Phnom Penh, Cambodia--Part I

In Angkor visiting the ruins of temples and walled cities, the vast scale and impossible intricacy left me mystified and awed. In Phnom Penh visiting the memorial sites of the Cambodian genocide, the magnitude of the terror and inhumanity was disquieting.

Choueng Ek, the killing fields, lie about 15 km southwest of central Phnom Penh. Riding on the back of a motorcycle, I watched the haphazard flow of traffic thin out to a trickle on an unlined two-lane highway, the low-storied buildings and bustling marketplaces giving way to fields and lonely houses. Choueng Ek was once a grove of Longan trees, Longans being lychee-sized fleshy white fruit. The killing fields have since been turned into a memorial to the thousands of dead. There's a stuppa at it's center, replete with pagoda-like roofs with their winged and serpentine khmer ornamentations. Enshrined behind the glass walls of the lower half of the stuppa a tower of shelves about 12 feet high holds hundreds of skulls, looking more like an anthropological archive than a memorial. On the floor beneath the shelves a ragged mass of clothes is gathered in an unfolded pile. Throughout the compound there is a rambling collection of exhumed graves and building sites (most of the actual buildings have been dismantled). The accompanying signage is at turns coldly factual (this is where the transport trucks stopped) or gruesomely explicit (body counts of beheaded victims in one pit, women and children in another, a list of torture instruments found, a tree trunk on which infants were beaten to death with one fell swing). The main sign in an information kiosk gives a moving testimonial to the extent of destruction and upheaval under the madness that was the Khmer Rouge. Elsewhere there are objects without a single word of explanation and since I declined a tour guide I will never know what meaning if any these things held, I cannot help but give them some ominous eligiacal significance: differently sized mounds of dirt covered with bright multi-colored swatches of fabric; nestled between trees, what looked like a spirit house (spirit houses being the ubiquitous animist shrines in SE Asia that usually look like very elaborate birdhouses) holding bundles of shattered bones instead of the usual offering of food or flowers; and in one remote corner a smoldering pile of trash.

The surroundings are fairly idyllic; if you didn't know where you were, maybe you would guess you were in a park or village meeting place. There's a creek directly behind the compound, a densely packed lotus pond, well-manicured shrubbery and bright boungavilla. The silence evoked by solemn places is always punctuated, transgressed in counterpoint, by the mundane sounds of the present. Far from the commotion of the city, the only sound besides the usual chorus of bird calls is the sound of children from two adjacent grade schools, each on either side. As I sat on a bench by the mass graves the slight wind carried the sound of children reciting numbers in English, the universal din of school yard retorts and the screams of play. There are no ghosts here; they have all fled. More vanquishing than the lack of proper burial rites, a proper cremation for their exhumed bodies, or even the foreign interests in this site as an enterprise: the spirits cannot abide by the ignorance of successive generations, more and more children losing a sense of the monumental sufferings of the past. Almost three decades later and they have only now assembled a tribunal to try war criminals. I read another news item in a Phnom Penh paper about how a textbook on the genocide had just been published, but is still under the scrutiny of a textbook committee. The committee has asked for rewrites freeing current figures in government from any complicity.

After Choueng Ek, my driver asked me if I wanted to go to the shooting range. Shooting range, I asked, wondering if it was another historical site. Just 1 kilometer, he said, pointing further south down a dusty stretch one side of it undergoing some kind of construction. He held up his arms and mimed aiming and shooting a semi-automatic, pak pak pak pak, no okay, he asked. I said sure, complacent as always. After some minutes of bouncing and dust clouds he turned off into a narrow road, past a military post and pulled into what looked like a restaurant, an open air shed with tables, chairs and a billiard table facing a dirt parking lot. A young teenage boy came out to greet me. What is this place, I asked him. Shooting range, he replied and brought me to a wall festooned with maybe a dozen assault rifles hanging on racks, the guns aligned symmetricaly outwards like the arms of shiva. Would you like to try, the boy asked me. I declined and pulled out my camera to at least take a picture. Please, no photos, the boy said politely. Then I recalled the billboards I saw in Siem Reap of the recent ban on guns, Cambodia historicaly being a hub for trafficing of stockpiled arms and ammunition. I got back on the moto and as we drove away, my driver muttered something and chuckled. I guess I was the wrong kind of tourist.

Angkor, Cambodia

WE BUILT THIS CITY ON ROCK AND ROLL

We built this city on Rock and Roll. Every temple, every gatehouse in every cardinal direction, every tower blossoming like a lotus flower, every labyrinthine, cruciform floor plan, conceived like the sweetest and heaviest rock ballad ever, sandstone compositions on a Wagnerian-scale, stairways to heaven and city walls to withstand the infrequent but awesome power of the November Rain. Nothing is more important than symmetry, mirror perfect, like a reflecting pool perpendicular to the horizon extending to the stars--you know symmetrical like a heavy metal logo, serifs splayed like swords in battle. We were given succor by the sweetest of angels, we sacrificed our souls to the demons of the record industry, kept up with the latest innovations from 8-track to CD to itunes. Little did we know that even the Gods of Rock are mortals like us--spend so much time reproducing that signature wall of sound, sharpening our battle axes, perfecting the most effortless arpeggio, and the whole time those upstart kids from Siam are coming up, coming up, coming up from behind, with their brash new and more marketable pop sensibilities, their fay schoolboy poses belying their vicious intentions, and thus we lose our edge. First the cornerstones shift, the keystones settle, and the rest just goes slack and sloppy, and nothing you could palm off as velvet-underground inspired either, just one big shit pile. All our boldest gestures, once shocking and sublime have turned pedestrian and dull--blame all that AOR radio airplay round the clock. And before you know it we're just another dime song on some bootlegged mp3 comp you can buy from any night market, from any schmuck with a CD burner and a color printer. The age of stone is no more and even the kingdom of metal is failing to the ashen shadows of dusk. Heed this warning you carefree daughters and mop-headed sons of Siam, all songs, no matter how long and contrived, will have their coda.

Lao New Year

Day of No Day

Yesterday was a very wet day, though it didn't rain one drop. Yesterday the youth posted themselves by the side of the road equipped with huge buckets and pails and constantly flowing hoses, dousing each other and every passerby. I got a bike again and road throughout the town, got completely soaked in jeans and a polo, and the super absorbent flipflops I bought in the castro made from beer-cosy foam, I left a trail of water--usually by midday most days I am soaking with sweat anyway from hoofing it around town, and it was a particularly warm day yesterday so the cool water was welcoming. There were roaming bands of teens, boys and girls, dressed in matching t-shirts or matching Hawaiian print shirts either posted at water stations or roaming around on motorbikes or on the backs of pickup trucks, school clubs, civic youth organizations, gangbangers? After riding outside of the old city I returned to the street along the Mekong with it's row of guesthouses and riverside patio eateries where most of the action was. I was lucky up until that point, not getting smeared with much more than some perfumed bright pink grease along the left side of my face. But here along the Mekong it was a decidedly more boisterous scene, at the stations they were downing big bottles of beer Lao, blasting ready-for-the-airwaves mixes of black-eyed peas and Gwen Stefani and Lao music from mega-woofers(The Lao music sounded like something off the Broken Flowers soundtrack--swirling minor key organs, a 60s groove). Along this last stretch I was accosted by a youth carrying a blackened wok, excuse me, he yelled, happy Lao new year, rubbing his wet hands on the burnt pot bottom he smeared my face with the soot and almost got a finger in my eye, others were throwing bags of talcum powder or maybe it was rice flour, the better to make a sticky goopy mess, at the end of the strip where my guesthouse was,a mob of farang had amassed, some shirtless, some of the girls in spandex sports tops, all armed with huge fluorescent squirt guns, shooting anything that moved. Up until then, most of the hosing down and dousing seemed to be done in a relatively considerate and dutiful manner (possibly it was because most of the stations I passed were attended mostly by younger girls and they were simply showing respect to their elders by not getting me in the eye or up the nose or in the ear if they could help it), I would slow down on my bike and they would jog alongside of me and pour water down my back or splash my pant legs. Along the Mekong, there were mostly hordes of boys--better to give them buckets of water than assault rifles to work out all that bottled-up sexual energy--so the splashing was done somewhat more aggressively, if they missed the first time, they ran after you and tossed one big bucket on your back. When I got to the farang mob at the end of the street, it was like a melee, I hopped off my bike and immediately got squirted in the face by two french boys--allo, allo, I think you have some powder zer, oh no there eez still more powder, let me get it off for you--I splashed back with what little water was left in my water bottle. Your welcome, you're welcome the french boy said. I had a beer and then took a long afternoon nap, when I woke up just after five I could still hear screaming and chanting and banging on pots and buckets.

Today seemed more mellow, or at least the dowsing got off to a later start. I went up to the top most temple of Pou Si, the sacred hill in Loung Prabang, that seems to rise suddenly above the old town (kind of like that hill in El Cerrito, a geographic anomaly) At night this topmost temple is spotlighted by klieg lights, it's gilded stuppas glowing, hovering in the dark air above the town--it's like the mansion on the hill in Edward Scissorhands or Phil Spector's mansion hovering above Alhambra. So this morning Imade my way up to Pou Si and bought a couple of flycatcher birds, these small brown birds the size of chicks, kept in a cage made from palm fronds. The idea is that you get karma points through various merit-making acts: giving alms to monks, leaving flowers at altars, or freeing small animals like turtles or birds. So I climbed up and up to the top. I thought it would be packed with both locals and tourists given the holiday, but there were only a couple of boystowatch mecash in my buddha points. After some wrangling with the palm fronds, getting birdshit on my fingers and for a second thinking I would get SARS, I finallygota sizeable opening. First one bird darted out and then the next,I was startled by how quickly they alighted on a tree some 20 meters away.

I descended on the other side of the hill facing the Royal palace of the long dead kings and watched a parade that didn't feel too different from the town fiesta parade I saw in the Philippines, except that the parade participants were all getting wet from a lineup of women with buckets, even the most venerable monks riding atop a float were getting water poured into their laps, which seemed somewhat sexual: a bunch of celibate men getting ritually bathed by a host of women.

Later that afternoon the waterfights reached peak frenzy, but this time situated along Thalong Falong, the tourist lane. After walking down the street without getting too wet and escaping getting potblack in the face, I found a bench next to a guesthouse where the women of the guesthouse and one rather fay boy were getting drunk and dirty, they were all soaking wet, their faces smeared with soot and powder, downing beer by the crate load. They danced in their lao way almost like a hula arms slightly raised rotating the palms at the wrist like tai-chi movements and splashing water on the slow procession of pickups and tuktuks all crammed with drunk kids. An old beat-up convertible bombed-out in multicolored hastily drawn spray paint marks passed by and the driver was waving a wooden dildo (that was hanging from his rearview mirror) at the guesthouse women. The drunkest of the guesthouse women, she looked to be in her late thirties if not older, wore a pail on her head like a valet cap and danced barefoot in the middle of the street. Playing the consummate flirt, she would throw herself onto the hoods of cars, and said probably scandalous things to the passing military men who were also getting their fair share of wet and potblack. On the other sideof the street from me was Louang Pabang bakery, packed with a whole peanut gallery of curious and some of themanxious farang watching the natives get more than restless--at onepoint a truckbed with hellbent teens doused the farang gallery with huge sheets and ribbons of water. Periodicaly the fay boy would walk over to me and the couple of other passive spectators in my vicinity and pour water down our shirts.

Earlier that afternoon at the Scandinavian bakery I overheard some knowledgeable-by-the-hushed-tone-of-his-voice farang explaining the whole water thing to a couple of dutch women in their late 30s--he told them how he thought the whole thing was really a mating ritual, how during this holiday--the Lao being a very demure and modest society--things became more permissible. He told the ladies how one time a girl in a crowd grabbed his crotch. I guess she wanted to know if the stories were true, he said.

And maybe Mr. Anthropologist was right, because from what I saw, there was some kind of raunch going on, maybe not quite like bare boobs and crotches on Bourbon street, but more like the rain scene in a bollywood production, squeaky-clean fun.

Lao New Year

I've been here in Louang Prabang for 5 nights so far, and now it's Lao New Year. It's a 3-day event: (1)the last day of the year, (2)the day of no year--inbetween days as it were, (3)and then new year's day. Like in Thailand,which also has their version of Songkan, people throw pails and buckets of water on each other to wish them good luck, supposedly it's done without malice, but doesn't fun always have some element of malice?

Yesterday I rode a bike around town and at first the kids with the pails would pass me up in favor of other kids on motorbikes, you see lots of kids riding around town drenched. Finally when I got to the old city I got doused and I couldn't help but laugh.



This morning while I was walking to the dry goods market to buy some sausage for lunch a group of farang on bikes with water pistols caught me by surpise from behind--from what I've seen the people doing the wetting are clearly stationed and you see it coming when you get to it. There were three or so farang on bikes, a guy and the rest of the horde girls, I heard them giggling as they approached, but suspected nothing, farang are always laughing at some dumb thing or another. It was the guy that wet me, got me at the nape of the neck and yelled Sabai Dii, I flinched, it wasn't all that hot today because of the morning rain, when he saw that I wasn't amused, he made a little sheepish grunt, maybe he thought oh he's a tourist and maybe doesn't know that this is the local custom--I wasn't that angry, but still I wanted to half-seriosly chastise him, get ethnic studies on his ass: you fucken farang, you're not supposed to ambush people, you give them fair warning, what? do you think you're fucken hunting down Hmong in the jungle. But he didn't strike me as a fratboy, a geeky bespectacled boy with curly hair. La dee da.

Went to the small village across the river, which was all mudded over, saw some abandoned temples up on the hill that I always saw from the other side of the river, all the trails were mudded over from the rains and the temples were further from the boat landing than I realized. a little boy of 8 or 9 from the village took it upon himself to be tour guide, he showed me a snail shell deposited on one of the weeded-over stuppas, and a strange grotesque figure at the back of the building that smiled like the cheshire cat, then when I asked for Wat Long Khoun, he lead me down a steep, muddy trail, bounding down like a jack rabbit, at one point after he saw how slow I was descending--I didn't want to slip and break a leg like in the short film made by some California film maker I saw in a gallery the other day--the little boy who I probably outweigh by some 150 pounds, held out his hand like he was a boyscout and I was an old lady.

Later that evening at the riverside restaurant of my guesthouse (and by restaurant I mean a shack with a wok over burning wood and plastic chairs and tables with table cloths--this is not to say there aren't fancier places further up stream, like one restaurant has a modest selection of wines (possibly for all the frogs in town) and the cook is dressed in whites and a chef's hat) like every other day I've been here, I watched the sunset, polished off a huge lao salad: eggs, tomato, lettuce, cucumber, and some homemade kind of sweet dressing. I was finishing off a big bottle of beer lao. The skies because of the rains were less hazy than they've been, and so it was a longer, more beautiful sunset, and a longer more protracted dusk, watching the lights come on across the river in the village I'd been at earlier, the evening boats coming in, the picturesque silhouettes of the boatmen standing with bamboo in hand poleing towards shore, the stern cabins of the slowboats lit by candle as they come downriver making sharp fast arcs as they head to shore turning about face. And I thought what I wouldn't give so my friends could be here right now for just these few minutes, no one saying a word, I only brought one cigarette so I wouldn't chain smoke at dinner--it's too easy to--but I can run back to my room and get more to share, the guesthouse keepers aren't rushing us, there's no second-seating here, just people drifting in and out, and then I wonder maybe only the tourists, maybe only the wealthy "blue-blooded" Louang Prabang families, maybe only irresponsible derelicts like me can enjoy the sunset, or maybe everything really does slow down at day's end, evening repast, and for a few minutes we can forget that life is hard and even harder for other's, forget that there are things we wish to forget, be lulled by the soft lilacs and the pale pinks of the quickening dusk before the resolute dark of night sets in--the french lady next to me just asked me if I know how to type in an "arabesque" a what I said? she went and asked the attendant showing him an "arabesque?" drawn on paper--she broke my mood--good thing too, I was probably getting cheesy sentimental in a filipino kind of way. ciao!

The Journey is the destination

The journey is the destination. Sorry to open with such a hackneyed sentiment, but this statement most accurately sums up my last 5 days here in Laos. In the last five days I've logged in about 39 hours of travel time and over a 1000 kilometers, traveling by bus and slow boat and minibus. Last Saturday morning I boarded a slowboat headed North up the Mekong to Houakxai, some 300 km upstream on the Mekong. This journey took 2 days, 9 hours each day, stopping halfway at the backwater town of Pakbeng, where the electricity went out at 10:30 and soldiers armed with AK47s wrangled drunk farang into their guesthouses at the 11 o'clock curfew. Between Louang Prabang and Houakxai I saw some of the most remote stretches of the mekong, where steep standbanks were left to erode on their own, flowing like sand glasses into their watery reflections, carving out facsimiles of the grand canyon--like watching the history of the earth at an accelerated time scale, saw albino carabou that looked like big pigs with horns, saw small fishing villages where the fishermen young and old in their skimpy briefs, cast their nets, their compactly muscled and tanned frames like something Walt Whitman would have waxed rhapsodically over, catalogueing each limb, each sinew, met on the boat a girl from Manila (at first though she was fil-am, the few phrases I first heard her utter without an accent, also her voice reminded me of Julia Reodica, who once appeared in a photo in the NY Times Sunday arts section in an article about performance artists working with biohazard materials--in the photo she was wearing a tshirt that read terrorist and was disguised in a ski mask) who taught acting in an arts center in Manila and was travelling with her Italian boyfriend who sported an off center pigtail and worked in Manila for a Spanish-Catholic NGO, among the many things I learned from her on the first leg of the trip: there exists a cult in the Philippines, the Rizalistas, that worship the national hero Jose Rizal as the second coming of Christ (I told her that in Bangkok a cult formed around King Rama IV, where people left offerings to his statue to improve their lives and fortunes), she agreed with me that between Buddhism in SE Asia and Catholicism in the PI there's not a whole lot of difference, just different icons and different talismans that people offer things to to curry favors. Among the people on the boat I immediately made judgements against: an italian guy--not the filipina girl's BF, another italian guy who wore the same yellow Lao-beer shirt and sagging jeans two days in a row (who also spoke english with an american accent for some reason) who tried to take a photo of an old Lao woman riding with her drunk middle-ages son, he asked her if he could take a photo, but she covered her face and said something in complaint, her drunk son argued with her and forced her to pose, making a scene, the italian guy was flustered by her protests and said that's okay I won't take her picture, I told him jokingly: after 5 hours of being wind-blown, she's not at her best, which I think further embarassed him, you have to admit she's a beautiful woman, he said, and when I didn't respond he slunked back to his seat at the back of the boat (In Pakbeng this guy roomed next to me in a 2-dollar guesthouse, stumbling around his room drunk after midnight, the wood sheet walls were so thin that not only could I hear his every drunken move, but I could see his flash light through the wall and the spotlight on my ceiling), the There were these 2 Germans a boy and a girl, couldn't figure out if they were siblings or a couple who brought along cards and dice, and played some dice game where they vigourously shook the dice in a cup like they were making a cocktail. The three blonde swedish kids turned out to be okay, the curly-haired one taking photos at the aft of the boat and writing in his journal, the girl at turns languidly gazing at the banks or smoking a cigarette, the other boy with the mesh cap and studded belt always waved back enthusiastically whenever village children waved at our passing boat, you gotta love that, there was an older north american guy with his Lao wife who for some reason only talked to the Germans, on the second leg of the trip there was a Japanese guy--I thought he was Lao at first--who kept to himself and never smiled or showed much enthusiasm, and I saw how I could easily be mistaken as a Japanese national.
On the stretches, where I would watch the scenery pass me,I thought about fractals, the enumeration and repetition in rock formations, stratified layers of rock pitched at an upward angle by ages of tectonic pressure, the lines etched on the bank formed by the receding river, the trees, the eddies and ripples in the river, I watched how the Mekong would narrow to these craggy, rock-strewn passages and at the next bend suddenly widen into vast, calm waters, the juxtaposition like cinematography out of a Kubrik film, I watched ashes from clear-cutting drift from the sky along with downey, cotton-fluff seedlings, I watched sparrows with their dagger wings wheeling tight circles above the river, we saw a few speedboats their passengers with lifevests and crash helmets (they can make the same 300 km stretch in 6 hair-raising hours), I saw strange flotsam: folded banana leaf packages, animist offerings to the river spirits? Sometimes I would fall asleep my head resting on the edge of the boat, the wind blowing in my face and I would wake up startled by so much water.

Louang Phrabang, Laos

After one night in Vang Vieng, I jumped on the first bus out of there (actually the second, nine seemed too early)--not that Vang Vieng isn't a beautiful town with the limestone karsts towering over the Nam Xong, but there really wasn't much to do there and I thought I was getting the jump on the other tourists (lately I feel like i'm in the Amazing Race), only to find so many familiar faces on the bus again--this is the first time I've taken chartered bus transportation--in Thailand we were riding trains and buses with the Thai Polloi, and now riding with European and American backpackers seems a whole different experience, there's that "ugly" mirror again, I can't really separate myself from these other children of privelage. The bus ride was I think 7 hours, winding through even more majestic limestone cliffs, towering like ancient temples of some ancient behemouth race over the small bamboo mountain huts of the nieghboring villages. It felt more majestic than what I remember of Yellowstone, but I may be coloring it with my own orientalist notions of chinese scroll paintings--tiny toothpick trees on vertical limestone slabs and calligraphic clouds swirling like steam out of a teapot. We arrived in Louang Phrabang close to dusk. (right now in this internet cafe-tourist package shop, this bear couple are having a mini-tiff about the tour package they want--Evan, come here now please--I don't want to argue about this right now--one doesn't want to walk for an hour and a half--the other, apparently the type-A one of the pair just wants to arrange something, anything. I hope this isn't their honeymoon) After I checked in to a guesthouse and had dinner on the Mekong again, I took a walk over to cafe L'Estranger (heard about it and read about it in the rough guide, the only other option being hanging out in a bar on Thanon Falang)--the name taken from that indochine classic about the despondant Lao that kills a Frenchman on the Mekong. Walking to L'Estranger in the barely lit dark along the Nam Kham I could easily imagine I was in Europe somewhere, not sure where quite-euro-river-lake-town (Louang Phrabang is the Lao cultural mecca housing the most sacred image of the Buddha, sacred texts and epic poems have been written here. I'm considering taking a slow boat north up the mekong (north being the less touristy direction, although many others have probably read the same advise in their guide books) and coming back here in time for Lao new year's on the 13th, we'll see how that goes (I gotta pee like a motherfucker. had a big pot of Lao green tea all to my lonesome).

Vang Vieng, Laos

Today I arrived in Vang Vieng, Laos. I rode a bike out to some caves in the lime stone cliffs across the river, the man at the end of the rice fields gave me a torch-- I clambered up to the top most cave--kind of dicey--went down to the chamber where it looked like there would be a pool during rainy season, I think I surprised a french boy and his girl who were probably enrapt by the rock formations, the french boy said hey want something crazy for your movie and he pointed out a spider on the ceiling big enough to smother my face.

Stoned is the way of the walk

I admit that since I've been in SE Asia, when I'm tired from walking in the afternoon heat, visiting temples and shopping malls, I gravitate towards a starbucks if there's one around, so maybe I understand crashing out on daybeds in bars in Vang Vieng, Laos, watching endless episodes of Friends and Simpsons (through the wall of the internet shop I can hear the theme song to Friends right now). Maybe they've all partaken of items off the happy menu or maybe after weeks of the runs and not getting laid in Laos, their western bubbles need reinforcing, maybe I'll stop by for a fruit shake and hope they're showing episodes before Chandler and Rachel got together, Simpson's episodes before the writing went to shit...

Lightning on the Mekong

Lightning on the Mekong, Vientiane, Laos

Vientiane, Laos

1) view of the Mekong from the Orchid Guesthouse Veranda, Vientiane, Laos, as you can see it's the height of the dry season, further dams in China are creating even lower levels and delaying the shipment of cargo in Laos.
2) One of the sculptures in Vet Xiang Khouan, 27 km from Vientianes city center, a folksy scultpure park built in the 50's, one self-made holy man's vision of buddhist-hindu cosmology. You crawl into the mouth (like something from Pan's Labyrinth) and climb through a rather dicey series of stairs to find dim floors cluttered with idols, some looking like Mr. Howdy from the Exorcist.