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.