Shell Crater 18.04.10

The Master has no mind of her own.
She works with the mind of the people.

She is good to people who are good.
She is also good to people who are not good.
This is true goodness

She trusts people who are trustworthy
She also trusts people who aren’t trustworthy
This is true trust.

The Master’s mind is like space.
People don’t understand her.
They look to her and wait.
She treats them like her own children.

Tao te Ching – Chapter 49

I’ll return to Siem Reap in a later blog. We spent five days there and I stood in awe of the creativity of man and the destructive power of time and nature. And at the destructive power of man and the creative power of time and nature.

We are in a bus heading south to Phnom Penh, once dubbed the Pearl of the Orient. Perhaps anus would be more appropriate now. No offence meant. The bus is jam-packed, which means the seats are all occupied and there are half a dozen young girls sitting on buckets in the aisle. The bus ride will last about six hours. The girls flagged the bus down on the highway and seemed to bargain with the driver for a few minutes – time for them to get back to school in Phnom Penh after Songkran. I am the only whiteface on the bus and I notice people are sneaking looks at me. I cannot guess what they are thinking. The young girl sitting on the bucket next to my seat tries to sleep. She has grabbed the armrest and wrapped her fingers around it. She has long, dark blue glossy fingernails and she sighs and presses her sleepy face into her knuckles. After an hour or so I remember that I have a long thick kromar (a traditional Cambodian scarf) in my bag so I fold it into a facsimile of a pillow and offer it to her. She accepts it without saying a thing but a smile briefly appears and there is a word in her eyes.

The highway is flat. The country is brown. How many times have I written the word dusty in these blogs. The sun is somewhere straight above in a sky that is cloudless but so uniformly bright that it feels more like fluorescent than directional light. The air conditioning is struggling. Every couple of hours the bus driver pulls into a rest stop and spends about 20 minutes flushing or filling something at the rear of the vehicle. Perhaps they use water for coolant. At one of the stops we clamber out of the bus to a smouldering-hot eating area under a metal roof. There are a few concession stands. One vendor is selling the much-anticipated cockroach-in-a-bun, without the bun – a few locals are sampling the delicacy. At another stop Sophie points to a lady with a bowl on her head offering another amuse-guele: fried tarantula. Mmmm-mmmmm! My stomach fails me and I decide that eating bugs isn’t going to be one of my tales.

All along the highway there are houses. For hours on end we pass a single defile of homes ranging from huts to block and brick houses that line the road. I suppose the farm properties extend back from the road like some seigneurial (?) system. I don’t know. The houses are tiny; squarish with thatch walls and often thin, rusty corrugated steel roofs. They are on sturdy stilts, probably 8 feet above the ground. Some are well kept with swept dirt yards and the obligatory chicken, rooster, chick trifecta. Dogs are everywhere and there seem to be a lot of white cattle. Not Brahmas, more like a western-looking animal but probably very drought tolerant. There are tall haystacks in many yards. I mean tall; maybe twenty feet. and varying greatly in shape despite their common constituency. There are tall cones or broad-shouldered boulders of the stuff with one or two or three lobes they appear like hairy cartoon monsters crouching just off the margin of the road - massive beasts squatting on low wooden palettes – why the palettes? Moisture prevention? To discourage snakes or rodents from nesting? Probably some reason I can’t even guess. It wasn’t until I saw a couple of those bucolic paintings by Millet in Tokyo (yes, I am well ahead of this journey in time and space but that is a different matter) that I suddenly realized why they seemed so familiar yet so strange. In those 19th century paintings Millet showed scenes of peasants with thick arms, blonde hair, white blouses and florid faces enjoying the simple bucolic life in the company of the same damn haystacks. We don’t see anyone languishing or raising a stein around these stacks and you can forget the autumnal fields and verdant hills. Too, there are properties whose yard is all at sixes and sevens a pick-up-sticks jangle of jerry-built coops ad pens and fences and God-knows-what. Bits and fragments of plastic lie everywhere like a bomb went off in a toilet paper factory.

I couldn’t take a successful picture of it from the bus but we passed miles of a table-flat land whose only feature was an infinitude of palm trees. They stood a good distance from each other. Against the brilliant hazy distance they appeared like black needles, each with a massive eagle’s nest of foliage at the crest. I thought they were like tall, frozen. anorexic mushroom clouds.. They spread across the horizon as far as the eye could see on a chessboard of fallow, dun rice fields. The visual effect was profound, like something other-worldly - maybe Biblical.

And then, incongruously, in a sudden flush of dense foliage there appeared a series of houses with clusters of gigantic white statuary out front. They must be artisanal businesses specializing in stone sculpture. There were lions and Buddhas in various stages of completion, some emerging like Michelangelo’s caryatids (but meditating, not struggling) from massive blocks of roughly quarried stone. The sight of these stark white forms after a numbing array of tawny, stilted houses came as a brief shock.

Has anyone ever written a thesis correlating the ratio of tread to riser as a indicator of a civilization’s consideration for the common man? I thought the stairs in ancient Angkor were a strange choice for royalty. They were perhaps 5 inches wide and anywhere from 10 to 20 inches high making for a challenging climb and a death-defying descent especially where they were broken or missing altogether (the Angkor buildings are to wheelchair accessibility is as Stephen Harper is to the Arts community). The stairs to these Cambodian farmhomes are likewise very steep. There aren’t any faces to the risers per se, just treads that vary from a series of narrow planks or bamboo to a solid piece of wood. The stairs are often painted bright colours, blue, yellow and green. Some have handrails. How do the elderly and the crippled climb up and down? There are no icebergs for the feeble to be set out upon. What is the tropical equivalent of death by ice floe? Probably just death.

Many hours and impromptu stops later Phnom Penh rises like a mirage in the waxy fug. At first it is white and modern looking but as we become more engaged in the urban core I see the same stuff as in the poorest of the cities we have visited. Ruined sidewalks and tangles of electrical wires, walls with mould and mildew and a nicotine haze of half-burnt fuel. People walking, working and sitting wherever you look. The constant cacophony of horns and poorly tuned engines. It is poor. We are told that in Siem Reap most workers are paid approximately $25 per week. That’s a good meal for two with beer in one of the tonier restos that are common in the downtown tourist track – and a fraction of the price of one night’s stay in one of the Tourist Hotels that line the road from the airport. Tuk-tuk drivers rent their machines here by the day. It will cost them $5 to sit on a corner and harass the passers-by. They may or may not get one ride a day. In this season tourists are outnumbered by tuk-tuk drivers by a sizeable margin.

In the old city it is crumbling decay with rank, fetid smells and soot-blackened windows – a patina of grime around things that people touch – doorknobs, handles and tables. When we first arrive there is a scrum of tuk-tuk drivers at the bus station. They were literally climbing over each other to get the attention of the handful of passengers who seemed inclined to hire a ride. We chose a fellow with an honest face. His name was Mony and he was ecstatic to have won the short contract for $3. Like the approximately 2000 drivers that we would encounter in the next three days he asked us if we wanted to visit the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng – the one-way ticket internment facility from Pol Pot’s reign of terror. There seem to be four things that one can see in Phnom Penh: The aforementioned, the Russian Market and the Royal Palace. The drivers offer up this menu like a little ditty. Running the gauntlet of drivers is like passing through a forest of birds all chattering the same song.

Our hotel was depressing - one of the recommends from Lonely Planet – ostensibly charming because of its proximity to the river. A word of advice to fellow travellers: if you absolutely have to visit Phnom Penh do yourself a favour: avoid the hooker bars and shabby hotels of the Riverside – at least near Wat Phnom. I don’t know where good accommodation can be found but it ain’t here.

Phnom Penh pretty much stopped my writing until now. I felt like I fell into a shell crater and some part of my wit and words got left there. Each time I ascended to our humble room I climbed up the musty-carpeted concrete stairs with unusually high risers and short treads I thought of the short, brutish life of the common folk back in the ‘Golden Age’ of the Khmer Empire, the horrible fucking-over the Cambodians took under Pol Pot and the onerous and dysfunctional life that most citizens experience today. The way up is steep and tiring; the descent might be lethal.