teasing me, she sputtered to life and revved loudly in neutral, but as soon as I shifted into first she died again, and refused to turn over any more.

Tossing my backpack over my shoulder, I prepared for the long walk to and from Cua Can, the tiny fishing village back up the red dirt road. Just then, a sixty year old Vietnamese man in a cannonball helmet skidded to a stop next to us. Unlike Cambodia, next to no one speaks decent English in Vietnam, so Miriam and I mimed “no gas” to the man. He laughed loudly and gestured to the back of his bike. “Hop on!” he was saying.

Miriam and I grinned at each other. Saved.

We had spent the day touring around Phu Quoc Island, which is perched a little more than 100Â km off the west coast of extreme southern Vietnam. The island is about fifty km long and is relatively peaceful, especially compared with the noisy, bustling, overpopulated mainland. Miles of deserted white sand beach, pristine monsoon forest, and small mountain peaks make up most of the scenery here.

Miriam and I started our day renting a 110 CC, four speed bike and headed from our bungalow rooms up to Duong Dong, one of two towns (maybe 10,000 people) on the island. There, we grabbed Pho Bo, beef noodle soup, for breakfast and stopped at an internet cafe for a while. Then we hopped back on the bike and headed north, following the coast for a while.

After a couple of hours at a very quiet beach, we continued up the coast. The road was red clay dirt, and dusty as all hell. When a truck drove by, we would have to slow way down and let the clouds of dust and pebbles wash over us. Intelligently, I wore a white dress shirt for the day.

Our second stop was another beach with a few quiet bungalows populated with mostly German tourists. Here I ordered lunch: fresh grilled cuttlefish (a squid). I should have seen it coming, but the squid was so freshly grilled that I had to do it myself, sitting above the beach with a pot of coals and a pair of tongs. It

was fantastic, but a little steep at four dollars including a couple of beers. After lunch, we road back down the coast and found ourselves on a deserted beach. It was about four km long, a huge arc of off-white sand completely to ourselves. We swam and hung out on the beach, enjoying our first real “beach to yourself” experience.

Cruising down sketchy dirt paths and over rickety wooden bridges, we came to a small field with a number of local kids kicking a volleyball around. They all ran to the edge of the road. “Hello! Hello! You come! You come!”

What other choice did I have? I parked the bike, hopped the ditch and played soccer with the kids for about thirty minutes. They were all around six to twelve years old and never stopped smiling. It was fantastic.

Cruising through Cua Can, we passed a gas station. I considered stopping to fill up, but I dismissed the idea because it was only another ten or fifteen km to the much larger town, Duong Dong, just north of the line of hotels along Long Beach. Four or five km later we sputtered to a stop.

Riding back into town on the back of my new friend’s bike, locals looked at us curiously. My friend called out to them in Vietnamese, I’m sure explaining that this idiot Westerner had run out of gas back down the road. We pulled up at the gas pump and he explained to the lady running the pump what had happened. She didn’t seem amused. Nevertheless, she stepped into her shop to grab a container. I couldn’t believe it as she stepped back outside. She had nothing but a small plastic bag. And so she filled the bag with neon

green petrol, tied an elastic around the top and handed to me. Ten thousand dong (sixty three cents) later, I was back on my friend’s bike speeding toward Miriam waiting with our bike.

As we passed the same locals hanging out roadside, my friend called out to them and I held my glowing sack of gas up triumphantly. Everyone laughed and pointed. Nothing swells the ego like people laughing at you in a language you can’t understand, because you can convince yourself they’re probably singing your praises.

We clumsily poured the gas from the bag into the tank, and cruised off down the road. My friend trailed a few meters behind us for the entire trip to town, only peeling off when we pulled into a gas station. What a guy. He wouldn’t even take the twenty thousand dong bill we tried to thank him with.

We capped off our day with a sunset dinner. Phu Quocular.

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Well. I’m in Vietnam now and it’s great, but leaving Cambodia was very hard.

The country tries so hard to erase its past but you can’t help but be reminded of it. The population is so young. The books and movies on the topic (see “The Killing Fields” and read “The Gate”) are everywhere and powerful. Modern Cambodia focuses its attention squarely on the Angkor Period of Khmer dominance in the region. The flag carries the image of Angkor Wat, the national beer is Angkor Beer (My country, my beer!), and every person you meet in the country asks you if you’ve seen it yet. Perhaps they hope that by concentrating enough on the height of their people’s existence, they can divert attention from the past thirty years of American bombing, Vietnamese invasions, and the mass slaughter of over a million people by their fellow countrymen.

You cannot help but pity Cambodia. But there is more to it than that. I will post photos when I find a decent internet cafe (might be a while).

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Its the reason we travel. There are some things that simply must be experienced. No photo or account can do it justice. This becomes understatement when presented with an experience on the magnitude of Cambodia’s Angkor Temple complex.

By the way, I do realize the contradiction in claiming that no photo or story can properly capture the place, and then proceeding to write a story and post some photos about it.

Sorry.

At any rate… The first day I woke up at 6:30 and rented a mountain bike for three dollars. It took about thirty minutes to ride up to the entrance to the park that contains over 100 temples, and at one point (in the 11th and 12th centuries) was home to a population in the millions. Riding alongside the vast moat that surrounds Angkor Wat, the most famous of them all, I had overwhelming feelings of anxiety.

Could it possibly match the hype? I’ve read that its the largest religious building in the world, that it towers over you imposingly, and is both intimidating and exhilarating upon first glance.

My first impression was obviously one of amazement, but I didn’t collapse into a heap, broken by its magnitude. What makes it so special is not necessarily its size, but rather the intensity of the place on many levels. The bas reliefs, like ten foot tall comic strips carved into stone, tell ancient Hindu epics and myths for nearly a kilometer, wrapping around the outside of the temple. Inside, statues of Buddha stand draped in saffron robes, with pilgrims lying prostrate, proffering sticks of burning incense.

I think for many people, like those I’ve met on the road who suggest you only do the temples for a single day (or skip them all together), they were indeed over-hyped and, as a result, underwhelming. This is unfortunate. These temples are an amazing feat of both design and engineering. The beauty and serenity of the early morning and late afternoon in these places is something that cannot be experienced anywhere else. With the jungle coming alive, birds and bugs and lizards and frogs all clamoring at once, I lay on nine hundred year old stone, a dancing nymph above my shoulder, and watched the sun rise.

A great way to appreciate the entire complex is to try and imagine it in its heyday. The walls of Angkor Thom, a former city that lies to the north of the Wat, run for twelve kilometers in a square circumference. They are twenty feet high and twenty five feet thick the whole way, except at the five gate points, where they tower over you, serene faces looking down knowingly. I waited for the van to drive under the gate to give it some scale:

At one point, this city was home to over a million people, and served as the capital for the Khmer (cuhm-air) Empire, which stretched from south-eastern Vietnam, through all of Cambodia, Laos and Northern Thailand to parts of what is now Myanmar. The Khmer people of Cambodia are the direct descendants of this nation, and they are fiercely proud of that fact. When a Thai actress mistakingly mentioned Angkor as part of Thailand a few years ago, riots erupted in Phnom Penh, and the Thai embassy was set on fire. Relations are still sticky.

Other bright points of touring the temples are the sites that have not received the attention of restoration workers. These are left in their crumbling state, with massive jungle trees literally strangling the rock into submission. These are fascinating, as they provide a glimpse into what many of the temples must have looked like when French explorers stumbled across them in the jungle in the nineteenth century. The root structures range from intricate to downright bizarre, as they twist and turn and wind their way over and through rock on the way to the earth below.

After my first day on the bicycle I was exhausted. I had probably ridden around twenty five or thirty kilometers, as the temples are spread out liberally. I was on the road by seven AM and I returned to the guesthouse around six or so in the evening. Intelligently, I took each temple in at length, preferring to stop and read my book in a quiet corner, rather than try and temple hop through many sites in succession.

After a day off to relax, I woke up at four AM and took a tuk tuk up in the darkness. I arrived at Angkor Wat for the second time, but this time it was still utterly black. I stumbled blindly, making my way down the kilometer long causeway, through the gate structure and eventually through the temple itself to the beginning stages of the sunrise. As I mentioned above, the serenity of it was incredible.

At any rate, there is my insufficient attempt at relating this place to you. My only advice on coming here would be: come. Now. They already have plans for an expansive international airport, and luxury hotels are springing up everywhere in Siem Reap, the jumping off town nearby. I was not overly frustrated with the tour groups, but there were a few moments of quiet novel reading that were disturbed. I don’t understand why the Korean, Japanese, Italian and German busloads all have to speak so loudly, and all at the same time. I cannot blame them for wanting to see this place, but I wish they would break up and see it independently from the seat of a bicycle or tuk tuk, rather than a bus or, cruelly, an elephant.

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So I stumbled out of Angkor What?, an well-named bar in downtown Siem Reap, and was immediately grabbed by three tuk-tuk drivers. It was less than a five minute walk home, but I was lazy and tired and so I figured I would try for a fifty cent ride home.

“Sah! Sah, you need tuk-tuk?”

“I’m going to Ivy 2 Guesthouse, you know it?”

“Oh yessah! I take you! One dollah!”

“Hmm, how about 2 thousand riel (fifty cents)?”

“No sah! One dollah sah!”

“I dunno, 2,000 riel sounds good to me!” I said this while doing a little mini-dance step, to demonstrate that I had everything necessary to make the walk: energy and two functioning feet.

At this point, one of the drivers started nodding emphatically and said “Two thousand, ok!” The other two drivers gave number three a dirty look, and then all started confirming that two thousand was ok. This started a little game of tug of war, with yours truly as the rope.

Eventually, while I was trying to break free and go with the first guy to agree to my price, the strongest driver muscled me into the back of his tuk tuk and away we went. On the way, we passed what was clearly a “taxi girl” and my driver, like a tour guide, pointed her out to me. He confidently assured me that she was Vietnamese, as clearly no Khmer (native Cambodian) girl would behave so.

As he dropped me off, he nodded and said: “Here you go sah, one dollah pleece.” I laughed and handed him two one-thousand riel bills. Nice try, my man.

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The only thing that stressed me out was that I found the perfect spot too early in my trip, and it will dampen my excitement as I go.

Other than that, it was perfect. A private beach on a private island, only ten bungalows. A single restaurant/bar; no chairs, only cushions. Each bungalow has two double beds and costs ten dollars a night. The restaurant was amazing: spectacular blackened barracuda with rice.

Check out the video of it here.

Slightly inebriated, I made an attempt at prose in my journal:

At night, the sea quiets like a tired child. The waves, breathing softly, caress the sand unconsciously. Sauntering along the beach, the stars absorb me. I follow the bowl down to the horizon. The island’s fisherman align their netting floats, guide lights flickering, to dance upon the waves like distant suns that have descended. Above the bouncing stars, heat lightening shimmers in a cloudless sky, providing staccato bursts of light. Its just enough to discern razor coral rocks from creamy sand, as I make my way to my bamboo castle, steps from the warm Gulf water.

Sunlit hours are spent in peaceful contemplation of painful questions: where to sleep next? Like a house cat, I sluggishly move from cushion to hammock to beach, too much sunbeam at my disposal. Forgotten novel on my chest, a sweaty glass of fresh juice at my side, I peruse the world of half awake for days.

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I suppose I would appreciate it more if I wasn’t making trips to the bathroom once an hour.

Yeah, that ol’ bastard, travellers diarrhea, has struck again. With a fury, this time.

I was hoping Taiwan was geographically close enough to Cambodia that my stomach wouldn’t notice the difference, but apparently sanitation levels are the real kicker, and the little guy is struggling. I’m getting better slowly, thanks mostly to seventy-five cents worth of medication, and I’m doing my best to not let the discomfort interfere with a beautiful beach resort here.

Sihanoukville is a town on the head of land known as Kampong Som, and it is surrounded by several white sand beaches, each with its own personality. All of them possess a rugged authenticity, except perhaps for Sokha beach, behind which looms a sprawling five-star resort. Otherwise, the feeling here is still haphazard and slapped together, as if the locals were surprised that tourists will spend a boatload to get drunk where ocean and sand converge. Local tourists are many, especially considering this week is between three major holidays (King’s birthday, a water festival, and Independance from France day), and so naked Cambodian children play noisily beside sunburned Swiss couples.

The beach I am spending the most time on is south of town, and is the busiest of the beaches. My guesthouse ($4) is just a minute up the road, and the beach is lined with bars and restaurants under thatch-roofed canopies. Beds and lounge chairs are outnumbered only by “You wan massage” ladies and “buy one bracelet?” local children, who playfully sit in your lap until you make it clear you aren’t paying two dollars for a ten cent hippie bracelet.

I made friends with one of these kids, an eight year old boy named Ta. He’s hilarious, quick witted and smooth, with an easy smile and a good sales pitch. Amazingly, the kid speaks as good if not better English than my twelve year old students did in Taiwan. Speaks volumes for the draw of cash and the pressure of parents in education. These kids are part of undeveloped tourist exploitation: Ta’s parents drive moto-taxis and run a small restaurant, his aunt operates a tour boat the surrounding, uninhabited islands, his older sister gives massages, pedicures and hair removal treatment right on the beach, etc etc.

In the end, you learn to deal with the hassling on the beach or you grab a moto to one of the quiet beaches further south. I spent an afternoon there, and lay in quiet bliss, disturbed only by one lady and some kids playing nearby. I sort of like the action of the crowded beach, though, as its easier to meet random travelers and such.

At night, the restaurants shut down and turn into bars, which operate until people leave. Western bartenders bring in crowds and mix stiff drinks for a dollar or two, and everyone shows up again the next night. I could stay here for a while, I think. One bartender, Mike from Calgary, has been traveling the region for years, and told me that Sihanoukville is where islands like Samui or Samet in Thailand were fifteen years ago. I believe him.

Oh, and for the record, I did buy a bracelet from Ta for a dollar, and I got that one lady on the quiet beach to give me a pedicure. Damn, nice toes.

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After four days in Phnom Penh, I thought I had exhausted the taste of foreigner life in the city. It is obvious to me now how naive that idea was. No matter where in the world, it takes weeks, or more likely, months to experience true living in a particular town, especially a million-plus capital.

 The Swedish bartender leaned in like he was giving us a tip on the Melbourne Cup. The bamboo walls and thatched roof gave off a perfect ambience after a night at the prostitute rich (and very disappointing) clubs.

“There’s a great expat party, friday night, elswhere.”

Took me a minute, but Elsewhere is a bar.

And so, all day friday, I spread the word. All over my guesthouse, the restaurant that night, in town, I told everyone I met.

Gathered together at number 9, my home, we piled nine into a tuk tuk and promptly got lost. Nobody knew where this place was. Our driver had confidently assured us, and had lost his sense of direction. What a surprise.

Twenty mintutes and few direction stops later, we pulled up beside an old French colonial home with ten foot high, whitewashed stone walls. The sign was discreet, green lit on the wall: Ëlsewhere.

Streaming inside, we were met with California. Palm trees and flowers lining the walls. Couches between the gardens. A brightly lit pool ringed with tatami mats. And everywhere were foreigners, almost no locals to be seen.

Within fifteen minutes, I had struck up a conversation with a beautiful girl from London. She was a Red Cross worker. She’d been there for nearly a year. Next, it was a crew of Canadians who were with a NGO based in town. Again, long termers. From group to group I wound, shaking hands and asking the basics: “where from, what doing, how long?”

Nearly all the responses: “anywhere, NGO, long time.” And one universal sentiment:

“Who the hell told the backpackers about this place??”

This surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. I learned very quickly that NGO workers consider themselves on a moral level unreachable by normal humans. Regardless of the effectiveness of their program, or the tangible contribution they may be making, there is a hightened self view many of them seemed to carry. This attitude was, naturally, disdainful of us grungy backpackers.

I dragged some inside views from an Aussie NGO worker only completing her first month. She agreed with the moral high ground attitude, and told me that Cambodia has the highest NGO worker per capita ratio in the world. This has not been verified, but it must be up there. She also said that some of the most effective programs were the most simple: taking prostitutes off the street and employing them in cafes and restaurants. This gives them income away from the oldest profession and training for jobs in other establishments. These cafes are frequented by foreigners who appreciate the effort, even if the service is, well, entertaining.

Other programs, however, seem to be nothing but cash dumps, filtered through locals whose priorities must change when presented with the sort of funding some NGOs can acquire. One NGO, she told me, was purchasing advertising around the city, including on tourist frequented tuk tuks (motorcycle taxis with a rear cart), that promoted their cause in English. Rightly so, she dismissed this as a useless attempt to raise the profile of their particular NGO in foreign minds, rather than educate the locals to the benefits available.

 The reason for the NGO presence here isn’t immediately clear. The country does suffer from extensive poverty, but not nearly on sub-saharan Africa levels. It does require help, but perhaps not the blind cash toss that seems to occur. Maybe it is collective Western guilt, after supporting the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the seventies, that has lead to circumstances here.

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Where to start…

I rented a motorbike two days ago, a bicycle yesterday, and so I’m already familiar with Phnom Penh’s streets. As with every poor Asian city, the number of motorbikes is astounding, the insanity with which they drive is hilarious, and the ease with which they deal with the craziness is nothing short of remarkable.

Having driven around Taiwan for more than a year, I was pretty prepared for driving here. One thing that is very different is the pace. Whereas Taipei is all “I’m late for work” speed demons, P.P. is all “we’ll get there eventually” relaxed. It’s a nice change.

Driving around yesterday we saw some sights, including the independance monument, with a palace in the background.

As well, we went to S-21, which is a former high school. During the Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge genocide during the seventies, this place was converted into an interrogation centre and work camp. The regime tortured and jailed thousands of their own people here, eventually sending them off the the more infamous Killing Fields for execution. This genocide was massive, and the Khmer Rouge regime was supported by the U.S. and other western governments. Learning about it firsthand is moving to say the least.

The school itself was left largely alone, although they’ve cleaned the bloodstains and placed hundreds of photos, many of the victims, in the former classrooms. The gallows for hanging are still standing, as are the cell walls and steel beds used for electrical torture. The whole place had a surreal feeling about it, and if you allowed yourself to imagine what had transpired where you were standing, it became difficult to swallow. Overall, impressive and disturbing, but worth a view. Here’s a photo I took of one of the torture beds.

As well, we (the Aussie guy, Rich, who I rented the bikes with) went to Wat Phnom, the spiritual centre of the city. Placed on a small hill near the river, it’s an impressive Buddhist structure that warmed me up to what I’ll see in ancient form in Angkor. As well, the hill had its own troop of monkeys (hilarious) and an elephant show (sort of depressing, poor fella). The big guy didn’t seem poorly treated, but that might have been because dozens of tourists were around. I wasn’t going to snap a photo of the elephant, but then I saw this Cambodian boy squaring up to challenge the behemoth, so I crouched down behind the kid and captured this David v. Goliath moment:

My guesthouse is pretty sweet. It’s Number Nine, and might be one of the most popular in the tourist area near Boeng Kak Lake, in the north end of the city. It has a twenty-four hour bar and restaurant, a free pool table, hammocks, and cheap rooms. Because the lake is so high, the water runs right up under the patio, and so you can hear fish jump and smack against the underside of the platform that your dinner table is perched on.

I caught a couple of decent photos. One of the view from my chair the first morning I arrived:

And another of the flooding between the bar and the rooms. My room is down that row to the left, behind the ferns.

The guesthouse is at a perfect level of business. If it was high season now it might be a little too busy, but its just busy enough to be interesting, without getting overly loud or crazy.

One more thing that is clearly noticable here is how young the population here is. Because of the genocide I mentioned above, the average age here is somewhere in the teens, and around half the population is under twenty. Just walking or driving down the street, you notice it. There are no old people. None. I have maybe seen two or three people over fifty or sixty years old my whole four days here. Wild.

All in all. First impressions are great. I’m excited to move on from Phnom Penh, though, because the friends I’ve made here have given me great advice. They all had nothing but great things to say about the other places they’ve been in the country, and I’m pumped for another new scene and a new group of people.

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