New Years in Bangkok

I arrived back at BKK around 11:30am, a half-hour late. Cousin Norm met me up at airport, as he had just gotten his international driver's licence, and was now learning to negotiate a car around Bangkok. We are back to driving on the left, and the conversion is once again 1=35 baht instead of 1=4000 riel. Back to "sawasdee Khrap", yellow shirts, and the ever-present posters of the king. It was almost a shock to see people commuting by car again. How long had it been? Oh, six days.

Spent the day hanging out at the house, and prepared to spend New Year's Eve with Norm and Karen, and their friends Cath, Miss Wendy, Miss Leslie, and Michael. At around 6:30 in the evening, plans changed abruptly when we received word that bombs had gone off in Bangkok. Karen suddenly had to go to work, being in the biz of broadcasting such events.

There was a nervous vibe in the house. Folk were bummed that Karen had to work at the outside of a great night, but that was obviously not the only thing. Was anyone hurt? Would there be more bombs? At or near midnight? Who was behind it? With a military government in power, what would happen next? All public festivities are cancelled, leaving our group a little worried and restless.

We felt bad that Karen was working, so 11:30 had us wandering over to the bureau to pop some bubbly and do countdown. I brought the horn along to play some Auld Ang Syne (sic?) Standing on the balcony a few minutes prior to midnight, we heard an explosion, which we nervously attibuted to fireworks and paranoia.

Did the countdown, played the horn really loud from a high building into the night. Omigod its 2007. Hoped the coming year would be better.

The lines lit up about 12:10, saying that a bomb had gone off at Central Sq Plaza (the public event we had originally been planning to attend - subsequently cancelled), which was just down the road from Karen's office. Guess that wasn't fireworks.

The group splintered shortly after, as Karen had just received more work to do. I ended up hitting a bar with Michael that had a funk band. I had the horn, not to mention a few drinks in me, so I talked my way onstage for a couple of tunes (I Will Survive). Details begin to get sketchy from this point forward, but we travelled to a place down the street, where I met Eileen from Kuala Lumpur. She was travelling alone for the first time and loving it! Then Michael bought a tray of bobbing dogs, and all broke loose.

The next day I was in rough shape. Contacted my mother to let her know I was alive. Ate at a nice french restaurant, and later had drinks at Banyam Tree, a bar and resto on the 59th floor of a hotel(?) which offered great views of the city. Early the next morning, Cath left for home, and Wendy and Lesley began their Cambodian adventure. I didn't hear them go. Woke up with the house empty. No time to be wistful though, I had to get in the shower and get my butt to Hanoi.

Pix are N+K et al., ferris wheel at Suan Lum Night Bazaar as seen from Banyam Tree, and the flag of Viet Nam.

Killing Fields.

While in Phnom Penh, I wanted to check out the Tuol Seung Museum (bottom pix) and the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek (top), two grim monuments to Cambodia's recent past.

I'd been reading about the rise of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot, a piece of history that I'd had only a fleeting knowledge of prior to my arrival in Cambodia, and difficult to avoid once I was here. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, and for the next four years performed a radical attempt to erase the past and start a new society. Dissenters, which included a great deal of the country's educated population, were imprisoned, interrogated and executed, as were children and infants. Though Khmer Rouge were overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1979, these events are still reverberating today.
****************
Once I got the hang of the bike, not to mention Cambodian traffic, I headed out of town down a dusty dirt road, rife with ruts, potholes, and the lounging crews sent to fix them. After about 15 km, I reached the entrance to Choeung Ek, and went to park the moto. I still hadn't got the hang of pulling the bike backwards onto the double kickstand, so I luckily had a crowd of cheering locals when I lost the bike and dropped it on its side.

Choeung Ek served as an death camp during the Pol Pot regime, and from 1975 to 1978 it is estimated that 17000 people died here and were dumped in mass graves. Just past the gate, the monument containing skulls, organised by age and sex, some containing obvious traces of the trauma which landed them within the exhibit. Surrounding the monument are the grounds of the orchard which dug up in favour of human disposal. A network of footpaths wind among grassy pits in the ground, the remnants of mass graves unearthed in 1980. A few trees and several open areas signify where an estimated 8000 bodies still remain buried, serving as another aspect of this memorial. While exploring the site, trying to imagine the merciless acts that took place in this peaceful environment, the visitor encounters a tree where a PA speaker was hung to play music and drown out moans and screams. While the visitor gets accustomed to seeing tattered clothing lying caked in the dirt, when it is accompanied by a human femur poking out of the ground, one can't escape the chill.

A little more sombre, somewhat spaced actually (though well in control of my bike again), I made my way back into Phnom Penh, and next saw the Tuol Seung Museum, also known as Security Prison 21 or S21. From the outside, it looked like an innocuous highschool, which is the function the building served prior to Pol Pot. While he was in power, the building served as an interrogation and torture centre. Prisoners were bolted to bedframes, from which point on they were subject to a variety of sadistic butcharies. The bedframes remain, accompanied by a photo of the prisoner found bound there when the Vietnamese Army liberated Phnom Penh. The site is also famous for having room after room of headshots of former inmates. While looking through, it struck me that the subjects were being pretty cooperative to sit still for a pic while awaiting a nasty fate. A larger picture later on explained it to me. Apparently, a metal device was invented to bind the arms tightly behind the back, force the head up, and get that wiggly prisoner to sit still. Necessity breeds invention, I suppose.

Phnom Penh (Dec 29-31am)

The road south from Siem Reap was bordered with little shacks and acres of field and wet rice paddy, punctuated by the occasional lone palm tree. The bus stopped twice for refreshments and washroom breaks, each time at a little roadside market with dusty stalls selling fruit and drinks. On one such occasion, the fare was a little different - fried tarantula. I had to try. It was coated with a sauce not unlike blackened chicken, and tasted quite good when not distracted by the revulsion of what it was you were eating. The locals were buying bagfuls, and I watched to see how they nibbled. It was like the precise methodology of an Oreo cookie or chocolate Easter Bunny. Pick the legs off first, then pop the fat abdomen into your mouth and give it a hardy crunch.

I arrived in Phnom Penh to find that my previous hotel had arranged to have me met at the bus stop, as there was a cyclo driver waiting to drive me and another to their sister location. We took the cyclo just to get ourselves into the thick of accomodations. It turned out that the place was a bit of a dive, so my companion headed off to look elsewhere in the area by the river, while I did the same, leaving both the cyclo driver and hotel manager sputtering and yelling out renewed sales pitches.

Walking north through run-down, tightly packed chaos of curbside transactions, I checked out a few places that were unfortunately booked, and arriving at Last Guest House. The landlady was Cambodian, but spoke better French than English, so I finally got an opportunity to practice speaking another language. My French isn't great, but it is a heck of a lot better than my Khmer.

After a much needed shower, I sat down to figure out my plan of attack. The way my timing had worked out, I had late afternoon of this day and all of the next to explore Phnom Penh, far too little time to absorb more than the superficial layers of this city. Still, I wanted to work efficiently with the time I had, and charted out a rough schedule while I dined on a "happy" pizza from Happy Herb's pizza. Felt kinda funny. Decided it would be fun to play some music, and so I went to a venue and spoke to the musicians playing that night. Soon, it was back to the guest house to retrieve my horn.

As I was leaving, I happened to ask the landlady how I late I could get back in. She said, "Oh, late, 11pm." Eleven? I explained that I (now) had a show to play, and that 11 was waaay too early. She said, "OK, 12." Twelve? After some deft bartering with times, reminding me of my pleas to stay a bit longer at the high school dance, I ended up giving her an out-and-out bribe, something which didn't seem to work as a teen. Talk about pay-to-play. I vowed that closing time would be one of the first things I would investigate when sizing up future accomodations. I arrived back at the Memphis Pub, and played three songs of the band's second set. Not my best work, but the gap in playing I'd had taken Thailand was catching up with me.

The next morning, I started at a respectable time, and began to work through the city as per my strategy. First, I hired a motorbike, and entered the stream of motos coursing along Sisowath Quay. I cruised along Tonle Sap, the river which connected the complexes of Angkor to Phnom Penh to the ocean. While there wasn't a lot of concern for lane markers, or even which side of the road to drive on, for that matter, the traffic was fairly simple to negotiate, as everyone kept at a speed of 50 km/h. I checked out my primary destinations, which were further afield, then headed back into the central area to fill my remaining time with the ranked items on my list.

First, I hit Psar Tuoi Tom Phong, also known as the Russian Market. My hunger for knick-knacks and souveniers had apparently been sated by my shopping frenzy in Siem Reap, so I moved on to the National Museum. The museum is home to many of the treasures recovered from Angkor. After about an hour of wandering through the displays of fine jewelry and statues, I decided I'd digested enough Buddhas, nagas (multi-headed snakes), garudas (half-man, half-bird creature ridden by Vishnu) and apsaras (elegant traditional dancers) to hold me for a while in that department as well.

I wound the rest of the day eating and drinking in the restos along the Tonle Sap strip, touristy places which offered local and Western dishes at fairly cheap prices. By Canadian standards, anyway. A shame to not stray beyond the tourist ghetto, but it had been a full day, and I did pretty good with the time allowed.