It was the worst of times. It was the worst of times.
We needed to idle a few hours away before we left Phnom Penh. We walked to nearby Wat Phnom where we were surprised to see a large troupe of baboons. I think they are baboons. In any case there were lots of them and they liked to play/fight with each other. The first one I saw was an old Grandpa with breasts as big as mine who was nursing a nasty bite on his tail. It looked like it needed about 50 stitches but he was not likely to get attention. Apes sure can look sad – they have ‘depressed’ locked down in the expression department. There were a dozen or so juveniles tussling and rolling around on the grass. I got the impression that they liked the attention they were getting from me pointing my camera at them because they got more aggressive and intense as I stood and clicked. It started to turn into a monkey melee so I stopped and moved on. We visited the Wat temple, got our last taste of the strange brew of Hindu-tainted Buddhism (Buddha sitting on a dragon) and then meandered back to the hotel to meet our Tuk-tuk driver.
As we sat in the tuk-tuk on our way out of Phnom Penh I felt a weight lifting off my shoulders. I had arranged to get to the airport, uncharacteristically, about 3 hours early. The poverty and prostitution, the decay and deadbeat farang and the universal decrepitude of the old city all contributed to me unease about the place. – instead of wanting to stay and contribute something I wanted to flee.
We passed huge new government buildings along the road to the airport; gleaming marble and glass castles that probably represent the squandering of international loans and empire-building bureaucrats. It would have been nice to see Ministry of Health and Welfare but these were Departments of Security, Armed Forces, Military etc. We were jockeying with other tuk-tuks, bicycles, scooters that buzzed and dithered like sparrows around the large, glossy, black SUV crows. The underclass is huge here and the canyon that separates them from the uber-wealthy is enormous. The airport is clean, modern and of a nice scale.
Truth to tell we barely scraped Bangkok this time through. I scrambled through the immense Suvarnabhumi Airport trying to get a JR Rail pass for cheap train travel in Japan – you can’t get them in Japan, only outside – Contrary to Lonely Planet info the airport office wasn’t offering them and their downtown affiliate was closed because of the civil unrest. SOL. So we caught the shuttle to a nice airport hotel. We saw soldiers in fatigues with automatic rifles idling around barricades along the highway on and off ramps but the trouble seemed to be at a great remove. Downtown Bangkok was just a yellow glow in the distance. The decision not to stay downtown was just practical – the traffic is horrendous and it would have added hours to our commute. Another shuttle returned us to Suvarnabhumi Airport in the soft, blue morning light. Easy-peasy on to the plane and off from tropical climes to spring in Japan. We had missed cherry blossom time but were still looking forward to a more Canadian climate.
Japan didn’t disappoint. We arrived late afternoon and caught a train into Tokyo from Narita. It is a pretty long trip on the Limited Express(?) which was sort of like a GO Train, stopping along the way at some but not all stations - $20 cheaper than the high-speed. The trees were beautiful in the dimming dusk. It was raining gently and the viridians, Prussian blues and Nile greens laid against a Wedgewood blue sky blending to ultramarine were like a drink of cool, fresh water to our eyes that had been looking at dry, desiccated landscapes for nearly a month. Navigation was not too difficult. The wayfinding systems of Japan are usually very well designed. They have a notoriously amazing public transportation system. One of the first things we noticed when we rose out of the subway station on our street was the near absence of traffic. Either everyone takes public transit or this place is like something out of a John Wyndham novel – Day of the Triffids or The Midwich Cuckoos. The streets are eerily quiet. The silent, sturdy Toyota taxis are common enough but compared to the swarming, honking, weaving onslaught of motorbikes, scooters, tuk-tuks, taxis, cars, bicycles, Buses etc. of Southeast Asia we felt like we had fallen into a miniature train set. Perfect little trees were everywhere. Lines are straight, everything is tidy. We were disoriented with respect to north and south so we asked a mature woman on a bike at a street corner if she could help us orient. She spoke very good English and this first encounter lulled us, temporarily, into the illusion that communication was going to be a breeze. We had no idea what we had just gotten ourselves into but we were about to find out
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