early morning chez Eric

We wake at 4, and breakfast half an hour later. Its a somnambulist affair. The little boy waiters, who in daylight are wreathed in smiles, walk around stiffly, dead-eyed zombies dispensing scrambled egg and coffee. Then we leave in the dark, and with us the whole town it seems. Bicycles, motorbikes, tuk-tuks (motor-bike rickshaws), limousines battered or bright, converge from all corners and stream together out of town, towards the jungle and its ruins. There's a camaraderie de la route at this ungodly hour, and people wave gaily.

Yesterday we took the tuk-tuk, and travelled far afield visiting temple after temple, each more astounding than the one before. In a few it pullulates with crowds, Japanese, prosperous Hong-Kongers, creamy-white European widows. In most its almost empty, and you can easily be on your own, scarily so at times.

There's often the sound of music on the long avenues leading to the ruins. In the dusty shade of a tree you pass a little band of men playing old melodies on traditional instruments; its lovely haunting music. They are amputees, victims of mines, and play according to their abilities. Prosthetic limbs lie around to the side.

Cambodia is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. I'm ashamed to say I never knew. The consequences are everywhere to be seen.

We visit a Mine Museum, started up by a young man who as a boy-soldier in Pol Pot's militia planted hundreds and hundreds of mines up and down the country. A Damascene conversion later he now dedicates his life to eradicating mines in Cambodia, and teaching the world about this scourge. He is now an expert de-miner, first doing it his own way, and now more efficiently and safely, having done a special course with the military in Salisbury, England.

Behind the moving and revelatory make-shift museum is a school for child victims, and a whole community to look after them. They are the lucky ones.

We alternate our days at the temples with lazy ones wandering around this charming town. I lunch at the Blue Pumpkin. The boys and girls there, slender and white of tooth, are all so beautiful they are surely of ancient royal stock, reincarnate. I sit there transfixed, stupefied by the midday heat and mesmerised by strange music with droning vocals from the next door wedding party. Something in me melts, like a block of ice on the sun-struck pavement.

Every other shop here offers reflexology and massage, and spas abound, but I'm shy of such delights, although God knows I could do with a good rub-down; my back is sore, and bum numb, from cycling, tuk-tukking on rutted jungle tracks, and months of indifferent beds.

siem reap

I step out into the Royal Gardens, and start a neglected regime of stretches and dog poses to release my strained back.
Overhead there is a racket in the tall trees. Looking up I see clusters of large blackened leaves hanging from the threadbare tops. Suddenly some of them drop away, and sickeningly spread their prehistoric wings and flap about. Giant bats, as large as seagulls, in great throngs! They are clearly relinquishing their typecasting as nocturnal creatures, and making a dreadful diurnal racket.

.............going for dinner.

angkor : wat can I say?

Yesterday, at the suggestion of our Swiss host Eric at the Prince Mekong Guest House here at Siem Reap, we had breakfast at 4.30 am and were on our bikes by 5 to see sunrise at a distant temple. We spent hours cycling around these stupendous ruins which disappear into the jungle at every turn.

Today, saddle-sore and ham-strung, I will do no more than flip-flop around town.

My ankles are being devoured by mosquitoes, so I will sign off.

pol pot

Sipping breakfast coffee with David on a lovely cafe terrasse we are approached by yet another hawker, in a wheelchair. He is selling books. This happens all the time. The man has no hands. A bond develops between him and David, who is missing a hand from birth. They touch stumps in greeting, in acknowledgement. A mine, the man says.

Phnomh Penh is full of amputees, new ones everyday. Unexploded mines all over the country are a legacy of an atrocious civil war in the first half of the 70,s and then of the Pol Pot years. The day after tomorrow the country celebrates the 30th anniversary of the demise of that crazy regime. No one, bar a minor functionary or two, has been brought to justice. Pol Pot died an old man, cremated in a forest on a pyre of used tyres and old mattresses - I saw it in a film just now.

We went to the Killing Field a few miles out of town, just one of almost 2000 places of execution excavated so far, all over the country. Thousands were killed here. Unlike the Nazis, the Pol Pot regime never perfected the art of disposing of bodies. Bones and skulls have been dug up in shallow pits. 8000 skulls found here have been put in a glass sided tower inside a tall stupa that dominates the site. Many more than that died here, as logbooks show. Large tracts of the site have not yet been excavated, and may never be. Funds are low.

Most of the people killed here, many of them women and children, were brought in trucks from the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnomh Penh. This was in a former secondary school building in a suburb. Classrooms became cells and torture chambers. There are gruesome displays, reminding me of Auschwitz, Teresin........images of violence I can,t get my head around. This place too lacks funding. The government has stopped its grant. Evidence, documentation, artefacts, moulder with neglect.
On my way out a man with a horribly burnt face asks me for money. I hurry on. I can,t look him in the eye. Perhaps he was here in its hideous heyday.

I flee in confusion, and walk for hours to take refuge at last in the beautiful Museum of Antiquities. I stay for ages in a room full of the most wonderful standing Buddhas, wooden, ancient and fragile. I sit in the lovely gardens till almost closing time. I watch a rat or two scurry between manicured hedges, waiting impatiently for us tourists to leave so they can reclaim their domain for nocturnal delights.

My camera goes through weird death throes. Do I imagine the wisp of smoke that puffs out with the flash? The autofocus fails. Everything more than a centimeter beyond my lens is a blurred haze, a pretty, impressionistic fog. Is this how I am to snap Angkor Wat, where we go tomorrow, the most stupendous sight ever I am assured? Necessity being the mother of invention, I reconcile myself to creeping about the ruins, nose to the grindstone as it were, doing microscopic closeups of Buddha follicles. This morning the camera breathed its last, with its dead eye stuck open, unseeing, unretractable. RIP.

I go to the market, a fantastic French building and buy a new camera. Is this a true Lumix, and can the lens be Leica as it says?

Its been lovely here, and sobering.

a constant refrain of.....

......give money, give dollars.

This computer has an imp in it, and a dodgy computer that won,t allow proper punctation'[ppl;,[[9 !

phew! {phrom phnom penh}

We had a busy sweltering time on the Mekong, tripping on and off many kinds of watercraft, walking rickety gangplanks loaded with our rucksacks and wheelie bags, paddling down narrow channels overhung with dense palms in tight canoes, passing returning canoes shed of their tourist loads emitting a constant refrain of .

We have been serenaded by traditional groups singing delta shanties, which kept breaking into Auld Lang Syne.
Seen acres of Water Hyacinth, with lovely pale mauve blossom, grown to stop erosion of the banks, but largely broken away from the edges and floating all over the place. Tasted more tropical fruits than I could imagine.
Watched how rice paper is made for your spring rolls, and seen rice pop in superheated sand, into crispies, in huge metal cauldrons heated over fires made from fruit husks.
Lurched through rambling floating markets at dawn - wholesale, so one boat will be piled high with jackfruit, another only bananas.
Marvelled at the flash of giant kingfishers, and recoiled from pythons wrapping themselves around brave tourists. We have cycled along dykes and perspired in hammocks, chewing on pomelo dipped in salt and chillie. Examined bee hives and drunk honey tea.

All in tremendous sapping heat, and torrential rain which delayed us reaching our last berth, a hotel boat twinkling seductively out in the bay.

We retired early, New Years Eve, to our mosquito infested cabins, to avoid the sozzled Swedish and German celebrations and merrymaking that a cache of cheap wine and spirits portended.

Another early rise, to a brand new year, and more boats and buses to Phnom Penh.
Lovely place, sinister history.

More of that later.

swelter in the delta

This is the last posting of 2008.

a very happy New Year to all my loyal readers.

It is too hot to write (pity us!)

Tonight we sleep on a hotel-ship at the border, and tomorrow sail on up to Phnom Penh.

love to all

miss saigon? i certainly will

tonight, our last in saigon, we have been on a cocktail crawl

long island iced tea (lethal) on the 32 floor of the trade centre as evening fell and the lights came on all over the city

saigon iced tea ( lethal) on the roof terrace of the rex hotel a gorgeous deco cruise ship of a building by the hô chi minh hôtel de ville as was

vietnam plays and wins a seminal football match against thailand and the city goes ballistic

at dawn we laeve for the delta

fowler unmasked

Dear Jane,

Thanks for letting me know that there is indeed a film of 'The Quiet American' which you have recently enjoyed.
But why, oh why, so swift in your response to what was after all the vaguest of enquiries? Don't you have better things to do than email, with a vast family to feed at Christmastide?
Now when I read of Fowler and 50's Saigon, all I see is Michael Caine in a backlot at Elstree!

David's dengue(?) fever is on the mend; tomorrow we leave Saigon for the Mekong delta, and a few days later we sail upstream to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

pseud's corner

Endre Friedmann, who became Robert Capa, died when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam on May 25, 1954. The film in his camera was printed, and that's what you see in the museum. His most famous picture is from Spain, of a dying Loyalist soldier falling from the impact of a bullet. There are those who say its a fake.

What is certainly a fake is the 'iconic' shot of a communist tank breaking through into the Presidential Palace in Saigon in 1975, which marked the end of the conflict. There was no photographer present at the time, and it had to be restaged a few weeks later. Apparently, too, the famous shot of American marines raising the flag on a Pacific island to mark the end of that conflict is a staged recreation, as is the shot of Russian soldiers raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag in Berlin.

My Penguin copy of 'The Quiet American' is a bootlegged fake bought outside Hô Chi Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi. It is badly photocopied on cheap and insubstantial paper, and I have to use my Swiss army penknife to cut the pages. I love it all the more for its fakery.
Incidentally the Continental Hotel does still exist, and I've seen it without realising. It stands by the French Opera House, and now sports a row of luxury boutiques (Calvin Klein and the like) where once the terrasses thronged with expat journalists, wheeler-dealers and girls in flowing silk pants.

My unfake Knirps umbrella, bought in Zurich earlier this year, gave up the ghost in yesterday's tropical downpour. RIP.