WAKE UP AND SMELL THE PEPPER
Black pepper, Kampot pepper corns from the South of Cambodia, the kind you grind into your Chicken Noodle Soup. Kampot pepper turns your head around and makes you realize that, though all pepper is created equal, some peppercorns are more equal than others and destined to rock and roll. I buy its distilled essence and burn it like incense. Beats patchouli I’ll say that. I burn it nightly now cuz it puts me in a mind to go back. And so I am.
Departure December 14 on an airline I can’t pronounce with just one stopover in a city I’ve never heard of which 4 million souls likely call home and whip out, every couple weeks, soccer jerseys and scarves and noise-makers to rile the arch rivals 10 miles away and 3.5 million strong.
The Kingdom of Cambodia kind of (of all the countries in the region) spares you that though, which is one of the chief reasons I Love it. Even Phnom Penh goes slow; it’s chaos, but slow chaos – more like an inexpert promenade; a hot glacier that groans like 10,000 scooters running out of gas and tooting horns with a loose wire.
The Department of Tourism calls it (justifiably) ‘The Kingdom of Wonder’ and some of us, lovingly and maybe at times of despair, also label it ‘The Kingdom of Blunder’. And blunder it does. A million things make Cambodia wonderful (and I’ve never heard one single person who has travelled there – really – gripe), but first and last it always boils down to the peeps. And they are fine. Their history, though, is indescribably tragic (and for some history is now) and I feel it’s their palm-like strength in surviving this that provides the incandescence to their warmth. I think of the Italians, whose history is a landmine of tragedy, and I think there is a parallel here: Italians are famously warm, engaging, spontaneous, deeply family oriented and never far from a long stare into the distance. You might say the same of our Cambodian friends and might also suggest that, at least in part, living in the moment is a way of being that often springs from the poppy fields of misery.
So they live and love and are doing their best with the materials at hand – the materials that the very worst of what Maoism left them. And they are prospering despite the goons and graft and guns that, one hopes, are only the lunatic residue of geo-politics’ paving machine.
They are new to the game and so they make mistakes; plus they, like anyone else, are suckers for the bright and shiny. Plus what can you do when when you pipe up the tanks roll out?
Corruption is their heritage and it runs deep and, tragically, many Cambodians at street level still worship its trappings. The bigger and Golder the LEXUS the better; no matter how it comes.
A real good and real sad example of this is the booming ‘Orphanage Business’, which is nothing but a noxious and grasping tentacle of tourism. Siem Reap (the starting-point for any trip to the Angkor Wat temple complex) has long had its own international airport and, more and more, many, if not most, visitors will land there, visit the temples for,say, 3 or 4 days, eat and sleep in town (and spend lots of dosh) and then, in what seems like a ‘spasm of caring’ want to check out a little of that vaunted Cambodian poverty, sickness and misery. So there are a growing number of very specious ‘orphanages’ who will, for a fee, let you dandle some abandoned kids. North of 14000 kids are guests of these establishments and, venally, many of these human puppy mills lay within a quick air-conditioned hotel shuttle from the strip in Siem Rip. In many of the orphanages not one, not one single kid, is an orphan. The orphanages commonly send out recruiting scouts to the poorer villages and actively relieve overwhelmed parents of one or two starving mouths; engaging their gears and idling away with trailing promises of a better life and a world of opportunity.
The orphanages usually pad the food and clothing bills to the donors, the schmaltz goes towards yet more new gold Lexuses and anyhow starving snot-nosed kids are more compelling shills. In many of these places the kids are treated like performing chimps and made to perform for tourists. The tourists will, for their part, pay admission, marvel at a kid who can sing ‘My Fair Lady’, dump spare change in various well-positioned donation boxes, get buttoned-holed for ‘annual support’ for the gamine of their choice and most will leave chuffed with having done their bit and having gone the extra mile and seen the other side of the Kingdom.
At the moment there are no controls, ‘The Ministry of Social Affairs’, well, isn’t, and dozens of these Dickensian Dumpsters have opened up since just 2010.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to harp on that at all, but it gets my goat and it gets me going. In a way it’s part of a more rounded love of what is incontestably a deeply troubled place. I keep going back though largely because I think they might make it. They have a solid chance.
