Further Adventures of the Dr. sans Charles

I have good news for fashion mavens.

Cliff will be pleased to hear that polo shirts are smart men’s businesswear in the Philippines. Such is the climate, however, that many of these shirts are hitched up to the base of the sternum, exposing the wearer’s almost always rotund belly to cool draughts.  This pot bellied look seems all the rage, an unfortunate effect, I propose, of the frightful Pinoy diet, which consists of the two major food groups meat and sugar. I wager it’s the patriotic duty of every Philippino to consume as much of the latter on all possible occasions ; all processed foodstuffs are liberally sweetened (the peanut butter gains most of its crunch from the large grits of sugar it contains); a natural product, such as water, simply not palatable until a mountain of this uncomplex carbohydrate is added. Up north the ulta-refined Manila white crystals give way to a dark brown sticky sugar, like demerara with added molasses. This is supposedly a more nutritious form, yet it too is consumed in such quantities that I can see, not far off, a diabetes type II epidemic approaching this land.

I feel not qualified to comment on the national dish Halo halo- having put off sampling it until I visit, on my last day, the world’s greatest Halo halo shop – but I can speak with authority on halo halo’s little brother, Mais con hielo. This dish I consumed in the heat of the day outside the church in Paoay. If I had realised at the time of ordering that mais was the Tagalog transliteration of maize, I may been more cautious in ordering this tub of shreaded ice topped with sugar, evaporated milk, and a few tablespoons of creamed sweetcorn.  I have to say that the sweetcorn did make a certain amount of sense in this melange, and the whole was delightfully refreshing. I look forward with anticipation to my climactic Halo halo experience. Few foods sound as enticing to my ears as yam icecream.

We flew up north to the Ilocos region, basing ourselves in Laoag, a town with little to recommend it save a leaning bell tower (a la Pisa) and a fleet of miniature goats by the riverside. It also has a charmless cenotaph erected by the townspeople in 1882 to celebrate the ending of the colonial administration’s tobacco monopoly. It is called the Tobacco Monopoly Monument and receives an average Trip Advisor score ; my favoured review (which is very hard to disagree with) complains that the monument is ‘just a pile of bricks’.

For a province at the centre of Philippine tobacco production, it is surprisingly difficult to secure cigars.  I had sampled some from this region down in Manila and found the panatellas to be of a quality well worth the three dollars I paid for them. After several questions of Laoag locals, I am directed to the city covered market and led through the subterranean stalls. Far from being assailed by the welcoming aroma of dried tobacco leaves, my nose is assaulted by the garlicky stench of longganisa, the same  local sausage the bride left overnight on the table in the pensione, to the nasal discomfort of all.  She will not be invited back. My guide leaves me at the stall of a jolly senior citizen, who produces for me a plastic bag containing what must be 200 of he shoddiest-rolled cigars I have ever seen. They smell all right, if a little spongey to the touch, so I buy a brace at eight cents each, fully aware that they will not be allowed into my country of residence.

Ilocos is Marcos territory.  The tribal propensity of humans means that the former president/dictator Ferdinand is revered by many, his daughter is ensconced as governor of Ilocos norte (provincial emblem : a hipster moustache), his son Bongbong a former mayor of Laoag and likely presidential candidate next year, his wife, the famed Imelda, still active in politics.  On a side trip we visit the Marcos’ summer house, plonked on the shores of a fake lake on which Marcos indulged his love of watersports. A few of Imelda’s dresses are there, as well as a few sets of creepy dolls that may or may not be likenesses of the former first lady, and the presidential library which consists of a disturbing number of James Clavell first editions and similar airport fiction. The most intriguing room belongs (belonged?) to Bongbong. It displays some of his early artwork (still life with jar) and an odd depiction of him as a Christian knight seated on a rearing horse, Holy book in hand.

The Marcos museum, 20 minutes away, is a shrine to Ferdinand. The exhibits -including yet more dresses and a replica pair of silk slippers Imelda wore on their fated/feted first meeting- are accompanied by hagiographic texts. We learn of Ferdinand’s humble beginnings, his outstanding defence in a famous court case, his brilliant career as House leader, and the fairytale eleven day romance of the future presidential couple.  The museum’s narrative abruptly ends, as so much in life does, with marriage ; that is, before Marcos became  president, before the unlawful detentions, the disappearances, the extravagant trips to Switzerland, martial law, the shoes, and the death in Hawaiian exile. I wonder if the new improved marcos museum being constructed next door behind hoardings congratulating the couple on their fiftieth wedding anniversary this year (no matter that half of the couple is dead) will continue the story.

Next door is Marcos’s breeze block mausoleum. It’s dark and pleasantly cool, empty save a glass display case holding an embalmed figure. Here Marcos lies awaiting resolution of a dispute over whether he should be buried in the cemetery alongside other national heroes.  He looks larger in death ; his barong – the traditional dress shirt woven from banana or pineapple leaves-  displayed  next door seems a few sizes smaller than the corpse’s uniform.  Predictably for the fetid Philippine imagination, rumours abound that the body here is not that of Ferdinand, perfectly preserved by supreme Russian embalmers, but some kind of lie-in. I have to say, being a seasoned observor of dictators’ corpses, that Ferdinand looks suspiciously waxy to my eye,  more ersatz than echt; less Vincent Price, more Paris Hilton.

The day dawns stinky as usual. Two tiny children – one named after a fictional princess from a galaxy far far away, the other in honour of the mogul-rapper’s champagne of choice – frisk and squeal in the pool. For them, taking a swim involves  splashing as many  bystanders as possible. For unfathomable reasons there is also great delight to be had in drenching those within the pool, in getting those who cannot get wetter wetter.  I no longer regret refusing their pool party invitation.

We stay at the aptly named Casablanca, a villa perched on a volcano’s rim.  It offers an expansive vista over the crater lake Tagaytay and the mini-me volcanic island Taal. Though I shall not visit Taal, I hear enticing rumours that it is an isle populated solely by donkeys.

At the end of a long driveway bordered by yellowbells is the street of Tagaytay, which is, like any other road in this country, lined by strip malls consisting of US-born fast food restaurants and chain stores. Only the swarms of chrome jeepneys shake the delusion that we are not in Kansas anymore (at least, the part of Kansas resembling Van Nuys).  We are ferried from place to place in a black mariah of a van, screened from the heat and harsh light of reality by windows of drug-dealing opacity. The occupants are entertained by never-ending renditions of “Let it go” provided by the gummy seven year old who is convinced that she is a princess. Later she will confound us all by materialising before us as an actual princess, complete with tiara and blue taffeta ruffled gown.

There is little time for sightseeing, just enough to visit the self-proclaimed “world’s most beautiful Starbucks”, just one of the many comparitors I hear on this journey ; the Philippines, it seems, has one of the planet’s ten best beaches, the eighteenth largest city, the world’s number one boxer (nobly fighting through injury to take on Floyd, thus it was an unfair contest), a basketball team ranked number two globally in the 1970s, the finest dancing bee-fronted fried chicken fast food chain, and so on. I begin to reconsider my long and passionately held belief, forged by assiduous analysis of my birthland, that only a psyche plagued by a crippling sense of inferiority can become possessed by the insatiable need to bigup itself. 

It is the day after the wedding, which took place in a thicket of mist further along the rim. Just before the bride was to arrive, the clouds rolled in, relieved themselves, and decided to hang around like unwelcome guests at a facebook party.  The red carpet was sodden, the bluewhite flower arrangements bedewed with heaven’s tears,  the trail of The Dress besmirched with mud. It was all very Alanis Morisette; a happy occasion.

The dinner took place in a magnificent villa, once a fairytale castle presided over by a seven year old princess the seven year old told me, of such a grand scale that the innocent visitor, having crossed the moat, is catapulted into a Carrolingian land of  oversized vases and the world’s largest table lamp. The six-course feast was continually interrupted by a curious custom in which the guests takeup whatever implement comes to hand and strike it continuously against the stem of a wine glass. The only way to arrest this ringing cacophony was for the bride and groom to engage in what my magazines call a PDA. How the happy couple established this causality I do not know.

On the way from Tagaytay back to Manila we head into the highlands to visit the People’s Palace in the sky, a mountain-top house built for Ronald Reagan at the request of Ferdinand Marcos. As was the case with the house Marcos built for the Pope, the intended recipient never visited.  Following the revolution, Reagan’s unfinished house was stripped by the hordes, leaving a shell occupied by puddles, skinny cats and trinket hawkers. Atop the building is an impressive array of telecommunications towers overlooked by a figure of Christ made less imperious by the Philippine custom of casting their statues in the diminutive dimensions they enjoy.

We stop for breakfast at the World’s most beautiful Starbucks. No one will be surprised to learn that this claim is the falsest of advertising.  Undispirited, we continue toward Manila to take up our ordained place in the capital’s perpetual gridlock.

Folowing an extended flight in the company of the world’s unhappiest baby,we deplane (as the delightful bureaucratic lingo has it ; luckily I prebooked my flight so I could preboard with the other protoadults). It is then a long march over damp carpet squares to checkpoint number one : Sars  and Mers. This is my introduction to the Philippino love for little bits of paper, signed in triplicate (no carbon here). I use my wiles to evade the thermometer stage, then move on to Border security (three more pieces of paper) and Customs, who, to my alarm seem not at all interested in taking the papers I wave before their faces, before doors slide apart and I ceremoniously step out, the Manila night enveloping me in a humid embrace not disimilar to having a tiger-emblazoned Warehouse microfleece blanket thrown over one’s head.

The next day is similarly stinky, the heat leavened only by a fierce thunder storm and torrid downpourlasting exactly half an hour. My trip to see Imelda Marcos’s shoes is a total bust, so I spend the day getting lost in this unruly city of 12 million souls. Aspirational statements are affixed to every cruumbling building, a better-late-than-never Newspeak reminding people of their place : “You make us special” ; “Manilla : city of a smiling future”. Some signs are more talismatic, sugesting thatt the mere act of embelishing your jeepney with a sign proclaiming a dispuable fact – ‘Jesus is Lord’ – is enough to safeguard you on these treacherous streets.

My brother comes to collect me from my hotel in the supposed redlight district and we drive to the nice part of Tondo, a district notorious for a deprivation and criminality unsavoury even by Manila standards. The house is crammed full of icons, both conventionally religious (Christ on a donkey) and consumerist (purple-haired Troll). Here I taste a wild range of fruits, joined at the brocaded table by the largest cockroach ever seen.

In front of the NBA, the man of the house launches into an extended monologue on the career of Manny Pacquiao, a poor boy who slugged his way up from the ghetto to global fame and untold riches, via the requisite period of excesive living – of gambling, of alcohol, of women – then the necessary contition, the whitling of hubris, to the man we know today :  the humble, devout man of both family and the people.  An inspiring tale just made out over the clatter of oscilating fans.

Across the road, the neighbours are preparing their cocks for this afternoon’s entertainment. Two roosters are placed in cages on the sidewalk, their positions adjacent to one another in the oppressive heat seemingly designed to rile the two parties into a unneighbourly frenzy. This is not enough, so, upon removing the fowls from their prisons, the handler inserts a finger up each unfortunate bird’s anus. Now the cocks are mad, ready to take their existential disillusionment out on the nearest bird. The remainder of the scene takes place behind iron gates, thus rendering me unable to provide further commentary on this Geertzian episode beyond the observation that there is a lot of noise.

A stroll through the neighbourhood is in order.  Next door at the funeral parlour a ten day-long observation is taking place ; a chalked sign reads : Silence. Mass in progress.  This is a squat area.  Houses are two stories at most.  Perhaps zoning rules militate against the thin lofty residences we saw in Vietnam, though something tells me, as I wander past many a breezeblock encroachment sprawling across the pavement, that Manila’s denizens may not be overly deferential to building regulations.

The black Nazarene is a life scale statue of Christ, schlepping the cross through Jerusalem’s streets. In the nineteenth century the basilica in which it was housed caught fire, the blaze  miraculously sparing the statue but not without turning what was a regular Jesus of Caucasian complexion black.  The result is like an accidental counterpart to one of my favourites, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. As such it demands full photographic documentation. It is only after I have undertaken a lenfgthy shoot that someone informs me that the wheeled Jesus I  am snapping is a replica. The original stands at the alter inside the church, currently overseeing a massive mass to an audience of fans, so far away from an apostate like me that it is smaller than the crude figurines of the Black Nazarene being hawked outside.

So much to say on one’s last day in a familiar land.  As the sun sinks below the lofty Mornington mansions, the light – which never has much time for me anyway – simpers off to a farflung corner, surrendering these undulating hills to Winter’s icy digits.  It’s a short walk to Charles’ abode, a neatly maintained grassy mound fronted by an enormous circular door adorned with giant knocker.  Cherubic faces – giggling like juvenile Aryans at the climax of the Day of the Locust – press themselves against the windows of the neighbouring Kohanga Reo.  Mercifully, there is no kite-flying.

There is only so long one can stand in uffish thought before entertaining the possibility that one is being ignored.  The resounding thump of brass on MDF elicits no response ; no snort of an old soul ripped from reverie, nor groan as the weary carcass is hoisted from its lazyboy, no audible shuffling over Matai boards, nor hurried tying of dressing gown masked by cantankerous utterances – not a sound from the mound.  I wonder if the householder has again thrown himself ‘neath the bed, possessed as he is, poor soul, of a mortal fear of the uninvited caller.  Uncharitable thoughts dispelled, I wander around the exterior of the residence, admiring in passing the superior workmanship lavished on the least deserving of window frames.

The interior is cast into darkness by fustian drapes, save one small unsheathed window.  Through this porthole I peer.  Amidst the dinginess I spy a lumpish figure ensconced in a massive winged chair upholstered in an unfortunate grandmotherly fabric.  The wheezing is unmistakably Charles’s.  On an occasional table by his side rests a long-stemmed meerschaum, still smoking, beside a splayed copy of that classic No rest for Biggles.  I stifle an ill-judged guffaw.  His fingers, interlaced on his heaving belly, tap-tap a gentle tub-thumping rhythm, a sure sign that Charles should not be wrenched from his somatic adventures, lest one be prepared to endure his wrath.  I don’t like him when he is angry.

It seems that this is not the occasion for further adventures.  Charles has found contentment in the armchair, the half-drained glass of port, the half-eaten Welsh rarebit, the tiny lapdog asleep on the rug before the embers.  This time I shall have to venture alone.

And so it is.  Tomorrow : the Philippines

• Final post, final night (bar Bangkok) on this adventure.  Half cigar in hand under a harvest moon, audience to a wondrous frog chorus – a croaking fugue, call and response – I am compelled to reflect.  What has been gained, what lost (save an out-of-date Samsung), what has been learned in these past few weeks?  And why, indeed, do we conceive of life – essentially a mysterious process-  as a teleological narrative, a journey towards some form of enlightenment?  Nonchalantly, in reply I toss : the strange beauty of the natural world, the studied cruelty of humans…but then Charles returns, turning on the kettle, switching  on the Fox Crime channel,  and any pretence of profundity evaporates.  So, here are the highlights :
• Best beer : Beer Lao, ice cold at Rikitikitavi, Kampot
• Best museum : War Remnants, Ho Chi Minh City
• Biggest mistake :  Plastic bags and SUVs (as usual)
• Best cocktail : Capirihana, Khmer root, Kampot
• Best breakfast : Orchid hotel,  Hue
• Best meal : Banh Mi,  Hoi An
• Least successful beggers : the children of Cheoung  EK, who stand outside the Killing Fields’ fence, humming at tourists contemplating genocide, before dispersing when a security guard on bicycle appears.
• Best building (religious) : Bayon temple, Angkor Thom
• Best building (derelict) : Grand palace hotel, Bokor
• Best building (civic) : Presidential palace, Ho Chi Minh City
• Best preserved dead guy : Ho Chi Minh, Ho Chi Minh City
• Most tedious moment : Charles lecturing me on the internal combustion engine
• Best coffee : Cocobox, Hoi An (espresso only)
• Most annoying tuktuk drivers : Phnom Penh
• Best juice : Banana
• Best fruit : Dragon
• Best tourist : tatooed, bald Geordie
• Most disquiet : Big pigs in small cages on their way to slaughter bundled into a pickup in the hot hot sun
• Best TV channel (English) : News Asia
• Best newspaper (English) : Phnom Penn Post
• Worst A pop song : Sexy lady, Cambodia (sample lyric : Sexy Lady, put your hand on my hair)
• Best snorkelling : Koh Chang
• Most beautiful bride : a certain Alex
• Most tactile sales assistants : hawkers in massage alley, Siem Reap
• Worst stench : Crab wharf at Kep, midday
• Most polluted waterway : canal in Phnom Penh, sluggish green goo sprinkled with fizzing black chunks of lord knows what
• Best animal : the macaque in Angkor who did not hiss at me
• Most telling moment : Jocular chap in Can Tho, slapping Charles’ belly, addressing him as ‘Big monkey’
• Most useless item of clothing packed :  a fleece top, brought on Charles’ advisement that “it will be a little chilly”
• Most embarrassing moment : My Kitchen Rules, New Zealand on national Cambodian television
• Most convenient toilet : anywhere in Cambodia, especially city walls in Phnom Penn for tuktuk drivers, and any treed area for women (to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum : ” I love the outdoors : it’s one big toilet”)
• Weight lost : I don’t want to talk about it
• It is with a heavier heavy heart I return to unreality.  I would like to thank all readers and the legions of commentators who have added to, folded, moulded and warped this blog into the enviable shape you see before you.  And to Charles, who has declined every request to set the record straight, I offer my sincerest appreciation.  Long may he prosper.

 

ON day two in Kampot, world capital of pepper, we hire scooters for an excursion up Bokor, a friendly peak 1080 metres above the sea.  Bokor sits within the eponymous Bokor National Park, supposed habitat of elephants, gibbons, bears and other fauna we don’t see.  Atop the peak is the Bokor hill station, a resort established in the 1920s as a refuge from Phnom Penh’s summer swelter but now abandoned.  An exceedingly wealthy company intends to turn Bokor into a city of 100,000 ; a gauche casino  (entirely empty of gamblers a German tourist tells us) has been plonked in a hotel car park, and the concrete skeletons of apartments-to-be  litter the peak, but generally  the development is proceeding at a sluggish Cambodian pace, leaving much of the area unmolested in its ghostly splendour.  The rosy result of this inexorable ravage of the capitalist spirit is that the notorious Bokor road, the construction of which saw 900 lives expended at the beginning of the 20th century, has been replaced.  The resulting road must count amongst the smoothest in Cambodia (Kampot, an unreliable but plausible guidebook tells me, invented the pothole).

The retreat of the French colonial classes left behind a Catholic church and a splendidly spooky hotel.  The grand casino hotel, constructed 1925, reopened in the 1960s by an unduly optimistic Cambodian government, is a concrete shell, stripped of its furnishings, down to the tiles from the floor, bathroom tiles, and (supposedly) wooden door frames.  It lacks the sublime aspect of the Khmer temples – the terror, the awe before the infinite- but it represents just as cogently the folly of humankind’s futile attempts to grasp immortality.  We find one bathroom that has been spared the iconoclasts’ wrath; the plumbing has gone, but the walls are sheathed in a modernist pebble dash of tiles. It appears that the Khmer Rouge, whose last refuge, as late as 1990, was Bokor, laid down their chisels to preserve the solitary ensuite as a shrine to a bourgeois age it strove to eradicate.

[Grand Palace Casino Hotel – then and now. Stock images, as Charles sent me only pictures of beaches]

The descent of Bokor’s slopes is perilous.  We ride through banks of freezing mist that move at andante speed, with barely 10 feet of visibility.  Some of us fail to moderate our driving to account for the hairy conditions and subsequently leave the road for a violent encounter with the gravelly hard shoulder.  The Buddha with the charming animal statues arrayed before him is barely visible, but  we abide, cruising the final few hundred feet in sunlight.

When we return to the hotel, glances in looking glasses (inadvertent on my behalf) confirm that the cruel sun, with barely a thought given to the SPF50 we slapped on ourselves, has scorched our skin.  Charles – red-faced, lobster-like – blusters about the inadequacies of skin protection, while I set out to find some soothing lotion.  The so-called supermarket (for Kampot, despite being Cambodia’s fourth largest city, is still a small town of 40,000) stocks a large number of skin products.  I choose the only one that does not promise to whiten my skin (I’m white enough already).

The trip to Ko Kong, near the Thai border, is farcical – whether by design or accident we may never know. It is difficult to distinguish between ineptitude and misfortune in Cambodia ; all I know is that the goings on are shrouded with mendacity. The first comical moment occurs when, after leaving Kampot almost an hour late, two French tourists enquire as to whether the minivan is going to Phnom Penh, which of course it is not, heading, as it is, in precisely the opposite direction.  The woman tourist, after admonishing a fellow passenger for laughing at the whimsy of fate (“What is funny?” in an Allo allo accent), produces a ticket for Sihanoukville, claiming that she confirmed several times with the issuer her preferred destination.  Evidently the couple failed to read the ticket, which was sending them back to the same place whence they had just arrived.  The van executes a wild u turn and returns to Kampot, where the French tourists will have to stay another night, as there is only one bus a day to the capital.

As it turns out, the Gallic unfortunates were the lucky ones. The driver races to make up for lost time, and deposits us at some dusty one street town, promising that a connecting ‘big bus’ will arrive shortly to take us on to Ko Kong and destinations further.  After half an hour of persistent harassment from vendors hawking goods no one wants, another minibus appears. The driver calls out ‘Ko Kong’ and we load our bags onboard.  Unfortunately pasenger numbers have been swelled by further dropoffs and it becomes apparent that there are too many people to fit on the bus.  Again I show the driver and his agent our ticket and they announce “another bus”, so Charles and I surrender our seats and remove our baggage to stand on the roadside with some others.  The packed van sits, engine running, baking in the sun for a further 20 minutes while urgent discussions, punctuated by phone calls, are held between the driver and agent.  The driver then tells us to get on board, ignoring our protestations that there is insufficient room. The agent announces that there is no other bus, that there never was another bus, nor a ‘big bus’ for that matter.  Requests that the company supply another mode of transport to Kampot for ticket holders are refused, on the dubious grounds that there are no taxis, private cars fir hire, or tuktuks in this dreary town.  Charles relents and squeezes on board, forced to perch on a metal cashbox, backtofront, between driver and passenger seat. The battle now lost, I now join the sardines, sitting half on a seat, half on thin air, jammed against the sliding door.

It turns out the Cambodians were correct : you can fit 14 tourists and all their accoutrements, including a guitar, into a hiace van.  Despite being not British, something of the Dunkirk spirit possesses the travellers, who break into shaky renditions of La Marseillaise and share mouldy scones, tepid water and tales of travelling misfortune in the stifling conditions.  After three hours we make it, cocyxes permanently damaged, to Ko Kong, a similarly uninspiring settlement, moods alleviated only by a cold shower and 50 cent beer served in frosted handles.

The beds are rubber, the air conditioning fierce, unwanted nocturnal visitors rap on Charles’ door, offering unsolicited services.  Tomorrow is another country.

FROM Phnom Penh to Siem Reap it’s a mere six hour boatride up the Tonle Sap river into Tonle Sap itself, the largest body of fresh water in South East Asia.  One can sit in the suffocating cabin of the desultorarily converted barge, a narrow space with unopening windows, packed with around 70 tourists, aerated only by one feeble fan at the front ;  or clamber upstairs and precariously perch on the cabin’s roof.  Neither option is without its risks. Stay below and chance falling into a stupor by inadvertently eavesdropping on pony-tailed, washed-up wrinkled hippies’ desperate attempts to relive the Cambodian follies of their decade of peace and love ; sit uptop and suffer the worst sunburn of your life.  Charles opts for the latter.

Aside from offering the pleasurable sensation that one is embarked on a Conradian pilgrimage, the river portion of the journey presents varied sights to distract attention from the whiff of sizzling flesh.  Birdlife has returned in the form of waders, cormorants, swifts and stilt-like birds. Flocks of terns compete for fish with the thousands of humans who subsist on the Saps : Vietnamese in their floating villages, Cambodians in their on-shore dwellings.   These buildings, taking account of the lake’s propensity to swell to five times its size in the rainy season, develop the traditional Khmer stilted house, which raises the living area above ground to create an open working space beneath. Here, some of the houses sit on stilts twenty feet high.

The waters are dotted with pieces of wood, which, attached to submerged nets, are used as floats.  As we move upriver and the fishing becomes more intensive, the floats appear in a greater variety of colours and materials. Timber seemingly cribbed from a building site gives way to brightly painted wooden floats ; these in turn are superseded, as we approach the more upwardly mobile sectors of the lake, by gaudy aerosol cans – Pledge and Raid scrape along the bottom of the boat.

Siem Reap literally means ‘Thais defeated’. It has only been Cambodian territory for about 150 years. Its famous temples are witness to the contested status of this region, an area of flux in which Hindu temples become Buddhist places of worship, buildings constructed as vast monuments to one mighty civilisation, the Khemer, are sacked by another, witnesses to the divine favour granted to humanity, are left in ruin, lost to natural forces, and towering structures representing a divine realm dwelt in by gods are given over to that most temporal of activities : the hawking of trinkets.

The first day we take the advice of locals and hire a tuktuk to take us to Bayon temple. Travelling down Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, the wind whips from Charles’ head the porkpie hat for which he forked over too many dong all those weeks ago. Barely a word of protest is uttered, no frantic attempts to get the driver to turn around, no cursing of the tuktuk fates. Is this a new, mellow Charles, I wonder? I promise we will scan the road on the way back in the hope of finding it, but secretly I suspect, if we spot it at all, it will have been utilised by a monkey as a toilet, hence unwearable.
Bayon is really all we can manage in the heat and the few hours we have. A portion of Angkor Wat, the largest religious building in the world, is attempted, but the place is too crowded and there is a fat German in a salmon robe harassing a young wedding couple and their guide on the promenade. “I’m a monk!”, he expectorates, “you can’t touch me. I’m filming you”, he blusters, holding aloft his iPad.

Bayon is similarly infested by humanity. Signs asking visitors to respect the sanctity of the place are ignored by the hordes, who cackle and shriek their way through the holy piece, stopping every few steps to extend a selfiestick and immortalise themselves. One tourist even shuffles me out of the way of his selfie, lest I inadvertently photo-bomb his narcissistic display.
This continual need to assert the self, to snap oneself, to photograph one’s companion posed sultrily beneath a thousand year old lintel, shaping with two fingers an absurd V sign (Korean for lucky, I hear), seems inimical to the surroundings. Here the gods dwelled on earth. It is a place in which the self is obliterated before the vastness of the divine, a site in which the individual ceases to be. It is, in other words, a blessed world in which the selfie does not exist.

The courtyard of Bayon is full of heaps of stones, parts of the temple that have not yet been reassembled. At first I thought the small piles, three or four stones high, were a constructed by devout Buddhists, for I am sure I have seen such towers throughout my travels. While in repose in Bayon, however, contemplating the heaps like a Wordsworth before the ruined Tintern Abbey, I witnessed a couple, both clothed in those sartorially-challenged elephant pants beloved of tourists (so-called, I suspect, not because their designs typically feature pachyderms, but because the pants can only look good on an elephant) create such a tower, take a selfie, then move on.

It is hard to tell how much reconstruction has taken place and some authorities, such as the eminent Dr. Charles, doubt the wisdom of any attempt to resurrect the temples, arguing instead that these sites should have been left as ruins, overrun with jungle.

I disagree, despite counting myself amongst those possessed of a romantic disposition, that noble community who spies great beauty in the majestic ruin.

A few days on we return to the temples, taking in more of Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm (where Lara Croft raided tombs), Angkor Wat again, and several other sites. Phimeanakas’ (four-sided) pyramid is scaled, though the apex sadly lacks the golden pavilion once inhabited by a nine-headed snake who transformed itself into a woman, demanding daily sexual congress with the King, lest the Angkor empire fall into ruin.
For his excursion we hire Chinese bicycles, ignoring the locals warnings about the foolhardiness of the venture. This proves a capital choice. Two wheels give a freedom of itinerary, the chance to stop at will to chat to the monkeys, an opportunity for much needed exercise, and a means to avoid being constantly harassed by tuktuk drivers, whose faces uniformally drop when deprived of the opportunity to yell tuktuk at any passing non-Cambodian.
Their silence is of great comfort to Charles, who to date has taken personally every tuktuk driver’s request, politely taking time to decline each offer with a friendly explanation of why their offer is being declined, a process he follows at every street corner in every town, before, the constant demands of affability proving too much, he snaps, barking at the poor driver to desist. I, on the other hand, ignore the offers and remark upon the apparent male underemployment in this land. Every block of every street is lined by tuktuks, in every one of which lies a driver, either in repose or tapping furiously on his phone. Acknowledging their unhappy circumstance, I still consider their business plan seriously flawed. Surely, if I had need of a tuktuk, I would hail or approach one?, I ask. Even more flawed, perhaps fatally so, is the fact that all most every driver will attempt to charge foreign passengers several times the going rate for a ride, hardly a strategy that encourages uptake of the service.

Outside one temple complex, we are harrangued by sellers. In exchange for one bamboo bracelet I don’t want, which is balanced on my shoulder because I refuse to accept it (“For your wife. Do you have a wife? I find you wife”), I am obliged to enter a dark stall full of woven goods. “This is for your table”, she says, holding up a purple cloth embroidered with a gold Angkor Wat. “I have no table”, I half-truthfully replied. “No. It is for your wall. Don’t tell me you don’t have walls”. Despite the clever sales patter, I am in no mood to purchase, so I cannily turn the conversation around to a dog I spot in the shop’s corner, stuck in that pose – back paw scratching ear- typical of all Cambodian dogs. “What’s his name?”, I ask (for it is obviously a male, desexing of domestic animals being an alien practice here). Following a pause, during which the young woman looks at me incomprehensibly, she sets me straight : “dogs don’t have names”.

Readers may be aware that one of the reasons I am in Cambodia is to attend a wedding. I shall go into no details on the nuptials as the event will no doubt be the focus of an upcoming well-attended Knowledge Sharing session presented by one of the participants. I do, however, feel obliged to announce that sometime during the hens’ night – as a result of general sloppiness or nefarious activity, I know not which – I misplaced my telephone. Henceforth my only means of communication with the outside world – save a message or two via a reluctant Charles – is via the blog. All photographs in this post have been kindly supplied by Charles. And for this, I truly apologise.

The first pool of the tour is in Phnom Penh. A bracingly unheated finity pool, it lies adjacent to a grand hotel, once the US embassy, now cunningly called the White House Mansion. Outside, serene palms frame the three-story Ionic columns, screening the privilged guests from the chaos that is the capital of the Kingdom of Cambodia. Many an hour is wasted lying on loungers by its waters, nibbling pastries from the superb in-house boulengerie.
The capital’s top sights commemorate genocide, though, as one display mentioned, this is a charge prosecutors have found almost impossible to prove against those responsible for the killing of millions. First stop on this grisly outing is Choeung Ek, just one of the three thousand odd soi disant ‘Killing fields’ of Cambodia. It is reached by a lunar road that runs past bucolic scenes : naked children waving frantically, bony cattle lying in oceans of plastic refuse, a soaped-up scooter lovingly cleaned with a toothbrush, an elderly man seated outside his house stroking a rooster on his lap.
Authorities think around 9000 people were killed at Choeug Ek, which was in its day little more than a truck stop accompanied by a few huts. Today it has a massive stuppa filled with the selected bones (skull and major arm/leg bonrs only – there was no room for pelvises or vertebrae) of the disintetted. The skulls are stacked on about four of the stuppa’s seven levels (a sacred number in Buddhism), alowing the casual viewer’s entire field of vision, should she look up, to be dominated by these momento mori. The bottom layer features a collection of the instruments of death – iron rods, hoes, bamboo canes, sythes – the executioners didn’t waste bullets on their victims ; resourcefully, they even utilised the shard-like protrusions from a nearbye sugar palm to slit throats. The forensically-minded visitor can match these tools with the fractures visible on the skulls to determine the cause of death.

Not all the mass graves have been excavated. It has been decided that many will remain undisturbed. Nonetheless, the rainy season often brings remains to the surface. Indeed, rags are strewn about the site (the Khmer Rouge cadres initially stripped their victims but soon found the volume too onerous and took to burying clothed corpses), and there are several signs politely requesting visitors not to step on bones.
Perhaps the most disturbing exhibit in this monstrous theme park of murder is the Killing tree. Now a melancholy site, festooned with a rainbow of cloth bracelets, this tree was the surface on which many an infant had its brains dashed. The mass grave next to it contained the corpses of over 160 mothers and children.

All these macabre activities took place at night, to the sounds of revolutionary songs broadcast by a tinny speaker hoisted in a banyan tree. Apparently, the locals had no idea what was going on.
It is recommended, to conclude the dreadful double header, that after Cheoung Ek one visits Tuol Selung Musem of Genocide. For readers interested in the history of (state) institutions, I can confirm that Goffman and Foucault were correct in pointing out the essential similarities of institutions – from prisons, to monasteries and hospitals. For it was seemingly easy for the Khemer Rouge to transform Tuol Selung from a high school into another site of inarceration, a prison for enemies of the regime.
The three classroom blocks housed inmates and rooms of interrogation. Large rooms were joined by crudely sledge-hammered doorways and lined with tiny cells barely 3×6 feet, constructed in the most shoddy manner imaginable – the first floor from poorly-aligned bricks barely held together by messy morter, the second from flimsy wood.

The yard has a wooden structure from which originally hung rings for students’ gymnastics.  Having no need for edcucation, neither physical nor scholastic (despite or because of the astonishing fact that most of the genocidal rulers were educated at elite French universities), the Khemer Rouge suspended their victims from this arch by their arms, tied behind their back. After this, they were dunked upside down in a large jar of putrid water.
This torture, and many more, such as waterboarding (which is torture, pace Cheany), were illustrated by a series of paintings in the naive style hanging throughout the complex. I could find no information on the artist, and sadly the gift shop stocked no reproductions.
Nonetheless, these fine paintings were another example of the Cambodians fearless documentation of atrocity. The Vietnamese had a similar bent, in their relentless parading of photographs of corpses, the dioxin deformed, the testimonies of victims. Indeed, some of the prison’s most interesting exhibits are the handwritten confessions of the accused, penned after bouts of torture, which reveal fantastical tales of CIA and KGB infiltration of Kampuchean society.
The Vietnamese and Cambodian attrocity records differ in intention from the superficially similar activities of the persecutors. The former is a witness, the latter a bureaucratic necessity. The Khmer Rouge authorities recorded the names of all those transported from Tonul Sep to Cheoung Ek. In the prison are grim room after room of mugshots of the incarcerated, many of whom were children (kill the whole family and there will be no one to seek revenge was the logic), some of whom are unaccountably smiling.
The top floor of one of the blocks – sheathed in razor wire to prevent prisoners leaping to their merciful death – house exhibits on legal proceedings against surviving Khemer Rouge members. The prison’s governer, Duch, admitted responsibility for the killings , torture and assorted atrocities of thousands, and was jailed. As you may recall, Pol Pot died while under house arrest before facing trial.  Four senior government members (including a Minister of Commerce, a curious post in a government that abolished money) were sent to trial in 2007. They rejected all charges levied against them, using the defence that they are not responsible for the actions of their subordinates (a sort of inverted Nurnberg defence). The exhibit was a few years old but it seems these trials have not concluded.  Several members of the Khmer Rouge are currently in government.

In fact, the whole story of Cambodia following the 1979 ousting of the Khemer Rouge by the Vietnamese and others is a depressing tale of mendacity, of ducking and diving, of responsibilities shirked and evil acts rewarded, on behalf of both individuals and the international community.
That night we visit a steakhouse of dinner, but end up eating small dishes of Laotian vegetarian food. Perhaps the day’s sights have caused Charles to lose his appetite for flesh.
The restaurant houses a cigar room, which I insist on occupying. The owner, an American possessed of an untraceable accent, sells me a $6 Dominican Republic corona. For the first time in my life I am smoking inside and, let me tell you, it is immensely civilized. No sudden gusts to extinguish the flame, no precipitation to rain on the parade. Joining us are the owner, a hefty Sicilian reminiscent of Stromboli (not the volcano), his Cambodian wife, and a mysteriously cool woman of uncertain origin, who bravely insists on cigarettes. The conversation is cordial and almost exclusively takes place amidst the attendant males, as is, I suppose, traditional for discussions held in a fug of cigar fumes. The following evening I return alone to collect a Nicaraguan cigar (my first from that land, but the host recomends it) with which to mark the imminent nuptials.