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.