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.