A February 11 New York Times travel piece offered the opinion that Phnom Penh may be "the next Prague." What happened to Berlin? Dubrovnik? Harrisburg?
There's no doubt, though, that with Cambodia's economic and political stability apparently assured for the immediate future by the thugs who run the place---the Hun Sen government buys off or eliminates opponents---the country's capital, once the "pearl of Asia," is fast rebounding from decades of civil war and post-war turbulence. And like Prague after the Soviet pullout, the hustlers, in both the good sense and the bad sense, are turning up on schedule.
Hundreds---thousands?---of young farangs are arriving to teach English and enjoy the vibrant cheap-as-it-gets night life. (As in other countries of former French Indochina, English is now the global-connection lingua franca. Yesterday Joe heard a French woman screeching at a hotel clerk. She was suffering the double ignomony of an uncleaned room and of being required to complain about it in English.)
Most tourists visiting Cambodia now fly directly to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat and skip the formerly problematical capital, but that's changing. Along Sithowath Quay, the riverfront restaurants and cafes are packed every night with farangs and East Asians enjoying good Khmer, Thai, Italian and French food. At Borane, a Cambodian place next to our hotel, we had the best sweet and sour tom yam soup (chicken, lemon grass, galanga, mushrooms, kaffir lime leaves and tomatoes) we've had anywhere. Our comfortable quayside hotel, the Star Royal, was nicely troppo shabby genteel, a place where Prince Phillip might end up if he began to hit the bottle and Helen Mirren chucked him out. The water and power cut out from time to time, but never for long.
The bad hustlers of the New Prague, arguably, are the foreign investors and developers whose bribes and kickbacks keep what may be the most corrupt government in Asia afloat. Hun Sen and his crew, former Khmer Rouge officials who broke with Pol Pot in 1977, have renounced their communism but not their crude means for maintaining control. In 1997, the coalition that won a United Nations-supervised election was forced from power in a bloody coup engineered by Hun Sen's Cambodian Peoples Party. The result was mild tut-tutting at the U.N. and a few years of punishing economic sanctions before it was back to business as usual. The king, Norodom Sihanouk's no-account son, has no influence over anything. He presides at ceremonial occasions in a palace room (tourists are allowed in on most days) that is decorated and furnished like the lobby of the Boston Statler-Hilton in 1964.
With its million-plus residents, Phnom Penh is coming along--- development is filtering down and helping workers---but it's still on the threadbare side. Most of the tile-roofed French colonial buildings are gone, and the four- and five-story cement apartment blocks that have replaced them could use a coat of paint. There's no mass transit system, so both the narrow streets and the network of wide boulevards built by the French are gridlocked in the morning and late afternoon with motorbikes, tuk-tuks and---it's pretty depressing---SUVs driven by farangs and by Cambodian businessmen and officials and their bodyguards.
(The country is up to its fried crickets in guns. Armed robbery is no longer routine, as it was a decade ago, but it's not all that rare either. A tuk-tuk driver wanted to take us out to a shooting range, a big tourist attraction. "Americans like guns! English too!" The government, however, has apparently halted the practice of farangs paying money to blow up farm animals with bazookas.)
Generally speaking, driving in Cambodia is on the right but it's not a hard and fast rule. Phnom Penh has few traffic signals and no stop signs. Vehicles take turns bombing through intersections at high speed. Pedestrians are at risk. The best approach is to proceed slowly but with a confident demeanor and let the traffic waters part around you. (We made it out of town alive. We're now in easygoing Sihanoukville on the Cambodian coast of the Gulf of Thailand. We came by bus---intercity public buses are pretty good, especially if you love karaoke videos---and we'll leave by bus on Saturday for the ten-hour ride to Ho Chi Minh City.)
The Phnom Penh sights that will stay with us, of course, were Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields. But there were non-heartbreaking attractions, too. The Royal Palace, with its golden pagoda spires against a brilliant blue sky, is thrilling to behold. As are the golden Buddhas and the emerald Buddha in a long gallery whose floor is all silver. (The Khmer Rouge, trying to stamp out Buddhism and art, both deemed rotten, destroyed 60 percent of of the palace's treasures. Pol Pot left the rest as a tribute to the long-ago Khmer empire. Why did he leave 40 percent and not 90 or 10 percent? This is unclear.)
The National Museum, in a grand red stone Victorian building, has a good collection of Angkor stone carving. Though it is not displayed as well as are the carvings stolen by the French and shown at the Guimee Museum in Paris.
The contents of the Phnom Penh New Market aren't special---it's a kind of Asian Wal-Mart---but its architecture is. Built by the French in the 1930s, it's one of the largest domed spaces in Asia. From a distance, the mustard-yellow, Art Deco, multi-layered structure looks like Ruth St. Denis's hat. The market is arranged oddly inside. Right next to the fine gold jewelery section is the fresh meat section, with glistening animal-innard swags as a backdrop to the duller gold necklaces and bracelets.
The best Phnom Penh attractions were, as is usually the case, the endlessly unfolding exhibits of Khmer daily life. With exceptions, these are nice people to be around. They don't grin as easily as the Thais, and they are not so seductively sedate as the Laos. But they seem to manage their frayed lives with both energy---a feat in this heat---and quiet dignity. We'd be happy to come back here.
One bright morning we went hoofing it (phoofing it?) around the city to see where we might end up. Joe has never met a back alley he did not wish to wander down, so there was a good bit of that. In one roasting third-circle-0f-hell corridor, women were tending boiling cauldrons of water over charcoal fires. Joe wondered if maybe they were selling hot water to hotels. They didn't seem to be doing laundry or making soup.
We rode back to the riverfront that day on cyclos. These are rickshaw-like contraptions, half bicycle but with a single seat in the front, pedaled by ragged, frail men who often have no homes and sleep at night on their cyclos. I felt like some aristocratic twit Hogarth would have savaged. We salved our consciences somewhat by paying these two guys two and a half times the agreed-upon $2 per person price---even though they got lost and didn't take us to where we wanted to go.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Monday, February 26, 2007
S-21 and the Killing Fields
As you approach the place, it looks nice enough. Maybe like a secondary school where a Peace Corps volunteer landing a rare posh urban assignment might have enjoyed two stimulating years in the 1960s or '70s. But as the tuk-tuk draws closer, you notice a couple of tour buses parked nearby, and then the barbed wire.
In 1975, airy, spacious Tuol Svay Prey High School, just outside Phnom Penh, was converted by the Khmer Rouge into Tuol Sleng, Security Prison 21, or just S-21, an interrogation, torture and detention center. Now it is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The place shows the history of, and serves as a memorial to, 17,000 of Pol Pot's Cambodian and other victims who either died at Tuol Sleng or were trucked out to the killing fields of suburban Choeung Ek to be stabbed or, more often, pounded to death.
Persons brought to Tuol Sleng were instructed to complete a "biography," as in seventh-grade English class. If you admitted to being a "new" Cambodian (educated, urban, professional) and not a "base" Cambodian (the peasantry), that status alone almost certainly got you killed. Most urban Cambodians were quickly shipped to the countryside to die of starvation and overwork when, literally overnight, Pol Pot turned Cambodia into an agrarian concentration camp. But people considered especially dangerous---former government workers, teachers, students, technicians and monks, as well as all members of their families, young or old---ended up at Tuol Sleng. Many lied on their bios, but they were usually found out.
Families---an institution deemed outmoded---were mostly split up. People were packed into small rooms in leg irons. They could not speak or even change position without asking permission. Most were tortured. One of the ten prison rules (see upcoming photo) was this: "When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all." A piece of gym equipment in the pretty courtyard was used to hang people upside down until they lost consciousness and then to dunk their heads in the fertilizer bucket to wake them up. On display at the museum, along with other artifacts of torture, is a water-boarding device.
Under torture, people confessed to crazy things. A monk or a student might admit to being a "CIA agent." People named names of other "traitors to the revolution," including family members. The museum brochure includes these lines about the 10- to 15-year-olds who worked as guards: "Most of them started out as normal before growing increasingly evil. They were exceptionally cruel and disrespectful toward the prisoners and their elders."
At the museum---which is essentially the prison as it was discovered in 1979 when the Vietnamese drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh---the fetid cells and instruments of torture are hard to look at, but the thing that makes visiting this place close to unbearable is the photographs. Every prisoner had a mug shot taken. New arrivals too weak to sit up were strapped in place. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, so proud of their work, recorded everything. Galleries of the museum contain wall after wall of these faces staring into the camera with awful fright. It's like some high-school yearbook exhibit from hell. There are many photos, too, of the mutilated bodies of those tortured to death. In one cell, a museum visitor had left two frangipani blossoms next to a steel bludgeon.
The museum contained graffiti. Some looked as if they dated to the building's high-school days: a John Wayne-looking cowboy with a revolver, a sketch showing the workings of a human heart. The other graffiti were scrawled across photographs of former prison employees. In the accompanying text, these men expressed regret for the bad things that had gone on, but they said they had just been following orders. The writing slashed across these faces apparently by museum visitors---surviving family members of victims?---was in Khmer script, so we were unable to read it.
In an hour-long documentary film by French-Cambodian director Rithy Panh that is screened at the museum, an old lady who lost a daughter and son-in-law to Pol Pot's "socialist great leap forward," is perplexed. She says she cannot understand why the Khmer Rouge so ruthlessly broke up families. She said at age 70 she is supposed to know certain things, but that inhuman practice she cannot for the life of her figure out.
A younger female interviewee recalls how in the countryside communes friends and those few family members still together stopped trusting one another. Or people chose not to confide feelings or opinions because to do so might jeopardize not just their own lives but the lives of others. This same woman said "even the floors were listening" for rule breakers. Spies hid under the raised bamboo houses at night. One girl was overheard quietly singing a pre-revulutionary pop tune. She was taken out and killed that night, and her bloody clothes displayed at a "meeting," as a lesson to others.
We had lunch with the tuk-tuk driver we had hired for the day. Mr. Bora, a quiet, dignified man in shades and a baseball cap, spoke a little English. He told us he had lost both his parents and two brothers to the Khmer Rouge. He didn't say exactly how. When we asked him how he thought this thing could have happened, he shrugged and looked away.
After lunch, Mr. Bora drove us in his sputtering three-wheeler out to Choeung Ek and the Killing Fields Memorial. This is the orchard where nearly everyone who survived S-21 ended up after a few months. Walking around under a scorching sun, we saw the pits where the bodies of nearly 9,000 men, women and children have been exhumed, with thousands more still buried nearby. We saw the tree where loudspeakers were hung to mask the moans of those being bludgeoned or pick-axed to death. We saw the sturdy tree the executioners slammed the children against to finish them off. We saw the fragments of bone and clothing unearthed by the weather along the pathways. We saw the tall Memorial Stupa, where over 8,000 skulls are stacked on shelves behind glass, arranged by age and sex. Then we rode into the city, with its life and bustle and pleasant cafes along the Mekong esplanade.
Did Joe and I have to go and look at S-21 and Choeung Ek? Not really. We debated whether or not to go. And we would fault no one who came to Cambodia and said, yes, I know it happened, but I can't bear to get that close to it.
But we're glad now that we went. It's part of human history and that greatly interests us. It means, too, that we're somewhat more likely to be among those who notice if something like the Cambodian holocaust ever starts to happen again. What would we do if we did notice such a thing? We don't know. But we hope something.
In 1975, airy, spacious Tuol Svay Prey High School, just outside Phnom Penh, was converted by the Khmer Rouge into Tuol Sleng, Security Prison 21, or just S-21, an interrogation, torture and detention center. Now it is the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The place shows the history of, and serves as a memorial to, 17,000 of Pol Pot's Cambodian and other victims who either died at Tuol Sleng or were trucked out to the killing fields of suburban Choeung Ek to be stabbed or, more often, pounded to death.
Persons brought to Tuol Sleng were instructed to complete a "biography," as in seventh-grade English class. If you admitted to being a "new" Cambodian (educated, urban, professional) and not a "base" Cambodian (the peasantry), that status alone almost certainly got you killed. Most urban Cambodians were quickly shipped to the countryside to die of starvation and overwork when, literally overnight, Pol Pot turned Cambodia into an agrarian concentration camp. But people considered especially dangerous---former government workers, teachers, students, technicians and monks, as well as all members of their families, young or old---ended up at Tuol Sleng. Many lied on their bios, but they were usually found out.
Families---an institution deemed outmoded---were mostly split up. People were packed into small rooms in leg irons. They could not speak or even change position without asking permission. Most were tortured. One of the ten prison rules (see upcoming photo) was this: "When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all." A piece of gym equipment in the pretty courtyard was used to hang people upside down until they lost consciousness and then to dunk their heads in the fertilizer bucket to wake them up. On display at the museum, along with other artifacts of torture, is a water-boarding device.
Under torture, people confessed to crazy things. A monk or a student might admit to being a "CIA agent." People named names of other "traitors to the revolution," including family members. The museum brochure includes these lines about the 10- to 15-year-olds who worked as guards: "Most of them started out as normal before growing increasingly evil. They were exceptionally cruel and disrespectful toward the prisoners and their elders."
At the museum---which is essentially the prison as it was discovered in 1979 when the Vietnamese drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh---the fetid cells and instruments of torture are hard to look at, but the thing that makes visiting this place close to unbearable is the photographs. Every prisoner had a mug shot taken. New arrivals too weak to sit up were strapped in place. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, so proud of their work, recorded everything. Galleries of the museum contain wall after wall of these faces staring into the camera with awful fright. It's like some high-school yearbook exhibit from hell. There are many photos, too, of the mutilated bodies of those tortured to death. In one cell, a museum visitor had left two frangipani blossoms next to a steel bludgeon.
The museum contained graffiti. Some looked as if they dated to the building's high-school days: a John Wayne-looking cowboy with a revolver, a sketch showing the workings of a human heart. The other graffiti were scrawled across photographs of former prison employees. In the accompanying text, these men expressed regret for the bad things that had gone on, but they said they had just been following orders. The writing slashed across these faces apparently by museum visitors---surviving family members of victims?---was in Khmer script, so we were unable to read it.
In an hour-long documentary film by French-Cambodian director Rithy Panh that is screened at the museum, an old lady who lost a daughter and son-in-law to Pol Pot's "socialist great leap forward," is perplexed. She says she cannot understand why the Khmer Rouge so ruthlessly broke up families. She said at age 70 she is supposed to know certain things, but that inhuman practice she cannot for the life of her figure out.
A younger female interviewee recalls how in the countryside communes friends and those few family members still together stopped trusting one another. Or people chose not to confide feelings or opinions because to do so might jeopardize not just their own lives but the lives of others. This same woman said "even the floors were listening" for rule breakers. Spies hid under the raised bamboo houses at night. One girl was overheard quietly singing a pre-revulutionary pop tune. She was taken out and killed that night, and her bloody clothes displayed at a "meeting," as a lesson to others.
We had lunch with the tuk-tuk driver we had hired for the day. Mr. Bora, a quiet, dignified man in shades and a baseball cap, spoke a little English. He told us he had lost both his parents and two brothers to the Khmer Rouge. He didn't say exactly how. When we asked him how he thought this thing could have happened, he shrugged and looked away.
After lunch, Mr. Bora drove us in his sputtering three-wheeler out to Choeung Ek and the Killing Fields Memorial. This is the orchard where nearly everyone who survived S-21 ended up after a few months. Walking around under a scorching sun, we saw the pits where the bodies of nearly 9,000 men, women and children have been exhumed, with thousands more still buried nearby. We saw the tree where loudspeakers were hung to mask the moans of those being bludgeoned or pick-axed to death. We saw the sturdy tree the executioners slammed the children against to finish them off. We saw the fragments of bone and clothing unearthed by the weather along the pathways. We saw the tall Memorial Stupa, where over 8,000 skulls are stacked on shelves behind glass, arranged by age and sex. Then we rode into the city, with its life and bustle and pleasant cafes along the Mekong esplanade.
Did Joe and I have to go and look at S-21 and Choeung Ek? Not really. We debated whether or not to go. And we would fault no one who came to Cambodia and said, yes, I know it happened, but I can't bear to get that close to it.
But we're glad now that we went. It's part of human history and that greatly interests us. It means, too, that we're somewhat more likely to be among those who notice if something like the Cambodian holocaust ever starts to happen again. What would we do if we did notice such a thing? We don't know. But we hope something.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Note
The copy desk has been busy. A cobra spreads its hood, part of its neck, not its head. Gay life in Laos and Cambodia is pretty okay, not are pretty okay. Yeah yeah.
The copy editor, Bill Ullman, also points out that adapting up and adapting down are among the great pleasures of travel. He recalls the fun of staying with Peace Corps volunteers in their Sierra Leone villages when he worked there in the sixties, and then returning their hospitality by putting them up---on his boss's dime---at the Ritz in London.
Joe and I are in Phnom Penh. We like this place for many reasons, not the least of which is its spelling. The big question here is, do you or do you not visit the killing fields and the museum of Khmer Rouge horrors? They both appear on tuk-tuk drivers' signs listing tourist attractions not to be missed. We're here for just three days, so we have to decide soon.
The copy editor, Bill Ullman, also points out that adapting up and adapting down are among the great pleasures of travel. He recalls the fun of staying with Peace Corps volunteers in their Sierra Leone villages when he worked there in the sixties, and then returning their hospitality by putting them up---on his boss's dime---at the Ritz in London.
Joe and I are in Phnom Penh. We like this place for many reasons, not the least of which is its spelling. The big question here is, do you or do you not visit the killing fields and the museum of Khmer Rouge horrors? They both appear on tuk-tuk drivers' signs listing tourist attractions not to be missed. We're here for just three days, so we have to decide soon.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Cambodia
It's an appealing jalopy of a country, steaming and clanking, with odds bits and pieces of its past flying off in the dust, and currently fueled almost entirely by the mighty engine of industrial tourism.
Cambodia is an old country, but young, too. The great Khmer empire dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, but now half the population is under the age of 15. Urban gerontologists will be bored here, for Pol Pot murdered most of the city people for the crime of having been educated. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia lost a third of its six million people through disease, starvation, mass execution---often bludgeoning, to save money on bullets---or from being worked to death in the fields by Maoist lunatics.
There are individual and collective memories of that savage time. Yet most Cambodians---the survivors, the eager and busy young people---seem to be looking ahead. An American who lives in Siem Reap thinks the skull-and-crossbones image of Cambodia is perpetuated largely by the foreign press and by NGOs that think they need it for their fundraising.
While the Cambodians' need to move on has to be respected, the West cannot afford to forget its complicity in one of the century's most horrendous genocides. It was the Nixon-Kissinger carpet bombing of eastern Cambodia, along with the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion, that recruited hundreds of thousands of Khmer soldiers, who believed they were joining a movement for independence, not the mass murder of their own people. And after Pol Pot's removal from power in 1979 by the Vietnamese, the West kept this despot and his land-mine-planting guerrillas going for more than another decade in western Cambodia, as a check on the Vietnamese. As an American here, you just want to slink away.
Most Cambodians, however, want you to stay. Beyond a shaky garment industry that's vulnerable to changing trade agreements, Cambodian income is largely dependent now on tourism. Two million visitors came to Siem Reap last year, almost double the number of the year before. Like Joe and me, they came to look upon and often climb over the the dozens of Khmer temples, of which Angkor Wat is only the magnificent centerpiece. Hotels and restaurants have opened by the dozens. The center of Siem Reap, a city of about 100,000, feels more like Cancun than Asia. At night, it's carnival time in the teeming---and steaming---open-air cafes and restaurants. You can get Khmer fish amok or a club sandwich, a pineapple shake or Beer Lao, a lady massage or a man massage. Most of the tourists are Asian---Korean, Chinese, Japanese---or European. You hear an American or Canadian accent once in a while, but this place is a bit out of the way for them. And then there's that Killing Fields image.
Through a fortuitous mix-up, Joe and I ended up in a hotel that's about as far as you can get from the Cambodia of the 1970s. Viroth's Hotel is run by a young Frenchman, Fabien Martial, who also has a nearby restaurant with the same name. Viroth is Fabien's Cambodian boyfriend. After another hotel reservation fell through, we sought the Internet help of Martin Dishman, a friend of two friends of a friend of ours in San Francisco, and Martin speedily booked us at his friend Fabian's small hotel. It's pure Miami South Beach, and it's a wonder. Our air-conditioned room---the daily high here is at least in the mid-90s---is both so comfortable and so lovingly stark, so Ian Schrager-in-the-heatstroke-belt, that we were barely able to unpack our shabby little possessions fast enough to get them out of sight. There's a gorgeous small-tiled swimming pool of many shades of blue, a third-story rooftop breakfast terrace under thatch, and---best of all---a staff that has been unfailingly helpful in arranging for rides or a guide or a mixed-fruit shake. We were able to remember the day manager's name, Nirong, because Nirong could do no wrong. All this for US $50 a night.
Joe and I are adaptable, and while at Viroth's we had to adapt up, in other ways in Cambodia we have had to adapt down. The country is really ramshackled. It's poor and it shows. The roads are a mess and traffic is chaotic. In Bangkok, you look twice each way before crossing the street; here you look five times. Cambodia also has more animals on motorbikes. That's what I said. Cambodia tied a Lao record for most riders piled onto a motorbike---five---but set new records yesterday when we observed the following: four people on a motorbike, the woman at the rear end clutching at her side the feet of several live upside-down ducks; and two large live hogs, hogtied, on their backs, resting atop a metal frame on the back of a speeding motorbike. We also saw a pickup truck with twelve people in the back seated atop cargo that spilled out onto a metal tailgate extension, four people in the cab, and one on the hood. And this truck was moving right along.
Along many of the dusty roads, along with the fruit and vegetable stands, are vendors with shelves stacked with bottles we thought were filled with amber cooking oil. But the plastic and gas bottles, we learned, are filled with gasoline. These places are gas stations. Joe saw one where all the containers were Johnny Walker bottles.
The people here are mostly gentle-natured in that Southeast Asian way we've so happily gotten used to, but the hardness of the urban poor is all around us, too. Joe hates it that we can't buy a postcard from every skinny kid who approaches us. The guidebooks say don't encourage the hard sell, but you constantly fear that if you don't buy this child's temple-photo book or that child's bottle of hot Coke, the kid won't eat tonight. We don't know that. What we do know is that the Big Hustle is bad for everyone's dignity, if probably necessary for some people's stomachs.
NGOs, often justly criticized for their posh staff lifestyles and sometimes wasteful ways, are probably doing good work in Cambodia. Anything should help. We haven't seen that close-up, but we have met a few non-NGO ex-pats who impressed us a lot. A French hotel-staff trainer named Geoffrey, staying at Viroth's, is sponsoring the education of an orphan. This is especially worthy, for the "socialist" government hasn't built any significant social safety net. (On a street in the restaurant area, we saw a physically handicapped band of musicians playing for donations; some appeared to be land-mine amputees.) We came in on the tail end of a cocktail-party fundraiser at the John McDermott Gallery, which features the American owner's gorgeous platinum prints of temple scenes. McDermott raised over $10,000 for the Siem Reap children's hospital.
Helping McDermott and his wife was Martin Dishman, whose bar is just across the street. We had heard about Martin from John Finn and Art Desuyo, pals of Peace Corps old boy Mike Learned. John and Art have provided Joe and me expert guidance on navigating aspects of Bangkok and Siem Reap. They alerted us that there was this fabled character in Siem Reap who had opened the first gay bar there and we had to track him down. Tracking Martin down was about as hard as tracking down Rick Blaine in Casablanca, to whom Martin has been compared. He's a presence here.
Homosexuality in much of Southeast Asia is not stigmatized. Buddhism has no opinion about it and neither do the governments. The governments are trying to crack down on child sex trafficking. And we have read of gay farang men caught with gay Asian adult men and victimized in police extortion schemes. But apparently this is rare, and gay life in Thailand is open and healthy, and gay life in Laos and Cambodia are not quite so open but pretty okay otherwise.
Martin is a nice-looking, forty-something American with alert blue eyes and a quick mind who figured out back in Indiana that he was attracted to men, and realized a little later in San Francisco that he especially liked Asian men. He worked in the hotel business in Thailand and, ready for some independence and seeing an opportunity when it stared him in the face, he opened the Linga Bar just over two years ago. On a busy bar and restaurant street that's closed to cars, Martin's place has a chic-but-comfy San Francisco feel to it. The customers are a mix of young and old, foreigner and Cambodian. You do see some Cambodian lads cadging drinks---and perhaps other assets---from farang gents of a certain age. But Martin stays out of that. He says he just sells food and drinks.
There's a lively warm feeling about Martin's place. You sense that it has been a liberating influence in people's lives. (The name is the Sanskrit word for phallus---a middle ground between the Blue Parrot Bars of the U.S. in the 1950s and the gay restaurant in Bangkok---oh, those irrepressible Thais--- called Eat Me.) Martin is plainly adored by his staff and customers. He is mister gay-go-to-guy in Siem Reap.
Martin also owns a one-luxurious-unit "boutique" hotel called The One Hotel Angkor, where he asks $250 a night and gets it. (Web site www.theonehotelangkor.com.) He's talking about opening another place in Luang Prabang and maybe eventually move to that quieter Lao scene. It would be hard for a lot of people to imagine Siem Reap without Martin. But even Rick left Casablanca when the time had come to move on.
Another impressive man we met in Siem Reap is Riem Bundrath. He was our guide for two days, at the standard rate of $25 per day. He accompanied us to Angkor Wat, Bayon and other temples---see Joe's pictures, which will be up soon. In addition to answering nearly all our questions about Khmer history, art and architecture, this small, sad-eyed, thoughtful man was open and forthcoming about his own life and philosophy. The temples were grand and mysterious, but the most memorable moment in the two days was yesterday, late afternoon, when we were all three hot and tired, and sat down to rest near the top of the Bayun temple.
This eleventh century wonder is said by the Lonely Planet Guide to be one of the most "mysterious"of the temples. But we found it's bas reliefs of Khmer daily life illuminatingly mundane, and even humorous, with a scene, for example, of a woman butcher working hard and scowling at her husband, who is off to the side smoking a water pipe. The mystery, we guessed, was in the huge smiling stone faces on four of the lotus-blossum-shaped towers. What were these faces smiling at?
Riem---whose father, if we heard Riem correctly, was murdered by the Khmer Rouge for eating a piece of fruit---sat and told us the story of the Buddha and his enlightenment. We heard about Siddhartha and his restless youth, his search for a "better way" to live morally and earn a better future life or even achieve nirvana. We heard the entire story in about 20 minutes---the turtle as an incarnation of Buddha that walked on lotus blossums, the cobra that spread its head to protect the Buddha against a rainstorm---and the way the Buddha's followers, like Riem, who was a monk for three years, can find peace and acceptance when life is very hard. We thought Riem thought we needed to hear him tell us this story, and we did.
Cambodia is an old country, but young, too. The great Khmer empire dominated Southeast Asia from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries, but now half the population is under the age of 15. Urban gerontologists will be bored here, for Pol Pot murdered most of the city people for the crime of having been educated. From 1975 to 1979, Cambodia lost a third of its six million people through disease, starvation, mass execution---often bludgeoning, to save money on bullets---or from being worked to death in the fields by Maoist lunatics.
There are individual and collective memories of that savage time. Yet most Cambodians---the survivors, the eager and busy young people---seem to be looking ahead. An American who lives in Siem Reap thinks the skull-and-crossbones image of Cambodia is perpetuated largely by the foreign press and by NGOs that think they need it for their fundraising.
While the Cambodians' need to move on has to be respected, the West cannot afford to forget its complicity in one of the century's most horrendous genocides. It was the Nixon-Kissinger carpet bombing of eastern Cambodia, along with the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese invasion, that recruited hundreds of thousands of Khmer soldiers, who believed they were joining a movement for independence, not the mass murder of their own people. And after Pol Pot's removal from power in 1979 by the Vietnamese, the West kept this despot and his land-mine-planting guerrillas going for more than another decade in western Cambodia, as a check on the Vietnamese. As an American here, you just want to slink away.
Most Cambodians, however, want you to stay. Beyond a shaky garment industry that's vulnerable to changing trade agreements, Cambodian income is largely dependent now on tourism. Two million visitors came to Siem Reap last year, almost double the number of the year before. Like Joe and me, they came to look upon and often climb over the the dozens of Khmer temples, of which Angkor Wat is only the magnificent centerpiece. Hotels and restaurants have opened by the dozens. The center of Siem Reap, a city of about 100,000, feels more like Cancun than Asia. At night, it's carnival time in the teeming---and steaming---open-air cafes and restaurants. You can get Khmer fish amok or a club sandwich, a pineapple shake or Beer Lao, a lady massage or a man massage. Most of the tourists are Asian---Korean, Chinese, Japanese---or European. You hear an American or Canadian accent once in a while, but this place is a bit out of the way for them. And then there's that Killing Fields image.
Through a fortuitous mix-up, Joe and I ended up in a hotel that's about as far as you can get from the Cambodia of the 1970s. Viroth's Hotel is run by a young Frenchman, Fabien Martial, who also has a nearby restaurant with the same name. Viroth is Fabien's Cambodian boyfriend. After another hotel reservation fell through, we sought the Internet help of Martin Dishman, a friend of two friends of a friend of ours in San Francisco, and Martin speedily booked us at his friend Fabian's small hotel. It's pure Miami South Beach, and it's a wonder. Our air-conditioned room---the daily high here is at least in the mid-90s---is both so comfortable and so lovingly stark, so Ian Schrager-in-the-heatstroke-belt, that we were barely able to unpack our shabby little possessions fast enough to get them out of sight. There's a gorgeous small-tiled swimming pool of many shades of blue, a third-story rooftop breakfast terrace under thatch, and---best of all---a staff that has been unfailingly helpful in arranging for rides or a guide or a mixed-fruit shake. We were able to remember the day manager's name, Nirong, because Nirong could do no wrong. All this for US $50 a night.
Joe and I are adaptable, and while at Viroth's we had to adapt up, in other ways in Cambodia we have had to adapt down. The country is really ramshackled. It's poor and it shows. The roads are a mess and traffic is chaotic. In Bangkok, you look twice each way before crossing the street; here you look five times. Cambodia also has more animals on motorbikes. That's what I said. Cambodia tied a Lao record for most riders piled onto a motorbike---five---but set new records yesterday when we observed the following: four people on a motorbike, the woman at the rear end clutching at her side the feet of several live upside-down ducks; and two large live hogs, hogtied, on their backs, resting atop a metal frame on the back of a speeding motorbike. We also saw a pickup truck with twelve people in the back seated atop cargo that spilled out onto a metal tailgate extension, four people in the cab, and one on the hood. And this truck was moving right along.
Along many of the dusty roads, along with the fruit and vegetable stands, are vendors with shelves stacked with bottles we thought were filled with amber cooking oil. But the plastic and gas bottles, we learned, are filled with gasoline. These places are gas stations. Joe saw one where all the containers were Johnny Walker bottles.
The people here are mostly gentle-natured in that Southeast Asian way we've so happily gotten used to, but the hardness of the urban poor is all around us, too. Joe hates it that we can't buy a postcard from every skinny kid who approaches us. The guidebooks say don't encourage the hard sell, but you constantly fear that if you don't buy this child's temple-photo book or that child's bottle of hot Coke, the kid won't eat tonight. We don't know that. What we do know is that the Big Hustle is bad for everyone's dignity, if probably necessary for some people's stomachs.
NGOs, often justly criticized for their posh staff lifestyles and sometimes wasteful ways, are probably doing good work in Cambodia. Anything should help. We haven't seen that close-up, but we have met a few non-NGO ex-pats who impressed us a lot. A French hotel-staff trainer named Geoffrey, staying at Viroth's, is sponsoring the education of an orphan. This is especially worthy, for the "socialist" government hasn't built any significant social safety net. (On a street in the restaurant area, we saw a physically handicapped band of musicians playing for donations; some appeared to be land-mine amputees.) We came in on the tail end of a cocktail-party fundraiser at the John McDermott Gallery, which features the American owner's gorgeous platinum prints of temple scenes. McDermott raised over $10,000 for the Siem Reap children's hospital.
Helping McDermott and his wife was Martin Dishman, whose bar is just across the street. We had heard about Martin from John Finn and Art Desuyo, pals of Peace Corps old boy Mike Learned. John and Art have provided Joe and me expert guidance on navigating aspects of Bangkok and Siem Reap. They alerted us that there was this fabled character in Siem Reap who had opened the first gay bar there and we had to track him down. Tracking Martin down was about as hard as tracking down Rick Blaine in Casablanca, to whom Martin has been compared. He's a presence here.
Homosexuality in much of Southeast Asia is not stigmatized. Buddhism has no opinion about it and neither do the governments. The governments are trying to crack down on child sex trafficking. And we have read of gay farang men caught with gay Asian adult men and victimized in police extortion schemes. But apparently this is rare, and gay life in Thailand is open and healthy, and gay life in Laos and Cambodia are not quite so open but pretty okay otherwise.
Martin is a nice-looking, forty-something American with alert blue eyes and a quick mind who figured out back in Indiana that he was attracted to men, and realized a little later in San Francisco that he especially liked Asian men. He worked in the hotel business in Thailand and, ready for some independence and seeing an opportunity when it stared him in the face, he opened the Linga Bar just over two years ago. On a busy bar and restaurant street that's closed to cars, Martin's place has a chic-but-comfy San Francisco feel to it. The customers are a mix of young and old, foreigner and Cambodian. You do see some Cambodian lads cadging drinks---and perhaps other assets---from farang gents of a certain age. But Martin stays out of that. He says he just sells food and drinks.
There's a lively warm feeling about Martin's place. You sense that it has been a liberating influence in people's lives. (The name is the Sanskrit word for phallus---a middle ground between the Blue Parrot Bars of the U.S. in the 1950s and the gay restaurant in Bangkok---oh, those irrepressible Thais--- called Eat Me.) Martin is plainly adored by his staff and customers. He is mister gay-go-to-guy in Siem Reap.
Martin also owns a one-luxurious-unit "boutique" hotel called The One Hotel Angkor, where he asks $250 a night and gets it. (Web site www.theonehotelangkor.com.) He's talking about opening another place in Luang Prabang and maybe eventually move to that quieter Lao scene. It would be hard for a lot of people to imagine Siem Reap without Martin. But even Rick left Casablanca when the time had come to move on.
Another impressive man we met in Siem Reap is Riem Bundrath. He was our guide for two days, at the standard rate of $25 per day. He accompanied us to Angkor Wat, Bayon and other temples---see Joe's pictures, which will be up soon. In addition to answering nearly all our questions about Khmer history, art and architecture, this small, sad-eyed, thoughtful man was open and forthcoming about his own life and philosophy. The temples were grand and mysterious, but the most memorable moment in the two days was yesterday, late afternoon, when we were all three hot and tired, and sat down to rest near the top of the Bayun temple.
This eleventh century wonder is said by the Lonely Planet Guide to be one of the most "mysterious"of the temples. But we found it's bas reliefs of Khmer daily life illuminatingly mundane, and even humorous, with a scene, for example, of a woman butcher working hard and scowling at her husband, who is off to the side smoking a water pipe. The mystery, we guessed, was in the huge smiling stone faces on four of the lotus-blossum-shaped towers. What were these faces smiling at?
Riem---whose father, if we heard Riem correctly, was murdered by the Khmer Rouge for eating a piece of fruit---sat and told us the story of the Buddha and his enlightenment. We heard about Siddhartha and his restless youth, his search for a "better way" to live morally and earn a better future life or even achieve nirvana. We heard the entire story in about 20 minutes---the turtle as an incarnation of Buddha that walked on lotus blossums, the cobra that spread its head to protect the Buddha against a rainstorm---and the way the Buddha's followers, like Riem, who was a monk for three years, can find peace and acceptance when life is very hard. We thought Riem thought we needed to hear him tell us this story, and we did.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
It's hot
We've been in Siem Reap for under three days, and we've already entered exquisite-twelfth-century-bas-relief rehab. Been to five amazing Khmer-empire sites, including glorious Angkor Wat. Cambodia is also of very considerable interest otherwise. For now, we can say authoritatively of the city of Siem Reap, Pol Pot would be dismayed. And, yes, it's hot here. More soon.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Note
The photo of two women in Khout's village who appear to be making whiskey from rice are doing just that. It's the village lao lao factory.
In an earlier posting I think I said sticky rice was high in glutin. Rice does not contain glutin. Sticky rice is sometimes erroneously called glutinous just because it is sticky. (Incidentally, we saw a sign outside a cafe here in Luang Prabang offering "glue wine." We'll never know.)
In a few hours we fly to Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Angkor Wat. A main tourist attraction in Siem Reap, we have read, is the Land Mine Museum. In Cambodia, tourists get to cover all the bases.
In an earlier posting I think I said sticky rice was high in glutin. Rice does not contain glutin. Sticky rice is sometimes erroneously called glutinous just because it is sticky. (Incidentally, we saw a sign outside a cafe here in Luang Prabang offering "glue wine." We'll never know.)
In a few hours we fly to Siem Reap, Cambodia, and Angkor Wat. A main tourist attraction in Siem Reap, we have read, is the Land Mine Museum. In Cambodia, tourists get to cover all the bases.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Saturday, February 17, 2007
I gave some BBM books to a Hmong orphan who wandered to this village on his own when he was seven. For the last two years the Akha families have taken turns caring for him. He seemed very loved and was captivated by the books.
Separating the pounded rice 
Spinning cotton thread
Detail with French coins and nail clipper
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)