I needed something new and sometime in between traveling through two continents and a part of another, third, in Turkey, I became obsessed with ghouls.
I turned to Google. Bokor Palace Hotel & Casino, Kampot, Cambodia, came up as the nearest, cheapest and easiest place to go (because of their visa policy). Said place was teeming with spirits, and there was no escaping a run-in with the ghouls. If I wanted another excuse for my desire to visit Bokor Palace and Hotel, Kampot, Cambodia, I could call it a self- congratulatory gift for my victory over Mt Kilimanjaro.
Dialogue with self:
“Does one need a reason to travel?”
“No. You just sort of do it.”
“Why the hell are you using ghouls as an excuse?” “Uh…”
“Damn it all. Go.”
So I did. I have said something about being a slave to my heart earlier, remember?
| Visa: Citizens of most countries can get a visa on arrival. Currency: Riel Useful words: Good morning (aroun suostei), Thank You (Aw-koon), Sorry (Som Dtoh) |
Arriving in Phnom Penh, Cambodia
The motodup (motorbike taxi) driver, a short Khmer loitering outside Phnom Penh International Airport knew a cost- conscious backpacker and managed in some mysterious way to convince me he was what I was looking for. I had one condition. If he expected a tip, he was to find me a living space under three dollars, breakfast included.
The Green Lake Guest House, Street 93, was where we fetched up. I cannot deny that Street 93 was the kind of setting I understood, packed with B&Bs and backpackers crawling out of watering holes or resting by light poles smoking the stuff and contemplating the world in general.
A three-dollar bed-and-breakfast from across Boeung Kak Lake wasn’t a bad deal at all, plus the hotel was equipped with a minibar, kitchen and a cashier-cum-receptionist-cum- hotel keeper with a welcome proposal.
Would I like “very good” quality marijuana?
“Here everybody comes to smoke weed,” he added generously. “Very good quality I give. You want?”
There are lessons I am glad I learnt and one of them is NOT reacting to everything. I said nothing. Also, I didn’t want to burn my bridges to heaven right now, so I explained that wash, not weed was my pressing need.
My rumpled clothes, unwashed hair and tired eyes may have led him to put me down as a weed-smoking bum and you can’t blame him for pinning his hopes on me.
That evening, however, after a dinner of noodles tossed with locally procured shrimps from a roadside stall, I took up the receptionist’s offer. What happened was this. While lounging about the deck, a few other residents in various stages of intoxication started up an impromptu musical. As if by magic, the deck filled up with smoke and gyrating bodies, and before I knew it, drinks and joints were being passed around, and a tall, dirty man with glazed eyes was dragging me into the melee.
What happened after is left to the imagination. I don’t suppose any of those present would be able to fill in the blanks either. I never found out who paid for all that excesses either.
But the receptionist had been right. Cambodia did have the “best stuff”.
***
Cambodia has had a run of bad press for the past few years, yet between genocide, bombings and annual flooding, the local population successfully clings to a thin fabric called Life—which, despite their best efforts, has not restored Cambodia’s status on the tourism map, with the exception of Angkor Wat miraculously overlooked by Pol Pot’s destructive drive.
Killing Fields
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The Killing Fields
But if you think you can handle grief, wait till you enter the Killing Fields.
Whoever said that the Killing Fields were just another tourist site was looking in the wrong pit. I don’t particularly fancy admitting that I should have stayed away from Pol Pot’s execution grounds, but when I finally made my way out, my outlook of Cambodia had undergone a complete change—enough to make me patient with the coffee shop fellow whose coffee tasted like the peace offering for the dead and I don’t mean that disrespectfully.
While on the matter of respect, I might add here that for some strange, unexplained reason, it seemed all right to stick my hand in through the open door of the glass tower that housed over ten thousand skulls and caress the cracked skulls—as though reaching out to the past to comfort the tormented soul. I had no connection to these people, yet I was there, feeling them around me, wailing, looking for escape.
My experience of the Killing Fields wasn’t life changing, but it certainly made me tolerant of small inconveniences.
Travelling certainly brings one up to speed on little facts of life that we take for granted. That walk through the Killing Fields should have curbed my urge to see further evidence of Pol Pot’s inhumanity, but I insisted on visiting The S-21 or Tuol Sleng Museum. It was not as if I sought morbidity by choice or force, it was something else. It was one of those visits that make you value life.
My so-called reason to visit Cambodia had been to chase ghosts in Kampot and I am not sure how I got talked into visiting the Killing Fields or the Tuol Sleng and although I cannot think of the two without balking—it certainly added another dimension to my trip. I realized that travelling was not always about the “good life”, but an experience that involved the good and the bad, and taught you something without meaning to. It was about understanding and tolerance, about respect and knowing the value of your own existence.
***
Back at Green Lake in the late evening, I made a dash for the bar. The day had affected me in ways I didn’t think possible. The only solace was that Sex on the Beach was cheap and in plenty, and at two dollars and a night ahead, there was no risk of remembering the horrors of Tuol Sleng. The evening progressed much like the previous one, and soon in the company of smokers sharing drags and singing into the night, I stretched the limit and joined in the merrymaking till the rooster crowed. So it wasn’t surprising that I got into a state of muddle-headedness second night running. I might add here that I was frequently gripped with the urge to fly (that went for all of us on the deck), but that was before we fell into the lake.
I missed the bus to Kampot the following morning.
Morning coffee and banana pancakes restored Cambodia’s appeal. The ghosts of Bokor would have to wait till I was sober.
My next day in Phnom Penh was an eye-opener. It showed me how it was possible to survive on less than 10 USD a day, and even less if you belonged in the tightfisted- backpacker zone. I was surprised at my transformation into a penny-pinching backpacker, eating pig intestines and unnamed birds at roadside stalls in Cambodia and actually enjoying it.
For a dollar, you could have the whole of Cambodia in a bowl.
Travelling through rural Cambodia was similar to travelling through rural India. That is, all that healthy country air forces its way through your windows as you pass along, which is the main difference between connecting with the place and seeing it through a window. But I have to say, it is such moments of keeping your hair in check that contribute towards precious memories.
Kampot appeared at the end of such a journey, but it being a dark and rainy evening, accommodation—rather the lack thereof—worried me. Not often have I come close to tears when arriving in a town engulfed in darkness; so Kampot became the first place that moved me in strange ways. It wasn’t as though darkness or rain put the fear of god in me, but being tired, hungry and uncertain about finding a resting place drove me to tears.
Having no particular skills in locating hotels in the dark was one thing, my ignorance of Khmer, the lack of a raincoat and gnawing hunger made me realize that outside the bus, nature could take revenge in ways she deemed fit. What I hadn’t expected to run into was pushy touts and agents appointed by unseen hotels shoving business cards under my nose before my feet touched the ground.
It dried up my tears pretty quickly.
If I had a magic lamp with a genie in attendance, I would have wished a room with a bath for five dollars, but Cozy Elephant bettered that deal at half that price, throwing in an additional surprise—free coffee and free motodup rides into town. It was not unwarranted generosity towards a lone female, but a ruse to attract backpackers during the low season to keep the machinery running.
Arriving in an empty hotel after dark is pretty unnerving; halls echo your footsteps, light from the generator-powered bulb flickers in defiance and raindrops take up an altogether alien rhythm on the terrace, leaving you feeling that you are going to walk into your room and find it taken. And this was Kampot, the home of the ghouls. And suddenly, in the midst of readjusting your faith in the Almighty, you hear the worst rendition of Blood on the Dance Floor from the room next to yours; you don’t linger
around waiting to be stabbed, unless you are made of some solid stuff.
I knocked on the door. The singing stopped. The door opened.
For the second time since arriving on Khmer soil, I shuddered. Silhouetted against the dull light bulb was a giant.
“Hullo there,” said he.
I have never known the right sort of answer to such a pleasantry.
“Oh, umm, hi there…oh, nothing really…you know I have only just arrived and, umm…this place feels so empty and you know…I heard you…singing and….”
I hoped he did know what I was driving at, for I clearly didn’t. He stepped out into the corridor and extended a hand.
“Steven Theron. Oh yeah, it’s a little empty all right, but comfortable.”
“Sorry to bother you…but…hi, I am Anjaly.”
“Angeline,” he repeated, rolling out my name in a very English way.
“Anjaly,” I said. “A” as in “Other” and not “A” as “Angel.”
Anjaly, with a Y.
We settled for Angie. It was almost my second name, one that I fell back on after people repeatedly failed to grasp the original.
That done, Steven observed.
“You might want to unpack while the power is still on. Here, with the rains and all, there is no saying when it will blink off.”
If Steven had meant that as a dismissal, he was disappointed. I lingered and unnecessarily explained that power cuts being very common in India, didn’t really upset me in any way, but what I really wanted was a feeding spot. Steven ran a finger over his chin and brightened up suddenly. Looking at him, it was hard to imagine food doing that to him, but it only goes to show how wrong you can be about looks.
“You know, I can do better than that. Let me walk you there,” and added heartily that he could do with a “bit” of something in his stomach too. I hated to admit that I was afraid of walking into the room by myself, but he must have guessed because he unlocked my door while I feigned interest in my backpack.
Steven was a sailor from South Africa sitting out his time in Cambodia before flying back home three weeks later. The yacht he sailed on was grounded and hauled off to some port in Malaysia to become seaworthy again. Steven preferred Kampot to Phnom Penh and for a sailor down to his last hundred, finding the two-and-a-half dollar B&B could only have been a lucky twist of fate. Kampot, in his opinion, was a place the dollar proved its elasticity and stretched itself out. Moreover, the kindly hotel owner, a Frenchman who came to Kampot years ago, fell in love with the countryside and a Khmer woman, had offered Steven a discount.
Steven was broke, but his luck was not.
“Cambodia has the best weed this side of Asia,” he explained enthusiastically. “India too, and I swear I had wanted to become a sadhu before my friend offered me the chance to sail.”
I wondered if it were the weed-smoking tourists that gave Cambodia a bad name.
That was just the kind of talk one gets used to hearing when travelling alone. Steven may have been wearing the
traveller’s mask, projecting an image of himself as an out- of-luck sailor, but I haven’t always been truthful about my whereabouts with people I have just met either. A conversation was necessary, but no one guaranteed its authenticity.
The road from the Cozy Elephant had disintegrated into a slush pond. “Not a great time to be out on the street,” Steven declared, cautiously picking his way in the dark. “Kampot wind’s down early, and our chances of finding anything to eat are ninety-ten.”
I pitched my hope on the ten, because I was starving.
“Do pancakes sound good? There is not much you can order around here, not this time of the night, and certainly not under the circumstances, but pancakes are a sure bet anytime. That and baguettes, although I am afraid they wouldn’t be as fresh as breakfast time.” I nodded in the dark and said nothing. Anything was welcome. Cold baguettes sounded remotely like food.
There is great comfort in dining with a pot-smoking, scrawny stranger not likely to stick pointed daggers into your back and is incapable of fleeing with your backpack when you are not looking. Not that I was in immediate danger of being held at dagger-point and made violent love to, but it was good to weigh the options before inviting him into my room. Steven’s goodnight kiss did, however, suggest possibilities, and I didn’t mind very much when he spoke about leaving his door open in case I was afraid of sleeping by myself in what we had agreed was an eerie hotel.
Waking up in Kampot
Greeting a Khmer dawn on a wet terrace with water trickling onto the corrugated roof of a house leaning against the hotel walls, excited crickets, grunting piglets and a very disturbed rooster who didn’t seem to realize it was time to shut up is enchanting. That, added to the lingering smell of sex and weed, put me on cloud nine.
But what the night had done was undone pretty quickly when I took the first sip of coffee from the Elephant’s kitchen.
