An American in Asia: His Quest for Cosmic Truth (or at least a Decent Espresso)

 

Cambodia: Like France without the French

For everyone who read this site regularly and has wondered if I’m still alive: sorry the weekly update hasn’t been weekly and yes, I’m still kicking. The man hasn’t gotten me down yet. I hate to admit it but the real reason I’ve been lax about the site is that, after a week of writing travel news for this Singaporean magazine I work for, I’m not much in the mood to hack out more verbiage, even of the creative sort.

However, I realise that the site is a good outlet for the exact reason that it comes from the other hemisphere of my brain, so I’m going to attempt to persevere with this sucker. For now, the updates will pretty much come randomly until I can figure out how often I really want to write them.

Ancient Kmer Temple and French Architecture...nice combo.

The most interesting event of this past interval was a trip to Cambodia. Cambodia, Khmer, Phnom Penh, and Angkor are names that conjure, at best, images of land mines, government corruption and sudden, unexplained disappearances.

That’s all in the process of changing now and, while you still don’t want to be caught on a country road without the backing of a high-ranking army friend, the main cities of Phnom Penh, Siem Reap and Sihanoukville are seeing enough tourists to attract the attention of the travel trade magazine I write for.

I was sent to Phnom Penh for a few days to write a story on a four-star hotel and generally scope the town and find out what it has to offer the international traveller.

I must say the airport is just about the prettiest airport I have ever had the pleasure to be delayed in. Really. You could not go far wrong to take this theme and open an upscale Southeast Asian restaurant in LA and if you decorated the den that way, you’d be expected to serve frothy tropical drinks in tasteful tiki mugs (if there is such a thing).

Unfortunately the aesthetic budget must have run out when construction hit the edges of the airport because the moment I hit the dusty highway into town, the only decoration consisted of heavy cake of dust that was constantly stirred and agitated by whizzing motorbikes.

This went on for several kilometres, but as I approached Phnom Penh, the things the dust was caking began to take on a funny, nearly romantic aspect. It all began to look French.

I have never been to France but I’ve seen a lot of fancy French paintings and Phnom Penh seems to have the bleary, nostalgic quality of light the impressionists were always lathering onto their works. Call it what you will – pollution might be a good word – but the place has a romantic glow.

A market in Phnom Penh

The French were the ones who taught Cambodia how to build modern buildings and even the newest structures somehow look like aging Parisian landmarks. This included my hotel, which was only eight years old but every night I sipped my fruity drink on a balcony that could have been painted in eight strokes by Cezanne.

The balcony overlooked Wat Phnom, a giant pagoda in the ancient Angkor motif in a roundabout in the centre of town, and that was the other thing that brought me to love that town. In amongst all the French architecture and French bread the ornate temples and spicy cuisine of the much more ancient culture of Cambodia wandered like a tiger escaped from a European zoo.

Among cool things I got to do as part of my job and to satisfy my sense of adventure:

1) Sitting on the balcony of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club, I lifted my camera over the top of a roll of French bread, aimed it at the river and snapped a perfect National Geographic picture of a guy throwing a giant circular net from his canoe.

2) A few minutes later some children broke a water main and started playing naked in the spray and I got a shot of that too.

3) I hired a motorcycle driver to cart me around at five dollars a day (which paid his rent for the month after one weekend) and one night he took me to the city’s best dance club, The Heart of Darkness. Dance clubs in Bangkok are OK if you like nothing but robotic techno music and top-40s cover bands, but the Heart of Darkness was much more my scene. The DJ was twisted and brilliant, mixing the obligatory crowd-pleasers with such gems as the Beatles’ Twist and Shout, and once he played a Blues Brothers tune and followed it with Hey, Big Spender. The crowd was about seventy per cent Khmer mixed with tourists and expatriates and everyone seemed to get along swimmingly. My motorbike friend cruised me back to my hotel at around 4am and the main streets were peaceful and empty. The unpaved side roads, however, offered unsettling glimpses of furtive and shadowy life and my Spidey-sense told me that would be a world best left to itself.

4) I hired a boat for ten bucks and spent a couple hours touring around the confluence of four rivers which make up the waterfront of Phnom Penh. My guide was a young friendly guy fluent in English who knew all sorts of good details about the city, from street level to high politics, which made my reporting job easier. He took me to visit a couple of Vietnamese fishing villages where people build huts on the water and raise fish in netted farms beneath the house. We passed the hulk of the city’s former gambling den, a ship that was gutted of its engines and towed into the channel to take advantage of a loophole in the gambling laws that stated gambling could take place on board a ship registered in another country. Since then the laws have changed and Cambodia is turning quickly into a new gambling centre for Southeast Asia. While the consequent influx of Chinese triad operators might not be so good for Cambodia, it will bring in much needed taxable income and it couldn’t be worse than the Khmer Rouge.

Phnom Penh is high on my list of places to get back to very soon and I have a feeling, as I get to know it better, it will rank among my best-loved cities in the world alongside New York, Tokyo, Portland (Oregon), New Orleans and Bangkok.

As my boss, who was a journalist in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years, put it in his dry British way, “Phnom Penh is a lovely place. It’s like France without the French.”