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Cambodia

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:22:35 -0400

It's important to smoke when abroad in the developing world. While there is very little chance that a six-foot white male will ever blend into crowd in Asia, smoking does make you part of the in-crowd here. Smoking also reinforces the illusion that nothing can harm you. It feels adventurous and reckless which - I am now coming to believe - is a really good substitute for genuine recklessness. And by ignoring the certain knowledge that you are destroying your lungs, skin, and heart, you reclaim a sense of the not-so-distant past where Americans smoked in business meetings, or a time before that when Camel sent 500,000 free cigarettes a week to our boys on the front (and later to army hospitals), noir heroes lit up at every opportunity (only to suffer various diseases later), and all the nagging doubts about the wonders of American hyper-capitalism were tucked away in the corner of our national brain to be dealt with once the hippies, yuppies, and Gen-Xers came along. As most of Asia is moving fast in that same direction, it's nice to ignore the consequences.

I'm sitting thirty feet from the beach in Southern Cambodia right now in an internet cafe that bears out the promises of the capitalist gospel. Thanks to the American know-how that created the internet, I could type in a few search terms and come up with step-by-step instructions of how to sterilize and sew shut a child's gaping leg wound. Or I could download a gigabyte of pornography. The beach itself is lovely, relatively trash-free, and pretty much what you would expect a tropical paradise might be like. For $10 a night, I have my own bungalow with a hammock on a porch that looks out over the Gulf of Thailand. Sinoukville, the city here, is in that pivotal stage of development where the night sky still doesn't have the neon and and halogen glare of city lights. Most of the guest houses are still owned locally, and Marriot, Hilton, and the other megahotels haven't yet bought up all the land and replaced the dirt with styrofoam and skyscrapers. But there are rumors of a deal in the works.

LOKI -->

I flew out to Cambodia last week to visit my friend Loki, who was taking five days at the end of nearly five-months abroad to see Phnom Penh, Ankgor Wat, and whatever else he could squeeze in. We met in Phnom Penh, a city on the move and it feels like a beehive at full tilt. The parts of the individual bees in this case are played by motorbikes. I gave my cabdriver the address of our guest house and he stared at me blankly. Then I told him 'Spring Guesthouse' and he started driving with confidence. It turns out that addresses mean almost nothing to anyone in Phnom Penh. The streets are technically labeled, but by 'technically,' I mean 'only on a map,' and by 'only on a map,' I mean 'not on most maps.' Instead there are only road signs on about six streets in town and the others you have to navigate by guesswork or prior knowledge.

Loki was waiting for me at the guest house and looked to be in the kind of shape you might expect someone traveling for five months would be in. He was dirty, unshaven, and sunburned a pastel pink as the result of not one, but two bouts with Indian vendors selling him hand cream in a sunblock bottle. We checked in for the night, walked to the river, sampled some revolting and bizarre southeast Asian fruit, visited Wat Phnom - the Buddhist temple at the north end of the city - and then, feeling we had done our duty as tourists set down in an outdoor cafe by the Mekong river to some rather serious drinking.

Here's a tidbit: a 250cc motorbike has a maximum speed of about 100 kilometers per hour. This is important to know if, for some reason, you decide to rent motorbikes in Cambodia to drive from Phnom Penh to Siem Riep and back. You need to know because a working speedometer is rare here and it was absent on both of our bikes. The people at Lucky Lucky Bike Rental also did not sell or rent helmets - requiring us to buy our own across town - and seemed a bit frustrated that we made them go through the additional hassle of filling out the paperwork required to insure the bikes and ourselves against catastrophe.

We left Phnom Penh at 10am, as we were assured that a bike could reach Siem Riep, 317 kilometers away, in just over five hours. This was definitely a lie. Or rather, it was certainly misleading. A bike probably could reach Siem Riep in five hours, but only if the reckless and fearful drivers were being hunted for sport by snipers just on their tail. As it was, it took us two-and-a-half hours to reach the small town of Skuon, otherwise known as 'that place in Cambodia where they eat spiders' about 80 kilometers away.

The buzzing pattern of the motorbike drivers that I watched on the way into town turned out not to be a pattern, but just chaos. Traffic in Cambodia works on a theory of deterrence: you don't wants to get hit by a bigger vehicle but no one worries much about smaller things in the street like pedestrians. Thus a truck has no qualms about running a bike or car off the road while passing on the two-lane highways. If you are on a motorcycle, you are the smallest vehicle out there and defensive driving becomes a survival skill. To turn left in this mess, motorbikes tend to pool together in the hope that even a truck won't squash more than a few bikers for fear of nicking the fender.

On the road to Skuon, only one car hit me and the collision was relatively harmless. I escaped with only a bruised elbow and the car with some superficial paint damage. The procedure after an accident here is somewhat different from in the US. Whereas US drivers tend to pull over after a collision, exchange insurance information, and get the phone numbers of witnesses, Cambodian drivers simply run into you and then tear off down the highway. This procedure cuts through the red tape and has the additional advantage of avoiding an awkward post-accident conversation. It's a fine solution and we would do well to consider it.

In Skuon we briefly attempted to find some fried spiders in order to say that we had eaten fried spiders. Sadly, where we stopped the vendors served as a grocery store rather than a restaurant; when we asked for spiders they insisted on showing us live samples. I rarely have a vegetarian's qualms when it comes to seeing a live version of something I plan to eat. Cows and lambs have not developed a very good evolutionary response to slaughter. They are, essentially, walking hamburgers and their cuteness doesn't really stop me from enjoying them. A better strategy might have been for cows to evolve a hairy black eight-legged exterior. We managed to find some fried spiders on our return voyage (they taste like crab) but if they had tasted like filet mignon with a mushroom gravy, I still don't think I could bring myself to eat them regularly.

A SPIDER -->

The road from Skuon to Siem Riep is substantially less crowded than from Phnom Penh to Skuon, so we made better time. On the relatively empty two-lane roads, we could put the bikes in sixth gear, leave the clutch open and the gas revved all the way and tear down the open stretches of road with our helmets blaring white noise from the wind until we came to another truck.

The trucks were tough. Trucks here are, without exception, either empty or overloaded. The empty trucks don't really need to be passed, but the overloaded ones move at about the speed of a fast jogger. Staying behind them slowed our progress to a crawl and passing them felt like a death wish. Most bikers pass these massive vehicles on the dirt shoulder to the right of the road. The flaw here is that even the dirt shoulder of the road has its fair share of traffic. Cambodian farmers still use oxcarts and Cambodians who don't want to bother with a truck will load up the back of a moped with anything from a few dozen chickens to a cart full of bricks to - in one particularly impressive instance - a full-sized armoire balanced on the back of a moped. These moped drivers frequently don't bother to drive in the same direction as the rest of the traffic, so if you choose to try passing a truck on the right there is the possibility that you might find yourself suddenly faced with a piece of furniture bearing down on you at speed. To add to the fun there is the certain knowledge that Pol Pot and his cronies spent the bulk of the last 30 years littering the sides of Cambodian roadways with land mines on the ill-founded theory that it would undermine the government rather than merely maiming a few thousand rural children. The net result of all this is that Loki and I arrived in Siem Riep with quivering hands, shattered nerves, and a need for a bed, a stiff drink, and - if possible - horse tranquilizers.

In retrospect, it would probably have been a good idea to just figure a way to get the bikes back to the rental place and charter some sort of heavily armored vehicle for the rest of our trip.

The next best thing was a slow day in a Tuk Tuk - a moped with a passenger cart attached to the rear - visiting the ruins of the vast Khmer empire that ruled a substantial portion of southeast Asia for five hundred years. If you do a Google search for Angkor Wat, you'll end up with a fair number of images of the place that don't really do justice to its size. It's big. Really big. Really really big. And it's a temple. And it was probably pretty hard to build. So that's the cultural part of this email.

ANKOR WAT (not pictured)

After a day-and-a-half at Ankgor Wat and the surrounding temples, we got back on our bikes with all of the enthusiasm of soldiers heading back to the trenches. That said, the journey back to Phnom Penh was substantially less harrowing than the ride out. We took the first half of the trip one afternoon and the next half a day later. We were getting the knack of the highways: it was kind of exciting when a truck forced us off the road. Here's where we got stupid.

There is something about testosterone or maleness or maybe just humanity or society that makes it really hard for two men to admit what they are doing terrifies them. We arrived in Phnom Penh at about 11 am and wanted to head down to the beach in Sianoukville. Rather than returning the bikes and taking a bus, we took the bikes. This was a bad idea. An early omen that this was a bad idea came when a moped in Phnom Penh pulled out in front of Loki and he tumbled off his bike into the street. Loki is a third-year medical student and after a quick self examination he determined that he was OK or that, if he wasn't OK, then he had probably only fractured his right kneecap and that was no reason not to continue.

We left Phnom Penh at about noon and the accident happened around 1:30. I didn't actually witness it, but Loki described it to me as he supervised the nurse in the rural Cambodian clinic who was stitching up his arm. Loki was on the shoulder of the road, sent there by a truck, and a moped heading in the opposite direction of the traffic made a beeline course for him. This happens all the time when two people are walking opposite directions: one person steps left at the same time as another person and then they both step to the right and then they laugh and pass by. It was just like that but minus the laughing and passing and plus Loki flipping over the handles of his bike and skidding stomach-first, superman style, across the gravel.

From my perspective, I saw the bright-yellow dot of Loki's T-shirt. It wasn't moving much and a bunch of other light brown dots surrounded it. So I turned back.

There was quite a lot of blood, though Loki was standing and swearing, which was a good sign.

"Just give me a second before we go on," were his first words.

My response captured the moment with both pathos and poetry: "Oh man. That's a bummer."

"I think I'm going to have to get this arm stitched up before we go on." Loki correctly believed that our trip was the historical equivalent of the battle of Okinawa and that the Island would be lost if we did not continue.

"Yeah. That's probably a good idea," I said.

We followed some locals to a health clinic and Loki realized the bike had landed on his foot and that a) his shoe was destroyed and b) a few foot bones might be broken.

"I really liked those shoes," he said, putting his priorities in order.

After some time, and the realization that Loki's foot would not actually operate the gear shift on his bike, we took it to heart that perhaps it was better to head back. It was a sad moment, but then retreat is sometimes inevitable.

In preposterous bit of good fortune an enormous truck designed to carry motorbikes came by the instant we needed it and agreed to take us to Phnom Penh. The driver realized we liked excitement and so smoked like a chimney and finished four beers on the way back to Phnom Penh just to keep things interesting. He also demonstrated the Cambodian method of truck driving when your truck is empty, which involves driving almost exclusively in the lane designed for oncoming traffic. At one point, after nightfall, as I clutched the seat cushion and the ceiling with a pale expression of terror on my face he explained "One light OK. Two lights bad." I.e. one light means a bike, two a car. Having recently been one of those lights, I was inclined to disagree.

SAVED!!

We made it back and had the next day in Phnom Penh before Loki flew out. Knowing my duty to the itinerary, I took a bus down to Sinoukeville where I have spent the last day or two playing volleyball and sitting by the ocean.

Tomorrow I leave this tropical paradise and head back to Phnom Penh (via bus) and then back to New York, a city I love, but also a place where the air feels a lot thicker and life is a hell of a lot more stressful. I'll get back into my routine of heading to the gym every day and quit my one-week affair with smoking and work towards a place in the suburbs with two-and-a-half children. For tonight though, I think a stroll by the ocean, and the still-visible stars of the tropical sky.

coast to coast walk, britain

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400

The time, once more, has come for me to send what are becoming annual travelogues. The idea here is to encourage you all to keep in touch while I am away so that I get to occasionally hear friendly voices while I am traveling in all the scary places that are not America.

This time around that won't work. It turns out that I am only gone for two weeks and that I will have e-mail access almost not at all. So this particular travel update is here to encourage you all to keep in touch once I get back to New York, one of those scary places that very definitely is America.

Britain is, as anyone who has ever seen a movie about it will know, a rainy country. It would have been a real shame if we had not experienced any of the rain while we were here: like not seeing canals when visiting Venice. I am happy that we have had rain. We have experienced it in its misty variety, its downpour variety, and its windy sideways variety. We have seen all manner of British settings in the rain. I feel like I have had the experience. Now I want some goddamn sun.

I should explain that the rain is particularly frustrating because the purpose of this trip is to walk from one coast of Britain to the other with my family and two family friends. We started out in a small town called St. Bees and we are finishing in an equally small town called Robin Hood's Bay. Walking, sadly, means spending the bulk of each day outside, which is where the rain is.

Family (pre-rain)

It has rained for five of the seven days we have walked and I am wet. There is nothing I have, in fact, which has remained dry. My passport is wet; my socks are wet; my backpack is wet; my Snicker's bar is wet; my extra socks are wet; my water bottle is wet; and my shirt - actually each of them - is wet. Everyone else on this trip brought rain gear. I brought a jacket and two pairs of jeans. Jeans dry slowly, so I am always at least a little wet. But since it rains constantly, I am usually completely wet. My boots are waterproof, but that doesn't matter since they are filled with water. After three days of constant waterlog, I finally washed some laundry at one of the hotels, only to discover there was no dryer and no time for air drying, so now everything I have ever-so-slightly cleaner, wrinkled, and still wet.

The British use the word 'walk' in the same way we might say 'hike' or 'backpack' or 'technical climb,' so while you might think of our trip as an afternoon stroll through the grounds of Cambridge, it is actually more like a forced march through the Alps. Each day we have a Bed and Breakfast reservation some distance away, and each day we have no choice but to make that distance by foot. Our shortest day has been nine miles, our longest twenty one, and the terrain has been unfriendly.

As walkers go, you could hardly have selected a worse group than my family. We are not a group for whom balance comes naturally. In fact, we tend to fall over without much provocation on flat ground. But we are not walking on flat ground. The terrain for these walks has been fells and moors, which are fancy British ways of saying hills and swamps. The fells we have climbed have been somewhere between 20 feet tall and 2500 feet tall. The moors are usually between six and ten inches deep. Here, we wobble like boxing dummies even when we are not actively falling. Fortunately, we spend most of our time actively falling.

We are family though, so we pull each other through the difficult moments. Today, for example, my mother offered to lighten my load. We have hired a van to carry our bags between hotels, and I usually carry whatever my mother needs for the day. This morning, my mother offered to ease that burden by leaving her rain pants for the van. Admittedly, I had to provoke this offer with the good-natured comment: "Jesus, Mom! I have been carrying these for you for six days now and you never wear them, are you honestly ever going to use them or do you just make me take them as some sort of cruel joke?"

Witnesses accused me of being a little grumpy. It was early, I was tired. Who could blame me? Whatever was said, though, my mother was kind enough to leave the rain pants behind thus lightening my load. I thank her for this.

Sadly, today was our first full day of moor-walking and it came at the same time as our first day of forty-mile-an-hour winds combined with heavy rain. My father came up with the fun game of comparing the hours spent mucking through swamp with other unpleasant moments. He felt that it was somewhat preferable to being beaten with reeds, but worse than stomach flu, where I felt it fell somewhere less unpleasant than adolescence but worse than a fierce kick to the groin.

Mom had a different fun game to pass the hours. Her game involved mentioning things she wished she had with her, which included rain pants. It was all gentle teasing and she was probably comfortable enough, though I will admit it was probably particularly unpleasant to be wearing cotton pants after she mistook a floating dirt clod for solid ground and found herself waist-deep in freezing water. Some have suggested the resulting near-hypothermic state was somehow my fault. History will judge...though apparently so has mom. She has told me she will be packing my bag tomorrow and I suspect it will not only contain rain pants but also some large rocks.

Despite the rain, England is a magical place. The valleys are remarkably beautiful and while I am not certain that Hobbits actually live in this country, it's clear where the Lord of the Rings would have been set in its maker's mind.

And everything in England was clearly named by fairies. I know this because I, like any imaginative youngster, am able to easily recognize names that are simply too preposterous for human ears. On our first day, we walked from St. Bees past Rodington Beck, the Pattering holes, Fleswick bay, Sandwith (a name that left me mysteriously hungry), Demesne, Scalegill, Moor, Cleator, up the peak of Dent, back down through Raven Crag, through the Nannycatch gate, past the Kinnisade stone circle, and finally to Ennerdale Bridge. In total: around fourteen miles, 1800 feet of vertical gain, and three otherworldly Elfin dimensions.

Where the Elves live

Fantastical as they are, none of these names is as wonderful as Reekie's Thistle of Grasmere, the store Teal and I passed. The spirit of journalism compelled me to investigate its contents, but then the spirit of indifference took over and I instead went to the next place, which promised food in big letters. It's just as well, since there is little chance that it could have lived up to my expectations. From the outside it appeared to be a sweater store of some variety, but I imagine that inside is some terribly magical device with truly wondrous properties. Perhaps a wizard's amulet, or a gauntlet of some lost Roman proconsul. Or, perhaps, that rarest English treasure of all: a beam of sunlight untainted by rain. I am very wet.