Last Friday I grabbed bus tickets with two friends of mine, Adam and Caisa who are respectively American and Swedish journalists for The Cambodia Daily, and hopped on an old Sorya Transport clanker down south to the provincial beach town Sihanoukville. The bus was everything I had ever hoped for from a “local mass-transit vehicle,” except the air conditioning worked. We started off half an hour late on account of various personalities clambering on and off, sitting in the driver’s seat, forgetting a bag of fruit outside, deciding they needed one more last smoke. When a bus here overbooks, they sell tickets for “aisle seating” (plastic kid stools lined up knees-to-buttocks) and “standing room” (an unlucky group of people crushed together on the steps by the door.)
Thankfully, all three of us had reserved early enough to relax in cracked plastic seats decorated by some great auntie’s best lace selection, mine with a suspiciously dark stain. Adam and I were in the first row, making us first-hand witnesses to Cambodian bus driving techniques. We gasped as the bus seemingly drove into a fully loaded oncoming lane of traffic, swerving away to miss a car or motorbike by too literally, an inch. A horn is a driver’s best friend here, and our driver leaned on his like a soul mate—no dog too small to give out a good blast. We knew a swerve had been an actual near-miss when the Cambodians around us exclaimed and clutched at their hair with us.
A Southeast Asian bus ride would not be complete without the ancient TV mounted at the front playing earsplitting local karaoke and comedy. The selected show for our ride was first assorted love-song duets, accompanied by a chorus dancing with oars, and then slapstick sketches by a fat man/midget duo. They would have been fully enjoyable if Khmer wasn’t such an aggressively spoken language, especially on highest volume. The bus broke down three times and pulled off the road for all the men to amble out, point a lot, and suck their teeth until someone performed some miracle fix they only have in these parts of the world and we were off again. Adam, quite the car guru, was wringing his hands over the apocalyptic smell that puffed through the door each time it opened. Nevertheless, we arrived mid-downpour at the bus station in Sihanoukville, hailed three motos, and headed to the Monkey Republic Guesthouse as we hunched ourselves protectively over our backpacks.
It rained all weekend, apart from a few lovely sunny hours on Saturday morning that we spent blissfully in the ocean and for a brief spell that night. The rain was blowing and chilly, and I marveled at the sensation of being truly cold for the first time in months, wanting to wrap up in a blanket with a hot mug. The weather meant time for catching up on reading and playing pool, shooting the breeze as we discussed what we’d left behind, what we had now in Phnom Penh, and what we’re sticking it all out for. I loved hearing Caisa talk about growing up in Stockholm, learning from her about what the newspapers and magazines don’t say about my European peers and what normal is for them, and how she saw my American peers on her study abroad in Missouri during university. We swapped stories about down-home cooking, our most delightful discovery being our joint enjoyment of boiled potatoes.
When the rain let up on Saturday night the restaurants on the beach opened their seafood barbecues for business, meaning stacks of whole, fresh-caught fish thrown onto a grill and served in all their intact splendor with chili sauce. I made an exception in my new vegetarianism (I accepted the exception because I’m not a moral vegetarian, just a health vegetarian) and had a plate of shrimp for the experience of pulling off their heads, scraping off the pasty brains and dark line of excrement, peeling away the skin, and finally yanking off the tail before I could dip. I distracted myself from the occasional shocks to my taste buds by watching the fire-spinners by the ocean douse their sticks in kerosene, light them, and then twirl around, over, behind, under with eyes shut tight from the heat.
We arrived back in Phnom Penh on Sunday, Independence Day, to the city in full mayhem-mode for the week’s Water Festival merriment. Adam and I decided to forgo the compressed traffic and walk the few miles to our apartments from the bus station. We stopped at one of Cambodia’s only shopping malls for the best cheap gelato in town and watched as families from the provinces just-arrived for Water Festival dealt with the mystery of escalators. Some waited for an entire step to rise up and then rabbit-jump onto it, some held the rolling railing from the underneath position all the way through. There was a special guard hired for the purpose of guiding those in serious bewilderment through the process. We smiled as we thought that this is how they must have felt watching us climb on a motorbike for the first time.
On Tuesday afternoon my German friend Christine and I decided to leap right into the Festival mayhem. Cambodian Water Festival revolves around celebrating the changing direction of the Tonle Sap River, as the Tonle Sap Lake has been filled by rainy season and will now begin to drain, thereby reversing the river’s flow. Cambodians celebrate by holding three days of traditional longboat races on the river, with boats from all the provinces competing. Revelers from the countryside flood the capital to more than twice its usual population, even more so this year because of the coincidence with Independence Day, and clog the riverside streets to walk-with-heavy-elbow-use only during race times and the nighttime float parade on the water.
It felt like the Minnesota State Fair. Street stalls selling every favorite treat a Khmer kid could tug on his parent’s sleeve for, from pork buns to spicy green mango. There were booths advertising “M-Fone Mobile” and “Yeo Soft drinks” and loud boom boxes on every corner, with big groups of people wearing giant grins exploring it all in souvenir hats and crowns. At the river, the choicest spots are on the concrete slopes to the riverbank, and those fill up to a single mound of humanity by 9am. Therefore everyone prods their way as close as possible to the short wall to get in on the cheering action, clutching baggies of iced drinks and coconut shavings.
Christine and I got our favorite sugar water from an exceptionally cheery street vendor, made by cranking a whole sugarcane through a press and gathering the liquid that comes out over crushed ice in a plastic bag, then sticking a straw in and rubber-banding the top. We also sampled a sticky rice and coconut cake, which was overwhelmingly gluey, and the uttermost Western fusion food—durian ice cream on baguette. It would have been a pleasant take on the ice cream cone concept if durian ice cream didn’t taste as stinky as the fruit smells.
The races themselves were staggeringly energetic rowing competitions in boats that held up to sixty men. Captains in all varieties of festive outfits mandated the pace from the front of the boats, drummers in the middle kept the pace of the crews’ pounding at the water, and two men with poles steered from the back. The most dangerous part of the racecourse is the sharp U-turn the boats take to return and paddle back up the current. Christine and I watched several boats get tangled together, and one nearly entire capsizing. It’s particularly frightening when you remember that almost every man with an oar in the middle of the swollen river can’t swim, most certainly not when worn out and trapped under a boat in a current. However, as is the Cambodian custom, danger is shrugged off in pursuit of exuberance.
Nighttime brings the brightly lit float parade, shadow puppet shows, random concerts, famous buildings like the Royal Palace strung with Christmas lights to gawk at, and fireworks. I have noted with a sort of horrified amusement that every night the fireworks go off, the sounds of ambulance sirens fill the air minutes after the booming sounds have faded. The police are actually on duty for once and most attentively so at night, fully uniformed and taking clear enjoyment in herding sellers, taking bribes, and controlling traffic via strings they hold between two officers weighted with rocks so they can raise and lower the barrier with effectiveness. Traffic becomes more hazardous in the evening when the beer flowing through the city lightens bribe prices and motorbikes flood the streets, making it impossible to even step cleanly between two. The lucky families from the provinces have a family living in Phnom Penh that they can stay with, but the rest are draped in hammocks strung up at the sides of the streets and sardined in big Russian trucks to sleep.
I have been relishing the brief change in attitude of the city, as a spirited feeling of happiness and goodwill is prevailing. Smiles and pats on the arm are not hard to come by and my skin color can be ignored in the face of pretty sights and loud music and good things to eat and racing.
Thank u r information
Posted by: Matthew | November 14, 2008 at 06:21 PM