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Non-Fiction
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| Sunshine & Showers 11 & 12 | |
| By Arandom | ||||
| 13 November 2006 | ||||
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2 more people, rather than place-focused entries. Could've chosen to glaze over and hit more obviously full, arguably more interesting than these. But thought I'd keep chronological for now. Thoughts appreciated, as ever... Thanks 11. 16:30 12/10/05 Heath is slowly beginning to grate on me now. It’s been induced by having to spend so much time with one person and one group of people. That had been something I was slightly nervous of before the trip as I can be particularly selective about people. Enforced company has definitely begun to take its toll. With Heath there’s a level of vacant dopeyness which I find alarming for the amount he’s travelled, and frustrating because, being his “roomie,” I feel obliged to hold his hand. Yesterday, for example, he finds nowhere will accept his card so he can’t draw out any more cash until we get to Bangkok in two days. I stand him twenty dollars, over half of which he then proceeds to mindlessly burn on beer, before getting himself into further debt with American Neil. First, we’d all gone for a meal, where he ate conservatively, then onto a bar, The Angkor What, where the pair of them remained until the small hours, long after the rest of us had left. That Heath had earlier been so tired, and was now up for a drinking session on other people’s money, was troubling to me. Miriam is starting to wear my patience too. With her it’s only a basic level of dappiness easily exaggerated by alcohol, and is excusable but still tiring. Yank Neil still largely dull. “Are Coldplay big in England?” he had asked me at one point, unaware that the band weren’t American. My inability to take an active part in conversations I find dull, and my accordingly reserved behaviour have become more visible lately. This morning I took a swim before breakfasting at the hotel restaurant around 10. Quietly disappointed to look up from my book and see Heath lumbering towards me. I left him and both Neils at the table shortly afterwards and caught a motorbike taxi to the main photography gallery on the edge of the town: a limited, unremarkable collection mostly of the temples at sunset or sun-rise. Next door was the local Foreign Correspondents Club, identical in style to the one we had visited in Phnom Penh. All pine, airy, spacey and high ceilings. I sat on the balcony section overlooking the river with a large hollow coconut full of juice, and a straw, and sadly finished my companionable book. Then I paced around Siem Reap town centre. Without stopping to browse, most of it can be covered in about ten minutes. Pondering what I could do today, enjoying my freedom, I decided that hell, yes, I would take my first massage. I had heard good reports, and figured it would be less likely to be sleazy here than in Bangkok. And it was all entirely kosher. However, as I relaxed into a traditional thai body massage from a youngish, not especially pretty girl, I was curious to know if anything else would be offered. I had been shown into a small, windowless room with scrappy, thin garments laid out for me to wear, before lying on the futon. The girl entered and washed my feet with a bowl of water, engaging in the smallest of small-talks and stretching her English to the limit. The massage itself was conducted largely in silence, punctuated only by instructions to turn over, roll, position myself in some way or other. When the massage reached the upper leg area there was a rumbling, some growth and material tightening entirely natural for a young man to experience, I told myself. But the lower groin border went unbreached, the legs were finished, and the material soon slackened. The back section of the massage was a disappointment. Muscles in my back felt uncomfortable, strained, and at times painfully contorted, rather than blissfully relaxed and put right. Hard and controlled, it felt like she knew what she was doing, but it hadn’t been as pleasant as the less thorough massage I had received from my Cambodian friend in the bar a few nights before. A perfect, refreshing beer at a roadside bar to recuperate, I then decided to hire a pedal bicycle to see around the town’s edges. So far I’ve enjoyed it immensely and whilst I’m still a little nervous of erratic traffic behaviour, I haven’t died yet. I have a small basket with a map inside, acting as my own primitive GPS system. Currently writing from the tranquility of The Butterfly Garden. You’re greeted on entrance here through a creaky gate at the end of a narrow path by an aging hippy, who may be Canadian. He gives an introduction to the garden and its small restaurant bar in slow, hypnotising tones. The butterflies themselves are startlingly beautiful with an array of unique colour combinations, but the garden is as much remarkable for its other worldly, almost hallucinogenic ambience. As well as our host and his native waitresses, there are handful of other western tourists are here, some of whom look rather camp, and one of whom is a lone, beautiful girl who I have considered saying speaking to, but know I won’t. Unsure of this evening’s plans, but I may now use my wheels to explore a further temple or two, and donate some blood to the local children’s hospital - as Marlo had suggested we could. That’s assuming I’m not the one who needs it after I get mauled at a junction by a passing vehicle. 12: 23:20 13/10/05/05 First impressions of Bangkok have been less positive than anywhere else we’ve been. Disappointingly familiar, smog-filled urbanisation, gridlocked modern traffic, infinitely overlapping fly-overs, high-rise buildings. Bumper to bumper, for long periods it took us a ridiculously long time to travel a ridiculously short distance. Then we reached the main tourist area where westerners were so common, the music so thumpingly loud and westerner-targeted I wondered if our rocky ride down the mini-cavernous dirt track dips to the Thai border had somehow tipped us into a wormhole and spewed us out at a second division Ibiza. - Uneducated, superficial first impressions based mostly on views from the mini-bus window, at the end of an exhaustingly long day. The showers in this overpriced hotel are undoubtedly the best we’ve experienced on the tour. A sense of glorious, indulgent luxury, albeit standing with knees slightly bent. After thorough dousing apiece, we enjoyed a good meal paid for by the tour company as we had missed out on a scheduled earlier one. Then a stroll around the infamous Kao San Road tourist area, mooching the market stalls on the main street before seating ourselves outside a bar. Marlo set down a bag full of allegedly edible bugs and grubs down on the table in front of us, which related to a conversation at an earlier meal about eating such jungle fodder. Heath went for the most daunting looking beast, and crunched through it. I opted for a smaller, easy to swallow grub, as did one or two others. Marlo left us for the final time amidst thank-yous, goodbyes and casual waves. With a larger female contingent in the group, hugging might have ensued as the men felt obliged to follow suit, but part due to this, part due to Marlo’s burliness, physical contact was at a minimum. As we departed the bar for another wander I accidentally on purpose lost the rest of the group for a mooch on my own, before meeting them shortly afterwards at another streetside bar. I took a seat but didn’t get a drink, and shortly excused myself to come back here, to the hotel. The by now titanically irritating, fairly vacant Miriam and Yank Neil barely acknowledged my departure, even though I could easily not see them again now the tour is at an end. It’s possible that they didn’t notice as they were deep in conversation at the end of the table. There had been a level of flirtation between the two which I found a little disturbing to contemplate too deeply. From the butterfly garden in Siem Reap yesterday, I had cycled over to the children’s hospital to donate blood. Once my bike was parked up and padlocked I strode into the building, gathering quizzical looks from locals as I went. I declared my reasons for being there to a nurse, already alerted to my imminent arrival by a car park attendant on his walkie-talkie, then felt rather guilty as she led me past mothers with sickly looking children to the front of a queue. A regular donor at home, I strangely felt myself less nervous here, and overly excited by the prospect of a novel free T-shirt, can of coke and pack of biscuits. An English-speaking doctor showed me into a tiny, mosquito flecked room after I had completed the relevant forms, excusing them of any responsibility should I die. The doctor proffered me the tools to inspect prior to their use, assuring me of their sterility. They seemed clean, sealed, new - to my eye at least, even if my eye didn’t really know what it was looking at. His young apprentice, a cheery young girl who didn’t speak much English but who I managed to converse easily with nonetheless, had a tennis racquet shaped, electrified mosquito killer. She swiped away at will, enjoying herself, often swiping into thin air. Only in hindsight did I think how relaxed I had been, how I had never really considered that it wouldn’t be safe, too focused was I on my material rewards and the quietly smug virtue I could carry with me for a while. I tucked my rewards into the basket of my bike and pedalled a short distance out of town, weaving between a greater volume of traffic, even overtaking some, growing in confidence. Ten minutes down the long, straight road - which I think was the same which had led to the jetty of yesterday’s riverboat ride - I swung left, through a small complex of temples. At the rear of them was a small hamlet of buildings which backed out onto an expanse of rice-fields. I followed the dirt-track which led between the fields a short distance, before deciding I should turn back. Shortly before I did that, I just stopped, listened to nothing, observed the first sparks of sunset igniting the sky, and their reflection in the watery rice-fields. My luck had been in when I took the turn left and stumbled across this isolated spot, and this view. I felt good about giving blood in the children’s hospital and had taken enormous pleasure from my day’s freedom, a freedom extended by the bike - hired for a ridiculously cheap fee. For a few moments I felt totally at peace. I had just enough time to freshen up at the hotel - the pedalling had produced reservoirs of sweat, smugly don my new T-shirt, cycle back into town (now dark so negotiating pot-holes was down to good fortune), and return the bicycle to the store, before meeting Heath and Scottish Neil in the street. We headed to a narrow hall where the kids from the landmine victim museum were putting on a short, chaotic show to an audience of mostly tourists. Dinner of a tough Khmer Steak, one last drink at the Angkor What? (where Heath had ended up driving a tuk-tuk back from the night before) - then back to the hotel to prepare for today’s early start and sapping 12-hour slog to Bangkok. A few members of the group might think me slightly up my own arse for so readily disassociating from them, but I’ll try not to let it bother me now the tour is at an end. I just find it difficult joining in conversations about how people from different countries say the same words differently. Then I just groan internally and have to hit play on my iPod. Bangkok seems like it won’t be short of people willing to have such conversations either. The tourist area feels self-conscious in its population of young, middle-class, pec-rippling alpha males strutting around, dying to tell anyone who’ll listen how worldly they are while James Blunt and Jack Johnson endlessly warble from every music stall.
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