Down an alley, I slid open a door, took off my shoes, and padded across a small foyer to an inner door. Immediately, there was the sound of flesh slapping against flesh, grunts of exertion, the noise from hundreds of pounds of wet humanity colliding. I opened the inner door and sat on a cushion on a slightly elevated platform at the back of the room, next to a chain-smoking oyakata oyakata, the boss of the Tomotsuna sumo stable. I was center stage, painfully cross-legged, at the back of the hot, low-ceilinged room, witnessing something very few Westerners had ever seen. A few feet away, about twenty gigantic, nearly naked men swayed, stretched, and flexed; they pounded their great sweaty no-necked heads against columns, pawed their bare and bandaged feet against the hard dirt floor. In the center of the room was a ring of what looked like a slightly raised hump of woven straw or hemp. A novice wrestler swept the dirt with a straw whisk broom.
The noise! Two gargantuan wrestlers faced off at center ring, crouched down, knuckles resting on the dirt . . . then . . . smack! smack! An incredible impact as two five-hundred-pound men crashed into each other at top speed, grappling, slapping with both hands, choking, striving for a hold, or leverage, momentum. Most matches were over in seconds, the winner remaining in the ring to meet one opponent after another until he was bested. The sense of bulk in the little room was overwhelming a sea of flesh and muscle confined in the cramped s.p.a.ce. Occasionally, when one of the mammoth athletes was thrown over another"s leg, he"d come spinning or tumbling right toward me, threatening to crush my spine like a bag of taro chips. A huge wrestler frog-walked on bended legs in front of me, back and forth, while at the edge of the ring a young novice, still small in size, stood in a painfully bent crouch, holding a basket of salt in outstretched arms, beads of sweat sprouting on an exertion-reddened face. Punishment? Initiation? I didn"t ask. Mr Tomotsuna, the boss, to my left and an ex-sumo wrestler himself did not emanate approachability and looked too focused on the activity in the room to disturb him with my witless questions. He hardly gave me a glance unless I was lighting his cigarette for him. Sumo wrestlers live as a family under one roof, all under the guidance and tutelage of the An incredible impact as two five-hundred-pound men crashed into each other at top speed, grappling, slapping with both hands, choking, striving for a hold, or leverage, momentum. Most matches were over in seconds, the winner remaining in the ring to meet one opponent after another until he was bested. The sense of bulk in the little room was overwhelming a sea of flesh and muscle confined in the cramped s.p.a.ce. Occasionally, when one of the mammoth athletes was thrown over another"s leg, he"d come spinning or tumbling right toward me, threatening to crush my spine like a bag of taro chips. A huge wrestler frog-walked on bended legs in front of me, back and forth, while at the edge of the ring a young novice, still small in size, stood in a painfully bent crouch, holding a basket of salt in outstretched arms, beads of sweat sprouting on an exertion-reddened face. Punishment? Initiation? I didn"t ask. Mr Tomotsuna, the boss, to my left and an ex-sumo wrestler himself did not emanate approachability and looked too focused on the activity in the room to disturb him with my witless questions. He hardly gave me a glance unless I was lighting his cigarette for him. Sumo wrestlers live as a family under one roof, all under the guidance and tutelage of the oyakata oyakata, who rigorously controls every aspect of their daily schedule and training: when they exercise, when they sleep, when they eat, what they eat. They rise early along hierarchical lines: novices first, higher ranks later. (You can distinguish rank by hairstyle.) The novices, much like kitchen interns, sweep, clean, and do household ch.o.r.es, including a.s.sisting with the cooking.
I was here to see chanko chanko, the food of the sumo wrestler. Typically, I had all the wrong ideas about what they eat. When I"d heard about chanko chanko food, I"d a.s.sumed, since we"re talking about the stuff sumo wrestlers eat in order to blow up to refrigerator-sized grappling machines of fat and muscle, that daily fare would consist of vats of fatty pork and lasagna-density starches, big gulp-sized milkshakes, Cadbury bars between meals, brick-proportioned Snickers bars, whole pullets filled with lardons of bacon and cornmeal stuffing, Grand Slam breakfasts, and endless buffets. I was wrong about this, of course. As I was wrong about these wrestlers. They are not just really, really fat guys in diapers. food, I"d a.s.sumed, since we"re talking about the stuff sumo wrestlers eat in order to blow up to refrigerator-sized grappling machines of fat and muscle, that daily fare would consist of vats of fatty pork and lasagna-density starches, big gulp-sized milkshakes, Cadbury bars between meals, brick-proportioned Snickers bars, whole pullets filled with lardons of bacon and cornmeal stuffing, Grand Slam breakfasts, and endless buffets. I was wrong about this, of course. As I was wrong about these wrestlers. They are not just really, really fat guys in diapers.
Sumo wrestlers are perhaps the most visible and obvious expression of all those dark, suppressed urges in the j.a.panese subconscious that I referred to earlier, that tiny voice inside every whipped salaryman that wants to make like G.o.dzilla (Gojira) and stomp cities flat. They are a projection of j.a.panese power, and, make no mistake, they are are powerful. Under all that carefully layered bulk, it"s pure muscle, baby. It"s like watching rhinos sparring as one fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d crashes into another, digs in low, and pushes the other guy all six hundred pounds of him straight back and out of the ring, or flips him onto his back. The momentum and the focus are so great that during practice sparring, when one wrestler fells another, or drives him out of the ring, the other wrestlers step in quickly, all yelling something that sounds like "Hesss!" indicating that the bout is over, settle down, cease fire and restraining the aggressor from further a.s.saults. You do not want to make a sumo wrestler mad at you. powerful. Under all that carefully layered bulk, it"s pure muscle, baby. It"s like watching rhinos sparring as one fat b.a.s.t.a.r.d crashes into another, digs in low, and pushes the other guy all six hundred pounds of him straight back and out of the ring, or flips him onto his back. The momentum and the focus are so great that during practice sparring, when one wrestler fells another, or drives him out of the ring, the other wrestlers step in quickly, all yelling something that sounds like "Hesss!" indicating that the bout is over, settle down, cease fire and restraining the aggressor from further a.s.saults. You do not want to make a sumo wrestler mad at you.
In old-school chanko chanko cuisine, four-legged creatures were rarely served, the idea being that sumo wrestlers who use all four limbs during a fight have lost the fight. Chicken which stand on two feet, like a good wrestler and fish were the preferred main ingredients. Mr Tomotsuna was making a soup of tuna and vegetables for lunch the day I visited a fairly sensible choice for Calista Flockhart, I thought, but hardly the bulk-inducing pigfest I"d imagined. I"d have to wait until dinner to find out more. cuisine, four-legged creatures were rarely served, the idea being that sumo wrestlers who use all four limbs during a fight have lost the fight. Chicken which stand on two feet, like a good wrestler and fish were the preferred main ingredients. Mr Tomotsuna was making a soup of tuna and vegetables for lunch the day I visited a fairly sensible choice for Calista Flockhart, I thought, but hardly the bulk-inducing pigfest I"d imagined. I"d have to wait until dinner to find out more.
The Edosawa restaurant in the sumo district is a four-story place where customers eat in private dining rooms. The walls are decorated with paintings of famous wrestlers, and the restaurant attracts a steady crowd of sumo wrestlers and former sumo wrestlers. Michiko, Shinji, and I sat down in a top-floor room, with a simmering hot pot in the center of the table. Mr Matsuoka, the owner, prepared our meal personally. Sumo wrestlers, I discovered, don"t just eat that one bowl of soup, as I"d seen them do earlier at the stable. They eat often. They sleep in between meals, and the meal is a delicious multistage operation. Essentially, we had a nabe nabe a big pot of broth into which a procession of ingredients were fed and removed, replaced by other ingredients. Platter after platter of vegetables, meatb.a.l.l.s, pork, fish, sh.e.l.lfish, and tofu arrived and were added slowly to the pot according to cooking time then transferred to our plates and consumed. The liquid was replenished from time to time as it cooked down or was ladled out, the added flavors growing more a.s.sertive over time. The less strongly flavored ingredients went in first; then, over time, things like anchovy paste were introduced. a big pot of broth into which a procession of ingredients were fed and removed, replaced by other ingredients. Platter after platter of vegetables, meatb.a.l.l.s, pork, fish, sh.e.l.lfish, and tofu arrived and were added slowly to the pot according to cooking time then transferred to our plates and consumed. The liquid was replenished from time to time as it cooked down or was ladled out, the added flavors growing more a.s.sertive over time. The less strongly flavored ingredients went in first; then, over time, things like anchovy paste were introduced.
It was a lot of fun. I"d never seen Michiko and Shinji enjoy themselves so much. It"s a family-type thing, cooking nabe nabe style, explained Michiko. At her family home, relatives might show up for a style, explained Michiko. At her family home, relatives might show up for a nabe nabe meal with different ingredients each relative bringing something and the adding and removing and serving is casual and fun, like a fondue party. Fooled by the soup I"d seen at the stable, I ate with gusto early on, not prepared for the arrival of more and more plates of raw ingredients, scarfing up scallops and pork and tasty little meatb.a.l.l.s with plenty of the hot spicy broth. Soon full, I was taken aback by the traditional ending to a meal with different ingredients each relative bringing something and the adding and removing and serving is casual and fun, like a fondue party. Fooled by the soup I"d seen at the stable, I ate with gusto early on, not prepared for the arrival of more and more plates of raw ingredients, scarfing up scallops and pork and tasty little meatb.a.l.l.s with plenty of the hot spicy broth. Soon full, I was taken aback by the traditional ending to a chanko chanko meal the addition to the remaining broth of cooked rice and beaten egg, a mixture that quickly becomes a delicious but absolutely cementlike porridge. I groaned with apprehension as Mr Matsuoka ladled out generous portions of tasty gruel, but I soldiered on, my belly straining. When the meal was over, I needed help to get up. I was the first to exit the room, and as I painfully staggered down the hall, a door slid open across the way and a large party of about a dozen well-fed and slightly drunk businessmen came tumbling out. One of them looked at me with a surprised expression of recognition. He was one of the guys I"d gotten hammered with at the yakitori joint a week earlier. The last time I"d seen him, he"d been fast asleep in his chair, his face resting on the table. meal the addition to the remaining broth of cooked rice and beaten egg, a mixture that quickly becomes a delicious but absolutely cementlike porridge. I groaned with apprehension as Mr Matsuoka ladled out generous portions of tasty gruel, but I soldiered on, my belly straining. When the meal was over, I needed help to get up. I was the first to exit the room, and as I painfully staggered down the hall, a door slid open across the way and a large party of about a dozen well-fed and slightly drunk businessmen came tumbling out. One of them looked at me with a surprised expression of recognition. He was one of the guys I"d gotten hammered with at the yakitori joint a week earlier. The last time I"d seen him, he"d been fast asleep in his chair, his face resting on the table.
"Bourdain-san!" he cried excitedly. "You crazy man chef! Where you go? What you eat next?"
Road to Pailin
I was going to the worst place on earth.
The heart of darkness.
"But what are you going to do in Cambodia?" asked the television executive, when I mentioned my destination. Not a bad question as we were, presumably, making a food show.
I had no idea.
"You should go to this place I heard about," said the TV guy, excitedly. "A war correspondent I know told me about it. It"s this town in Cambodia, Pailin; it"s in the middle of nowhere, all the way up by the Thai border. Almost no Westerners have been there. It"s a Khmer Rouge stronghold. It"s where they still live. It"s the end of the world. You"ll love it. It"s rich in gems; the streets are supposed to be littered with uncut rubies and sapphires, which is why the Khmer Rouge like it. And get this: The Khmer Rouge is in the casino business now!"
Casinos? Run by the most vicious, hard-core Commie ma.s.s murderers in history? Well, why not check it out? I thought. Satan"s Vegas: lounge acts, strippers, maybe a few new casinos surrounded by razor wire and militia. A town where anything would be possible. Lawless. A little dangerous. I liked the idea. The last outpost for international adventurers, spies, speculators, smugglers, mercenaries, and lovers of vast reasonably priced buffets. Sounded good to me. The cutting edge of extreme cuisine. What could the Khmer Rouge be serving to the legions of degenerate gamblers who were no doubt pouring into their former stronghold? What were their plans for the development of tourism? How were they reconciling their formerly stated hopes for a Stone Age agrarian Maoist Valhalla with the logistical necessities and s...o...b..z glitter of running a profitable casino?
Uncharacteristically, I read the small section in the Lonely Planet guide on Pailin: Pailin occupies a curious position as a semi-autonomous zone in which leaders of the former Khmer Rouge can seek haven, avoiding the long arm of international law. There is little of interest to the tourist here, unless you know a bit about gemstones or like hanging out with geriatrics responsible for ma.s.s murder. It is indeed ironic that this one time Khmer Rouge model town is these days a center of vice and gambling.
"Vice"? "Gambling"? This was going to be the kind of l.u.s.ty adventure I"d read about in Terry and the Pirates Terry and the Pirates as a kid! Roadblocks. Sinister guys with automatic weapons. A heart-shaped water bed in some Maoist version of Trump Castle. Even if it was a little rustic, how bad could it be? When Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo in Vegas, things were still pretty rough out there. This could be fun! as a kid! Roadblocks. Sinister guys with automatic weapons. A heart-shaped water bed in some Maoist version of Trump Castle. Even if it was a little rustic, how bad could it be? When Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo in Vegas, things were still pretty rough out there. This could be fun!
I flew Air Vietnam into Phnom Penh. At Pochentong Airport, a long desk of uniformed military men examined my pa.s.sport, doc.u.ments, medical certificate, and visas. All of them were in full parade regalia: leather-billed hats, mortarboards with ta.s.sels on their shoulders, chests festooned with medals. It looked like the Joint Chiefs had gathered to personally inspect every incoming visitor. The first guy gravely scrutinized my papers, handed them to the officer on his right, who read closely, made a tiny written notation, then handed them to the man on his right, who stamped them and returned them to the first guy where the whole process began again. My papers made it all the way down to the last guy. Then, after some tiny incongruity was noticed, they were returned, once again, to the beginning of the line. Eventually, my doc.u.ments made it through this ludicrously overdressed gauntlet and I was in. Welcome to Cambodia. This is the last law you"ll see.
Once you"ve been to Cambodia, you"ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous sc.u.mbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia the fruits of his genius for statesmanship and you will never understand why he"s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Miloevi. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki remaki at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg. at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.
One in eight Cambodians as many as 2 million people were killed during the Khmer Rouge"s campaign to eradicate their country"s history. One out of every 250 Cambodians is missing a limb, crippled by one of the thousands and thousands of land mines still waiting to be stepped on in the country"s roads, fields, forests, and irrigation ditches. Destabilized, bombed, invaded, forced into slave labor, murdered by the thousands, the Cambodians must have been relieved when the Vietnamese, Cambodia"s historical archenemy, invaded.
One look at the abject squalor of the capital city"s crumbling and unpaved streets and any thought that Cambodia might be fun flew out the window. If you"re a previously unemployable ex-convenience store clerk from Leeds or Tulsa, however, a guy with no conscience and no chance of ever knowing the love of an unintoxicated woman, then Cambodia can be a paradise. You can get a job as an English teacher for about seven dollars an hour (which makes you one of the richest people in the country). Weed, smack, wh.o.r.es, guns, and prescription drugs are cheap and easy to find. You can behave as badly as you wish. Shy boys on motorbikes will ferry you from bar to bar, waiting outside while you drink yourself into a stupor. You can eat dinner, then penetrate indentured underaged prost.i.tutes, buy a kilo of not very good weed, drink yourself stuttering drunk, and be driven safely home to your s.p.a.cious apartment all for under thirty dollars. Cambodia is a dream come true for international losers a beautiful but badly beaten woman, staked out on an anthill for every predator in the world to do with what he wishes.
Phnom Penh"s total population when the Khmer Rouge finished marching its citizens out into the countryside to dig irrigation ditches and executing most of them was a mind-boggling twelve people. That"s down from about 850,000 only a couple of years earlier. Most of the survivors returned to the city, to find their former homes in shambles; looted, waterless, powerless hovels, often occupied by equally desperate squatters. Armless, legless, limping, and crawling locals struggle still to scratch out a living making handicrafts for tourists. Or begging. The average wage in Cambodia is under a dollar a day. Four-year old children wander the markets, begging, carrying their two-year-old brothers.
Where does one go in Phnom Penh? Just where you"d think the expats would go: The FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club), where you can have an American-style hamburger, and a cold beer, then retire to the rear balcony to watch the bats leaving the eaves of the National Museum at dusk a nightly event where a stream of thousands and thousands of bats curls out and up into the purple-and-gold sky like fast-moving smoke. Then you can stumble into the street, where a crowd of skinny, underweight boys on scooters and motos wait, no doubt calling your name as they know you and your predilections by now brush by a few amputees, hop on the back of one of the boys" motos, and head off to "the Heart", local shorthand for the Heart of Darkness Bar. After that, there are the nightclubs and brothels (a narrow distinction between the two), maybe some pizza seasoned with ganja, a bag of smack for a nightcap. With any luck, your Cambodian-made condom won"t snap, you won"t get rousted or shot at by the cops, and you won"t run into any relatives of Hun Sen, the prime minister any of which might lead to tragedy. If you do get into trouble, don"t look to the law to help you out.
A story from the Phnom Penh Post Phnom Penh Post: Tha Sokha, 19, tried for the rape of a six-year-old girl, will serve only six months in jail for indecent a.s.sault because the rape of his victim "was not deep enough" said Kandal Court Judge Kong Kouy . . . After initially ignoring the girl"s family"s complaints against Sokha, district police brokered a compensation deal between the families of the victim and the perpetrator. The girl"s parents thumbprinted a contract in which they would receive 1.5 million riel in compensation for the rape of their daughter, but they never received the money. Upon taking the case to the commune police station on Jan. 11, the victim and her sister reported receiving death threats from a commune police officer named Lon if they continued to "talk about rape."
Another typical story from the Phnom Penh Post Phnom Penh Post same day as the above: same day as the above: Acid Mutilation a Misdemeanor: The first case of a viciously mutilated acid attack victim pressing charges against her a.s.sailant has shocked legal observers by resulting in a two-year suspended sentence against the suspect. Kampong Cham Munic.i.p.al Court Judge t.i.th Sothy dismissed a pet.i.tion to upgrade the charges . . . Sothy justified the ruling on the grounds that [the perpetrator] had no intention of killing the victim but only sought to "damage her beauty because of jealousy."
Getting the picture? So who is in charge? Hard to say. The easy answer is Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge officer who defected to the Vietnamese and then was "elected" prime minister, ousting his nominal compet.i.tion by coup d"etat. There"s King Sihanouk, back again, installed in the palace after playing footsie with the United States, the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese and everybody else. He provides a thin veneer of legitimacy and tradition to what is essentially a military dictatorship. There are the remnants of the Khmer Rouge and its allies a loosely knit coalition of convenience among various unlovely private armies, organized criminals, former Vietnamese stooges, and extremist groups. The Khmer Rouge "defected" to the "central government" (such as it is), awhile back, in return for amnesty, and was basically given control of its former stronghold and cash cow in northern Cambodia, free to pursue its traditional pastimes of gem smuggling and lumbering and its new gambling ventures. Those in the Khmer Rouge were given central government uniforms when they put down their guns, which means that nearly every male Cambodian of draft age, it seems, wears the same fatigues in one form or another, making it difficult to tell exactly who is robbing and extorting you on any given day. There are the much-feared private armies (everybody"s got one), which act mainly as security for various despotic scuzzb.a.l.l.s and their relatives with attendant hit men making it a dangerous matter if some drunken lout steps on your toe in a nightclub and you voice your displeasure too expressively.
Driving out by the airport one afternoon, my cabdriver pulled his car over suddenly, as did everyone else on the road. A police escort whipped by, sirens screaming, followed in short order by a spanking new black Humvee with tinted windows.
"Hun Sen nephew," said my driver with distaste. Hun Sen"s family and friends are the subject of frequent stories of drunken beatings, stabbings, and pistol-whippings, when one of them gets cranky during an evening out in the discos. There"s a famous tale of the time one business a.s.sociate arrived at Pochentong Airport on a commercial airliner. Told that the airline had misplaced his luggage, he is said to have disembarked, procured a gun from a waiting flunky, then begun shooting out the airplane"s tires until his belongings were recovered. Needless to say, this behavior did not result in arrest.
Shooting things, if you have enough money in your pocket, is perfectly all right in Cambodia. Drinks are free at the Gun Club. Ammunition, however, you pay for by the clip.
My waiter, a slim, friendly Khmer, stood over my shoulder as I perused the menu. A tray of Angkor and Tiger beers sat in the middle of the table. Under the thatched roof of the long, open shelter, a few well-muscled soldiers in paratrooper camos from the nearby base sat at another table, unsmiling behind their sungla.s.ses, drinking sodas and beer.
"I think I"ll start off with three clips for the .45 . . . three clips for the AK-47 . . . followed by an entree of five clips for the M16 can I have some grenades on the side?"
"You like James Bond?" asked my waiter, refilling my gla.s.s for me. "You like James Bond gun?"
"Depends," I said. "Sean Connery or Roger Moore. If we"re talking Roger Moore, forget about it."
"Look!" said my waiter, dangling an automatic pistol in front of my face. "Walther PPK! James Bond gun! . . . You like?"
"Sure," I said, hefting the thing over a picnic snack of baguette and sausage I"d brought along. "I"ll try it."
You"ve got to admire an establishment that invites its customers to get drunk and then fire automatic weapons indiscriminately. Next to the gun racks and the ammunition locker, at the Gun Club, there was a sign on the wall that said in big block letters Please Don"t Point Your Weapon at Anything You Do Not Intend to Shoot. This being Cambodia, I thought the text left a lot of room open for interpretation. A j.a.panese businessman boozily pulling the pin from a grenade a few feet away gave a gla.s.sy-eyed look in my direction, smiled, and hurled the thing at a target about fifty feet away. Boom! Boom! Next time I looked over, he was playing with an M16, trying to jam a full clip into the rifle backward. Next time I looked over, he was playing with an M16, trying to jam a full clip into the rifle backward.
I"d be lying if I told you I didn"t have a great time. Firing bursts from heavy weapons at paper targets of charging Russians is fun. I did surprisingly well with the AK-47 and the .45, hitting center body ma.s.s almost every time. At one point, his hands over his ears to protect them from the racket of my discharging weapon, my waiter tugged my sleeve and asked, "So . . . whey you from?"
"New York," I said.
"What you do?" he inquired.
"I"m a chef."
My waiter looked at my target, which I"d pretty much shredded from neck to crotch, smiled encouragingly, and said, "You could be a killer!" That"s what pa.s.ses for a compliment in Phnom Penh, I guess.
They had an impressive selection of armaments at the Gun Club. Ammunition cost between eight and fifteen dollars a clip. I favored the AK-47, as the M16 seemed to jam anytime I put it on full auto and my marksmanship was better with the heavier gun. I sprang for a few tries on an ancient M50 machine gun, an old partisan weapon from World War II, they told me. It had a big drum canister, like a larger version of the old tommy gun, and discharged in one extended noisy squirt, kicking up and away. The first time I tried it, it raked the target area from floor to ceiling, very difficult to keep steady, sandbags blowing apart in smoky bits as the bullets chewed through. They used to let you play with a mounted M60, but no longer, my waiter informed me. The high-powered sh.e.l.ls were tearing right through the sand berm separating the paG.o.da next door from the Gun Club range, causing mayhem among the bonzes. If I wanted to shoot a cow or a water buffalo, however maybe with a B-40 rocket? one could be provided.
I learned a few things at the Gun Club. I learned that when you see Bruce Willis or Sylvester Stallone in a movie, firing for what seems like forever with an automatic weapon, he must be changing clips a lot. When you squeeze down on the trigger of an M16 with the selecter on full auto, it"s all over fast, all the rounds gone in seconds. Sly and Bruce would have a problem with overheated barrels, too, I"m guessing, as even on an AK-47, firing on semiautomatic, the gun gets very hot. And any idea that someone can competently handle two machine guns one in each arm with any kind of control or accuracy is ridiculous. Try firing two M16s at the same time and you"ll blow your own feet off at best.
We crossed over the j.a.panese bridge to the other side of the river. A strip of gigantic, football field-sized restaurants had been built on sagging wooden platforms over wetland. At the place we were eating, there were seats for at least five hundred people, yet Philippe and I were the only customers. A Khmer band played a mix of traditional Khmer and pop standards on a large soundstage with disco lights. A menu the size of a telephone book contained laminated full-color photographs of at least 150 offerings mostly not very good-looking takes on stir-fry. We ate chrouk pray chrouk pray (wild boar), (wild boar), popear popear (grilled goat) in hot sauce, and (grilled goat) in hot sauce, and chilosh chilosh (venison) with a salad of cabbage, tomato, and eggplant. A bus pulled up outside and the "beer girls" arrived. Buying beer in a restaurant or nightclub can be tricky. Every beer brewer or importer hires teams of attractive girls in distinctive, presumably s.e.xy uniforms to work the places the brand is sold. They arrive together the Angkor girls, the Tiger girls, the Carlsberg girls and representatives of two or three other brands. They"re paid by the can or bottle sold, so compet.i.tion is fierce. Within minutes, Philippe and I were surrounded by a throng of aggressive young women, all trying forcefully to get us to order their brand. When we ordered Tiger, the other girls melted away, leaving just the Tiger girl to work our table. Every time I"d get halfway down my bottle, she"d snap open another one. (venison) with a salad of cabbage, tomato, and eggplant. A bus pulled up outside and the "beer girls" arrived. Buying beer in a restaurant or nightclub can be tricky. Every beer brewer or importer hires teams of attractive girls in distinctive, presumably s.e.xy uniforms to work the places the brand is sold. They arrive together the Angkor girls, the Tiger girls, the Carlsberg girls and representatives of two or three other brands. They"re paid by the can or bottle sold, so compet.i.tion is fierce. Within minutes, Philippe and I were surrounded by a throng of aggressive young women, all trying forcefully to get us to order their brand. When we ordered Tiger, the other girls melted away, leaving just the Tiger girl to work our table. Every time I"d get halfway down my bottle, she"d snap open another one.
That night, we went out with some expats. Misha, a Bulgarian; Tim, a Brit; and Andy, an American, sat at a table with me, drinking warm beer over ice, comparing bullet wounds. " "97," said Misha, pointing at a puckered, shiny spot on his neck. " "93," said Andy, pulling back his shirt to expose an ugly recess in his chest.
Along the wall, twelve or thirteen girls sat silently on folding chairs, looking as enthusiastic as patients waiting for the dentist. One of them cuddled an infant.
"Look at that little scrubber," said Andy, pointing out a sad moonfaced girl hunched over in her chair under a flickering fluorescent light. "She"s a chunky little beast, isn"t she?" he said in English, then translated it into Khmer for the girl"s benefit.
We stopped at three or four bars, FCC, the Heart, a nightclub filled with underage wh.o.r.es. At the end of the night, I asked Tim how much to tip my moto driver, a kid who"d been hustling me around town on the back of his bike all night, waiting for me outside until I was ready, then taking me to the next place.
"Give him three dollars," he said.
I gave him five. What the h.e.l.l? Two extra dollars, right? He needed it more than I did.
"What are you doing?" complained Tim. "You"ll ruin it for everybody!"
Psar Thmei is the central market, a fetid, sweltering mess with heaps of room-temperature food sweating in the crowded aisles beneath heavy canvas tarpaulins none of it looking (or smelling) any too fresh.
The difference between this market and markets in Vietnam was like night and day. But then, the Vietnamese have the luxury of pride. I pa.s.sed by reeking cloudy-eyed fish, limp vegetables, slimy, graying poultry. Philippe, however, was undeterred. He dug into a towering pile of lemongra.s.s tripe and tongue with a blissed-out expression on his face. "Mmmm! Yummy!" he said to the tripemonger, clasping his hands together and affecting a short bow. "Tony! You should try some! It"s delicious!" He came at me with a steaming, dog-smelling mouthful of tripe pinched between chopsticks. I opened my mouth, and bit down, reminding myself to call Nancy later and ask her to make an appointment with the gastroenterologist. Philippe was trying to kill me.
He tried to kill me again at the "Jello-O" stand at the market, insisting I try the nasty-looking gelatinous kelp-colored stuff they were eating from iced bowls. But Philippe is an adventurer, a gourmand, in the best senses of those words. He is afraid of absolutely nothing. He"ll put anything in his mouth. Maybe it"s because he"s French. We visited a Vietnamese floating village off Tonle Sap, or Great Lake. We drifted past floating homes, businesses, livestock pens, catfish farms. "What is she eating?" asked Philippe, pointing out a woman cooking in a wok on the small porch of a dingy floating house, naked children squatting next to her. He made us take our boat over. He smiled broadly and asked the woman if she"d be willing to share a small portion of her meal with us. She very nicely obliged, spooning up a serving of ground fish and pork cooked in sugar syrup with dried shrimp. It tasted pretty decent. As we pulled away after a rudimentary but filling meal, I pointed something out to Philippe. The woman was rinsing the wok in the brown river water a few feet down from a floating livestock pen, and a child washing nearby. "How do you say E-coli E-coli in French?" I asked. in French?" I asked.
I knew it was close. I could smell it. The fabled durian fruit. You can smell it a hundred yards away. Imagine a big green menacingly spiked football only it exudes an unforgettable, ga.s.sy, pungent, decomposing smell. It"s an odor that hangs over markets and produce stalls all over Asia. It is said to be delicious. I was intrigued. Expensive, ugly, difficult to transport it"s against the law to take durian on most planes, buses, and trains it is said to be one of the most prized delicacies of the East. I had to try it. I bought a nice big one; it looked much like the relatively benign jackfruit, except spikier. I"d planned on taking it back to the hotel, but after ten minutes in the car with the reeking, foul-smelling object, the crew were crying for mercy. We had to pull over by Wat Phnom, a paG.o.da and park in the center of town, where, under the watchful eye of an elephant, I carved up my durian, sawing through the thick skin and cutting myself on the stegaosauruslike armor. G.o.d it stank! It smelled like you"d buried somebody holding a big wheel of Stilton in his arms, then dug him up a few weeks later. After sawing through the skin, I pulled apart the fibrous yellowy pulp, exposing, around the avocado-sized pits, lobes of cheesy, gooey, spreadable material that looked very much like whole foie gras. The smell inside was less intense. I took a thick smear of the stuff it had the consistency of a ripe St. Andre and was shocked. It was fantastic. Cheesy, fruity, rich, with a slightly smoky background. Imagine a mix of Camembert cheese, avocado, and smoked Gouda. OK, don"t. That"s not a very good description. But tasting the stuff, one struggles for words. It didn"t taste anything like it smelled; the flavor was much less a.s.sertive, and curiously addictive. Durian was one of the first truly "new" flavors I"d encountered unlike anything else in its uniqueness, its difficulty. Remember the first time you tasted caviar? Or foie gras? Or a soft ripened cheese? There"s that same sense of recognition that you"re in new and exciting territory. You may not love it right away, but you know you"ve tasted something important and intriguing.
Licking the delightful gleet off my blade, I wondered what I could possibly do with this information. What could one make with durian back in New York? How would one store it? Even wrapped in six layers of shrink-wrap, buried in foil, and encased in cement, the odor would escape like an evil spirit. You"d have to treat it like fissionable material, keep it segregated in a special locker in some specially ventilated subcellar constructed just for that purpose. But it"s a tantalizing product. Someone, some New York chef, someday, will harness durian"s strange and terrible powers. And I"ll be there to eat it. Probably alone.
I flew President Air to Siemreap. It was a forty-year-old Antonov cargo plane with pa.s.senger seats bolted clumsily into the cabin. The seat belts were broken, hanging uselessly on the sides. When I took my a.s.signed seat, it fell back immediately into the reclining position. The cabin filled up with impenetrable steam as we taxied down the runway. When the flight attendant handed out the in-flight meal, a cardboard box containing plastic-wrapped mystery-meat sandwiches, the entire planeload of pa.s.sengers burst into nervous laughter and discarded them untouched under their seats without a second thought. Chris and Lydia, the shooters, sat paralyzed, their eyes bugging out of their heads as the plane wobbled and shimmied over Tonle Sap, then slowly descended over the mud flats as we approached Siemreap. Misha, the likable but sinister Bulgarian from Phnom Penh, was on the same flight, on the way to some "business." From what I"d understood from previous meetings, he was selling exotic snakes to a Russian clientele. But Kry, my translator/fixer, was dubious. "He going to see KR," he said. "You don"t wanta know. Believe me. I don"t wanta know."
Misha exhaled as the plane touched down. "When I was in Bulgarian paratroopers we like this plane very much," he said. "Of course, we were all wearing parachutes."
I stopped taking photographs at Angkor Wat. No camera is adequate to the task. It"s too big, too magnificent to be captured in any frame. There"s no way to convey through simple images the sense of wonder when you encounter the cities of Angkor looming up out of the thick jungle. Mile after mile of mammoth, intricately detailed, multileveled temples, bas-reliefs, jumbo Dean Tavoularis-style heads, crumbling stone structures choked in the root systems of hundred-year-old trees. This was the center of the mighty Cham empire, which once extended as far as Nha Trang and the sea to the east, all of what is now South Vietnam to the south, to occasional sections of Thailand and the Indian subcontinent. The work, the time, the number of artists, craftsmen, and laborers it must have taken to construct even one of the hundreds of structures is unimaginable. Looking at the densely populated reliefs, you are utterly intimidated by the impossibility of ever taking it all in. The KR did its best to ruin Angkor for all time, laying mines all over the grounds, destroying statues and shrines. Looters and unscrupulous antiquities dealers knocked off as many heads as they could, stripped the temples of what they could carry, and sold them on the black market in Thailand and elsewhere. But the UNESCO people are there now, painstakingly restoring what they can. The mines have, for the most part, been removed, and you can wander the interior of the dark stone piles, a waiflike Khmer kid by your side, telling you what it all means, pointing out the two-tongued figures in dark corners, urging you to give the saffron-robed bonzes tending to small Buddhist shrines a few riel. The dark, clammy interiors smell of burning incense and go on and on forever. Standing at the foot of a great stone head, I could only imagine what the first Frenchmen who"d stumbled onto the place must have felt like.
The cheap b.a.s.t.a.r.ds from the TV production company had booked me into yet another depressing sinkhole in Siemreap. I took one look at the lobby, and, fully aware that I would be staying in even rougher environs over the coming days, decided to splurge. I checked myself into the Raffles-operated Angkor Grand a mile down the road. I figured one night living like a colonialist oppressor would be good for me. I had never enjoyed a high-pressure shower with unlimited hot water the way I did that night glorious after all the lime-encrusted dribblers I"d been standing under in recent weeks. There was an enormous pool, three restaurants, and a bar and sitting room, where uniformed help in pointy hats and green kromahs kromahs made girlie drinks decorated with umbrellas. When I returned to my room after a ma.s.sage, a swim, and a croque monsieur, there was a garland of fresh jasmine flowers on my pillow. made girlie drinks decorated with umbrellas. When I returned to my room after a ma.s.sage, a swim, and a croque monsieur, there was a garland of fresh jasmine flowers on my pillow.
I took full advantage of my luxurious surroundings, because tomorrow the ordeal would begin. The crew was nervous. I was nervous. The plan was to take a hired boat out onto Tonle Sap, cross over to the mouth of a river, and chug upstream to Battambang. The following day, we planned to rent a 464 and driver and travel seventy to eighty kliks over the worst, most heavily land-mined road in Cambodia to Pailin, near the Thai border. This was not an auspicious time to be visiting with the Khmer Rouge. Recent developments in the capital indicated that the government was planning to revoke its agreement with Ieng Sary, the leader of the KR"s Pailin faction, and bring him before an international tribunal for war crimes. The mood in town, we a.s.sumed, would not be good.
The road to Pailin. It"s not a Hope/Crosby movie and Dorothy Lamour is definitely not waiting in a tight-fitting sarong at the journey"s end. I"d wanted to go up a no-name river to the worst cesspit on earth and, for my sins, I got my wish.
I set out from Siemreap in the early morning, along with Chris, Lydia, and Kry. Kry, who is something of an expert on the Khmer Rouge, had been to Pailin before, during the last fighting. But the moment we set out for Battambang from a muddy creek off the lake, he was struck dumb, nearly speechless for the duration. From the very get-go, things did not go as planned. Our skipper and a mate, who concerned himself mostly with a noisy, clanging, and dubious-sounding engine, couldn"t agree on exactly where to find the mouth of the river. After crossing open water, we floated around the lake, looking for landmarks, broiling in the late-morning sun. I ate a packed lunch from the Angkor Grand of saucisson sandwich saucisson sandwich, Camembert cheese, and a nice bottle of Cote du Rhone and waited.
The river, when we finally found it, was wide and clean and pretty to look at. But after about thirty miles, as we approached a floating village, our skipper, without warning or explanation, pulled over to a waterborne police station bobbing on fifty-five-gallon drums. A few uniformed officers in death squad-chic sungla.s.ses and two very dodgy-looking characters in red kromahs kromahs and olive drab fatigues stood there waiting for us. Without asking, the two fellows in and olive drab fatigues stood there waiting for us. Without asking, the two fellows in kromahs kromahs and military clothing boarded our vessel and sat down by the skipper at the helm. The cops waved us on. and military clothing boarded our vessel and sat down by the skipper at the helm. The cops waved us on.
Now, the red kromah kromah is an almost universally worn accessory all over Cambodia. It"s worn as headgear, as a scarf, as a bustier top for women, as a sarong. In a pinch, it can be used for pulling an oxcart out of a ditch, as a carryall, or as a diaper. But when worn by unsmiling, unfriendly strangers with bloodshot eyes, attired in military garb who"ve just boarded your privately engaged boat without asking the red is an almost universally worn accessory all over Cambodia. It"s worn as headgear, as a scarf, as a bustier top for women, as a sarong. In a pinch, it can be used for pulling an oxcart out of a ditch, as a carryall, or as a diaper. But when worn by unsmiling, unfriendly strangers with bloodshot eyes, attired in military garb who"ve just boarded your privately engaged boat without asking the red kromah kromah takes on a sinister aspect. One"s mind naturally flashes back to footage of the newly victorious KR riding into Phnom Penh on the backs of tanks just before the ma.s.s murdering began. takes on a sinister aspect. One"s mind naturally flashes back to footage of the newly victorious KR riding into Phnom Penh on the backs of tanks just before the ma.s.s murdering began.
A few moments later, I noticed that our boat had slowed almost to a standstill and that our new additions were arguing with the skipper, pointing in a direction decidedly opposite from where the river was taking us. I looked to Kry to translate, but he wouldn"t meet my gaze. Not a peep. He stared off at some fixed point in s.p.a.ce, apparently oblivious. When, at our uninvited guest"s instruction, the boat changed course, coughing and clanking up a narrow no-name creek perpendicular to the river, I barked to Kry, "What"s happening? What"s going on?"
"We take shortcut," said Kry, quickly slipping back into what seemed to be a coma.
"Shortcut." The word filled me with dread. When has a shortcut ever worked out as planned? The word in a horror film at least usually precedes disembowelment and death. A "shortcut" almost never leads to good times. And in Cambodia, with our skipper suddenly piloting the boat up a shallow, twisting, foliage-choked, water-filled ditch, deep into who the f.u.c.k knows where, with two who the f.u.c.k knows who giving the orders, I was not feeling too secure. I consulted my Lonely Planet guide and was dismayed to find that this particular body of water did not appear on the map.
Upriver we went. For hours and hours, with no end in sight. The trip was supposed to take six hours. It had been nearly nine. The terrain grew roughter, then narrowed with each three-point turn. We pulled and pushed in waist-deep muck, tearing free of clinging vines, just barely clearing sandbars and mud flats. This trip was beginning to make the river journey in Apocalypse Now Apocalypse Now look like the Love Boat as the scenery got more primitive, the few signs of life becoming more backward and desperate-looking as we pushed farther and farther into the bush. The few sampans or boats coming in the opposite direction squeezed by without any of their pa.s.sengers even acknowledging us. They eyed our olive drab-garbed pa.s.sengers, then turned away, their faces showing what surely looked like fear. There were no longer greetings of "h.e.l.lo" or "Bye-Bye" from the riverbanks, just glowers, stunned looks, silent hostility, indifference. look like the Love Boat as the scenery got more primitive, the few signs of life becoming more backward and desperate-looking as we pushed farther and farther into the bush. The few sampans or boats coming in the opposite direction squeezed by without any of their pa.s.sengers even acknowledging us. They eyed our olive drab-garbed pa.s.sengers, then turned away, their faces showing what surely looked like fear. There were no longer greetings of "h.e.l.lo" or "Bye-Bye" from the riverbanks, just glowers, stunned looks, silent hostility, indifference.
I saw nothing for hours but the occasional hut protruding from the water, or high atop stilts on the bank, men and women in rags, near naked in kromahs kromahs, squatting by the water"s edge, rubbing unguent into sick pigs, washing clothing in the brown water, sharpening machetes against stone. I was becoming concerned. I hadn"t seen a single house, not a single building with what could be called walls, not a TV aerial, not a power or phone line in hours. We could have been traveling up the same body of water a thousand years ago, with no discernible difference. What if our engine breaks down? What if our propeller fouls? What if one wing nut shears off, leaving us dead in the water? Whom could we call? Even if we had a cell phone? (Which we didn"t.) No one on this boat, I suspected, could even have described our location. Which of a thousand similar gullies, ca.n.a.ls, streams, creeks, and ditches were we on? And how far up? My American Express representative was not waiting at the next stop. Where would we sleep if we had to spend the night out here? There was nothing but water, mud, flooded rice paddies, jungle, and the occasional construction of bare sticks and bamboo like a child"s collapsed and forgotten tree house. And my mysterious fellow pa.s.sengers, what about them? Who were they? Where were they going? What were their intentions? The scarier-looking of the two, who"d been smoking Alain Delon cigarettes, gave me something that looked like a smile when I offered him a Marlboro, but that"s all I had going for me.
Deeper and deeper into the weeds we went. Mile after mile of nothing but demolished huts, muddy riverbanks, waterlogged and useless sampans. Once in awhile, there would be a chicken, a rooster, a water buffalo, or a pig, and a few of the tall, bare sugar palms in the distance. We rounded another turn, and there, in a village now sagging and sinking into the water, two more pa.s.sengers were waiting for us with their bags packed. One of them was wearing a Tweetie Bird T-shirt and camo pants. Great, I thought. My executioner. Killed by a guy in a Warner Bros. T-shirt.
It was getting darker, and still there was no sign of Battambang or anything else even resembling civilization. I wasn"t looking for minimalls or office buildings any more. Evidence of electric power would have sufficed. Bugs were feasting on me. As the light failed, wood smoke began to curl over the water, and the river began to widen a bit. A few families bathing together on the banks provided some encouragement. More smoke, coming from cooking fires. I saw a house on stilts with actual walls. Another good sign. The river became busier. Flat rafts pulled by rope towed motorbikes and their drivers across the river to the other side. More homes and shelters. The skipper was listening his way upriver now, all light almost gone. The smoke thickened, and then I saw my first electric light, hazy in the distance. Soon, torches, more lights, a surreal image in the heavy smoke and near-total darkness. Shrill Khmer music and drums echoed out over the river from distant loudspeakers.
After tying up at the bottom of a steep, muddy bluff, hands reached out from nowhere and helped us off the boat and up a slippery slope. Dark figures grabbed at our bags and hauled them up the hill. Soon we were loaded into a van and taken to the fabulous TEO Hotel, Battambang"s "best."
White tile floors, white tile walls, white stucco ceilings. The hotel was a big four-story blockhouse, free of decorative features. A sign by the front desk depicted the black shape of an AK-47, circled and bisected in red. The usual Cambodian hotel industry"s hospitality features were in evidence: A door off the lobby with a sign saying karaoke ma.s.sage in red letters. Translation? "Wh.o.r.es available."
My room was more white tile, a central floor drain as if the whole room had been designed to be flushed with the press of a lever. The bathroom worked on the same principle: Turn on the shower, hold the calcified showerhead over your body while sitting on the toilet, and everything goes. The single roll of toilet paper was waterlogged from a previous guest. A smooshy packet of something that could have been either soap or a condom sat on a shelf over the sink. In the bathroom drain, a wadded-up Band-Aid floated on a raft of hair and soap sc.u.m. I didn"t mind. At least I wouldn"t be sleeping out in the bush with the cobras and the banded kraits and the mosquitoes. I showered as best I could and bounded down to the TEO"s empty restaurant, where an eager waiter helped me select dinner from another colorful menu of photographs. Congee Congee, green curry, pad Thai pad Thai, amok amok, the usual collection of stir-fry and hot pots, the menu about half Thai, the check payable in riels, dollars, or baht. My waiter, after hearing that I was en route to Pailin, volunteered that he had been there once, having hoped to strike it rich in the gem trade. He came back with only malaria to show for his efforts. He said sadly, "Bad people in Pailin. Bad people."
You saw the signs first.
Little orange ones, every hundred yards or so, all along the road. warning! land mines! There was a helpful picture of a skull and crossbones.
Try to imagine the worst road in the world: sixty miles of unpaved trail, alternately bone-dry ruts, hillocks, potholes, and crevices so deep and so steep that one"s vehicle nearly topples over onto its side. The cars only a few feet ahead actually disappeared from view into ruts and depressions in the road. Trucks so dangerously overloaded with wood and hay that they towered ludicrously nearly fifty feet in the air with whole families sitting on top. Vast pools of puddinglike muck, stagnant water from adjacent flooding rice paddies. And, of course, the usual road hazards of broken oxcarts, diverted streams, checkpoints, roadblocks, crumbling bridges, and armed bandits.
Black SUVs bounced by us, KR gangsters and illegal timber merchants behind tinted windows, armed goons riding shotgun. The occasional white 464s were the good guys, the minesweeping outfits, still hard at work in northwest Cambodia. The occasional full-color billboard depicted on its left-hand side a happy farmer walking with his son through their fields. On the right-hand side, the same farmer and son were shown being surprised by an explosion, the stumps of their arms and legs sprinkling brightly colored blood. Our vehicle was a hired white 464 with a very worried-looking driver. He didn"t like us. He didn"t like where we were going. He seemed unhappy about what the road was doing to his car.
From time to time, we crossed a bridge over a deep gorge or rocky stream. Rotten, moldering planks bounced and crumbled under our wheels, the rocks and water below visible through gaping holes as we slowly edged forward. Some bridges were actually suspended from cables so we had to worry not only about the planks disintegrating under our tires but also about the whole structure swinging unreliably from jury-rigged supports. Overloaded trucks came to a full stop at each bridge as driver and pa.s.sengers a.s.sessed their chances, then sped across as quickly as possible, hoping that it would be the next vehicle that might plunge through the splintering planks onto the rocks below.
Bounce, jolt, lean, grind, crumble, drop, bounce, jolt. We often had to stop and wait for an old woman, a pantless child, or an armed teenager in fatigue top and kromah kromah sarong to remove a big rock or a row of sticks from our path makeshift roadblocks and tollgates and wave us on. sarong to remove a big rock or a row of sticks from our path makeshift roadblocks and tollgates and wave us on.
I began to see more guns at the checkpoints. And skulls. Arranged on display atop small birdhouselike platforms and shrines by the roadside were small piles of human skulls and thighbones. A warning? A remembrance? I don"t know. As we got closer to what used to be the front line of the last armed conflict, I saw a rusted-out, bullet-pocked APC (armored personnel carrier) by the side of the road. Then a burned-out Chinese-made tank.
The armed guys at the last checkpoint did not look happy to see us. What about the casinos? Didn"t these people want our business? I began to get the idea that I would not soon be enjoying a mai tai in the main lounge, entertained by the comedy stylings of Don Rickles. The likelihood of a buffet or a station to make your own omelette seemed increasingly remote. My driver kept looking in the rearview mirror as he drove along at a breakneck clip of ten miles per hour, echoing my waiter from the TEO with occasional remarks that there were "bad peoples . . . bad peoples" here.
We stopped in a small village to eat and to stretch our ruined backs and necks. At a roadhouse next to a market, a group of agitated Khmers were rather too enthusiastically watching a Thai kick-boxing match on a television in the dining area, shouting and pumping their fists in the air anytime anyone got hit. I had a bowl of some warm beer on ice and some tom yam tom yam, a sort of Thai noodle soup. It was the best thing I"d had to eat since arriving in Cambodia Thai food. Everything was increasingly Thai here, the closer we got to the border. Thai food, Thai money, Thai television. After a meal and a rest, we set out again, with about two hours to go until Pailin.
"This was where the front was," said Kry awhile later, speaking up for the first time in memory. He pointed out a craggy mountain peak and a paG.o.da. "KR used to dump bodies in this mountain. Thousands of bones up there inside the mountain."
Just outside Pailin, the road was actually graded probably to accommodate the lumber trucks. (They"re cutting down every tree in Cambodia to sell off to the Thais, a practice that is leaving the countryside even more devastated and that threatens, each rainy season, to flood Tonle Sap, Ba.s.sac, and Mekong, drowning the capital.) We sped along the road, no one speaking, and then we were there.
Pailin. Unpaved, littered streets, mangy dogs, sullen locals who glared at our arrival. A few signs indicating karaoke ma.s.sage, a barber, a few gem retailers selling chip-sized rubies and sapphires, a run-down, hopeless market. No casinos. No neon. No jumbo parking lots, new entertainment centers, dog tracks, or air-conditioned necropolises filled with one-arm bandits and Keno. No Seigfried and Roy. No Debbie. No Steve and Edie. Nothing but naked hostility, squalor, and scary-looking guys with guns. The Hang Meas, Pailin"s only hotel, was a smaller, drearier version of the TEO. Same cautionary sign in the lobby about AK-47s. Same karaoke ma.s.sage booth. Same white tiles, creepy stains, drain in the floor.
I ate some soggy stir-fry in the hotel restaurant, then took a ride around town on the back of a motorbike with a young man who wanted to show me where I could score some good rubies. There wasn"t much to see. Ramshackle buildings, two-story businesses, a paG.o.da. The homes with the satellite dishes and the SUVs and new 464s out front belonged to the KR. Apparently, only Communists get to make money in Cambodia. I bought some overpriced and undersized rubies. Yes, there are uncut rubies strewn everywhere by the riverbanks, in front yards, in the soil but they cut the gems in Thailand, and they rarely make it back from the other side of the border like most of the country"s resources.
We sent Kry off to talk to the official in charge of tourism and information, a former high-ranking figure in the KR. Unsurprisingly, considering recent developments in Phnom Penh, he didn"t want to talk about Pailin"s future as a destination resort. He was not interested in showing us the casinos. The casinos, it turned out, were about thirty kliks beyond Pailin, in the jungle and mountains near the Thai border.
"He say you want to go there to shoot film? Maybe you get shot," said Kry when he returned. The KR official did not care to talk about economic development or Hard Rock hotels or anything else to do with tourism. He wanted to talk about what the KR would do if Ieng Sary was in fact indicted and dragged before the courts. He wanted to talk about returning to the jungle. Rearming. Going down fighting with their leader in a blaze of glory. Not what we wanted to hear.
That night, at 3:00 a.m., someone began pounding violently on Chris"s and Lydia"s door. Lydia, whom I had seen leaning out of fast-moving cars to get a shot, who has filmed on paratrooper bases, in jungles, and in minefields without fear, told me later that she jumped out of bed and huddled in a corner, shaking as Chris finally opened the door. Fortunately, it was a drunken Thai businessman back from an evening of karaoke ma.s.sage, confused as to which floor his room might be on not a KR security cadre with radiophones and alligator clips.
The next morning, I ate breakfast in the hotel. I was depressed. Things had not turned out as I"d hoped. Two days of travel up a no-name river and across the worst road in the universe and for what? This was no gamblers" paradise. The "vice capital" was the same collection of dreary wh.o.r.ehouses and bars as everywhere else, only less welcoming. The citizens seemed stunned, lethargic, frightened, angry not what you want in a destination resort. My dreams of becoming some kind of Southeast Asian Bugsy Siegel were shattered. Everyone wanted to leave, Kry and our Khmer driver more than anyone. The food, particularly compared to the delights of Vietnam, was uninteresting mostly watered-down Thai, served under conditions incompatible with freshness. While I sipped my instant coffee, two guys in fatigues pulled up on a motorbike and dumped a dead deerlike creature on the ground with a plop plop! They dismounted and went to talk to the chef. Two children in rags hurried to the carca.s.s, probing the large exit wound by the creature"s neck with their fingers, then sniffing them while flies gathered.
"That"s an endangered species, actually," said a voice in English.
Tim and Andy stood there in head-to-toe leather motocross outfits, covered in road dust, behind me in a dark corner of the hotel"s dining room. Tim has penetrating pale blue eyes with tiny pupils, and the accent of an Englishman from the north Newcastle, or Leeds maybe. Andy is an American with blond hair and the wholesome, well-fed good looks and accent of the Midwest. Behind them, two high-performance dirt bikes leaned on kickstands in the Hang Meas" parking lot.
Tim owns a bar/restaurant in Siemreap. Andy is his chef. Go to the end of the world and apparently there will be an American chef there waiting for you. Kry, looking exhausted, joined me for breakfast, saw the two men in dusty leather, and nodded h.e.l.lo.
"Kry! How"s it going, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d?" said Tim.
"Not bad, Tim. How are you?" replied Kry.
"Still hanging at Happy Herbs?" asked Andy.