Khmer opera has everything I’ve always wanted in a performance: Comedy, drama, acrobatics, costumes and good kung fu. The play started with ornate shadow puppetry about two monkey brothers quarreling. When the action got very intense, the monkey brothers were replaced with live acrobats who had a fast and funny monkey style knife fight. The mayhem causes the brothers’ girlfriend to leave them for a Prince with a calmer temper.

We sat in the front row with a dog and some seven year old Khmers piled against the stage in front of us. The Khmer kids pointed at our beer and made drinking motions, so I gave them our water bottle. They tore into it like candy and realized I had accidentally bought the “fancy” water with the French label.
After much debate amongst themselves, they decided to leave me a little water at the bottom and found the English to say “sorry”. One of the children then adopted me and took it upon himself to explain every scene in the opera to me… in Khmer. I’m sure I got all the nuances.

At one point in the opera, the Prince’s warriors filed out and begin showing their martial prowess with Khmer boxing and acrobatic strength. Flips and backsprings turned into swift kicks and spinning elbows. Human pyramids were built and destroyed and then the magical Apsara girls appeared.

The girl’s dance was Indian with tight mincing footwork. Their arms and hands moved about independently from each other like snakes catching butterflies. Decorated smiling faces weaved back and forth and they folded effortlessly through the increasingly aggressive boys’ dance. The warriors worked harder to impress the girls until they dripped with sweat. Finally, the girls chose two surprised musicians from the orchestra to be their consorts.

At the finale, The Prince battles the two reconciled (but furiously jealous) monkey brothers to the death in an aerial knife and staff fight. Just as the prince and his warriors are overwhelmed, the ever present Apsara girls sprout weapons of their own. The graceful Apsaras’ dance turn out to have been an empty-handed sword dance. Suddenly armed, the girls help the prince defeat the monkeys without altering a step of their fluid moves.

Moral: Do not give monkeys knives. Join a band.

Many days we’d just hang out with the family who owns Sunday Guest House, mostly with Gech, the oldest daughter. Gech is really sharp, loves her job, dresses Japanese and practices origami. Her younger brother is 13, goes to Khmer, Chinese, Japanese and English school and is the best student in each. The father just bought a Korean digital video camera, which never leaves his hand. They go on weekend trips in their private automobile. The guest house thing has really worked out for the family.

One night the Sunday family took us and a retired Australian couple out to dinner a few miles outside the city. We drove to a bunch of huts on stilts with hammocks. We ate beef kebabs, papaya sum tom, corn on the cob, and sucked water from coconuts while we watched the sunset and talked.

Later we went out for beers with the Australians where we met Patrick. Patrick is an ex-UN worker who’s started a private Development oriented IT/Polling/Statistical Analysis services company. He hopes to expand into providing “real Computer Science degrees”. We stayed up late trying to keep up with his Irish liver and listening to grizzled Cambodian stories. In 1991 he came here and there were 8 year olds on motorcycles with RPGs and AK-47’s. He says the current King of Cambodia enabled Pol Pot to come to power and managed to profit from his downfall as well. Patrick thinks there’s no foreign capital here because of a “misconception about the level of corruption.”

Another night up late talking with Patrick, an SUV hit two motos and flipped over right in front of us. Working from the wrong set of reflexes, I jumped up and ran over to see if anyone needed help. Patrick later informed me that this happens several times every night and its best to just not get involved. He said two months ago a similar thing happened a couple blocks up the street and the moto driver was killed. The SUV driver was the nephew of the prime minister. The nephew screamed at the gathering crowd of Khmers, but they wouldn’t go away. So he reached into his car for his machine gun and sprayed them with bullets. Three people died and it took three weeks before the police would arrest him. It remains to be seen if the nephew will be charged with anything.

Patrick needs old computer donations in the hundreds. If you can swing such a thing, contact me. He’s also hiring. Here’s some photos of Phnom Penh.

We woke up early the day before to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat and stayed up drinking with some Japanese kids. Sleep deprived, we got up before dawn, again, to catch a ride down lake and river from Siem Reap to Phenom Penh.
I realized that I had food poisoning about the same time we figured out that we only had “cling to the roof” tickets on the speedboat. While trying to find a way to nap where my stomach didn’t hurt and I wouldn’t fall off the boat I burned myself pretty good on a smokestack. A few hours later, lake sick, sun scarred and deaf from engine noise we arrived at our guesthouse in the capitol where I promptly electrocuted myself trying to turn on a fan. I stopped twitching and fell into a very deep sleep. A good day of budget travel is one where you actually get where you’re going.

Phenom Penh’s not much to look at. There’s not much pavement, people build little shacks between buildings, on top of buildings or in the street. On our first day we met a screaming old Khmer. In fractured, slurred English he told us that we should not worry about anything in Penomh Penh, that he would take care of us. Over and over he would shout: “I AM DRUNK AND FROM RHODE ISLAND!” and open up his wallet to display a Pennsylvania Drivers License and Social Security card with his picture and name on them. He was a moto driver.

In Thailand the most pervasive form of transport is the tuk-tuk, a moto-trike with a passenger bed. No one has the capital for such an elaborate ride here. Light motorcycles/scooters (“moto”) are the transport of choice.
A typical moto ride begins with you finding a driver who will agree to your price and who can bluff you into believing he knows where you’re going. Like their counterparts in Thailand, moto drivers can’t read maps. You hop on his bike and he speeds off against the flow of the no-rules traffic. First stop is always a group of his moto buddies, whom he queries until he has directions. Next you hang on to the bike and motocross to some part of the city that is often near your intended destination.

Like in Lao, Cambodian food is like bland Thai food with lots of black pepper added to make up for flavor. You can eat good French food if you shell out $2. In the city, we tended to eat at NGO-cafes that trained street kids in French restaurant skills. The food was pricey ($3.50) but excellent.

A thousand years ago the Khmer ruled Southeast Asia and Angkor was the seat of their empire. They spent their time feeding the Vietnamese to the crocodiles, stomping on the Siamese and constructing colossal temples filled with beautiful dancers. Things change.

The Mongols and then French invaded, the American/Vietnamese war obliterated what little infrastructure there was. Then the Khmer Rouge stepped into the vacuum. They wiped out all the culture, all the intelligentsia, and maybe a quarter of the population. Eventually Vietnam rolled in and kicked Pol Pot out. The Khmers are now building up from nothing and just sort of making it up as they go. Somehow, out in the jungle, the temples have managed to survive all this.

While touring Bayan Temple I met this grinning old toothless monk who spoke French at me. All the old guys speak French and assume all Europeans do. He lead me around the temple and showed me how to pour water over a stone lingham and wash my face with it. Then he lead me to a bat cave and charged me a nickel for the use of his flashlight. Man, there were a lot of bats in there.

Photos of Angkor, Bayan, Preah Kahn and Tah Phrom

What we only started to grok in Siem Reap was how incredibly friendly the Khmers are. We found out a bit more about that in Phnom Penh…

The transition from Thailand to Cambodia at Poi-Pet couldn’t be more drastic. Cambodia is incredibly poor. The highways and most streets are completely unpaved. Many of their destroyed monuments have only been replicated with cheap plaster. There are people missing multiple limbs everywhere. The country is littered with land mines. Its really hard to rebuild a completely shattered culture when you can’t even walk around –let alone farm– without exploding. On the bright side, the signs and seeds of growth are everywhere.

Everyone on the street says “Hello!”. Moms wave their baby’s arms and teach them to say “Hello! Howareyou!” to foreigners. Everyone wants to talk to you. Not to sell you something, but to practice enough English so that they can eventually sell something. Its difficult to describe the desperation you feel here. The police want to practice their English with you. The most basic contact with you is gold. There’s a lot of begging.

As we entered Poi-Pet we saw a British kid get mobbed by street children. The people in this border town have nothing and the Brit didn’t have a good hold of his bags. He looked frightened, so I waded in to help. I found myself a rich foreigner in the middle of a public square about to fight the local youths for control of a backpack. I felt absurd, but the kids jumped away after a tap on the shoulder.

We stopped to eat at a cafe one night in the town of Siem Reap. We followed our usual practice of looking for a clean, crowded place without English signs. When we sat down we were warmly welcomed by no less than six waiters who hovered to attend to our every need. The head waiter took our order and then plunked down to practice English. He has 4 siblings living in the country, Pol Pot killed his father and he makes about $30 a month as the head waiter. That’s a good job. Average income for Cambodia is like $200 a year. A meal at a restaurant will run you $1.25.

One thing I hadn’t seen in Thailand or Laos was guys practicing fighting in the street. Khmer boxing is just like Thai boxing. When men and boys are idle (which is most of the time) they start playfully chucking knees and elbows at each other.

Tourism is a big part of the solution for this place. The area next to the famous Angkor Temples is exploding with (relative) prosperity. But foreign capital is scared. Cambodia is caught in the catch-22 of needing infrastructure and a well paid government to get tourism and capital, but that won’t happen without infrastructure and less corruption.

Here’s some photos before we get on to Siem Reap’s big draw: The Temples….

We dropped into Bangkok with severe jet lag and sent our broken gadgets on their own holiday to the technology Shangri La of Singapore.

Thailand has its lips firmly wrapped around the fire hose of American capital and tourism. The opportunity and inequality of the unchecked market are readily apparent. Bangkok is a huge sprawling city of gleaming steel and glass towers next to shanty towns. The city is an environmental disaster area of sewage and motorcycle fumes cut with the sweet stink of coconut. The air quality ranges from eye-stinging on a good day to choking on a bad one. American corporations control the real money, but the rich locals are ethnic Chinese. They parade around in their bling and mercedes like gangsters. The Thai’s, however, are a happy and optimistic people.

Thailand is a constitutional monarchy. A hard thing to understand is that most everyone uncynically loves the king. Every business and home has a small shrine to the royal family. If you go to a Thai restaurant at home, it will too. The king is Thailand, he’s Thai pride. He’s given direct credit for all Thailand’s success. Thailand is an economic jewel in the region and Bangkok is the only fully modern city. The king’s not a bad guy either, as far as royalty goes. Taxi drivers crack up with pity whenever we mention that we don’t like our head of state.

There’s no gay movement here, because there’s no anti-gay establishment to move against. This is most readily apparent in the large number of girl-boys. One out of every 20 or 30 guys just feels that way and dresses that way. While its not necessarily “normal”, nobody seems to give them crap. Looking around, it gives you a better perspective on what the sociological situation probably is in the west.

To kill some time we went to see the fights at Lumphini Stadium. The guys came out and just lit into each other with knees and elbows. They even manage to get off these fast kicks to the neck sometimes. People bet like mad all around the ring while live musicians accompany the action. A reverse spinning elbow makes a hell of a sound when it hits someone’s head. We got to see several weight classes fight and a couple fellas get put to sleep before their bedtime. Our brutal appetites satisfied, we high tailed it out of the city.

We went to the quaint little island of Koh Samet while we waited for our stuff to be repaired. We got some much needed time relaxing on the beach. While we were there, the festival of Floating Lights took place and we found a little old woman in town to cook delightful local dishes for us.

When our equipment came back from its holiday, we zipped south without checking the weather. Huge mistake. The monsoon was spitting out storms from the Philippines every three days. This sucked a lot because we got trapped for a long time on the big islands of the south, which are nasty tourist traps. Eventually the storms abated, we had some calm seas and our Thai time had a very happy ending.

Diving was as otherworldly as I hoped it would be. All of a sudden we could fly and were amongst thousands of brightly colored animals of every size and shape. Many of the animals were killing each other, which greatly added to the entertainment. On our first dive a trigger fish attacked our instructor. This pie sized blue fish with gold stripes and large bony beak leaped out of the coral and went nuts on his fins. You cannot beat diving for wildlife observation. I could spend all day down at 18 meters just watching the infinitely varied kaleidescope of eels and anemones, fish and more fish.

Our mission accomplished, we lusted for more new experiences. On the cheap, we took boat and bus back up to Bangkok. With very little sleep, our transport dropped us in the backpacker ghetto at six in the morning. We stumbled over to a travel agent and asked how to get to Cambodia. She rushed us on to a waiting mini-bus and we continued our journey without rest…

Island photos.

We’re back in Indochina!

Southeast Asia is poor by Western standards. A dollar buys you a lot. English has become the lingua franca of the region. Many signs have English and nearly everyone can speak a little. US dollars are an acceptable second currency most places, and preferred as the first currency in countries where local note values fluctuate rapidly.

Southeast Asia does not give a gecko’s ass about Western “intellectual property”. Nobody “licenses” Windows. The moment a movie hits the theaters (or before that, the net) its on everyone’s television screens, and in the store on VCD for a dollar. Knockoff brands of clothing, bags, watches and sunglasses with big name trademarks abound.

The careful, pleasing design of European cities is absent. Urban areas are new, mostly built in the last 15 years. They’re thrown up in the American utilitarian (cheap!) style but with inadequate infrastructure. The poor just set up shacks between buildings. Smaller towns are able to retain nice traditional architecture. There’s not enough money for the tight rules of the west to be enforced, so everything is pretty loose.

Everything possible is done to save precious money. All lights are florescent. There are even more motorcycles and scooters than in Europe, cars are comparatively rare. Drinks on the street are served in small plastic bags with a straw because cups are too expensive.

The animals are different. On any given wall or ceiling there are a couple of geckos. I love them. They eat all the bugs, and go “cheep cheep cheep!” and “gECK-O!” Bigs ones get loud. Elephants are used as cranes and tractors. There are more colorful birds than people have found names for. Monkeys roam free in the smaller cities and there are cobras. In the wilderness there might be some tigers left. Siam has only one predominant breed of domestic cat. Burma too.

The people are small and thin. In America, I’m kinda thin. In Europe, I’m heavy. Here, I’m a giant. Every movement I make is accompanied by a duck or crouch. Doorways clip me all the time. Awnings and shoddy electrical wiring stretched over the street come to about my neck. Boats, buses and planes are cramped affairs and I can just forget about clothing. As for Mandy, her feet finally touch the ground when she sits and she buys large sized clothing.

Southeast Asia takes boxing very seriously. Its kick boxing with knees and elbows as the primary weapons and gloved hands and bare feet acting as softeners. In Burma you can head-butt. Every Sunday everybody stops and watches the big match. Everyone, boys and girls learn boxing in school. The only thing they might love more than boxing is beauty contests, which are staged on every occasion.

The countries that make up the region vary quite a bit, so I’ll get to them as we pass through…

The first thing I noticed when I got off the plane at Gatwick was the sign asking me “Please, do not assault the airport staff”. Then I saw all the signs and I was a child again. The rules were back, everything was regulated. I needed to be told when to cross the street, where to drink, and where to put my eyes: “Look Left! Look Right!”. I got told to Mind the Gap and not to loiter. “Please, do not batter the train conductors/waiters/police” was a disconcerting and frequently posted message. It wasn’t that I was fluent in the language again, its that there’s a hell of a lot of rules in London. I was constantly instructed in the very basics of human behavior. Most of the signage pleaded for me not to contribute to the massive amounts of battery.

But not to worry: London is “SAFE! Under a Watchful EYE!”. There are motorized cameras every fifty feet on every corner of every block, in every WC, and on every bus and train. I read a book about a London like this in high school.

London is caught halfway between the USA and Europe. Coming from Italy, the presence of chain stores was very noticeable. The shops in central London are painted in bold primary colors making the streets into attractive checkerboards. Stretching across the skyline, old, ornate buildings like Parliment and Westminster compliment lots of interesting modern designs. An egg shaped glass skyscraper stands out in my mind. Central London is very clean, and everyone dresses very smartly. The United Kingdom still has royalty which, when you’re there, is so ludicrous its not even funny. We got a distinct sense that London was very much unlike England as a whole.

The parks in London are spacious and beautiful. They have gardens, soccer pitches and all manner of gorgeous waterfowl. My favorite sign in the park: “Please, do not Worry the Pelicans.” Fretful birds. The soapbox orators in Hyde park make for a good back and forth. I tried to worry those guys as much as I could.

Despite the traditional cuisine being kinda, well, boiled, we did all right with food. We nibbled painfully sharp cheddar at cheese shop, snarfed enormous slices of fish and stuffed chips down after them. We also enjoyed a brief window of quality beer again. But unlike in Germany, we payed for it.

London is very expensive. Every time you move a muscle in London you hemorrhage money. Prices look just like they do in The States, except they have that tricky ‘£’ in front of them. Its all very very nice, but very obvious why its so nice. The Underground, for instance, is very nice, very clean costs $2.50 a ticket, just for Central London.

But the Museums were all free! The Tate Modern had a good selection of modern art. The British Museum has the finest ancient exhibition I’ve ever seen. Its laid out as a chronological history lesson with the archaeological objects used as examples in your detailed tour through the ancient world. I got to see spells from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Rosetta Stone, and got a first hand glimpse at the dawn of the West.

We liked London, but were really eager to stop spending so much money. So we tubed over to Heathrow and flew back to Asia…