On the first Friday night of each month hundreds of expats (i.e., white people) assemble in a bar named "Elsewhere" to drink and carouse and be seen. In any western city, the scene would be completely unremarkable, a typical gathering of 20- and 30-somethings looking for escape/entertainment/sex/love via the usual social lubricant: alcohol.
But the party is very remarkable, because Elsewhere is not in New York. It is in Phnom Penh -- which must be the NGO capital of Southeast Asia. Nearly everyone at the party is, in some way or another, probably living in Cambodia to try and do good. Watching do-gooders flirt and drink and then jump into and couple in a bar-side pool is odd, to say the least. But when it's all happening in a swank French colonial-style house with a plush yard protected by high walls, and when virtually all the Cambodians in sight are moto-taxi drivers standing just outside the property's gates, the scene grows surreal, even shocking.
It is an informal NGO industry party, a collective release (both therapeutic and indulgent) by a small army of people who must be very frustrated by their line of work. I know I would be.
Name an NGO, it's here: from World Vision International to the World Health Organization to the World Wildlife Federation, from Norwegian People's Aid to Kampuchea for Christ International. Every member of the "UN Family" is represented here, all part of the world's biggest bureaucracy. Hundreds of local and international NGOs you've never heard of compete with missionary zeal (some literally) to remake this broken land, "building capacity" by empowering "local stakeholders." Hundreds of young, educated and unattached westerners move to Cambodia to donate their time to help this country shed its awful recent history.
The only silver lining to thirty years of war is an endless stream of donations flowing into a country that, thanks to the Khmer Rouge and the film "The Killing Fields," has nearly become synonymous with genocide, poverty and "a good cause." Cambodia is full of the world's do-gooders.
It was odd to realize - in Sri Lanka, just after the December 2004 tsunami - that charitable development is an organized industry like any other. Competition for funding is intense and the services provided to the needy must be packaged and sold to donors -- who effectively act as customers buying a product (new primary schools, AIDS prevention, cleft lip operations) they can trust.
To borrow corporate language to describe NGOs is not to denigrate their value. It's only to recognize how NGOs halfway around the world from Americans - who will probably never visit Cambodia - bridge the distance to ensure their survival. Without stable income, how can any organization complete its mission?
But often I wish all of Cambodia's foreign NGOs would lower their overhead costs by pooling their budgets and programs together. Centralized, coordinated infrastructure building! No redundant programs, needless competition and unseemly flag waving! But wait a second - that would essentially turn the NGOs into...a government. And Cambodia already has one of those, and it barely functions.
The Cambodian government can't stand on its own. Wandering Phnom Penh's quiet streets south of Sihanouk Boulevard, which are lined with the signage of NGO headquarters, it's easy to remember that 50% of the Kingdom of Cambodia's annual budget is provided by foreign governments and international donors such as the World Bank. And it's easy to think that Cambodia has not one government, but hundreds - that each NGO functions as a tiny fiefdom offering piecemeal salves to a people who rarely feel the presence of their country's official government.
Yesterday I learned the private bets I've been quietly placing with myself could make me a rich man. I could, during my remaining days in Cambodia, bet on the sky.
As it turns out, there is a thriving rain betting industry here during the monsoon season. (I should have guessed this, with so many men sitting around doing close to nothing while so many clouds build overhead.) The game is known here as "phnal tuek phleang," and those who play it are called "rain punters," according to a recent Agence France-Presse story.
It's as simple as it sounds: You bet on what time it will rain on any given day, or how much it will rain during a specific period of time, or whether a piece of paper will be soaked by a certain time of day. Odds are calculated according to weather conditions that spotters - freelance meteorologists - report to bookies via radios.
It may sound easy to look at the sky and guess when a gathering storm will empty itself. But I assure you: it is not. During the last seven weeks I have never once accurately predicted when rain will fall. The nastiest clouds will wander off leaving nothing, or the edge of a cloud will suddenly arrive with a small shower and then scuttle off, or a friendly looking cloud will suddenly transform into a drainage pipe's worst enemy. After weeks of frustration (and leaving my poncho at home), I gave up, leaving the fate of clouds to...the clouds.
Rain betting is illegal in Cambodia. Which means nothing, of course. And how could you enforce the law, anyway? Follow anyone who looks at the sky too pensively? Arrest anyone who has placed a bucket on a rooftop? And in a country where betting on cock fights and fish fights is rampant, authorities have more important things to worry about. In the world of gambling, what could be more harmless than betting on clouds?
It's an ancient tradition, apparently brought to Cambodia by Chinese immigrants hundreds of years ago. But technology has modernized the game, thanks to cell phones and handheld radios and internet weather forecasts. But in my experience, no technology in the world can possibly track monsoon season rains closely enough to guarantee a sky gambler success. It is impossible to predict a monsoon season sky here -- and that is exactly why rain betting will never die: there will always be money to be made, whether by the bettor or the bookie.
It reminds me of Sri Lanka, where betting seemed even more culturally embedded. The best gambling game I ever heard of in that country, or anywhere, has to be this: Two or three or however many birds are sitting on a fence. Which one will fly off first?
There is so much money to be made in this world.
One of the reasons I love to live and travel in very unfamiliar places (i.e. poor, non-Western places) is that they force me to ask myself questions that I often evade in the U.S. At home, familiarity often leads me to complacency, the false feeling that the world makes sense. But South and Southeast Asia don't leave much room for complacency - the region's sheer intensity forces you to confront its poverty and chaos and wonder how it all came to be. Asia poses many questions, but doesn't offer many answers -- to me, at least.
Last week, finishing my meal at a Phnom Penh cafe's wooden lunch bar, I suddenly began closely watching the restaurant's staff work with surreal bemusement. It's the stance my mind takes from time to time in aimless moments. Simple questions pressed into me:
What is this place? Who are these people/objects? Why are they moving and what is their point? The questions became reflexive, turning themselves on me, making me feel just as strange and pointless for being there asking them. Wanting answers, all of them. And I thought: I am a perpetual child, covering the world with question marks. That is the natural state I return to. It is as though the names I have learned for things - wall, Cambodian, coffee mug, fan - expose their essential mystery, and I think: I do not know, cannot know, how these things came to exist before my eyes, weak eyes passing through thick fog.
And then later that night, I came upon this passage in Saul Bellow's "Henderson the Rain King":
The world may be strange to a child, but he does not fear it the way a man fears. He marvels at it. But the grown man mainly dreads it. And why? Because of death. So he arranges to have himself abducted like a child. So what happens will not be his fault. And who is this kidnapper -- this gypsy? It is the strangeness of life -- a thing that makes death more remote, as in childhood.
I think Bellow goes a bit too far here in saying the awareness of mortality is the root of all of our confusion. But that doesn't make him wrong. When I think I am curious like a child I am partly right; there is real continuity between my sense of wonder, say, 15 years ago, and today. And that's a good thing. I don't want to lose that childlike wonder. But mostly I am lying to myself, pushing myself away from the awareness of death into ignorance, the false comfort of a never-ending childhood.
Sometimes, even though I'm not sure where it is anymore, I miss home. The way its familiarity can put all the questions to bed. Perhaps this whole rambling post is just proof that I am tiring of travel, that my own country finally seems to hold more than foreign lands seem to offer. But I'm sure six months after I get home I'll be staring at maps again, wondering what other places in the world might throw me for a loop.
Cambodia's streets carry clouds of dust, but it's impossible to know just how wretched those clouds are until you rent a motorbike and drive through them for five hours. I agree with this simple and highly scientific equation, which I have just formulated:
Motorbike + Speed + Time + Road = Filth.
But despite returning to Phnom Penh with blackened forearms and facial stubble, I had no regrets last Saturday after making the 230 kilometer round-trip journey to the lushly forested Kirirom National Park, southwest of the capital. All on a puny 100 cc motorbike that would make any Harley aficionado point and laugh.
My last significant experience on a two-wheeled motorized contraption was when, aged 12 or 13, I drove a dirt bike completely through a neighbor's wooden fence and then collapsed into a semi-conscious daze. (I did yard work for weeks to pay that debt off.) But how could I resist a simple fact of life here: I can put $3 and my passport on a table and get a motorbike for an entire day, no questions asked.
My lack of confidence was not helped by being pulled over by two cops 30 seconds after leaving the rental business. I impulsively followed my Dutch friend and day-trip companion Paul as he mistook a green left-turn arrow for a full-on green light. Suddenly Phnom Penh's finest/worst were hard at work flagging us down and demanding $5 or else -- what? But I paid, very aware that my "ticket" required no paperwork whatsoever, just bills placed carefully in a binder underneath a tree.
People I work with at The Cambodia Daily advise sticking to a few simple rules to evade extortion: never get off your motorbike because it signals weakness. Tell the cop you want his boss' name. And my favorite: Tell the cop you can only give him, say, $1 now, and then write down your employer's address and tell him to drop by tomorrow to pick up the money you owe him. Absurd, but apparently it has worked.
Cambodia's streets are largely lawless, but there is one notable exception. If you are white and driving a motorbike, you are more likely to be pulled over to pay off traffic cops - reverse racial profiling that's understandable given the cops' salaries. How can I complain? I had just got hold of a motorbike for $3 carrying no license. And I desperately wanted to get the hell out of Phnom Penh.
Cities suffocate everyone, eventually. Phnom Penh may be urban Asia lite and surprisingly green, but it still leaves me gasping for open space after ten days. And so we took to the road, flimsy helmets and all, zipping by the airport into the paddied countryside.
I had traveled through it before, but in buses -- so I had no idea how black exhaust can slowly built a film of pollutants on one's face, despite a helmet's pull-down face guard. Sounds bad, but it's barely noticeable when you're traveling tight-lipped down a road at 30 or 40 or 50 miles an hour, trying to steal glances at gorgeously green scenes. Never was quite sure how fast I was moving, thanks to a broken speedometer.
After collapsing into a bar chair after a dusky return to the city, I realized two things: Riding a motorbike for hours is surprisingly tiring, and terrible for postures. And I was filthy.
I hate to think this as hundreds of people in the region fall victim to floods and their attendant illnesses, but I really enjoy South and Southeast Asia's monsoon season. From May to November, it waters the paddies, gives life to the tropics. It turns the sky into cinema, like this:
In Kandy, Sri Lanka, where five years ago I first met the season, every day offered a predictable drama: between 4 and 5:30 p.m., the world would be flash-flooded, suddenly hosed down, completely drenched. We'd watch the clouds roll in, build up, and bet on their delivery time.
But here in Cambodia, nothing about the sky is predictable. The rain might wake you up, put you to sleep, interrupt your sidewalk meal, give you a reason to stop working and stare through windows. You might feel it coming, you might be ambushed. It could be gentle - a tease - or it might it might flood your vehicle to a stop in the middle of the street. (This nearly happened to my taxi in Siem Reap.)
I love watching the clouds pile up through an afternoon, guessing how long before they empty themselves onto the earth. I love the way sudden downpours transform drab buildings into protected pockets of luxury; they are shelter, and that is the point. Something between me and the sky. Even if it's a boat:
But most of all, I love the monsoon sky's dynamism, how it becomes a highway of clouds constantly changing. They, multi-layered, swirling, brooding, provide a dramatic backdrop to the day -- until they become a dramatic foreground. Then we run for cover and enjoy the show.
Amazingly, the rain has never struck while I was riding a moto-taxi. It has exploded while I was in a tuk-tuk (3-wheeler taxi with roof), though. The driver pulling over to unfurl canvas walls and tie them to the taxi's frame to create a raincoat, and me peering through tiny cloudy plastic windows to watch Cambodia's dust turn into mud.
A laborer in Kep, the lazy coastal village I visited last weekend, takes a break in the sunny lap of his new best friend, Yeah Mao, the "Black Grandmother" who is believed to protect travelers and fishermen along the coast. Kep's only true landmark, the naked statue sits atop a pedestal at the end of a tiled spit of land jutting into Kep's harbor. She needs a full-body makeover.
If I could go back and talk to my high-school self, I would say: "You fool! Take French seriously, learn the language so you will not feel mute abroad!" Back then, I never suspected that traveling abroad would become one of my overriding passions and that French would pop up in places I didn't then know I wanted to visit. Like, well, France, and Southeast Asia.
And Cambodia, the western piece of France's invented "Indochine." Of course, English is still the best bet for getting around the region, but occasionally the language pops up in fascinating places. Like on "Rabbit Island," the secluded island that I and a small boatload of French tourists shared this past Saturday. But I was too insecure to strike up a conversation with them in their language.
But Monday, in a rural village on the outskirts of Siem Reap, I found myself seated next to a 60-something survivor of Khmer Rouge-era, a man who spoke no English but plenty of French. He is the father-in-law of the Cambodian reporter I was traveling with, and we had just visited a tiny backyard crocodile farm a short walk from his small house as part of an article I'm working on.
He learned much of the language before the French finally packed up and left in 1953, but his command of the language was almost as halting as my own. After we exchanged pleasantries and talked about how great his son-in-law Chandara is (one of the most intelligent English-speaking Cambodians I've met), he grinned and said something I'll never forget. Of course I've forgotten the exact French words, but the English gist is:
I am sorry, but my French is not so good. You see, I had to forget the language during the Khmer Rouge time. Then, we had to forget French. If the Khmer Rouge heard us speaking French, then --
And then, giggling, he made the international sign for murder: a straight hand quickly moved across the front of his neck. (Imagine being killed for speaking a language!) One of my favorite things about Cambodians is that they laugh at the most unexpected times, often for absolutely no reason at all.
I think that perhaps now, 28 years after the Khmer Rouge were flushed out of power, the only thing that some survivors can do - publicly - is laugh those four years off as the cruelest, sickest joke humanity has ever told. "Nazi" generally functions as a byword for evil, but after reading Elizabeth Becker's excellent "After the War Was Over" I realized that Hitler's regime at least had a certain kind of logic to it. Pol Pot's ideology was quickly replaced by rabid xenophobia and hallucinations, turning life into an absurd march into auto-genocide. The only logic was survival, for both him and his hapless subjects.
And now, decades later, an international tribunal is set to try Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes against humanity and genocide. Everyone knows what happened: the killing fields were not hard to find and the memories cannot be extinguished. And so now, a new absurdity: trying to follow international norms of justice. How can any survivor presume the innocence of admitted Khmer Rouge leaders?
One of my favorite bumper stickers in the U.S. has long been "Motorcycles are everywhere!!!!!" -- that half-cautionary, half-threat by car and truck drivers who would much rather be cruising the countryside on their Honda or Harley. But motorcycles, of course, are not actually everywhere in the states. If they were, their devotees wouldn't have to remind other drivers that they could be lurking in blind spots.
But in Cambodia, motorcycles really are everywhere, outnumbering cars and trucks 10 to 1, by my estimate. They slide between government SUVs, they hop sidewalks, they roll along dusty provincial roads skirting rice paddies, they manage to carry five-person families. They are cheap. And only two or three of the dozens I have taxied on have working speedometers, the best defense against speeding (if traffic laws were actually enforced here).
So I had to join in the fun and rent my own last weekend, as I explored the untouristed coastal bliss of small-town Kep. I had been looking for a bicycle, but instead found an offer I couldn't refuse: a half-day rental of a 100cc "Honda Dream" for $3, plus $1 for a liter of gas. After a ten minute lesson by the renter, a very nice man who for some reason trusted me despite my telling him that I had never driven a motorcycle before, I was on my own. Gulf of Thailand (offering views of a a Vietnamese island) on my right, and foregrounds filled with verdant paddy, curious children and grazing livestock.
The best moments of travel are serendipitous, and my two hours of riding before the sun went down were certainly that. Nearly empty roads surrounded by a landscape unchanged for more time that I can imagine: oxen pulling steel plows, sugar palm trees punctuating paddy. The clouds were hyper-dimensional that afternoon as a monsoon storm moved off of water onto land, but somehow the light rain that began as I returned to the center of town didn't seem the least bit threatening.
Motorcycles are as liberating as they look (I decided to ignore that they are also potentially dangerous as they look), especially when all your travel in a new place has been, up until the moment you take hold of the handlebars, in buses and on moto-taxis driven by strangers. Suddenly, you can stop for as long as you'd like to stare at something like this:
