“The difference between a good
haircut and a bad one is a week.”
--my Aunt Marcy
Day 1:
You arrive Sihanoukville, in the
south of Cambodia, at 7:45 PM. You’ve
been on the road since 7:30 that morning, bouncing over barely paved roads and dodging
in and out of motorcycles carrying whole families, minivans crammed with thirty
people.
You’re tired. You’re two-and-a-half-weeks into your trip
and you’re not sleeping enough, not exercising, and eating way too much rice.
You hate this. Not Cambodia, but arriving in town this way,
in the dark, tired. Bad enough trying to
establish a mental map, locate a good grocer, figure out the logistics of
getting breakfast, work through the kinks of your hotel room’s cooling
system. But to arrive late at night,
exhausted and hungry with a second round of Pol Pot’s revenge on the
horizon. The worst.
It probably doesn’t help that Dam,
your guide, has warned you and the rest of your group that Sihanoukville can be
a dangerous town. “There are pickpockets
there,” he says, his baritone unusually earnest. “And bag snatchers. Don’t leave anything alone on the beach.”
And it probably doesn’t help that
Sihanoukville has a reputation as a sort of hippy enclave, a place where people
who can’t stay sober even long enough to maintain a job at McDonalds go to hang
out on the beach and smoke weed until they pass out, waking at dawn with their
legs red from sand flea bites. You did your
stint in Colorado twenty years back and have only minimal tolerance for people
like this, folks who have no loyalty to anything or anybody other than their
own high. After seventeen days wallowing
in the company of Cambodians whose kindness and humor is unparalleled even by the
Thai, you’re not in the mood to spend time with dread-locked pot heads who
haven’t bathed in weeks.
At the Holy Cow for dinner, you
barely sip your pumpkin soup, your stomach grumbling. Everyone else is thrilled with their food,
but when they start talking dessert, you put your spoon down and excuse
yourself, catching a tuk tuk back to the hotel.
You spend the next twenty minutes on the toilet, head in your hands.
Day 2:
Breakfast sucks. The dining room is hot and crowded, the
tables are littered with crumbs and used napkins. The buffet, featuring everything from boiled
eggs to lo mein to batter-fried squash, has been picked over. Sihanoukville, a masseuse in Siem Reap told
you, is a favorite vacation spot for Cambodians. This sets it aside from many of the beaches
in Asia, where the only natives you see are the ones cleaning your room.
But even so, it means you have to
stand there quietly, watching the dark-haired lady in front of you take the
last six slices of mango.
At lunch that day, you and your
colleagues watch as a handsome young man with Irish skin and black hair throws
a leg over the seat of a moped. Moments
earlier, you watched as this same young man came down the hall toward you,
weaving slightly, eyes half-closed, lips parted as though he’s just thrown up,
or is just about to.
It’s barely noon.
Now he’s joined by a companion, a
lanky boy with sun-bleached hair, expensive dark glasses, and a full bottle of
San Miguel in one hand. The two of them
settle themselves on the moped and dark hair starts the engine, twisting the
throttle. As they lurch off, blonde hair
sways back, spine arched, nearly tumbling head over heals onto the sandy
courtyard.
He doesn’t though, doesn’t spill a
drop of his beer as they zoom off the curb and into the road, veering to miss a
gray-haired man on a bicycle.
It’s afternoon now, and you’re at
Wat Kraom, high in the hills on the other side of town. You
might as well be in another country, it’s that different from the open-air bars
and restaurants that line the beach area, all sporting red and white Angkor
beer signs.
The wat itself is a typical temple
in Cambodia: boxy and rectangular on the
outside, with glaring whitewashed walls and a tiled roof with gold trim that
rises in ornate flames toward the sky.
Inside, the high walls and ceiling are covered with primary-colored
paintings of the life of the Buddha, beginning with his birth beneath a banyan
tree and proceeding to—well, it’s hard to tell exactly where they proceed to,
since they don’t appear to be in any particular order. They swim over and around you, grabbing your
eye at every turn, and then grabbing your eye again with the next image, and the
next: the Buddha as a child taking his
first steps, the Buddha on a journey across India, confronting some sort of
deer-like creature that looks a little . . . angry? A huge golden Buddha statue rests on a
platform at one end of the tiled floor, surrounded by four white pillars. By the door at the other end of a room, a
fortune teller is dolling out handfuls of rice onto a square mat. A slender woman in a white shirt kneels
beside him, watching silently, her face anxious.
You’re here with Liesl, who’s
writing an article on death practices in Cambodia. There’s a school in the compound as well, and
she’s come to interview one of the teachers.
Outside the temple, young monks in saffron robes—it’s a cliché, and you
know it, but that’s what color they are—sweep the brick courtyard with fronds
of grass tied into short brooms. Their
heads and eyebrows shaved, they have a slightly startled look. Mostly, though, they look bored. Not surprising, perhaps: they’re teenage boys and as often or not they
became monks because in a country where 48% of the country lives below the
ninety-cents-a-day poverty line, joining a monastery is the best way for their
families to ensure they are fed and educated.
One of them, a tallish boy with unusually round eyes, has draped a towel
over his head, swinging his broom across the dry leaves with a practiced, easy wave
that ensures he remains cool and sweat-free.
There’s a cemetery here, filled
with ornate stupas, circular burial structures that spiral toward the sky,
sometimes eighteen feet high, sometimes higher.
Some are painted red, some are white, some are yellow, but all of them
are topped by the same flame-like waves you see on the temple. The flames are meant to purify, someone told
you, to lift evil away. Some of the
older stupas contain bodies, but most hold only ashes. One of the things Liesl will discover is that
in Cambodia, only the very rich can indulge in grief. The poorest just cremate the body and go back
to work.
In one corner of the compound
stands a small temple. You slip off your
shoes, go inside, the tile gritty and reassuring beneath your feet. The news from home has not been good, so you
light three joss sticks, bow the same number of times. It can’t hurt. A man comes over, his face broad, his shirt
faded and baggy from so many washings.
He gestures toward the front of the temple, beneath a low ceiling where
a dark-faced carved figures rests cross legged, staring over your head. You follow him and he places you in front of
the figure, hands you more joss sticks.
You bow your head and he reaches in front of you grabs some sort of long
brush, like a butler’s broom. Chanting,
he dips it in a bowl and splashes droplets of water over you, again and again,
his voice low and earnest.
God, you love the Cambodians.
Whizzing back down the hill in the
tuk tuk, you start to feel a little better.
But that night, on the way back
from dinner, you pass clusters of Anglo kids, college age and a little older,
resting on concrete medians, their heads in their hands. Others drift along the crumbling streets, more
like zombies than you thought possible of people who are not partially
eaten. A couple passes you, the woman
lithe in shorts and a bikini top.
“I got fired from my job today.”
“Yes?” says the man. She barely reaches to his shoulder.
“I told off my boss’s wife.”
“What was your job?” he asks. He sounds German, but may be Swiss.
“I was a receptionist.”
They are holding hands.
Day 3:
You’ve been avoiding the
beaches. Partly this is due to your
guide’s warning about bag snatchers, but partly this is because some of the
people you’re with have come back with reports of wild bars, lunar parties,
body painting. You’ve been to Hoi An and
you’ve seen pictures of Phuket, and you know what beaches in Asia can be like
when they’re not lined with bars featuring fireworks and fire twirling every
night. Ever seen The Beach, starring Leonardo DeCaprio? Like that, only: a) real; and b) without a film crew.
It doesn’t help that when you
Googled “Sihanoukville,” before coming, you found a half-dozen blogs
complaining about the kids peddling bracelets and hair bands on the
beaches. You like kids, but you know
that in Cambodia parents often pull their children out of school, forcing them
to sell to tourists, knowing that only the stoniest of hearts can resist a
brown-eye, dark-skinned twelve-year-old who looks no older than six. The problem got so bad that the police in Siem
Reap took to rounding up the kids in early morning raids and driving them out
into the country where they dumped them, unceremoniously, as far from the
hordes of annoyed tourists as possible, forcing them to find their way back on
their own—or not. Indeed, the problem
got so bad that now there’s an NGO—Child Safe—that papers hotel lobbies and
elevators with flyers begging tourists not to buy from children, insisting that
poor returns on this practice might lead to parents keeping their kids in
school.
Child Safe, it appears, hasn’t had
much of an impact in Sihanoukville.
Children roam the beaches in packs, peddling their wares. When tourists decline, it’s not uncommon for
these brown-eyes, mocha-skinned twelve-year-olds to unleash a string of the foulest
words in the English language—learned, undoubtedly, the packs of tourists who
used those same words to shoo away the kids.
And they really are
pickpockets. Clusters of children will
approach an adult, half of them poking them or stroking their skin—“You have
pretty skin, lady!”—while their peers dip into your pockets. This sounds Dickensian, you know, but sure
enough, when some of your colleagues come back from the beach, they tell
stories of being accosted.
“What did you do?” you ask.
“I freaked out,” says one of
them. “I told them ‘Get away! I don’t like being touched.’ Then this little girl says, “You no like
being touched? But I bet you like it
when boy f**k you, right?’”
So you’ve been avoiding the
beaches. This morning, though, a friend
mentions going to a nearby national park (one thumbs up, one down), mentioning
in passing, “If I weren’t doing that, though, I’d probably go to Otres Beach.”
Then later that morning you’re
stepping out of the grocery store and a tuk tuk driver says, “Need ride?”
“No,” you reply. “My hotel’s just over there.”
He nods. It’s still early, and the mild panic that will
kick in later when the day is growing short and still he hasn’t received a fare
hasn’t yet arrived. “Maybe later,” he
says, “you find me, I take you to Otres beach?”
You take this as a sign. So later that day, you do indeed find him, and
he takes you and some friends to Otres beach.
It is pretty near perfect. There are restaurants and bars, yes, but in
this slow season—May is when the rains will start to come—and with a twenty
minute tuk tuk ride from Sihanoukville, the stoners and drunks can’t be
bothered. The sand is white, the waves
are strong enough to be interesting and steady enough to be soothing. Buy a mojito—for a mere three dollars—and
you’re allowed to sit all day on a chaise lounge beneath a thatched
umbrella. There are venders, but only
occasionally, and they seem half-hearted.
When a middle-aged mother comes along and offers a massage, you decline,
figuring it, too, will be half-hearted, not to mention sandy. But then she goes down the beach and a
Chinese woman flags her down, and you watch as the masseuse spends an hour
spreading oil over this woman’s body, working every muscle, front and
back.
Fishing boats putter near the
horizon, passing between small islands.
The horizon—no, the sky, the entire sky:
there is no sky anywhere in the world like the sky in Cambodia. It’s blue, for one. Rains come once a day, in the late afternoon,
and twenty minutes after the first drops, the sky is that perfect shade
of—again, with the clichés—azure, like a cartoon movie you watched when you
were a kid. And the clouds. They climb, bundling up one over another
until they seem to reach miles into the sky.
When the sun strikes them you can see every curve, every indentation and
pillar and every bend in every bale. You feel like a dork, looking at these
clouds, trying to find ways to describe them.
You feel like a poet, a bad poet, struggling against cliches.
You sip your mojito, feeling more
than a little silly, watching these clouds, trying to find words.
Day 4:
Your friend has booked a
three-island tour. You’ve seen men on
the beach selling these, flashing cracked plastic binders full of photographs
at anyone who will listen to their patter.
You assumed, like with the massage, that it was a scam of some sort,
which is funny in a twisted sort of way.
This is Cambodia after all, not China, not Vietnam. The people here are genuinely very
forthright, only sly when they’re teasing you or making a joke. This just goes to show, you think to
yourself, how much Sihanoukville seems to carry an air that doesn’t feel like
“real” Cambodia: real Cambodia is
genuine and brown-skinned and always polite.
Sihanoukville—or so you were led to believe, or have led yourself to
believe, is fake and pale-faced and obnoxiously drunk.
But anyhow, so your friend has
booked a three-island tour, an all-day excursion beginning at 8:30 and including
lunch and stops for swimming and snorkeling and lazing about on the beach. You’re not really that interested, but you
haven’t seen your friend for a while and you’re not sure what else you’re going
to do, so you pay your $15 and tag along.
A van arrives to pick you up and
you climb aboard. They make one more
stop, along the same strip of sand-blasted road you wandered the other night looking
for a restaurant. At a small guesthouse
behind a bar, the van stops to pick up three British students lugging their
backpacks. They seemed dazed. When the bus stops next at the pier, one of
the students climbs out and stands there, swaying as though blown by a
breeze. When the group makes its way
down to the dock, she drags her backpack behind her, letting it bounce along
the pavement. She’s wearing the shortest
of short shorts, and you’re pretty sure you’ve never seen quite so much butt
cheek on a person who’s technically clothed.
Once on the boat, the trio of Brits
collapses on a platform on the rear deck, their forearms over their eyes, their
hands on their stomachs to counter the rise and fall of the deck. You go fore, and the boat quickly fills with
tourists from all over: Cambodians and
French, Germans and Russians. The boat
casts off, and one of the Brits—the boy, wearing Harry Potter glasses—leans
over the rail and vomits.
The first stop is a coral reef, or
what remains of it. Most of Cambodia’s
coral was killed off by dynamite fishing years ago. Nonetheless, the snorkeling is pleasant,
black and blue striped fish swimming beneath you. Lunch is served and it’s good, pan-fried fish
with fried rice. Afterwards, the boat
reaches the second island, Bamboo island, and everyone gets off, lugging their
gear. The hungover Brits march across
the sand to a pair of sun-bleached huts on wooden stilts and you watch,
wondering if they’ve loaded their packs with tequila or if they’ve come here to
dry out for a while. You find, finally,
that you don’t really care.
The beach is nice, the sand warm
and clean. Fishing boats bob maybe
fifty-yards out, and the whole thing has a made-for-face-book feel to it, and
you mean that in a good way.
Nevertheless, eventually you get
bored and make your way through the saw-grass to a trail that leads to the
other side of the island. You follow a path
of moist earth beneath foliage rattling with tree frogs.
You don’t quite get it at
first. When you reach the other side of
the island, it just looks like another beach. Sure, there’s the ocean, unobstructed by more
islands, no fishing boats or tankers on the horizon. Sure, the sand stretches for a half-mile on
either side of you, not the white sand that you’ve been told is so precious,
but ordinary tannish-brownish sand, regular sand like what you grew up with in
your sandbox as a child. Only here it’s
flawless: no tidal debris, no seaweed,
not so much as a gum wrapper. Brightly
colored huts stand back on the edge of the forest, and here or there a cluster
of tourists—mostly white, but some brown—stretch out in the sand, talking
quietly.
You wander both ways up and down
the beach, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. This makes you hot, though, so you leave your
backpack and t-shirt in a pile on the sand—fears of bag-snatchers seem to have faded—and
wade into the low, steady waves. The
water is warm, but when you dive under and squint into the clear green water,
you can feel a layer of sweat being wiped from your skin. You come up, take a breath, then dive back
under, not so much swimming as coasting along the sandy bottom, feeling your
way with your hands. Coming up, a wave
slides by, knocking you back on your heels.
You press the salt from your eyelashes, squint toward the shore. Your bag is still there, so you dive under
again, and then again. When you come up,
your toes dig into the sand and you realize you’ve never felt sand like this
before, that it’s rubbery and fine, almost elastic beneath your feet.
Later you’ll wade back to shore and
flop in the shade of a tree along the edge of the sand. You’ll lay back, eyes shut, the sun playing
through the piney branches above you, warming your skin.
Day 5:
What does it, though, what makes
sure you will remember this place for the rest of your life, happens the next
day as you’re preparing to leave.
Your bags are packed and you’re
standing in the lobby, waiting for the rest of your group. It’s hot outside, and you’re glad to be in
the shade watching the world through a plate glass window. Then, across the parking lot, you see a monk
strolling beneath an umbrella, carrying an alms bowl. He’s in his saffron robe, of course, and
holds a fold of it above his knee so that he doesn’t trip as his sandals scrape
over the melting asphalt.
You’ve seen monks collecting alms
before. In Phnom Penh, you could sit in
your hotel over breakfast and watch as a stream of monks curved up the road,
each one stopping, slightly stooped beneath his umbrella, at the same
house. Every time this happened, a
motherly looking woman in a flowered blouse would emerge, a few riel in hand, bowing deeply before the
monk as she hands him the money.
You watch now as this particular
monk pads across the steaming concrete in Sihanoukville. He must be taking a shortcut, you think to
yourself—surely monks don’t stop at hotels?
Surely a place of business doesn’t offer alms, too driven by profit, you
think, too . . . soulless, maybe, is that the right word? It’s corporate, after all, made up of a
series of individual employees with their own lives, their own homes, their own
alms to offer to the monks who come to their own doors. Why would a business give money or food or
gifts of any sort to soliciting monks, particularly when these monks trod the
same path every day, making the same stops every day?
So you expect to see this monk cut
across the parking lot, bypassing the wide, covered entrance of the hotel.
But no. He stops just beyond the line where the front
porch of the hotel would offer shade.
Standing there beneath his umbrella, his hands crossed along the rim of
the coffer in which he makes his collections, he looks neither left nor
right. He just waits.
And so do you.
Nothing happens at first. Two women stand behind the huge carved desk
at the far side of the lobby, laughing at some joke the hotel manager just
made. A porter in a red and gold suit
swishes by, rolling someone’s bag.
Still the monk stands there.
You consider, wondering who’s
missing, who he might be pausing for. A
janitor, maybe, or the boy who hands out towels by the pool?
Then, finally, the door that leads
to the dining room swings open and the concierge emerges. He’s a big man, the concierge, especially for
a Cambodian, his shoulders filling his dark uniform. He has a face that seems to play at
seriousness, as though he wants you to think he’s the epitome of
professionalism when really you suspect he has a sly side, isn’t beyond making
jokes in Khmer about the clientele, perhaps even when they’re standing right
there, uncomprehending.
In his hands he carries two
sandwiches wrapped in plastic. His heels
click as he strolls across the lobby and then out onto the tiles beneath the
veranda. Approaching the monk, he stops,
bending at the waist until his head is low, the food offered in front of
him.
The monk puts one hand out,
hovering over the thick hair of the concierge.
He begins a blessing, his voice low, melancholy, melodious in a subdued
kind of way. The concierge stays remains
bent, his head at the waist of the monk.
The monk murmurs, words pouring over each other like stones in an ocean,
solid and smooth and tossed by waves. You listen.
You watch.
Then the prayer ends, the silence
suddenly full again. The monk accepts
the food. Placing the sandwiches in his bowl,
he nods once and moves off into the heat, his umbrella bobbing above him,
bleached by the sun. The concierge
remains bowed for half a moment or more, then rises, touching his coiffed hair lightly
before straightening the lapels of his uniform.
