slight retraction

Well, it turns out you can access hotmail in big, bad Yangon if you follow the gamers and find a shadier looking net cafe which has a proxy server. I need to keep reminding myself that anything that looks legit is most likely run by the government and therefore dodgy as hell. Strange place. There's a technology time lag of about a decade and I doubt that there will be any communication between my gadgetry and the machines of this country.

My long held plan to catch the train to Mandalay has, alas, run aground. In the first, the railways are owned by the govt and deserve a big fat boycott. There are special foreigner prices on the train and it costs about three times as much to train as to bus. And finally, I made my way to the station to make some enquiries and floundered. I made lots of friends at Yangon Station but alas, the dream of a common language did not materialise and, unable to find out anything at all, I'm resigned to the bus.

I fear too that I won't be able to stay till the end of my Myanmar visa, and not just because the place has put me a little on edge. I perhaps could have worked out before I arrived that there is absolutely no way of obtaining cash here. Credit cards are accepted at one 5 star hotel in Yangon and they offer cash advances at 7.5% interest (plus local bank charges)... There are no ATMs and no Western Unions and lots of extra special prices for foreigners... So it might be back to Thailand sooner than I had thought.

On the sights and sensations front, I did visit the Schwe Dagon Pagoda which was dazzling. Literally, because it is covered in gold. I discovered that because I was born on a Saturday, my Burmese lucky animal is that dragon and this pleases me no end. Right! Off on the road to Mandalayeeo.

au revoir phnom penh, bonjour yangon

We-eeell, I've just arrived into the heat of Yangon and thereby moved to a country which is even higher up than Cambodia on Transparency International's list of dodgy nations. The official government exchange rate is almost a third of the blackmarket rate. Change your US dollars with the government and you receive 450 kyat. Change them on the blackmarket and you get 1200 kyat. Crazy. I also find that access to hotmail is restricted as it violates national web policy. If you want to email me, try my usyd account for the next few weeks... For some reason, I can't access hotmail, but I can post slightly narky comments on a blog. Again. Crazy. Things will probably be a bit silent for the next little while (even though I have much still to post from Phnom Penh) because internet access is hard to find and USB ports seem like a long shot. The virtual silence will correspond to actual silence as I'll be on vipassana in Mandalay from the 1st to the 12th of May. And then? Prolixity beckons!

Mod-Cambod

My Khmer eating experiences in Phnom Penh have been more hit than miss. I’ve been spoilt by the faaabulous Med-Fusion food at my guesthouse and clearly have been frequenting the wrong hawkers. Some terrible soups full of entrails, some gluggy noodles: I’ve obviously been walking right past the good stuff. Because of this, and because I leave Cambodia in two days, I decided to splash out on the ne plus ultra in Modern Cambodian cooking and go to Malis, a new and slightly flashy restaurant near the Independence Monument and all in all, I’d say this was a good decision.

Now, you know you’re in a flashy restaurant when the lights are so low that reading the menu is difficult and you only really see your food for a split second when your camera flashes. Candlelight, schmandlelight. With the aid of an extra candle, I was able to both read the menu and see the restaurant. Plenty of frangipani trees, tasteful tasteful burgundy walls and dark wood and innumerable water features whose trickling drowned out the tasteful tasteful jazz tinkling in the background. To help me through the menu, I was presented with an appetiser of pickled greens with a tamarind chilli sauce and a shot of mango juice: salty, sour, hot, and sweet: excellent.

To begin! The chef’s seafood selection… At this juncture, I’m still wondering whether I should have ordered the scallops with green peppercorns… I’ll never know. Instead, my scallop encounter was limited to magical Cambodian scallops (magical because there are three of them per shell…) stir-fried with diced red and green capsicum, mango, and mushies. Pretty good, but nothing spectacular. Next to the scallops lay a handful of baked clams, spiked, I think, with Cambodian fishpaste. Clams are close to my heart both because of their pivotal role in clam chowder and their Italian incarnation as vongole. These shellsters I would have classified as cockles rather than clams, but who am I to be picky. Intensely brackish bites of the sea, some of which needed a fair amount of coaxing to leave their shells. Fortunately, I’m not just a lover, I’m a fighter. No pugilism was required for the prawn cakes which were extremely easy to eat, if a tiny little bit nondescript. As someone for whom the entrée is usually the high-point of the meal, this did not augur fabulously well, particularly as the whole lot was unnecessarily strewn with julienne vegetables.

Nothing is normal in Phnom Penh, however, and the relationship of entrée to main would seem to be no exception as the eggplant and crab salad was a winner, flashing lights and clanging bells included. Crab meat and eggplant flesh served in the hollowed eggplant bellies with tiny peanuts, basil, chilli, fresh coconut, fish sauce and who knows what else. Texture! Flavour! Crab! Eggplant! I wasn’t entirely certain that the marriage of crab and eggplant would be a happy one but I suppose any marriage is a high stakes undertaking. It seemed like the middling risk option on the menu – not quite as safe as the good old amok (I’m still loving the fact that Cambodia’s national dish is called amok), papaya salad, beef and bamboo and spicy shrimps but considerably less risky than the stuffed frog’s legs. Daaaamn, though, it was tasty.

I would have tried any and all of the desserts and it was with reluctance that I passed over the pomelo custard with fresh ginger, the jasmine, ginger, and honey mousse, and the corn tapioca. I have a sentimental attachment to crème brûlée and was honour bound to order the pumpkin brûlée, although not without regret at venturing away from the principled terrain of Mod-Cambodian into the badlands of Mod-Cambodian-French-Fusion. It was only via my flash that I was able to see how darn orange it was. Lord only knows how you make a pumpkin custard but this was nicely managed, thick and smooth, like a creamy pumpkin pie filling without the cinnamon. I couldn’t taste the rice wine sauce but this might have had something to do with the chillies I downed earlier in the meal.

Anyway, Mod-Cambod. It’s the next big thing. Watch out for it, and remember that you heard it here first.

Phnom Penh: off the map

Exhibit A: Ads for Booze
Never have I seen the relationship between drinking and virility so explicitly mapped. 1 drink = lotsa ladies.


Exhibit B: International Food
Love the Irish as I do, never will I love the grey stodge that is Irish Stew. Why anyone would voluntarily eat Irish Stew is utterly beyond me. I am made humble in my mortal incomprehension as to why anybody would voluntarily eat Irish Stew IN THE TROPICS??

Exhibit C: Transparency of Government Affairs

In spite of the fact that Cambodia apparently stands thirteenth in the list of the world’s non-transparent governments, I must commend the administration on their candour here.

something in the water

I’ve been staying at a guesthouse called the Boddhi Tree in Phnom Penh, an aptly named location in which to psych up for ten days of making like the Buddha and sitting under the proverbial boddhi tree, waiting for enlightenment, in Myanmar. The perfect pre-meditative retreat, non? Did I think about it beforehand? Yes. And yes, that would make the Boddhi Tree the perfect pre-meditated pre-meditative pitstop… It’s run by one very chilled Spanish Buddhist called Manuel who is committed, it would seem, to bringing the delights of his native cuisine to Cambodia. So not only is there an excellent shady garden onsite, you can find olives! (real olives, not black pieces of dung shrivelled in brine) gazpacho! chorizo! queso! in it. There’s all the regular Cambodgois/generic S.E Asian delights but whole slabs of the menu are swimming in garlic and olive oil and salt. This makes me very happy. Just to keep people guessing, for some reason the margaritas are bright blue. Either they ran out of both triple sec and Cointreau and used blue curaçao or the heat is making me hallucinate. The camera doesn’t lie.

I’ve also reading Thomas Pynchon who was sending me insane so slowly that I turned to Sherlock Holmes for relief. Anyway, the Boddhi Tree finds itself in a location which strikes me as Pynchonesque in the first by virtue of its highly disturbing contrast. It’s just across the road from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Musuem, also known as S-21, the high school that Pol Pot turned into a prison and torture centre. Obviously this place wasn’t a hippy guesthouse run by a Buddhist Spaniard in the 70s but it was a colonial villa decades before that. Two remarkable transformations, I’d say, whose juxtaposition captures something of this place. Tourist friendly as Cambodia is exerting itself to be, as soon as you start talking to people and looking around, the fact of the civil war a generation ago makes itself apparent in such a way that sleeping across the road from a former prison entails an explicit rather than an exceptional proximity to the horrors of the recent past. I read an interview with the hombre who runs the guesthouse in which he claimed that its mellow presence (and its salutory involvement with local NGOs) is a ‘life-affirming protest’ against the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. Whilst protest still strikes me as a pretty strange word to use in this context, I suppose the presence of the guesthouse could be termed affirmative insofar as it bears good Buddhist witness to the changeability of all things. Then again, change is the root of all suffering… And yet again, the margaritas are blue.

The Solution, or: Never shall the term crabby be received as an indictment!

* Warning *
If you are even remotely squeamish about eating seafood, don’t read this. This applies doubly if you have any sentimental attachment to crustaceans. Lexicon, ma chère, this means you. Possibly to be avoided too if you have a moral problem with gluttony. I hereby acknowledge that I deserve to be reborn as a crab in the Gulf of Thailand, as a crab whose coming of age will be marked by an innocent clamber into a crab pot and from thence into the wok. Que sera etc.

So, Kep, the Crab Capital of Crab-Craaaaazy-Cambodia. Just in case the waterfront crab market, crab shacks, and crab claws littered everywhere didn’t draw the fact that this is crab central to your attention, there’s a large concrete crab on the boardwalk to really hammer the point home.

Of course, I considered it nothing less than my Duty to fully apprise myself of the merits of the crab. I flatter myself that I have discharged this Duty with some merit. Yes, acting in the best interests of my sweet-as-crab sisterellas and grandfather, I have eaten enough crab to grow a set of pincers, and I can state, without hesitation, that Crabs are Sweeter, More Tender, and generally Better than Lobsters. Yes, they are a pain in the arse to eat, but the effort is worth it. Your meal is interspersed with a regular series of digestive pauses. To Crab, I say, to Crab!

Anywaaay, the crab. Let me count the ways. If the process of separating crab meat from crab shell doesn’t appeal, it’s possible in some quarters to order crab soup, which here is served with mushrooms which look like, but are not, golden enokis. This is simple enough – a good crab stock, thickened cornflour, with flaked crab meat and mushies stirred in and an egg beaten through to finish it off. Think Chinese chicken and corn soup and substitute crab and mushrooms. Keen crackers can also order crab soups which are full of unshelled crab. Grrrrreat. I hear plenty of crab and corn soup is waiting for me in Vietnam.

I was warned off the crabs at the main beach of Kep by my Austro-Bulgarian agents and their reports of surcharges for serviettes and seating and stuck to the crab markets. Main course crab dishes here are variations on a single theme. Crabs, with a 5-10cm carapace are flash-boiled (I told you this wasn’t for the squeamish) and chopped in half. The goop is removed and they are chucked into a wok with oil, soy, and handfuls of whatever delightful aromatics you select. For the statisticians, crabs retail at the markets for 15000 r, just under US$4 per kilo. Generally, you are served a huge plate of crabs with some entirely redundant rice on the side. If you’re lucky, you are given a bowl of hot water in which to clean the muck from your fingertips. From here on, it’s a matter of pulling the crabs apart, extracting as much goodness as possible from the claws and sucking sauce from the shells before picking away at the carapace. Very late Roman Empire. The crab meat is indeed incredibly sweet and cooked as it is here, light years away from toughness. If I develop an addiction to opiates, I will surely be plagued by visions of cruel crabs, scuttling over my inert form. For now, my crabby hallucinations are of the order of delight and satisfaction. The Crab with Ginger on Serendipity Beach in Sihanoukville was mighty fine but it was upstaged by Kep’s Crab with Green Peppercorns, possibly the Best Thing Ever. Kampot is famous for pepper so the Crab with Green Peppercorns is a particularly worthy combination of two local specialties.

I took this photograph with four people looking on. They were very impressed with the picture in the box, deeming it a worthy likeness, and I promised them that I would send my friends to the stall. So: Kep Crab Markets, second stall down from the Kampot end of the market: Go there. Fresh mango for dessert. If anybody is game to order the Fish with Distril, please tell me what the hell it is. The Crab with Green Peppercorns has made me a vulnerable woman. I would renounce my lifelong strident aversion to marriage for the man who could cook this dish. I would undergo religious conversion. I would emigrate. I would sell my soul. I would eat my own liver, provided that it was sautéed with peppercorns. Etc etc. Fortunately, someone has recommended a cooking school in Battambang called, heh heh, Smoking Pot, so I am going to go there and find out how to make this dish and thus maintain my independence. Fronds of green peppercorns, one of my favourite things, slices of onion, shallots, smashed cloves of garlic, another of my favourite things, and loads of little crablets. Yes, quite a solid candidate for the Best Thing Ever.

Elsewhere in the crab market, I encountered a crab dish with chilli, doused with a thick, sweet and sour chilli and dried prawn paste and lots of garlic which was, predictably, delectable. I didn’t get around to ordering the Crab with Hot Oil but if my spying is accurate, the crab is given the same hot oil treatment as the Hot Oil Noodles at the Victoria St Dumplingeria (nostalgic sigh).

Other noteworthy features of the crab-eating life:

You can see the crab-pots being hauled out of the ocean as you eat. Food miles here can be calculated in feet.

The servings are stupendously enormous. When eating alone – watch out, this will shock some of you – I have taken to requesting that I be given a serving smaller than the standard small serve. The picture above is of a smaller-than-small sized meal. It’s true, I have struggled to eat a five dollar plate of crab on my own. I kid you not.
It’s possible to hire a boat and cruise out to an island and eat crab as per above under coconut palms.
There are plenty of hammocks to aid digestion.
Some minor dosage of alcohol seems to make the process even more pleasant. As all the white wine I’ve drunk here has tasted like stale vinegar, I’ve found the local beers a more than sound accompaniment.

I apologise if this all sounds obnoxious and insufferably smug. It would be wrong not to share the joy though, wouldn’t it? No doubt when I post this, I will have arrived in Phnom Penh, been mugged, contracted some uncurable tropical disease and somehow be in a state of deep physical or psychic hurt. The Gulf is probably full of noxious heavy metals. Crab flu will, in all probability, be the next deadly pandemic you’ll read about. Be that as it may, I am now a qualified crab aficionado, drinking a very reasonable margarita, and watching the sun set.

Great Questions of Our Time

Seafood is a major preoccupation of the Menzies-Pike clan. Important portions of our communal time are devoted to the consumption and discussion of seafood. There are some points on which Family Opinion is reasonably inflexible, particularly when oysters are concerned. Taking our lead from the Elder Statesman, we concur on the following:

1. Oysters should be eaten freshly shucked and raw.
2. Lemon, salt, and white bread with butter are the only acceptable accompaniments to fresh oysters.
3. Sydney Rock Oysters are The Best Oysters in the World.
4. Pacific Oysters should be avoided at all costs.
5. Bigger is not necessarily better when eating oysters.
6. Seafood tastes better within sight of a large body of water.
7. Eating oysters inland is Risky Business.

I am really missing oysters en famille. Never let it be said that our opinions have been formed without sufficient reference to alternatives. We have dabbled with other sauces – wasabi vinaigrettes, gazpacho dressings, lime and chilli fandanglery and so forth – and found them to be unnecessary fripperies. I myself allow exceptions to Rule #1 when faced with oysters steamed with ginger, shallots, and black vinegar for example, or, in the right company, the chickpea flour tempura numbers at Oh Calcutta; let it be known too that I am no stranger to vodka-oyster shots. We have all eaten smoked oysters on occasion. Nonetheless, these are exceptions and the general principles are adhered to with some rigour. Accordingly, I am a little suspicious of the advice dispensed by a middle aged gentleman from Perth to the effect that if you haven’t eaten an oyster omelette in Bangkok, you haven’t lived.

Anyway, there is, of course, room for differences of opinion in a Menzies-Pike seafood symposium. The generation gap is clearly marked on the question of the mussel, for example. The Elder Statesman is adamant that the humble mussel, bearded, green, black, New Zealand or otherwise, has no place on a civilised table. His granddaughters, most vocally the eldest and youngest, are equally adamant in their respectful disagreement. As the rollmop separates us, wasabi mayonnaise unites us. To seafood extender, we say no in chorus. And then, the baby octopus splits the choir. I have rarely encountered a cooked baby octopus that does not resemble a knot of rubber bands in texture and firmly believe that those responsible for the ubiquity of BBQ baby octopus salad on pub menus should be forced to chew on rubber bands in perpetuity as they contemplate their sins. It stands to reason that if the tentacles of adult octopodes need to be bashed to buggery with a mallet before cooking in order to be tenderised (they do, I promise you), the toughness of the octopodlets must also somehow be sorted out. Some of my closest relatives are not in agreement here.

Hours of pleasant discussion have been dedicated to unravelling the possibilities of cooking beer battered fish en casa. (At this juncture, consensus says no.) Songs have been sung in honour of the sardine, the scallop, of fried whitebait, the pommes frites of the ocean. Can garlic prawns ever be too garlicky? Is there a limit to the number of fresh prawns one can eat in a sitting? Is Doyle’s exceeded by its reputation? Smoked trout or smoked salmon? How raw is your prawn? Is there ever a reason to eat fish fingers? Should anything that once lived in the sea be doused with mornay sauce and cheese and put under the grill? The minutiae of such matters delight us.

The relative merits of crabs and lobsters have been under the microscope recently. Crab meat is alleged to be sweeter and more tender than that of the lobster. My lobster eating experience is reasonably limited and my lobster cooking experience even more so (with some notable exceptions.) Prior to my arrival in Cambodia, however, I was a veritable novice when it came to crab. The not-inconsiderable costs of eating crab and lobster in Sydney aside, the main reason I have, shall we say, avoided crab and lobster, is laziness. All that claw-cracking and shell-manouevring for such a little bit of meat. Who wouldn’t order the scallops? Anyway, lobster, for some reason, retained pride of place in my sea-bug imagination. Lobster tails dressed with lime butter, lobster rolls, bouillabaisse, all of these are good things. I was barely aware of the crab sidling into the limelight. The bright lights of Harry’s Singapore Crab did their bit. The renaissance of the soft-shell crab on Sydney menus helped my infatuation along as did the discovery of pre-picked crabmeat and the ease with which it can be turned into crab-cakes. Nonetheless, when I left Sydney, I was, lamentably, not able to make a sufficiently informed contribution to family discussions of crabs v lobsters. Then I arrived in Kep, the Crab Capital of Crab-Crazy-Cambodia. The question loomed: To Crab or to Lobster?

Kep-sur-Mer

I thought Kampot was the best sleepy town in Cambodia, and then I arrived in Kep, even smaller, even sleepier! There is very little to do in Kep and therein, to my mind, lies its appeal. I’m staying in a ridiculously beautiful guesthouse on the foothills of a jungled mountain, surrounded by tropical fruit-trees and creepers blossoming in superabundance. My room has a private balcony and hammock from which I can listen to the geckos honking away to each other in the evening. This is the view from my balcony at sunset, which I have taken to enjoying in company of a margarita. Bokor Mountain is the square shaped outcrop in the distance.


Sundowners, very civilised. My days have largely consisted of walking to the beach and crab market, reading, and working away on my morbid, angst-ridden, tropics-addled Magnum Opus, and no doubt, future great shame. Oh yes, and writing long, rambling blog entries. At the end of the main beach, there is a large concrete sculpture of a mermaid who for some reason doesn’t have a tail.

There’s an island nearby – Rabbit Island, half an hour away by boat – and a trip there doesn’t demand much more than lying on the beach, walking to the next beach, and waiting for lunch to be caught and cooked. I ate mangosteens on the beach with a couple of toothy kids and inexplicably suffered a brief attack of the Angelinas. The attack passed soon enough. My ride to the jetty was with a guy on a motorbike who regaled me with Cambodian pop songs on the way. This truly is a fabulous place. There’s plenty of building activity which suggests to me that a wake-up from the slumbersome pace is on the cards. It is only the necessity of organising my visa for Myanmar, not to mention figuring out how I will get there, that is impelling me to leave for big, bad Phnom Penh. Alas.

Lights! Camera! Action!

Horror movie directors, take note. The Bokor Hill Station is the best location you will ever find for a shoot. As far as I can tell, it’s virgin territory. You reach the Hill Station, a casino, hotel, and supporting buildings built for French colonial pleasure seekers in the 1920s, by means of a godawful pothole ridden road, 34km from Kampot. I travelled the road on the back of a ute, clinging on for dear life all the way. In company of a smattering of Mitteleuropa’s most charming, I discovered that the jungles of Mount Bokor are home to a feline urban legend, Tripod, the three-legged tiger. The stories vary as to whether Tripod lost his leg to a landmine or is in fact a member of that ultra-rare species mutation, the Cambodian three-legged tiger. Our Cambodian guides were adamant that Tripod exists and urged us to take photographs if we were lucky enough to spy him. I didn’t, but not for want of looking. Anyway, following are the reasons why I believe the Bokor Hill Station might be the Best Haunted House Location in the World. 1. It’s Remote 34km from a very small town, along a dirt road that you need rally driving experience to navigate. It’s going to take a while for the authorities to come to the aid of any hapless heroines. In between civilisation and the Hill Station lies thick jungle and Tripod. Anyone seen Predator? 2. Location location Phnom Bokor is 1080m above sea-level and hence strangely chilly, given that it is hot, humid, and hot down at sea-level. The ruins, and there are many, are shrouded with spooky, churning fog and mist such that visibility is, at best, partial. No expensive smoke machines needed here. There’s also a cliff nearby, a useful hazard to prevent any easy flight. 3. Pre-existing ghosts The Hill Station was built by the French who abandoned it in the face of the Free Khmer movement in the 1940s. Because of its altitude, on the rare occasions that the mist clears, it is possibly to see from Kep to Kampot, giving the site strategic significance. It was occupied by both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge troops during the civil war and the dereliction of the buildings is primarily due to the fighting that took place here. Plenty of graffiti in Khmer to reinforce the point. Everyone I’ve met has a story to tell about the Khmer Rouge, is angry that its leaders haven’t been brought to justice under either Cambodian or international law. There’s no need to manufacture evil spirits, they’re already here.

4. A derelict Catholic church
What horror movie would be complete without the desecration of some Catholic iconography? At Bokor, the gusty ruins of a Catholic Church stand already travestied by gunfire, graffiti, and decay.

5. Rust which looks like blood

The buildings of the Hill Station were all once painted white. The white paint has oxidised and so, in the right light, many of the surfaces look like they are dripping with blood. Perfect for a hallucinatory breakdown like the one in The Shining.

6. Handy architectural decay

I turned a corner, I spied a spiral staircase, I started to walk down it, and lo, the staircase crumbled to nothing! Most of the walls of the Bokor Palace are intact, but the staircases, windows, and balustrades are another matter. Imagine a chase scene in which no cgi is needed for the ground to fall away from your heroine’s feet! And the possibilities for weird, panic-stricken surveillance through holes in the wall!

7. Looming towers The Bokor Palace isn’t enormous but at three storeys, it has height. What has height, has gravitas, and what has gravitas, can loom in a shady, scary fashion.

8. Sinister vegetation Lantana grows wild up here, believe it or not. Vegetation is the dominant occupying force these days, overwhelming even the tourists. There is a wild pomelo tree edging through a wall of one wing whose blossoms carry perhaps the most divine scent I have ever encountered. Or perhaps I was in danger of being drugged by enchanted blooms?

9. An alien pod

If the plot has gone to buggery, you can bring in a host of aliens. Adjacent to the Bokor Palace stands this strange edifice, clearly ready to communicate with our sisters and brothers across the galaxies. Perhaps it has already done so, and a flock of aliens, cruel or munificent as befits your purposes, can leap out, deus ex machina style, and resolve all narrative convolutions!

In sum, a strange and eerie set of buildings, in which the ghosts of the colonial administration and Khmer Rouge already reside, no doubt in company with the various spirits of pre-Angkorian Kambuja, the exiled Hindu demons of early Angkor and the malignant horrors of the many lesser worlds of Buddhist cosmology. I will expect some acknowledgement for this hot tip, although preferably not via the naming of a demon.

And a slightly off-topic post-scriptum. The weirdest graffiti I have ever seen:

Invest in a breakdown: your heirs will thank you!

Being quite charmed by this dilapidated town I am delighted to find that I have, for once in my life, preceded the real estate boom. The market is anyone’s and there are buildings for sale everywhere. Hell, there’s only one five-star resort in the south of Cambodia. It’s untouched territory! There’s money to be made!


If I were a little closer to my post-prime-Brando-Garbo days, I’d be more than tempted to buy a crumbling colonial villa in Kampot, settle in, and compare the pace of architectural decay to my own corporeal and mental decline. With a stock of long white dresses and a bigger hat (which I probably should have now), I’m confident I could competently enact an elegant and anachronistic unravelling. A bit of swanning, a bit of swooning, naps a-plenty, the development of minor expertise in the history of pepper cultivation and the preparation of crabs, tea before 5pm, gin afterwards: perfect. In case you are worrying that the heat has addled my brain, may I remind you that there are some very eminent reference points for the convergences of heat, emotional breakdown, faded architectural glory, and the passage of empires: Blanche DuBois, Aschenbach (is it?) from Death in Venice, Jeremy Irons’ character in Damage, Miss Havisham (without the heat)… And hey, I’m on a river in south-east Asia, thinking about colonialism, why not Kurtz, either the Conrad or Coppola version? If this all sounds a bit loopy, I’ll turn to midnight’s child, Saleem Sinai for support: ‘What grew best in the heat: fantasy, irrationality, lust.’ Would this not be a suitable setting for such a withdrawal from the cares of the world?


Fragile a flower as I am, I’ll grant that some of the buildings do have a head start.

Indolent I may be but I’m not quite ready for a terminal breakdown as, when I, with difficulty, apply thought to the matter, nothing really ends particularly well for my role models. The property market will have to take care of itself.

Ramshackledom

Sihanoukville’s bright lights, cheap cocktails and deckchairs of eternal sloth have been left behind, as, alas, has the fair Monica, and I find myself here in sleepy, faded Kampot, sitting under a mozzie net in the Blissful Guesthouse, such a nice place that I can forgive it the sappy name.


Bougainvillea and frangipani blooms in abundance, hammocks and hanging orchids on the verandahs, a gazebo in the garden, friendly geckos and plenty of books to read.

The sea-breezes which made Sihanoukville darn hot rather than damn hot are absent here and the middle of the day does not really invite any activity. I’ve been strolling along the promenade of the snoozy Kampong River in the early mornings and pink evenings, admiring the Elephant Mountains and imagining myself as the daughter of some colonial official, strolling with broad-brimmed hat and parasol on her pauses from the study of pre-Angkorian temples or somesuch. I’m aware of the improprieties of the colonial fantasy and the decrepit condition in which most of the remaining French buildings stand is a good figure for the outcome of such imperial imagining. The town is famous for its pepper and apparently until the beginning of WWII, Kampot pepper was the only acceptable pepper to French gourmets, the Maldon salt of its day, I suppose. Kampot was Cambodia’s southern port town until tarty Sihanoukville was built in the late 1950s and seems to have been winding down since then, a process considerably aided by Cambodia’s independence struggles and civil war. The area was overrun by Free Khmer and Vietnamese troops fighting each other and the French from the 1940s onwards and then by the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese until not so long ago. The hills and limestone caves behind Kampot concealed Khmer Rouge units until the mid-1990s. Now it’s agriculture and tourism which keep the town ticking along. I’ve just finished Midnight’s Children again and Rushdie’s phrase, ‘handcuffed to history,’ seems apt for Kampot. As I walk by the river and through the town, I’m hailed, ‘hello, laaaady’ by other folks alongside the river who seem to find my presence hilarious (and that is without hat and parasol). The youngsters are keen to practice their English but become rapidly concerned about my marital status. Oh well. There are wedding dresses on the street should the situation become critical.

So captivated am I with the slow pace of life in downtown Kampot that I’ve decided to take a reading pause for a day or two before heading up to Bokor Hill Station, the Official Attraction of the area. In doing so, I’m bucking the trend of hordes of enthusiastic Scandinavian types who march off smiling into the wet morning sun to see caves and ride motorbikes and take river cruises and visit temples. The evidence that that clean Baltic air has invigorating effects is before me, but I am nonetheless baffled that people from such a climate should find apparently inexhaustible reserves of energy in this dense heat. Anyway, I’m not going to put my feeble physiognomy under too much pressure at this stage. I’m swallowing books whole – some are re-reads, some are should-have-reads, others are randoms – and I’m in no mood to start hurrying.

so much to say, so little bandwidth

Well, I've found myself in a beautiful sleepy little riverside town, with news and shiny photographs to post. It seems, however, that even though I can bring a digital camera, laptop and usb drive to the show, major conniptions in the force are generated anytime I try to process a file bigger than my little finger. Oh well. From Kampot I will head to the even smaller and sleepier coastal town of Kep, and from thence to Bamboo Island, which only has three hours of electricity a day. Expect a deluge of riveting commentary, replete with stunning illustrations. In about a week.

Oh, and yes, faceless slanderers, gather your quills, anonymous comments have been turned on.

Conspicuous consumption

The routine of lounging, snoozing, drinking, eating, reading and swimming was broken by an excellent trip to the Sihanoukville markets. Shaded by canvas and corrugated iron, the markets were hot, shadowy, and odiferous. When it began to rain, even the duckboards underfoot were steaming. Unflurried, we ventured forth. Honestly, Monica and I should really be hosting our own gourmet adventurer food-show. We could call it ‘The Fearless Gullet’ or ‘Point and Eat’ or ‘I Will if You Will’ or something like that.

Discretion and a desire to avoid the sociological safari syndrome held me back from taking photographs of all that was on offer. It included: fresh crabs, more different kinds of dried fish and shellfish than I would have thought possible, a long alley bedecked with ripening bananas, preserved eggs rolled in some sort of dark ash, pickled everything, huge baskets full of lime and chillis, fresh noodles, barbequed seafood, fluffy ducklings (sniff), piles of tropical fruit and herbs and lotus flowers... Foolishly, we had eaten breakfast before hitting the markets and hence were only able to sample a few bowls of insanely cheap and entirely delicious noodle (one yellow and one white, for variety) soup. Actually, that’s not entirely true. There were also plenty of sweets to try – pumpkin stuffed with coconut cream jelly, sago delights candied chilli and mangosteen served with chickpea flour halva and coconut milk, black rice cooked in fruit juice with fresh coconut, deep-fried sweet dough (the traditional name) served in a banana-leaf. Things do taste better when wrapped in a banana leaf, there’s no doubt about that.

Below are the leftovers from our tropical fruit purchases. The mangosteen is making inroads into my list of favourite fruits.

sihanoukville

Sihanoukville resembles what I imagine the French Riviera or the Costa Brava might have been before cheap airfares and the European Union and mass middle-class holiday making. It’s a uninteresting little town which happens to be encircled by a series of sandy beaches which tumble into the Gulf of Thailand. It’s a resort town and there are hundreds of tiny guesthouses and beachside bars catering to local tourists and shoe-stringing internationals. It’s a pretty easy place to stop for a few days. Compared to Sydney’s, the beaches are incredibly benign – the water is warm enough to poach an egg in, there are no waves, rips, sharks, waxheads, jellyfish, or blue-bottles, and all you need to do for someone to bring you a menu is sit on a deckchair under an umbrella. I didn’t see a cocktail for more than three dollars, and the beer starts at fifty cents a glass. Sure, the martinis aren’t a patch on the Bayswater’s, but you can sip wearing your togs, and a round costs less than a bowl of olives. You lie on the beach, sipping a margarita, and locals wander past offering fresh fried seafood, tropical fruit, massages, manicures, bracelets, sarongs, photocopied books, chips, you name it, all for sale and super cheap. The seafood is amazing, accommodation is really really cheap, there are internet connections everywhere (but no phones) and the sun seems to keep shining all day. That said, I’m not devastated to have left Sihanoukville and not only because crowds and expat bars full of sleazy middle-aged men and comatose backpackers are not really my scene. I wrote a huge, windy rant on my misgivings about this place which I think I’ll leave in the recesses of my hard drive. Key words/concepts: exploitation; sex tourism; Houllebecq, J.G. Ballard; first world guilt (mine); child poverty (not mine); US$300 average yearly income v US$2 margaritas and this laptop; fascism, complicity; consumption; blindness. You get the idea?

roots 'n ruins

Yet more from the Angkor temples, this time with an intrepid and quizzical human figure to add a sense of scale.

would you please be quiet please?

a few good meals

It is possible, I suppose, that I’ll become a little blase about the faaabulous food on offer after a few months. I am currently, however, light years away from blase about the comestibles.


Pleas salad, near the bus station, Phnom Penh
Sadly, this had to be eaten all too quickly as the bus to Sihanoukville was waiting outside. White fish cured ceviche style in lime with peanuts, more lime, chilli, onion, basil, and mint, all wrapped up in a banana leaf. Pleas salad is apparently a Cambodian specialty to which I am inexorably, predictably drawn to say, yes, please.

Fried squid with pepper salt and crab with ginger, Occheuteal Beach, Sihanoukville.

The poor little squidlets suffered the fate of the wallflower in this meal. They were delicious – tender, peppery little morsels seared on a grill – but their charms were nothing compared to the crab with ginger. I have learnt, to my great pleasure, that dishes advertised ‘with ginger’ are not stir fried with a measly few slabs of ginger, but properly cooked with handfuls of julienne ginger. What you see here is a couple of whole crabs, wok cooked in ginger, sweet soy, and oil. The niceties of claw-crackers and crab picks were dispensed with, the beach being about three metres away. This was a Maltese Falcon dish: the stuff that dreams are made of. Note too the Angkor beer on the side, brewed here in Sihanoukville. It is probably highly vulgar to add that this meal cost $7 but add it I do.

Eggplant in oyster sauce and chicken with ginger, stall 16, Angkor Thom
My experiences with the hawkers and food stalls around the Angkor temples were varied. The gristle spring rolls (see below) made me cautious. A vegetable noodle soup, apparently made with rooster stock, was more miss than hit. These two dishes, however, were amaaazing. The eggplant was peeled before stir-frying in oyster sauce and loads of oil with garlic, an innovation that I will emulate when next in the vicinity of a wok. Uninterrupted by the bothersome skin, the texture was consistent, a firm gooey sponge for the sauce. So very, very good. The chicken and ginger were presented in equal proportions on plate number two, also an excellent move. The ginger was young – so I must plagiarise John Lanchester and invoke the vague whiff of infanticide which accompanies all young and baby vegetables – and its youth imparted to the poulet a sharp pinkness which bore no threat of bird flu. The sprinking of shallots on both dishes confirmed the righteousness my love for this humble aromatic.

PS: if the only reasonably contraction of travel blog is trog, is it possible that a food/travel blog could qualify as a frog?

have you seen this tree before?

the only way i can process the stupendousnous of the angkor temples, it would seem, is through a proliferation of really silly questions.

so:

What film featured this tree? For extra points, tell me why the hell I saw this film.

fear not, gentle friends, i have taken hundreds of photos of rocks in various states. slide night is going to be a riot. book your seats now!!

in the meantime, check out the rubble! a pox on neat, clean, orderly lines. long live moss, lichen, and precariously balanced ancient corridors.

name that face

This is a picture of one of the enigmatic (official adjective) faces of Bayon, one of the larger of the Angkor temples, housed in the Angkor Thom complex, built, I believe, by Jayavarman II in the 12th century. Where is the guidebook that will make me sound like a great authority on Angkorian history?

There are more than fifty of these faces, which are about two metres high, staring out from every tower and aspect of this huge temple. The first Angkor temples were built to Hindu gods; when the kings converted to Buddhism, so did the temples. No one is sure whose faces peer out of the Bayon temples. Does this face belong to the Buddha, to Shiva, or to Brahma? If you know the answer, tell me, and together we will rocket straight to the top of archaeology class.

angkor what

The Angkor temples defy superlatives. I regret a life lived in hyperbole as it might detract from the credibility of my appraisals. Something grandiloquent and weighty on this place will no doubt emerge but for the moment, the frivolous, incidental, and visual may be my only outlet. In other words, check out my breakfast.

Notable culinary experiences, with digressions on the side

Close and uncensored observations of my eating experiences have been promised. And so, in no particular order, it begins.

1. Mango, sticky rice and coconut cream on the street in Bangkok.

Sweet, salty, chewy, and succulent all at once. Marks deducted for service in styrofoam.

2. Degustation amok in Siem Reap.

Amok is one of the national dishes of Cambodia, or so I’m told. It’s a mild red curry of whatever meat, fish or veg takes your fancy, served in a banana leaf with a swirl of coconut cream on top. The curry paste is spice rather than garlic-ginger-galangal based, thinned out with stock rather than coconut milk and the whole seems to be brewed with some sort of red pepper, onion and morning glory. It’s pretty tasty. And it’s called amok, which lends itself to a delightful array of puns. And a degustation amok seems to me to make a good thing even better, with five versions of the one dish, all displayed in their own little banana leaf compartments. I really must start taking photographs of such noteworthy dishes. Full marks for presentation, Amok (the name of the restaurant as well as the dish).

3. Banana flower salad, Siem Reap

Prasit’s does a mean banana flower salad, possibly a better banana flower salad than this. Monica, who is highly knowledgable about such things, tells me that is because we have better quality produce in Sydney. Of course we do. That said, a banana flower salad within coo-ee of banana trees is hard to beat.

4. Banana pancakes, Angkor Hilton Guesthouse.

This guesthouse was a little terrifying. I was dropped there at 11.30pm after a truly heinous fifteen hour trip from Bangkok. The bus trip was dusty, hot, and bumpy, there was a five hour schlep through border checks in the middle of it and it was punctuated by a sappy English girl lisping, ‘it’s all experience, innit’ every five minutes. So is being in a padded cell, love. After all of this, I would have slept under a banana leaf. As it happened, I slept at the Angkor Hilton. Our deposition there was a clear example of collusion between a bus company and a guesthouse as no sane person would have recommended this place unless they were on the payroll or a member of the family. Yes, it was large and airy and clean and cheap-ish. (The price offered pre-midnight was subject to some increase with the passage of eight hours. In fact, the overnight net increase in tariff turned out to be 100%. Classy. ) The fact that there was no electricity was a negative, but one with which I could cope. (The midnight story was that the king of Cambodia was visiting in a few days so electricity was being conserved in his honour. The light of day revealed this to be a fiction.) That not one of the surfaces would have passed a basic-spirit level test was worrying to my only occasionally practically minded self. (Watching my torch roll along the window-sill was amusing for a very little while.) The great difficulty I had in convincing my hosts to let me leave was unnerving. (It involved the concoction of a large ballooning fiction involving room reservations elsewhere, a large boyfriend, two large boyfriends, and the inability to make plans independently, and a lot of girly shrugging and giggling.) All that said, the Angkor Hilton made a mean banana pancake – bananas properly caramelised in coconut milk and fluffy eggy pancakes. The coffee tasted like it had been made with last week’s dishwater, but the pancakes, the pancakes were grrreat.

5. Chilli sauce, Thai Airways

The precedent for a constant fine array of condiments was set on the flight from Sydney to Bangkok. The insipid inflight noodle offerings were supplemented by optional sachets of chilli sauce. Since then, chilli, in various forms has rarely been more than two metres away from my table.

6. Gristle-filled spring rolls, Angkor Wat.

Alas, what record of notable culinary experiences would be complete without a serious dud? Monica and I arrived hungry at Angkor Wat at sunset and thought that we would brave one of the Khmer menu only resto-shacks and order on the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ principle, using the time-honoured ‘point and smile’ technique. A little gesticulation took us a long way. A little risk-taking on the eating front seems vital to me. My father instilled this principle in my sisters and I from an early age and it is one that I am determined to pursue. Following the bloody-minded Pike principle, we wound up with a yummy sour chicken soup and a strange sweet curry with cold noodles, some kind of meat and sausage and pumpkin. On watching others, I realised we were supposed to eat spoonfuls of this alternating with bites of fresh chilli. Unfortunately the chilli-lime plate had been taken away before we could try this. Some cold, yellowy-looking drinks were delivered to the people at the other end of the table. They looked happy, I thought the drinks might be some sort of soothing lemon concoction so we finangled a couple of them too. They turned out to be sugarcane juice – super-sweet, but palatable. The chaps sitting next to us were onto our game and watched us, amused; when fresh spring rolls arrived in front of them, we got in on their act. The fun stopped here. Plenty of fresh greens – mmmm. Some slightly gritty tiny prawns – oooh-kay, texturally challenging but do-able. We both stopped at the same time when we realised that there was a texture which couldn’t be categorised as either leafy vegetable matter or odd little shellfish. That texture turned out to be strips of what I can only describe as cured gristle, long chewy strands of some sort of tough fat which had been stewing in something acidic for an insufficient period of time. It was unforgettably awful and suddenly absolutely inedible. I remain haunted.

Thus far, I am sad to report that I have consumed neither dumplings nor crab. I expect this sorry state of affairs will be remedied soon.

Minority Joke

No, not that kind of minority joke.

I happened upon Aporia Books last night. Students of post-structuralism, please chortle along with me in a knowing yet slightly desperate fashion.

bangers and dash

On the flight from Sydney to Bangkok, I read Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. On the plane, this loose set of essays about California – as it is, as it was, and as it has been dreamed – seemed entirely appropriate reading. I followed Didion with pleasure as she scrutinised the contradictions and misrecognitions in the mythology of California via her own experiences and family history. Taking the great western expansion as a beginning, Didion unsettles the Californian fables of independence and community, examining defence spending and employment, the deceptive rhetoric of water, landscape painting, the mental health system with her habitual cool intelligence. In the controlled limbo of the aircraft, I was able to contemplate my own departure from Sydney, a city with more than its fair share of myths and misrecognitions. Neither here nor there, stripped of any specificity, planes and trains (less frequently buses) have always been to me spaces wide open to such contemplation and so I am generally quite unflummoxed by solo transit.

Touching down in Bangkok, though, – here – left me in a state of disorientation, suspended somewhere between mild panic and delirium, as intense as any such state I can recall. I can find some reasons for this fervour: the jolt of leaving Sydney – where I was from – for an as yet indeterminate period, the heat and humidity, the very newness of the place, mild jet-lag, the adjustment to anti-malaria medication. Nonetheless, the shock of the new, necessary, desired, invited as it is, still occurred to me as a shock. It’s not that hot, is it? It’s not that new? I came to Bangkok under very different circumstances with my entire family twelve years ago. It seems that everyone I know has been to Bangkok at some juncture. It’s only a nine-hour flight from Sydney, for crying out loud. And Thai restaurants are so ubiquitous in the inner-city as to eliminate any culture shock, aren’t they? It would seem not as I found myself entirely defamiliarised and managed, in the course of a single morning, to get lost, to get driven down a seedy alley by a tuk-tuk driver on an unsolicited mission to show me the best silk in Bangkok and then get dropped I don’t know where, to extract myself from the aforesaid, to forget how to say thank you in Thai, to meet two middle-aged New York women fruitlessly looking for Chinatown, to avoid collision with all manner of vehicles, and again to get lost. I climbed to the top of the Temple of the Golden Mount, Wat Saket, in order to take in the promised panorama of the city, an attempt, I think, to physically orient myself in Bangkok. I climbed down and wandered around, looking for landmarks, trying to avoid touching monks, trying to embody the spirit of flânerie in the hot, odiferous sois, far from Benjamin and Baudelaire’s grands boulevards. I had no hat and wondered what would happen if I fainted in the heat.

Somehow, the neighbourhood in which my guesthouse is located suddenly surrounded me and I took myself into a shaded café to drink cold sweet coffee with ice and watch the traffic. Once I had calmed a little, I thought I would turn back to Didion in the hope that her froideur would cool me further.

I’m changing my readings processes. For years I have been reading either under some pressure or with a measure of guilt, reading against the clock to extract some sense for research purposes, or furtively for late-night pleasure, aware that there are classes to be prepared and abstracts, articles, papers to be written. I’m determined to read more slowly and more carefully, without a clear object in mind. I wanted to look more closely at Didion’s economical and exact sentences, at her interweaving of her own experiences with trends and events in Californian history, at the meticulous structure of her prose. Actually, I wanted to figure out how to write like Joan Didion, but this is a project which will take more than one morning in Bangkok. There is also a pragmatic element to this re-reading. I left Sydney with too many books and I must jettison Where I Was From to lighten my pack and make space for another volume down the track.

I found myself, however, barely able to focus on the page. Didion’s prose is ordered and regulated; it is concerned with the strangeness of the very familiar. She conveys, coolly, elegantly, her bewilderment in the face of received wisdom. I cannot imagine Joan Didion as anything but cool and elegant. It is inconceivable to me that she should be flustered, or lost, or without the nous to find a cool, air-conditioned bar in which to order a drink, organise her notes and proceed from thence to dine with a literate member of the diplomatic corps. In other words, the Didion of Where I Was From and of my imagination is entirely incongruous to my brief experience of Bangkok. Just as there are few gimmicky metaphors, flashing lights, or tacky figures in Didion’s writing, it is hard to find cool, clear spaces for reflection amidst the frantic movement of Bangkok in April. I had to abandon her and instead started reading Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a book that is far more suited to Bangkok in that it is digressive, wonderfully gaudy, delivered by a hapless young female narrator, and shamelessly, hilariously hybrid in both its content and allusions. Tomorrow, though, I take the bus to the Thai-Cambodian border from whence I will make my way somehow to Siem Reap. My sources tell me that the only reason to pack any warmth for travel in SE Asia at this time of year is to withstand airconditioning in buses. I think I’ll carry Didion with me for one more stage and see if the highly regulated environment of the bus allows me to follow and admire her with a little more ease.