Cambodia

El problema del sureste Asiático es que todo parece acomodarse deliciosamente al ritmo que uno lleva, de manera que de un momento a otro uno echa raíces, establece afectos, se acostumbra a las transacciones tranquilas, al olor del árbol de frangipani, a la vista placida del rio Mekong, a las serenas plantaciones de arroz y a los estanques cubiertos de flores de loto. Y cuando uno empieza a disfrutar de esta suerte ya tiene que ir rehaciendo la maleta, porque es hora de irse.

A regañadientes fue que hicimos las maletas en Luang Prabang (Laos) y volamos a Cambodia. Llegamos a Siem Reap al hotel de una pareja británica. Antes de apresurarnos por conocer los templos de Angkor Wat nos dimos un día para disfrutar de esta pequeña ciudad determinada por hordas de turistas.

Las tiendas y restaurantes aquí tienen una fusión bien lograda entre sabores y texturas de Cambodia con comodidades y servicios occidentales. El mercado central con todos sus contrastes es el mejor lugar para experimentar la cultura local:  los peces inconformes con su nueva realidad dan sus últimos saltos inútiles en canastas de bambú, los sapos desollados y sin tripas se apilan uno sobre otro en bandejas metálicas con una exactitud casi geométrica, el olor perfumado de frutas – para mi desconocidas – le gana al almizcle de los pollos recién desplumados que con sus patas de uñas brillantes mantienen una imposible postura, como de cantante de góspel: relajada y orgullosa. El microcosmos del mercado se expande mientras uno camina, a veces es un caldo tibio que huele a galangal y jengibre, y otras veces una comparsa viva que ofrece de todo, manicure donde estilistas travestis, vestidos floridos con motivos Thai, bolsas de cemento recicladas y convertidas en accesorios de moda. Yo repetí mercado, me deje convencer en cada puesto y aunque haya querido quedarme más tiempo siempre quedaban los otros planes pendientes, así que seguimos con el recorrido que faltaba.

Los templos son magníficos, nos compramos un tiquete de tres días para poder recorrerlos bien y un amable señor de un rickshaw nos llevó de templo en templo durante dos días. Para la tarde del segundo día yo ya había tenido mi dosis necesaria de ruinas y me quede en el rickshaw haciendo la siesta mientras Oisin y Gareth exploraban solos. Como frente a otros lugares monumentales los recursos de mi imaginación fallan al intentar especular acerca del tipo de vida que se llevaba en estos sitios, pero los portales enormes, las caras gigantescas talladas en piedra, los pasadizos que conectan galerías, los lugares ceremoniales, y el detalle meticuloso de cada pieza sugieren un tejido complejo de relaciones sociales.  Es curioso imaginar que cuando Angkor Wat sostenía cómodamente a una población de más de un millón de habitantes, Londres apenas contaba con escasos trienta mil. Cada piedra cuenta historias, explicitas o tácitas del paso del tiempo y es un gusto ver que este lugar se ha mantenido firme y bien conservado.

De Siem Reap viajamos a Phnom Penh, capital de Cambodia, donde los estragos de la guerra están todavía presentes. Afortunadamente  Cambodia ha documentado la tragedia como parte de su deseo por reconstruir la memoria después de la devastación de la guerra civil. Una vez más hago comparaciones con mi país, y creo firmemente que es indispensable – para la sanidad colectiva – hacer ese ejercicio de documentación, entender donde está cada muerto, saber quién disparó cada bala, no tanto para elaborar rencores como para empezar a hacer un mapa coherente del tejido político de esa nación hecha de retazos. Visitamos el macabro museo del genocidio y uno de los campos de aniquilación y aunque son lugares tétricos lo enfrentan a uno con la realidad absurda de la guerra y permite ponerle rostros a las cifras.

Pero además de darnos una idea de lo que fue el conflicto en Cambodia, nuestra visita a Phnom Penh también nos permitió descansar un poco y planear nuestra visita al sur donde llegamos para unas merecidas vacaciones de playa. Inicialmente queríamos pasar unos días en el sur de Cambodia y regresar a Tailandia y pasar otros días de playa allí, pero después de llegar a Otres nos dimos cuenta que no hacía falta buscar más playas, habíamos llegado al lugar que queríamos.

La playa en Otres fue ideal, casi desierta, aguas tibias y tranquilas y lo mejor de todo conseguimos unas cabañas perfectas a menos de 20 metros del mar con todas las comodidades y a un buen precio. Pasamos ahí más de una semana, absorbiendo ávidos los rayos del sol y descansando, esta vez de verdad como no lo habíamos hecho durante el viaje. La playa está bordeada por casitas de bambú donde los residentes tienen restaurantes, y los dueños del restaurante más próximo a nuestro hotel fueron un encanto. La mayoría del tiempo que estábamos en la playa nuestro hijo estaba entretenido jugando con ellos, o en la hamaca con los niños, o haciendo castillos de arena con unas hermanas Alemanas de unos veinte años tan dulces que era fácil entender el magnetismo de Oisín hacia ellas.

Si salir de Laos nos costó trabajo, salir de Otres beach nos dolió, pero salimos un jueves, dejando atrás ese maravilloso lugar y su gente tan desinteresadamente generosa y empezamos el camino de regreso a Tailandia con la promesa del mercado de Chatuchak para el fin de semana.

Flying South

Pati and Oisin wait for a pineapple in Luang Prabang 

Luang Prabang’s lazy charms kept us entranced for a good few days, but with the clock ticking for our onward flight to the great family reunion in Australia, we knew we had to get a move on if we wanted to see more of the region. Our consummately ad hoc approach to planning means that by the time we sit down to arrange the next part of our journey it usually transpires that the time necessary for the journey has already been spent, carefree, doing anything but planning. After savouring the delights of Bangkok for an unconscionably protracted spell of ten whole days, Vietnam now had to be struck off the agenda. Ever since I had laid hold of the Lonely Planet guidebook (approximately seventeen weeks ago) I had nurtured an urge to see Halong Bay. This was no longer going to be possible. I’d seen the Bangkok metro and I should count myself lucky. On top of this, we had met several travellers who all told remarkably similar stories of rude treatment that bordered on the physically hostile in Vietnam. I’m perplexed. What possible historical reason could the Vietnamese have to harbour resentment against the West?

The urge to see more of the region was also slowly morphing into the urge not to see it all from the window of a “luxury” bus endowed with bottomless seats and a suspension assembly freecycled from the Wright Brothers. Sloth got the better of the argument, and we opted to fly out of Luang Prabang to Siem Reap in Cambodia. That and the fact that the trip overland would have taken at least three solid days of travelling through the rural south of Laos. Given that the guidebook’s advice about any potential health issues was “get over the border into Thailand as soon as possible for treatment”, it was easy to use the boy as an excuse not to explore the more remote reaches of the country. It also warned that you would be fleeced as a matter of course by the Cambodian border guards on the way into their country by land.

So with a strong sense of wanting to return to this little gem of a town, with its somnolent streets, lanterns swinging in the Mekong breeze, monastery roofs that sweep down near to the ground, traffic that rolled gently past at walking pace and smiling inhabitants, we packed and headed for the tiny airport. One short flight later, and we abruptly realised that we had been on an all-too-brief leave of absence from the capitalist west, and in Cambodia it returned with a vengeance.

Laos is one of those few countries where you belatedly realise that on Planet Earth there are still some places where not every last inch of public space has been devoured by the advertising industry. This was something that I had never even contemplated until I visited Havana in 1997 – the idea that you could walk the streets of a city without being bombarded by endless idiotic entreaties to purchase a limitless amount of superfluous garbage that did nothing much but shorten the lifespan of our planet. The fact hit me with such force that I felt like some redneck woken from a bad dream who was walking through a William Morris landscape. Siem Reap airport brought the capitalist bad dream back with an instant array of billboards and a cash machine that dispensed – the horror – US dollars.

Flying the Flag!

Laos has one of those irritating currencies that employ an enormous number of zeros. 50,000 kip sounds like a lot of money until you realise it won’t buy you dinner for the night. A typical trip to the cash machine left my wallet stuffed with something like two million kip. And the smallest denomination note, 500 kip, is worth about four pence. What on earth are they thinking of, printing four pence banknotes? Then my brain rouses itself from its millionaire stupor: it’s probably cheaper to print those notes than mint coins. Cambodia, on the other hand, has surrendered itself to the Evil Emprire. For reasons that elude me, it runs on a dual-currency set up where both local riels and US dollars are accepted nationwide. The local riels tend to be used in place of cents, as there are no American coins circulating, so your change from a ten dollar bill might be seven dollars and two thousand five hundred riels. Managing one exchange rate is bad enough, but having to do twice the work simultaneously is a recipe for financial mismanagement. Nevertheless dollars were procured, not least because that is all they accept as payment for their tourist visa. The visa official at the airport did a double-take at my passport photograph, the one where I look like I’ve just been released under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, and scowled. My pulse began to quicken as I blanched at the prospect of the negotiations ahead of me now. He laughed and handed it over, and as the rain started to come down in biblical quantities, our tuk-tuk driver produced two umbrellas and jammed them into the canopy of the taxi to shield us from the spray. We had no view whatsoever of the road ahead, so fingers crossed the traffic was light. The only thing we could see was an astonishingly large illuminated billboard for a hitherto unknown to me brand of “quality blended [!] Scotch whisky”. Followed by another billboard. And another one. We had arrived in Cambodia but we were having troubling spying it between the gigantic hoardings plastered in images of suave, sub-James Bond, “quality blended whisky” drinkers. As a single malt aficionado Cambodia was bringing me unexpected problems.

Refocus

It is disarming how quickly the eye accustoms itself to the unfamiliar. On the bus from Vientiane to Luang Prabang we slowly left a small city behind and drove through flooded paddy fields into the rural hinterland of Laos’ capital. The plains eventually gave way to mountain ranges, and the space available for human settlements steadily decreased. From a city of concrete and brick, we made our way into a landscape that was populated by villages composed of bamboo shacks on stilts. Easy. I’ve browsed copies of National Geographic in the dentist’s waiting room, I’ve seen The Human Planet online – bamboo shacks are nothing to get excited about. The eye accustoms itself, and we drive past family homes constructed of the flimsiest material that I can imagine, the cheapest, most readily available material, material that is easily replaced in the event of a storm or flood. Yet the ease with which the eye soaks up these new exotic visions elides some pretty obvious questions. How do you put running water into a bamboo shack? How do you put plumbing into a bamboo shack? My guess is that you don’t. Likewise I would guess that you don’t have a solid wall to screw an electrical socket to plug in your fridge and keep the food fresh. Who collects the rubbish from outside a bamboo shack up the side of a mountain? Maybe that is the reason behind the ever-present clouds of thin blue smoke, as the rubbish is burnt and the plastic releases its toxic stream of dioxins into the mountain air.

The bus pulls over outside a bigger shack where food is served and passengers can use a toilet. Children push their way onto the bus, balancing large metal dishes containing bags of sliced fruit and packets of something indeterminate and fried. The youngest are scarcely bigger than Oisin, and with a mischievous glint in their eye try to sell him some snacks. How lazily the eye welcomes the smiles and entreaties of the children to buy their wares, how quickly I have learnt to casually shrug off their badgering. Then I check the time. It’s a weekday and it’s just after lunchtime. Is it naïve to ask if these kids should be in school? The driver’s assistant on one of our longer bus trips was about thirteen years old, and wore a t-shirt with a striking graphic and the slogan “Stop Child Labour”. He took our back-breaking backpacks from us and loaded them into the hold. He didn’t seem to be a living embodiment of irony, so was his t-shirt just a freebie someone had given him, or did he no longer consider himself a child and was campaigning on behalf of his younger brethren? For the first time my conscience has me squirming in a bus seat as the boy stood on the steps of the bus and stared open-mouthed at Oisin watching some cartoon on our little netbook. His eyes don’t refocus so easily when confronted with the casual wealth of the western traveller child. Shall I let him know that I’ll write a hand-wringing piece about him on an internet blog that he’ll never see (would he be able to read it if he did?), or just send a donation to Oxfam and hope that a few pennies trickle down into his bamboo shack?

A scooter wobbles past us somewhere in Cambodia. An obese middle-aged Western man is driving, a petite Asian girl is clutching on to a small portion of his expansive girth. A couple on a scooter – my eye doesn’t blink. Then another, then another. A couple of laughing British men sit down at a table on the beach, followed by two dainty Cambodian women less than half their age, and then their siblings. The British men don’t bother to talk to the two women: do they even speak their language? The women, in turn, concern themselves with their smaller sisters and brothers. Presumably all will eat at the table of the unstinting British males – I try to stop myself wondering what price might be exacted later once the children are in bed. My eye is repelled by the endless succession of ugly white men towing pretty young Asian women behind them. I don’t know the numbers, but surely this many cases of “romantic love” are statistically improbable? We debate: Pati rankles at my view of the women as economic victims of predatory western males, while I can’t accept her view that they are still agents of their own destiny, even if hitching up with a flabby foreigner is the quickest way out of poverty for them.

Here’s the text from the restaurant in Luang Prabang that I mentioned in the last post. I don’t think it answers any of these questions. Maybe it prompted them.

Luang Prabang

We decided to bite the bullet and take a bus straight to Luang Prabang. It was slated as an eight hour trip, which meant it would be longer (why are travel agents the world over such inveterate liars?), but we allowed ourselves to be seduced by the “VIP bus” blather, and thought that it might not be a totally horrendous trip. It wasn’t horrendous, but the on-board toilet was the right size for hobbits, and if it had ever seen a VIP it must have been Keith Moon judging from the state of the decor. Oisin had his revenge on us by finally throwing up on a road trip, a mere six hours into the journey, but we think we got off lightly and it was probably the MSG for lunch. The scenery was, once again, spectacular. Laos is blessed with a strange type of mountain formation known as karst formations, which seem to rear up unprovoked out of the surrounding plains with nearly vertical sides and improbable round tops. Finally, a mountain horizon that resembled the waggly landscapes I used to draw in primary school. You know you’re in special countryside when there’s a motorcycle parked up at the side of the road, helmet hanging from wing mirror, with a bloke just standing gawping. Motorcyclists don’t usually stop for much else apart from a piss.

The downside of the karst formation’s shape is that there is no going over them – only round them. And round and round. Eventually part of the bus gave up, so we pulled over and got off to watch the driver and assistant empty out the least inspiring collection of hand tools that I’ve seen for quite a while, before proceeding to batter some key part of the rear suspension back into working shape.

We were only two hours “late” into Luang Prabang, although it was dark by the time we arrived, and the concept of a payphone in the bus terminal was a novelty to all those of whom I enquired as to its whereabouts. With what must be by now tiresome familiarity, we had over-prepared for this leg of the journey by not phoning any guesthouses at all, so now as it got dark and the rain came pouring down, Oisin and Pati huddled under the corrugated tin roof of the bus shelter while I blagged a mobile from a stall holder on the other side of the bus park. Half an hour of calls revealed that every decent hotel listed in the guide book was full, so we ended up in a wooden shack with torn lino on the floor and three single beds. One day we might learn some lessons, but that day is probably still a continent or two away.

Next day we set out early with the one aim of finding decent lodgings. And find them we did. A beautiful old colonial building right by the side of the Mekong, with a dusty antique shop on the ground floor and criminally cheap rooms upstairs – two double beds, aircon, satellite telly and private bathroom for about £7.  Their wifi was “broken”, but I was prepared to forgive them that as everywhere else in town seemed to have wifi coming out their ears. Luang Prabang is another UNESCO World Heritage site, sitting on a peninsula between the Mekong and the Nam Khan rivers, with decaying French colonial villas in neat lines, interrupted only by disproportionate numbers of Buddhist monasteries.

After the rains of Vientiane, we were in the mood for a change of pace, and Luang Prabang fulfilled our needs amply. Scooter in hand, we wandered the few streets of the touristy end of the town, browsing impeccably tasteful handicraft shops, drinking good coffee and slowly succumbing to the fact that the local beer, Beer Lao, is really very good indeed. Beer Lao has a brand ubiquity that even Guinness would be proud of. Every backpacker and his dog seem to have a Beer Lao t-shirt on, doubtless encouraged by the fact that the logo is visually pleasing and hence makes for a good t-shirt (that and the price – the shirts cost about £1.50 here). For that very reason I fought shy of getting dragged in. But when I eventually gave it a sup, it rewarded my jaded taste buds in style. We promptly bought the t-shirt. In fact, we got one each. It took several hours of scouring the enchanting night market, but we finally found a Beer Lao t-shirt the right size for a three year old, so we are now the Beer Lao family. I’m still waiting to get a photo of the whole team, but as soon as I do it’ll be up here.

Just today I read a comment on Trip Advisor where a Canadian woman had posted a review of a place in Bangkok where she’d eaten and used the restaurant wifi. The staff refused to hand over her fifty baht change on the grounds she’d plugged her laptop in to the restaurant’s power supply and used electricity. Fifty baht is currently worth about one British pound. The Canadian wrote an appalling review of the place, denouncing the staff as thieves and explaining that she and her partner stood and argued for twenty minutes for their fifty baht. Twenty minutes arguing over a pound. Welcome to the ugly side of international travel. In Luang Prabang I came across an amazing text that was the last page in the menu of a reasonably unassuming bar where we stopped for food one afternoon. The waiter spotted me trying to sneak photos of it, paragraph by paragraph, with my mobile, and happily offered me my very own copy to take home and keep. I’ll put a copy of it up here in its entirety once I get it scanned, for I think it says far better than I could many things about what our presence means here on the other side of the world. And I might just email the link to the Trip Advisor reviewer. The bar is called Lao Lao Garden by the way, and their tempura is great.

Elephants!

This is a 5min video of our trip out of Luang Prabang to the nearby elephant sanctuary, which included a trek through a little bit of jungle in the howdah of a very forgiving lady elephant.

Este video dura 5 minutos y es de nuestra visita al sanctuario de elefantes cerca de Luang Prabang, durante la cual hicimos un breve paseo por la selva sentados en el "howdah" de una elefante viejita pero paciente.