May 15, 2004

Cambodia --- odds and ends

[This is the first of seven log entries that cover our last two weeks. Start reading here.]

Christine's entry covered the main points of our stay in Cambodia. In this entry, I'll add my own weird observations.

Cambodian houses are usually built on stilts, and they are a single room. No interior plumbing, though electricity is fairly common to run the TV (with the exterior antenna on a long bamboo stick). The roof is usually dried palm leaves, but sometimes metal or ceramic shingles; the walls sometimes wood, sometimes bamboo with mud or thatched. The house is set back towards the far end of the small fenced property (30 by 30 meters or so). Sometimes, a separate structure (without stilts) is in front of the fenced section, and acts as a family shop. I'm not sure why the stilts are there for the house but not for the shop. At first I thought it was because of regular flooding during their rainy season, but that doesn't make much sense for hillside houses. Maybe it's to lift the house away from the ground, and allow the family to sleep without having the ferocious red ants (or other critters) bug them.

I saw red ants in Angkor. I accidentally stepped on one of their trails, and then I looked down to notice the others cut up the dead ones into smaller pieces and haul them away along with their food... creepy!

Public phone booths are virtually impossible to find in Cambodia. Yet, it's pretty easy to make a phone call anywhere you are in the country. You just look for the impromptu, portable 3-sided plexiglass booths with seemingly random numbers glued onto them. At first, they look like lottery ticket sales outlets, but eventually, you realize that the numbers are area codes and their corresponding per-minute rates. So how do you make a call? Simple... you go up to the lady who mans the booth, she hands you her cell phone, you make your call, and when you are done she looks at the call duration shown on the phone and you pay her! Sometimes, the phone is a regular phone, with a long overhead wire connecting it to the house in the back. Talk about business creativity!

Today I saw a buddhist monk smoking a cigarette. In Saigon, I saw a monastery by a pagoda, and three monks in a room were watching an action movie on TV. We also met the rich, data-crazy monk in Dalat who raised the money he needed for a 160GB drive by selling a handful of his paintings. Also, in front of another pagoda was a vendor of live sparrows: that's one of those --- pardon my un-PCness --- naive religious traditions of freeing a bird to send a blessing to a dead loved one (even though, of course, you are only paying the vendor to trap a bird so that you can release it --- never mind how many sparrows die in the trapping process). And beggars who kindly say "Fuck you" if you don't give them money. Add to these impressions the photo-crazy monks of Angkor that Christine covered... Seems to me that applied Buddhism is as far from the teachings as Christianity or any other religion. No surprise there... Organized religion and spirituality are not the same thing.

And now for our regular motor vehicle-related news:

  • When you cross the street in Southeast Asia, look at both sides. Always. No matter whether you are crossing a one-way street, or one of the sides of a divided highway. I have seen plenty a motorbike or regular bicycle go against traffic (without causing the Hollywood-style mayhem on the road) if that's the shortest way to get there.
  • Don't expect motorbikes or cars to have their headlights on at night. Ghost riders in the streets, not the sky.
  • Don't expect buses to have a working suspension... avoid seats on top of the wheels, or you are in for a very bumpy ride!
  • The maximum number of people/items on a motorbike is: however many can fit. I've seen up to five people (and, as for cargo, you won't believe your eyes when you see the photos). The point is that such motorbikes aren't easy to maneuver, so stay clear out of their way as a pedestrian.
  • Cambodia has many more cars than Vietnam. And big, new ones, too. And used to the max like motorcycles. A small minivan, for example, can accomodate 17 people: 12 inside (4 on each of three rows), and 5 people on the roof, sitting on top of the luggage tied on the roof. That's regular practice, not just a rare sight.
  • Safety at gas pumps is optional. You see people smoking, but also very odd sights like this one: the overhang of a gas station (the roof over the gas pumps) is a metal structure, and a crew was installing lights. Which meant soldering. Which meant sparks flying everywhere. The gas pumps were protected by a couple of metal roofing sheets placed on top of the pumps. Of course, the winds blew the burning sparks right onto the pumps, but nobody seemed to care.
Throughout Southeast Asia, but especially in Cambodia, there is a preoccupation with numbers. Not math, but rather astrology and other superstitions like recommended days to get married, etc. It is quite common to find businesses whose name is a number. For example, a popular beer in Vietnam is 333. In Cambodia, 555 is a brand of cigarettes. Along Ochheuteal beach in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, one can see side-by-side the beachside restaurants 888, 777, the most original 898, and the always popular with the Religious Right, 666. I wonder if anybody has named their child '5' (as in the Peanuts comic strip).

Ochheuteal beach in Sihanoukville is where we went to hang out and rest after Siem Reap (and a single day in Phnom Penh). It was a very relaxing stay --- we planted ourselves in an air-conditioned room of a beachside guesthouse for $10 a day and did nothing but swim, take leisurely walks, and eat. The water was so warm that we could get in and stay in the water for an hour or two without shivering; in fact, the rare cooler currents were most welcome. There was only one motorboat in the water (dragging behind it a floating tube on which at most 5 riders could sit at a time and do water-skiing for the balance-challenged) --- having enjoyed the wonderful music of jet skis on the Silkworm Island off Nha Trang (Vietnam), it was very nice to be on a quiet beach... I still wonder what the appeal is to go on such a water ride when you get to do this on land all the time (on the ever-present motorbikes). Oh well.

Other niceties of the beach were the scarcity of tourists, and availability of cheap seafood (for Christine). We went there after high season (which runs through winter) and right before all tourism goes away (when the summer rains start). But things weren't too dead yet, as evidenced by the trash on the beach (which we saw only one tourist walk along the beach to pick some up), and the substantial presence of food sellers. Those sellers walk up and down the beach with a big basket on their head or Vietnamese-style bamboo poles with a basket on either end. The baskets contain all sorts of fresh goodies for a ridiculously low price: Christine had 5 (smallish) lobsters for $1; and 3 crabs for another $1. There's also fruits, squids (cooked on the spot with a portable grill), potato chips (packaged, not fresh), fruits (including the smelly durians), and so on. Of course, the downside is that truly quiet time on the beach does not exist... If you answer "No" when an offer to buy lobster wakes you up from your beach-side nap, you get an answer of "Why not?", and by that point you are awake. And, if you say "Later", or make a promise to buy from one vendor but not another, you get involved into vendor politics (since many more than one vendor sells the same item).

The sellers are mostly children (under 18 years old). They should be in school, right? Well, according to one of them (whose English was decent), they are simply too poor. Going to school is a substantial expense for a family: on the one hand, there are the expenses such as the mandatory school uniform, books, etc; on the other, there is the lost income to the family from removing the child from the work force. The girl, aged 17, said she picked up English from tourists on the beach; her parents are 42 years old and too weak to work (whatever that means); she has four siblings, and works so that they can go to school. She wakes up a 7a, goes to market to buy fresh lobsters, cooks them, and sells them on the beach till 6:30p. Whether what she said was true or not, I don't know for sure, but it sounded plausible. Poverty sucks.

Yet the kid sellers are still kids --- we saw a few take a long rest from selling their wares. And they goofed around like all kids do. They were Vietnamese immigrants, so Christine understood what they said (and when the kids figured her out, they were embarassed and whispered instead). Part of their play involved a girl braiding her hair, while looking at her reflection on a small mirror, part of a Hello-Kitty-like plastic makeup-kit contraption. The girl wanted just the mirror, so the boys ripped the kit apart and removed it. The rest of it, shredded plastic, they tore into smaller pieces and just threw it out on the ground. It's their beach, and it's quite an irony that it is the locals that pollute it while some tourists pick up their trash.

The sellers were almost invariably girls; the boys seemed all to be motorbike drivers offering tourists a ride between beaches or into town. Their English was mostly horrible, and many were out for a fast buck charging $1 for a ride usually costing $0.25. The one time Christine took a moto, she tried to get the guy to turn right but he ignored her and dropped her off to a totally different spot. So we walked for the most part.

The walk into town was about 2km, and we did it twice to get dinner. The first evening, we went to a Sri-Lankan buffet restaurant and stuffed ourselves for $3.50 each. We also met Don there, an Australian expat who runs (with a partner) a scuba outfit. He used to be in high-tech, his latest project being an SAP deployment. No wonder he quit all that and went a few meters under the sea to escape the calls for bug fixes! Anyway, what drove Don to Sihanoukville is a sense of being a pioneer --- an early investor in a beach that is bound to grow. Ironically, most investors are foreigners, as the Khmer Rouge did a very good job of eliminating the Khmers who might have such capitalistic tendencies... Don mentioned that another Aussie was getting an airport going, a French had opened an excellent restaurant next door to his scuba place (we tried it the second night... very good food), etc.

On the good side, those outfits employ many locals. And so do the big, ugly hotels that are starting to show up on every beach. Also, some foreigners open non-profit businesses, like the Starfish Bakery, whose proceeds benefit poor locals. Hopefully, development will also bring education, reduced birth rates, and an appreciation of nature before it all disappears. On the other side, who says development has to work that way? More money and better health care means more mouths survive and need food, and spawn even more mouths to feed. And there is no real government in Cambodia --- everything is wheeling and dealing, and so no controls. As Don put it, it's pioneering, and look what pioneers did in the US and the natural environment. Well, money talks and shit walks, so in due time, Sihanoukville will turn into another high-class Hawaii-like resort. Unless another Khmer Rouge comes into the picture to reverse time. And here lies the big irony... the main reason Christine and I saw an undeveloped Sihanoukville is probably thanks to the Khmer Rouge. You see, Sihanoukville was a very popular resort back in the 70s, with many a villa and casinos. It is only because of the brutal elimination of all non-peasants that Sihanoukville reverted back in time. One can still see the skeletal ghosts of old villas here and there.

Anyway, our trek through Cambodia ended with a short overnight stay in Phnom Penh. We went to another charity-related restaurant after wandering the streets for a while (and also passing a Greek restaurant on the way... operated by an American). This dinner cost us about $20, but the food was great and the cause worthwhile: to take kids off the streets and teach them a trade, in an organization ran primarily by Cambodians themselves. Cambodia has had a major drug problem since 1997 (that's "development" for you), and it's always good advice never to give money to beggars on the streets as you are usually financing the drug trade. Service was spectacular, but sadly we noticed that most kids there were boys. Why? I don't know, but my guess is that girls can always get money from prostitution while there is a lesser demand for boys who turn to the streets. Maybe. What is surely true is that in Cambodia, unlike in Vietnam, the separation of the sexes in terms of their roles is very obvious; maybe communism or development lessened the gap in Vietnam. Anyway, after the restaurant, we went to another outfit ran by the same operation, an Internet cafe costing us $0.50 an hour.

Being with Christine, I didn't get to see much of the prostitution side of Cambodia. Sure, the heavily made-up ladies were easy to spot. And so were the ever-present massage parlours. But I didn't get the line "want a girl with your room?" upon hotel check-in (as warned by a Cambodian friend before our trip). On the massage front, if you really want a massage, get one from a blind person --- many hotels offer the service, the cost is peanuts ($3 an hour), the service is legitimate, and the quality is high (as Christine found out).

We're now off to Thailand to learn how to ride and bathe elephants. What the heck do I get myself into? The temperature has hit the high nineties regularly, and we'll be staying in a hut without air conditioning. We tried this once in Phnom Penh and we could hardly get any sleep. Maybe things will work out as this backpacker told us in the hospital I gave blood: you get used to the heat, and, in fact, nights without AC make it easier for your body to handle the heat on the following day. Being too competitive to be out-hippied, I will give it a shot... If I don't melt, I'll report on the results next time. Posted by Toli at May 15, 2004 06:32 AM

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