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Angkor ‘94 – lost temples of Cambodia : ART

21 Dec

Angkor ‘94 – lost temples of Cambodia : ART

Angkor, Cambodia, mid-1994: It was a crazy and dangerous time with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas still active and killing people (more…)

Greetings from Phnom Penh, Cambodia

20 Dec

Lack of sun, the wind, the grey skies are confusing my logic & lowering my libido – this not the Cambodia I know as a cold – if true-cold is possible – snap here has hovered over Phnom Penh this past week and while I know it’s the ‘coldest’ month of the year and that there’s no possibility of sweating I wish I was hot.

But not that I’m cold – except sleeping now, with the fan off and I’m actually under a sheet to cover my otherwise nakedness here in a city where – taxi-girls – working women are by far the best blankets, where the pizzas are HAPPY – laced with marijuana, where bar cocktails include Viagra and red bull, where westerners get cheap heroin & Nazi-speed addictions, where increasingly old western men lust on young local babes, where secret bars offer blow-jobs as you drink, where people get shot in nightclubs by local kids of the rich elite, where motorcycles and the quiet chaos whizz around everywhere – here, where rampant corruption and poverty and real smiles are the everyday: Welcome to Phnom Penh – CAMBODIA.

I could live here – for reasons well beyond those listed above but those factors are certainly a deep-consideration to stay here longer – forever – and get completely fucked-up … but then again I tend to get bored – of everything – and restless easily and so I suppose more travel is awaiting me next year …

Mondulkiri Elephant Village – Cambodia

27 Mar

Mondulkiri Elephant Village – Cambodia

The killing of a country – Phnom Penh #2, Cambodia

16 Jun

Tonight, as I rest on my bed and write, I feel uneasy, still queasy, you see, I’ve several reasons for feeling sick.

Earlier I’d bought a hard-boiled egg from a street vendor. I sat on a stool beside her bucket as she cracked the shell, then handed me the spoon to scoop out a well-cooked yoke. Firm white and yellow – but containing the tiny black body of a nearly-born bird. Fuck! I thought. I can’t eat that! I ain’t eating that! I must’ve looked pale: I felt ill. I paid the woman, excusing myself after the first teaspoon of hard-rubber. She smiled. So did I. My first taste of Cambodian street food – this a national delicacy, has killed my desire to eat another egg ( … for many months). (more…)

City under shadow – Phnom Penh, Cambodia

10 Jun

From the balcony of this run-down hotel I gaze along the street to where the pace of life is slow, calm, nonchalant – as dense, creeping grey slowly smothers the sun and sky.

Another monsoonal rain-rage shadows the city, threatening to spill. For an hour I’ve watched the grey growing closer; blacker.

The pace of the street picks up as chilled air alerts.

With the first drips dropping – vendors fold up their trays of cigarettes, remove their stools and goods from the pavement; women shelter their noodle stalls with plastic sheets as a motorcyclist honks past a slow-churning rickshaw in this quiet, canyon of crusted concrete – where opposite me, clothes hang along the railing of an apartment-block balcony, where an old man sits bare-chested, reading a magazine, seemingly unaware / unconcerned with the approaching storm.

But really, two shadows loom over Phnom Penh: the capital of Cambodia (once Kampuchea and still gripped by a recent, brutal, unrelenting history). Since the Nam conflict Cambodia has been thrashed by civil unrest and war.

When Viet-Cong guerillas used eastern Cambodia as a corridor to attack into South Vietnam, the US responded with a temporary invasion and B-52 bombing. Then with the country embroiled in civil war the Communist Khmer Rouge – led by Pol Pot, seized control of Cambodia in 1975. There followed chaos as the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated the cities to set-up a radial agrarian society; to ban the state religion Buddhism, and to commit mass genocide as the country remained closed to the outside world.

During the Killing Fields period of late 1978, Cambodia was dragged into further turmoil when provoked by Khmer Rouge attacks, the by-now-communist Vietnam (the South fell to the North in 1975) invaded Cambodia to kick-out the KR and set-up a pro-Vietnamese government. Civil war followed – commie against commie – til the Vietnamese left a decade later in 1989. Despite the Paris Peace Accords and deployment of the U.N – Khmer Rouge guerilla armies still create problems in Cambodia.

So after 2 decades of instability there lingers this heavy, haunting vibe.

Phnom Penh remains threatened from its past: soldiers stand in the central market and checkpoints come alive at night.

Phnom Penh is a city that has been left to decay; there is a stark lack of newness.

The university was sacked by the (anti-intellectual) Khmer Rouge and the tower block remains a skeleton without windows, the campus entrance tangled with barbed wire. Roads are pot-holed. Inner-city tenements stacked like shabby egg cartons, their once white walls now worn and blotted by dark bare-concrete like thick mould. And during the monsoon season this damp decaying city seems even greyer.

Gloomy.

It exudes a sombre vibe. People in the streets stare, taking some moments to trust, to smile. Phnom Penh is a place desperately needing fresh paint, needing a fun fair to hit town – to lighten the load, a country anxiously awaiting a fresh chapter to begin in Cambodian history. That of lasting Peace and Hope.

A scooter-taxi guy I befriended, who’d lost his family in times past, told me this: To see foreigners returning to Cambodia reassures Cambodians that finally, their country is safe.

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