year three ...

“So … welcome back, Mr. Nerd, to the land of the perverse and the perplexing. Are you sure you’re ready for another year of this?”

That, in case you’re wondering, was the voice of the universe. Specifically, it’s what the universe seemed to be saying to me as Yuliya and I ran madly towards gate G1 at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport, to board flight KC932 to Kazakhstan.

Running beside us was an airport employee, looking extremely worried. “Hurry Up! No time!” he kept urging us, in the manner of someone who fears the wrath of a superior and has reason to think that said wrath may be close at hand.

Yuliya and I did our best to keep up with the guy, though we were a little confused as to why the situation had suddenly become so urgent. Our plane wasn’t due to take off for another 35 minutes, so when we’d heard our names read out over an airport PA system in close proximity to the words “final” and “immediately”, it had come as something of a surprise. But when a uniformed official repeatedly says “You have to get to the gate right away!”, and you’ve paid $700 each for the flight, you tend to adopt a ‘run now, ask questions later’ approach.

This flight was part of an international move, so we had a ridiculous number of carry-on items with us. After going through security and passport control, we’d grabbed two of those miniature trolleys you can get in some airport departure lounges to help you carry around your extended family of little bags. We were pushing those frantically in front of us now.

As we got closer to the gate, a random thought surfaced from my subconscious and began back-stroking around my head:

“You know”, I thought, “this is exactly like the shopping trolley races I remember from high school.”

I’m sure it’ll cause you no great surprise when I report that, upon further analysis, this comparison turned out to be less-than-perfectly accurate. I mean, for a start, none of the participants in those trolley races had been grown adults. And there was usually a second person inside the trolley – as opposed to a laptop, a digital SLR (that’s a camera, not a rifle), a bulky winter coat and a backpack full of books, snacks, medication and laundry. Also, as far as I can remember the teenaged trolley races usually ended when one trolley fell over and everyone’s attention was transferred to dealing with the occupant’s injuries – not when, for example, we reached a departure gate and a person wearing epilettes took our tickets and motioned us onto a waiting aircraft.

Thinking about it more, I realised as well that the trolleys were bigger back then, had dodgier wheels and sharp soldered edges, and were often found abandoned in suburban streets… so basically they were the trolley equivalent of rough-edged moggies with a habit of straying, whereas today’s sleek Suvarnabhumi model was the pampered Siamese* who never leaves the comfort of her owner’s slick city pad.

Still … apart from that, the similarities were eerie.

Anyway, we finally made it to the plane, and were welcomed on board with an icy “zdrastvuiyte” (hello). The brusque Russian greeting contrasted dramatically with the cheerful Thai “Sawasdee ka(p)” we’d been hearing all week, in roughly the same way that bathing in freshly chilled mango juice contrasts to bathing in your own blood. We were the last people to board, and everyone else was already in their seats. A few glares were noticeable as we walked down the centre aisle.

But why, I wondered, had we been rushed onto the plane so far ahead of time, and with such urgency? Well, we soon found out, and here’s the reason:

It was so that we could watch the safety demonstration.

Mm-hmm, that’s right. I'm not making it up, or leaving bits out for comic effect. See, while most airlines ask their cabin crews to demonstrate the safety features while the aircraft is taxiing toward the appropriate runway**, our airline had decided to provide us with this information while the plane was standing completely still at the gate. Only then, after the hostesses had simulated pulling an oxygen mask down from the ceiling and attaching it to a child’s face, would the pilot turn the ignition key and start the engines.

Result: twice as much ‘dead time’ between boarding and take-off.

Very post-Soviet, I thought.

Small compensation came from the fact that it was quite an entertaining demonstration … or at least, it was if you were watching the air hostess nearest to us. Her range of expressions was great: there were a couple of moments when you could see her looking down the aisle at another crew member, grinning about a dirty joke they’d no doubt shared earlier. At other points in the performance, she made no attempt to hide her boredom, looking almost contemptuously at the life jacket with its ridiculous lamp, and blowing the whistle with all the joy and enthusiasm of a person signing insurance documents before undergoing bowel surgery.

Then we were ready to go, and the aircraft began taxiing away from the terminal. We’d flown three times in the previous fortnight with Air Asia – not what you’d call a ‘top shelf’ airline, but fairly decent – and once again, the contrast was immediately evident. Our plane shuddered to life, pulled grudgingly out of its parking space, and treated every tiny bump and crack in the asphalt as a personal insult, bouncing along like something that would have difficulty getting up a steep-ish driveway without falling apart, let alone into the air. When our turn finally came to take off, I was pretty close to being terrified (and I’m usually pretty good with flying).

A few minutes later we were climbing towards the clouds, and I started to relax. Years ago, I read somewhere that most airline accidents happen in the first or the last minute of flight, and I often use this randomly-gathered statistic to calm myself down if I feel nervous about the aeroplane that’s carrying me. It came in very handy on this occasion!

Putting all the post-Soviet weirdness to one side, though, the crucial fact was this: we were on our way to Kazakhstan. And somehow, the weirdness/scariness of the flight seemed like a fitting re-introduction.

I definitely didn’t expect to be back in the 'Stans so soon … I mean, it wasn’t the plan at all. Plan A for the 2010-11 academic year was to stay in Ha Noi and get our teeth into Far Eastern culture, taking up cycling, morning yoga and perhaps a martial art along the way. On the other hand, though, when I realised that a return to KZ was imminent, I can’t say that I felt overly surprised. Ever since I’d left Almaty 18 months ago, it had always seemed to me that I had a future date to keep with the ‘Stans.

And so now that date begins.

No idea how it will go, of course, but I’ll let you know as things unfold.

Here’s to Year Three!


(* We were in Thailand, after all – home to the Siamese breed. And let me say, the cats there are gorgeous, and they all have that fantastic deep and strident Siamese “miaow”.)

** (for ESL people) we use “taxiing” to describe an aircraft travelling very slowly across the ground at an airport, and a “runway” is the long straight road on which aeroplanes take off and land.

curmudgeons in the sand

I remembered something today that I'd kinda forgotten: namely, that there's almost nothing on this planet that brings out my Inner Curmudgeon more than spending time on a beach*.

The memory was awakened for me in, of all places, southern Cambodia. Yuliya and I are staying in a coastal town called Sihanoukville, which is desperately trying to tart itself up and become a Hot Backpacker Destination. Quite frankly, it isn't a place I’d recommend to anyone (unless I had at least one good reason to dislike the recommendee). But it’s right on the sea's edge, and from the town there are boat trips to some of the islands lying offshore.

We’re on one of these delightful excursions today, about to have lunch on a lump of sand and tangled vegetation known as Koh Ru (“Bamboo Island”). Yuliya has disappeared into the undergrowth, possibly never to been seen or heard of again, and I’m ‘relaxing’ on the beach.

For some people this may sound like a rather pleasant way to spend a day, so let me explain the presence of rabbit ears around the word "relaxing".

Basically, I find beaches just about the least relaxing places on Earth. I mean, if I thought really hard I could probably list some other environments that would put up a fair fight in the ‘least relaxing’ stakes … like, say, jungle trails strewn with deadly poisonous millipedes (miles from the nearest hospital, which is bound to be crappy anyway), and fishing boats so completely infested with wood lice that you can’t sit down or put your belongings on the deck for a moment without them snooping around your backpack, looking for a way in. Fortunately, though, our little day trip to the islands includes both of those environments as well … so whatever happens, we’ve hit the discomfort jackpot.

Amazing what you can get here for US$15.

So anyway, now that I've put the "I hate beaches" thing out there, let's consider for a moment: what IS this thing called "the beach"?

As far as I can see, a beach can be defined thusly: it’s the place where land runs out and water begins. Or, if you want to be a tiny bit more accurate, the observable point at which the land becomes lower than the water, thereby disappearing from view.

For me, this begs one obvious, two-word question. As questions go it’s rather direct and not overly imaginative, but nonetheless I think it demands an answer. In fact, if I were World President, I'd be tempted to display said question on every single beach in 4-metre high flashing neon letters, surrounded by dancing girls who periodically spell out the two words by lifting their skirts provocatively to reveal large yellow letters printed on their knickers (except for one girl who would have just plain red knickers, corresponding to the space between the words). Surrounding this scene would be hippos dressed in marching band costumes, each with a huge bucket in front of them, the size of a small wading pool. From the buckets they would regularly draw water, then spit it dramatically into the air, further drawing readers' attention as the neon sizzles at the impact of their spray. Then a curtain would fall away, revealing a 100-strong chorus line of arm-linked, leg-kicking dancers, all singing the same refrain.

(There might be some skywriting in there too ... but I’m not sure. Would that be overkill, do you think?)

Let’s get to the point. The question I want to ask about this land-ending-and-water-beginning place, worshipped by so many for so long, is as follows:

SO WHAT?!?!?

And btw, you can feel free to add an expletive in the middle if you want.

I mean, really, folks. Is it that exciting when one element stops and another takes over? ‘Cause if it is, you ought to be experiencing complete, undiluted bliss every waking moment of your life. I mean, we live continuously in what you might call ‘boundary conditions’: our planet is solid rock most of the way through (with some hot gooey stuff in the middle, if scientists are to be believed), but the part of it we happen to inhabit is the precise point where the rock runs out and the atmosphere begins … i.e., every single breath we take during our existence is taken at the boundary point between two elements.

So if elemental boundaries are so fabulous, why are we not jumping up and down, waving flags and giant soft toys, and inventing catchy little sing-along chants to celebrate the end of rock and the beginning of the air?

“Because they're not”, would be my answer.

For some reason, though, when I've complained about the crappiness of beaches in the past, I've found that this opinion has raised its share of objections. So if you'll bear with me, I want to examine a few of these objections now.

First, it could be pointed out that being near a body of water is very pleasant. I can’t say that I completely disagree with this, but guess what else bodies of water are, apart from pleasant? Yep … they’re extremely common. Just go for a walk beside a river or a stream, a canal or a lake. They're honestly not that difficult to locate.

Or here’s another thought: if you really want to be near the water, and nothing but sea or ocean will do, then fine: buy a boat.

Some may also say that I'm de-personalising the experience of being at the beach to suit my own narrative purposes (if indeed I actually have any). I'll admit that the descriptions I've given so far are a tad clinical, and do little to capture the 'beachfront atmosphere' so keenly sought out, or at least dreamed of, by people of all nationalities. So ok, let's zoom in a little closer: what is it, in fact, that comprises this special atmosphere?

First of all, there are the unique sensations that await beachgoers, like the feeling of warm sand between your toes. I know that a lot of people claim to like this, but really: would you go outside tomorrow, strip down to your underwear and lie in the dirt beside your nearest main road? Or how’s this: you’re in a bar and you meet a woman who tells you that she has silicon breast implants, then goes on to reveal that one of her implants is defective. There’s a hole in it, and the silicon is slowly leaking out. A little shocked by this new and surprising information, you haven’t had time to formulate a suitably sympathetic response when the woman suddenly offers to squeeze the silicon onto your face and body if you pay her. My question: would you accept her proposition? Cause at the end of the day, that’s what sand is: it’s dirt made of silicon. And yet people pay thousands of dollars to go and lie in the stuff.

To me that's just insane, and I’ll never, ever get it.

But maybe there's something else I'm missing. Let me see ...

Is it the knowledge that the sand grinding between your toes now will be in your shoes, your socks, your underpants and, finally, your bed later? Maybe. Is it the smell of salt and rotting seaweed, or the bitter taste of these in your mouth when you come out of the water? Hmmm ... well, I s'pose that could be it. Weird, though.

Is it the collection of people you can find on beaches, who roughly divide into two categories: 1) those who really should never go anywhere dressed in bathers, and 2) those with far more athletic bodies than your own, who make you feel depressed and self-conscious, whereas just a few hours earlier you were basically ok about yourself? No, that can't possibly be the deciding factor.

Must be the overpriced crappy food being sold in the immediate environs, combined with the gradual roasting process that your skin undergoes on the beach, slowly altering your white/red blood cel balance to get you a little closer to having cancer.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Btw, before we go any further, a little disclaimer: I fully realise that I’m being a cranky old grandpa here. Feel free to regard this entry as just that: the rantings of a grandpa at the height of his cumudgeonry.

Still, I really think that the beach is vastly overrated. No, more than that: it isn’t just overrated. It’s highly unpleasant.

And see, here’s where I’m really gonna lose you, because now I need to tell you what I think when I see other people enjoying the beach. Most of you are gonna hate what I have to say … but please don’t take it too personally.

Some background first: as you know, I grew up in Australia, where the beach is more or less a given. The centre of the country is pretty close to being uninhabitable, so ninety-something per cent of the population live on the coast, and there beaches are just a fact of everyday life. And even when I lived there, I hated the beach. In the last few years, though, all the beaches I’ve visited have been mainly populated by people who don’t come from countries like this.

And so here’s the honest truth. Basically, when I’ve seen people walking, sitting, and especially lying on beaches recently, they’ve often seemed to me a little desperate. It’s as if these people come from sad, grey, depressed corners of the world, where the drabness of their daily reality weighs them down so heavily that they feel compelled above all else to spend their money trying to escape into the sunshine, pursuing some vaguely-construed myth about having their own piece of ‘tropical paradise’. They’ll continue chasing this dream regardless of cost, subjecting themselves to the most uncomfortable and humiliating circumstances just to feel the satisfaction of lying on any white (or yellow, orange or stony grey) shoreline with a barely perceptible tidal swell.

I try not to think in such condescending terms, but when I go to those ‘boundary areas’ where tourists recline on hard wooden chairs being served massively overpriced, diluted cocktails by obsequious waiters who eye their bikini-clad adolescent daughters avariciously, I just can’t help it. Beaches seem to me so self-evidently horrid that I can’t quite manage to put myself in the headspace of a person who thinks “Yay!” when s/he encounters one … especially in places like Cambodia, where the beachfront enviroment is pretty average, and the attendant conditions (e.g. drainage pipes leading directly from restaurant toilets to places where people are swimming) are rather scary.

And so now you’ve heard my piece, it’s your turn to reach out across the electronic oceans and slap me in the virtual face. What you’ve read here is my honest opinion, without a word of exaggeration – I really, really hate the beach! But I know that my view leans towards the extreme, and you know that I’m the kind of person who won’t mind if you come back at me hard and say “Listen, Anthony, you’re full of shit, and here’s why …”

So go on then: try to sell me on the beach. Bet you won’t succeed ;-)


*(except MS Windows of course.)

preah khan

Hello!

This entry is a slight deviation from the usual Ranting Manor format – something like a 'photo album', but with a bit more commentary than, say, Facebook allows.

The previous rant was about my first day at Angkor, the ancient empire state of the Khmers, which lies in the jungles of northern Cambodia. I said more or less everything I wanted to say about Angkor, but I couldn't leave the subject alone without showing you some photos from our second day.

The main reason for this is that Day Two kicked off at a temple called Preah Khan. When we left our hotel in the morning, I had serious doubts about whether I could cope with another full day of temples. But by the time we'd reached the entrance of this remarkable place, standing in a junge clearing in a state of elegant ruin, my mind was well on its way to being blown all over again.

Every bit as grand, colourful and chaotic as its older sister Ta Prohm (which I enthused about in the previous entry), Preah Khan had one advantage: namely, that when we got there at 8am, we had the place almost to ourselves. We saw just a few tourists wandering through, a group of construction workers out the front working on the main entrance, and a Thai family trying to have breakfast in one of the many ruined halls that led off the main passageway. (They were chased away by a policeman – guess you're not supposed to eat in the sacred spaces of Angkor.)
  

So, what you've got here is basically a short selection of pics from one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited. (I wanted to include many more, but I have to catch a plane this afternoon!)

Hope you enjoy )))

First cab off the rank: the almost inevitable 'cute kid sitting on enormous grisly statue' shot.

Like many of the temples at Angkor, the entrance to Preah Khan is flanked by dvarapala (temple guardians). They're suitably fierce-looking creatures, with warriors' scowls and so on, but when a ridiculously cute Cambodian girl sits on one and starts singing to herself, some of the fearsomeness is definitely lost.

I did take this photo partly for its 'cute value', but I also liked the fact that the dvarapala here has lost part of his arm. It struck me as being somehow symbolic of one of the major problems plaguing Cambodia today: namely, that the whole northern half of the country is packed full of land mines.

Even after decades of clearing, land mines remain a major issue here. There are still a staggering number of live mines in the country (estimates range from 6 million to 42 million), and they claim large numbers victims every year – about 800 in 2009, for example.

Travelling around Cambodia, you see these people all the time: amputees, legless people on wheeled carts, blind people and so on. So it  really is a daily fact of life here.

(Btw, an extremely cool initiative has taught people blinded by landmine explosions to perform therapeutic massage, and the resulting industry has really taken off. Now you can find 'blind massage' centres in any Cambodian city or tourist town. Brilliant idea, no?)

Ok, social conscience sated. Back to looking at pretty stuff )))

Preah Khan's ground plan is extraordinarily complex, with four main enclosures each containing multiple galleries, courtyards and so on, linked by a complicated maze of corridors.

Here, for example, you can see a small courtyard lying adjacent to the central passageway. As with most of the temple, nearly every surface is partly or fully covered with carved motifs or figures, and nature has supplied some extra colour to complete the artwork started by the Khmer.

In a lot of the outlying rooms the ceiling and parts of the walls have collapsed, so as you stroll along the central passageway, you see glimpses of sunlight and great piles of rubble, inviting you into halls and corridors at either side. This one's a ruined cloister leading onto an open verandah area. Cute, isn't it?

The carvings mostly depict figures and episodes from various myths. Back in the day, spiritual beliefs in Cambodia were rather syncretistic, with aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism mixed in with earlier pagan/animist beliefs. So as you walk around the temples, you often see austere Buddhist statues right next to, say, episodes from the life and times of Vishnu (who always looks like he's on the verge of delivering some incredibly cheesy pick-up line, don't you think?).

These ladies are devatas (female deities of Indian descent), often designed to look like they're dancing, or else just smiling enigmatically.

Looking from one parallel roofless hallway to another, Yuliya noticed something weird: there's a second floor, but no stairs. We looked it up in our guide, and apparently there was never a staircase to the upper floor of the temple, as far as anyone knows.

Mmmmm ... spooky )))

But possibly the most spectacular scenery here is supplied by nature herself. When restoration began in Angkor, Ta Prohm and Preah Khan were chosen as sites that should remain as close as possible to their 'natural state'. So everywhere you go, you see what appear to be giant botanical cephalopods** from outer space, locked in mortal combat with the masonry.

Actually these attacks begin inside the walls of the temple, as tiny seeds germinate, grow into enormous silk cotton trees, and burst through the stones. But whether you choose to go with the scientific truth, or the flights of fancy which these scenes inspire, the spectacle is awesome. 

And here's my personal favourite. This enormous silk cotton tree has the rear gopura (entrance door) of the temple in its unshakeable grip, creating a dramatic and surreal final view of Preah Khan that's rather difficult to extract yourself from.

Of course, if you happen to be a mad Ukrainian woman trained in the Eastern arts, you can find 101 uses for this remarkable tangle of stone and wood.

Or, if you're just a typical gawping tourist like me, you can simply stroll around and marvel at the queer beauty of it all. Preah Khan rises quite suddenly out of the undergrowth, immerses you in its hallways and courtyards for a few hundred metres, then rapidly disappears from view as you walk away from it. As the semi-digested remains of the rear wall (pictured below) vanish under a carpet of green, it's fun to let your imagination tell you that you've hallucinated the whole thing under the influence of jungle fever.

Or at least, I thought so )))  

Ok ... that's it for the moment. Have lots more pics of Preah Khan sitting on my hard drive, but no time to sift through them now. This will have to do. Hope you enjoyed the visuals.

Bye!

* The caption of this photo, btw, comes from one of my all-time favourite pieces of music by the Norwegian band Ulver. For some reason, when I first looked at this photo the song (both its music and its title) came to mind.

** The generic word for that family of animals which contains octopi, squid, shrimp and so on. It's another word I simply had to use on The Manor at some point.

wat's up?

(angkor part one)

So, about Angkor ... I know that a few people reading this have already been there, so to you, apologies for filling this entry with stuff you already know and things you've already seen.

To everyone else, I just wanna say this: if you've got any interest in ancient sites at all, you really, really should go there. In the last entry I quoted Henri Mouhot as saying that the temples are "grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome", and he wasn't wrong. Angkor is, in a word, mind-blowing.

The typical tour starts with sunrise at Angkor Wat, which is the best preserved of the area's temples and palaces, as well as being ... get this ... the biggest religious structure of any kind, anywhere in the world! So, y'know, it makes a fairly obvious centrepiece.

(Wat means "temple", btw.)

In practical terms, catching the sunrise means stumbling out of bed at 4:30am, eyes half-closed, dragging yourself into the shower, dragging yourself out again, making a mental list of all the things you need for the day, forgetting the list completely before you've even finished it, packing whatever useful stuff you can see, and rushing downstairs to meet your tuk-tuk driver, still barely awake and definitely not functioning in the brain area.

The driver smiles and whisks you off through the darkened streets of Siem Reap (the closest town to the temples – previously a place with a definite 'Wild East' vibe, which is still faintly discernible despite the plethora of tourist hotels, travel agents and restaurants). Half an hour later, as the dark of night slowly softens to pre-dawn grey, you emerge from jungle into a wide clearing, where a large body of dark water appears on your right.

My first thought upon seeing this was "Ooh, what a pretty lake". Then we rounded a corner, and the lake followed us in a 90-degree turn. I thought "Huh?" (which is about my level of mental sophistication at 5:30am), realising later that I was in fact looking at an extraordinarily wide moat, encircling a walled city. I was subsequently told that, back in the day, the king ordered this moat to be filled with crocodiles (whereas, if I had my own city, I'd have quite a tough time deciding what to fill the moat with. It'd probably end up being either mango juice or bubble bath. Guess I'd be a fairly crap god-king.) 

To get across the moat you walk over a huge sandstone bridge, then through a grand gateway (constructed with elephant access in mind), where the bridge becomes a kind of raised stone highway. It stretches from the city's entrance all the way to the far end, where the temple stands.

Along the road there are stairways down to ground level, each guarded by seven-headed serpents. While in themselves they're not the most visually impressive features of Angkor Wat, the stairways are extremely cool for this reason: they show where each street began in the original city plan.

See, Angkor was actually not just a city but an empire of cities, each with a temple at its centre. Around the temple, people lived, worked, ate, shopped and, when they were sick of all that, died. The signs of their habitation are completely gone now, 'cause it was believed that only constructions dedicated to the gods should be made of stone. So these were wooden cities. But unlike the other sites in the area, Angkor Wat gives you enough of a sketch to imagine a whole metropolis functioning within its walls.

When you consider that there are 100s of these temples already uncovered, with an estimated 1,200 still hidden in the jungle, this makes Angkor a full-blown civilsation in itself. Somewhere in a guide book I read that, in the 11th century, over a million people lived there. At around the same time, the population of London was about 50,000. So y'know, we're talking huge here. 

Anyway, as you walk towards the popular viewing spots, Khmer people run up and start trying to sell you coffee from nearby stalls. Seemed like a pretty fabulous idea to me, so I bought my tall glass of coffee and shared the sunrise with a squillion other tourists, before escaping as quickly as possible from the hordes to do some exploring inside the temple. This is when the fun really began.

Inside the walls of the wat, trying to take in both the scale and the level of fine detail together is quite overwhelming. There are grand halls with Hindu and Buddhist carvings adorning every surface ('cause Cambodian religion is a mixture of these two faiths with some pre-existing pagan/animist beliefs thrown in). There are forests of stone columns holding up ornately carved ceilings. There are long cloisters and

hallways, some

  of them lined with statues and carvings that depict episodes from mythology. In fact, there's pretty much everything

you'd want from a temple of great antiquity, in pretty darn generous quantities. Not only that, but

somehow the whole thing is rendered in a symphony of rich monochromes and variegated colours that change throughout the day. (We know this because we went back to Angkor Wat the following day to get some more pics in bright afternoon sunshine.)

As with the other temples and palaces of Angkor, you can climb all over the many structures in Angkor Wat to your heart's content. The elegant outbuildings are accessible only by partly-worn staircases that are almost vertical, but you can get up onto those too. You can even – if you have the inclination – place a beautiful Ukrainian woman on top of one of them, and encourage her to reach into the morning sky, just for the sake of a good photo. But of course, only irresponsible husbands do that sort of thing. I personally wouldn't recommend it ...

From Angkor Wat, you head by tuk-tuk to Angkor Thom, also the centre of a great city now swallowed by the jungle. This temple is quite confusing in its layout, conceived as a "mountain of faces" and subsequently

re-modelled by successive kings into a mish-mash of styles and ground plans. But you sense you're getting further into the wilderness here – at Angkor Wat, you feel that nature has been effectively held at arm's length, but Angkor Thom and surrounding structures (including the enigmatically named 'Terrace of the Leper King') are set in a huge park with jungle licking at the edges, clearly wanting to reclaim the whole area.

None of this, however, will prepare you for what you see when you leave central Angkor and head to the eastern part of the former empire. Out here lies a temple called Ta Prohm, which would have to be one of the world's weirdest structures, just in the way that nature and architecture have joined together in a relationship which is both symbiotic and mutually destructive at the same time.

Before I go further, I should probably give you just a little more background info (not enough to send you to sleep, I hope). The khmer people always knew that Angkor's temples were there somewhere in the jungle, but other than Angkor Wat (which was inhabited and cared for by Buddhist monks), the khmer didn't set out to find and restore them. The restoration efforts only started in the late 19th and early 20thC, and were/are mainly conducted by an organisation called the École Française d'Extrême Orient.

When the École first arrived in Cambodia, many of the temples were in an advanced state of disrepair; the stones were discoloured by fungus and bat droppings, while silk cotton trees and other arboreal giants had taken root between building blocks, ripping apart walls and sending rooves crashing to the jungle floor as they grew to enormous dimensions. It was clearly going to be a huge job fixing even one of these temples, let alone all of them.

Over a century later, the École's restoration efforts grind on. But at some early point in the process, they decided that cleaning up everything would deny visitors the pleasure of seeing these vast stone edifices in the state they were in when found. So the decision was made: let's leave a few of the temples as they were when we found them, doing just enough work to stop them falling apart any further.

One result of this inspired decision is the wonderful Ta Prohm, a maze of open galleries, mysterious dark passageways partly blocked by fallen masonry, library rooms hidden in corners of the complex, and parallel doors and windows that produce a 'hall of mirrors' effect. There are so many atmospheric little corners in this place, you could spend a weekend exploring them, admiring the faded carvings, the incredible colours, and the romance of stone crumbling to dust around you. I can't imagine there are too many sacred sites in the world that can match this one for beauty and atmosphere (although there is another temple at Angkor which does exactly that – tell you 'bout it later).

Yet for all I've just said about the architecture of Ta Prohm, the real star here is Mother Nature herself. It's her contribution to Ta Prohm which makes it the most frequently sketched of all Angkor's temples, and the one which has "prompted more writers to descriptive excess"* than any other part of the ancient empire.

When archaeologists from the École first came to the site, Ta Prohm's walls were under attack from an unlikely enemy: giant silk cotton trees and strangler figs (or possibly golden apple tress; sources disagree about the identity of this species).

The fruits of these trees are eaten by birds, whose droppings contain the seeds for the next generation. If a bird leaves a dropping on a stone wall, and a seed finds its way through a crack in the sandstone (between two blocks, for example), the tiny seed will germinate in the darkness and, in time, become a huge "wooden octopus"** strangling and suffocating its prey.

Maybe the most fascinating aspect of this (for me at least) is that in some cases the trees are actually the only things preventing a complete collapse of the temple walls, whereas in others, they're crushing and tearing the stonework year by year, and causing amounts of damage that you wouldn't dare put a dollar sign on. So it's a love-hate relationship between stone and wood, between nature and architecture.

The École are doing their best to keep the balance, letting the trees remain  

in place wherever possible while re-inforcing the structures which they're parasitising. But one gets the feeling that no group of mere humans can determine the fate of this site. Whether the jungle or the gods will emerge as victors is something only time can decide.

By the time you've seen these and two or three other sites at Angkor, it's mid- to late afternoon and you're feeling more than a little mind-blown, exhausted and temporarily 'templed out'. So then, there you are in northern Cambodia, wondering what the Hell there is to do here (I mean, apart paying to stand in a glass tank for 15 minutes, so that small fish can eat the skin off your feet – something that's offered on almost every street corner here).

Then you notice the signs saying "Happy Pizza", and you think

"Hmmm ... should I risk it? Is it a crime in this country? Will it make me miss my 5am start for the excursion tomorrow? And how strong will it be? Strong enough to make me think I'm a flying bunny on an interstellar mission to spread joy throughout the world via the medium of the Happy Dance? This is Indo-China, after all".

In the end, you decide to brave the Happy Pizza ... I mean, the signs are so blatant, it must be legal, right? And the guy taking orders is so middle-aged and respectable looking, he can't possibly be part of the 'criminal element', peddling substances which make people think they're alien rabbits. There's just no way.

Ok, enough justification. You know you're trying it for one reason only: namely 'cause you want to.

An hour later, head to the conveience store to grab some snacks for tomorrow's temple-viewing, continually asking yourself "Has the pizza started working yet?" After a little bit of giggling and a few odd but inconclusive moments, decide that in fact, the happiest thing on your pizza was probably the blue cheese.

And that – apart from a visit to the night market to do a bit of haggling and be chased by people who want your dead skin to feed their fish – is your day. Time to head back to the hotel and rest; you've been awake for a ridiculously long time!

Goodnight )))


* An often-cited quote from the book "Ancient Angkor" by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques.

** A phrase used by one of Yuliya's friends when she saw a pic we'd taken of a huge silk cotton tree growing on top of a temple wall.

legacy guy

Around about 155 years ago, a French naturalist called Henri Mouhot went to the British Royal Geographic Society and asked them for some money. He and his wife wanted to go on a botanical expedition to Indo-China, and he wanted them to provide all the necessary funds for him to meander through obscure parts of the Far East, scribbling in his sketch pad and collecting samples of unknown flowers.

Correction: he and his wife wanted to go on four botanical expeditions, and he wanted the Geographical Society to pay for all of them.

Now, I d'know about you, but to me this sounds like a request which was almost tailor-made to be a) laughed at and b) flatly rejected. I mean, I'm sure if you've ever applied for an arts or science grant, or worked in project management and fought hard to get project budgets approved, you'll appreciate that getting the people with the money to be enthused about your Big Idea is always a challenge. And of course, getting them to actually open their purse and let you put your hands in is harder still. In this case, though, we're talking about an even bigger ask: a French explorer wants money from a British organisation, to bankroll his exploits in a region (Indo-China) that was of little interest to anyone at the time – and for a completely uncertain, probably very minimal result that would be of interest to a select few scientists and enthusiasts.

Hmmm ... not the easiest thing to sell.

The fact that Mouhot did manage to get the money for these expeditions forces me to consider an idea which I generally resist with all my argumentative powers: namely, that perhaps some things really are meant to happen. See, at that point, nobody (including Mouhot himself) could've predicted how much a few quirky little expeditions would enlarge our knowledge of the world, and the strange wonders lying therein. His big discovery had nothing to do with flowers, and everything to do with ...

wait, I'll tell you in a sec.

On his third Indo-Chinese round-trip, Mouhot traversed the jungles of northern northern Cambodia. There he came across something which hadn't been the focus of his journey at all, but which so moved and inspired him that he decided to deviate from his orginal plan and investigate. Out of the endless tangles of dense vegetation, as he hacked his way through with machetes, there emerged a series of impossibly vast, stunningly ornate and sublimely beautiful temple complexes – "grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome"*, as he later put it. They were so overrun by nature that they seemed almost at one with the fertile jungle flora, but nonetheless they were still at least partially intact.   

Astonished and moved by what he'd discovered, Mouhot started sketching these weird, wonderful, other-worldly sacred sites. He also started writing ... evocatively, passionately, copiously. As it turned out, our nerdy botanist hero had quite a talent for literary description, and when he brought his accounts of these buried temples back to France, they caused quite a sensation.

It was only a couple of years later that Mouhot's writings were compiled into an illustrated book – an instant bestseller which fired the imaginations of the French people and made Angkor the subject of intense interest and speculation. Mouhot never claimed to have "re-discovered" the temples in his writing (because he knew that at least two other Europeans had been there before him), but before long, his name had become synonymous with 'the ancient city of Angkor'. 

And here comes the inevitable tragic twist to the story – the bit which convinces me that, if indeed there is such a thing as fate, she's a cruel bitch who deserves to be tied to the back of a tuk-tuk* and dragged through streets freshly re-surfaced with boiling tar. See, Mouhot never got to see the stunning effects of his work. Fired up as he was about expedition #4, he stayed only a short time in France before venturing even further into the unknown. By the time his book had been published, and become a sensation, he was lying in a grave in Laos, having died there of malarial fever in 1861.

See? Cruel. Bitch. Boiling tar.

As to why I'm telling you all this: well, I guess I kind of admire, and even slightly identify with, this Nerdy Little Plant Nerd (who, btw, worked as a language tutor in Russia before he disappeared into the Eastern haze). As I read more about him, I've also come to see him as something like the Indo-Chinese equivalent of those "Men of The Stans", who I've written about previously in The Manor, and who I admire very much. And lastly, I feel kind of a debt to Mouhot, since it was his work more than anything before it which eventually resulted in the re-habilitation of Angkor's temples.

Thousands of other people who come to Angkor and sit sketching the temples ("following in Mouhot's footsteps", as one website puts it) also feel seem to feel this debt. He's become almost as much of a legend as the temples themselves. And deservedly so, it seems to me – firstly for having such a wonderfully silly dream (the whole 'Flower-sketching in Indo-China' thing), secondly for convincing others to let him follow said dream, thirdly for being ready to Man Up and face the jungle, and fourthly for bringing such an incredible thing to the eyes of the world.

So ... thank you, Legacy Guy. We owe you one )))

I'm gonna write more about Angkor ... probably much more, in fact. It's without doubt one of the most astounding places I've ever been to, so I figure it's worth a couple of entries – plus I have loads of pics to show you.

Bye!   


* (A quote from Mouhot's writings.)

* A motorbike or bicycle taxi, very numerous in Thailand and Cambodia. They're kind of like a horse and cart, but with a roof on the cart and a bicycle or motorbike where the horse should be. Great way to travel in the hot Indo-Chinese weather, 'cause you get shelter from the sun and wind on your face )))

sa-pa, cat cat and the terraces of the hmong

Quick readership survey: hands up if you don't love it when the world suddenly turns around and surprises you by revealing some detail about itself that you'd never previously suspected, heard about or even dreamed of.

Ok, now hands up if you do love that.

Yep, it's as I thought … we're more or less unanimous )))

Of course, it does depend on the kind of detail we’re talking about. I mean, if someone came up to me in a bar tomorrow night and asked “Did you know that the State of Kansas hosts a 5km running race every April, which is one of the most popular in the whole of the USA?”, I wouldn’t be going “Wow, that's amaaaaaazing!!! The world is such an interesting place, isn’t it?”. At least, not unless there was a twist ... as for example, you went on to tell me that competitors are required to throw buckets of pure alcohol over each other before the race, then set themselves on fire at the starting line so that the audience – watching overhead in hot air balloons – could get high on the fumes that rose skyward, as sprinting fireballs sent intoxicating clouds of ethanol into the air. In that case, I'd be reaching for my laptop and getting hold of every single available Youtube video before you could say "sick imagination" ;-) 

Generally speaking, though, I'd consider myself a reasonably big fan of discovering-stuff-you-didn't-know-about-the-world (especially if it's of the weirder variety). It's usually small things, of course; you put the puzzle together piece-by-incredibly-tiny-piece, knowing you’ll never have the full picture but enjoying the process, as here and there little areas resolve themselves into something you can almost make out. However, on the odd occasion you do find something fairly big, and that's ... well, pretty damn cool.

A case in point: this year at uni I've been studying East and South East Asia as a 'language area', looking at the languages spoken in that part of the world and learning about some weird/interesting characteristics that many of them share. You can divide most of these languages into 'families', like the Sinitic (i.e. Chinese) languages, the Tai-Kadai family (including Thai and some other formidably difficult monsters) and so on.

Quite a lot of SE Asian languages are rather obscure, exotic and not yet fully documented, and lots of them have features that seem completely bizarre from a Eurocentric point of view. I s'pose the most famous of these is 'lexical tone' – i.e. where saying a word with different intonation completely changes its meaning.

As luck would have it, last month I moved to a country where the national language has this weird lexical tone thing, and I've enjoyed encountering a few multi-function words in Vietnamese. My favourite is "ga". This little midget of a word turns out to be quite versatile, with a range of meanings from "chicken" to "railway station", depending entirely on the intonation. And because the tonal system is so difficult for foreigners to master, if you try ordering "com rang ga" (rice fry chicken) in a Ha Noi restaurant, you can quite easily end up asking for fried rice with a railway station. Or else you can go the other way, and ask a taxi driver to take you to Ha Noi's Central Chicken.

*pause for giggling*

Really not sure why I find this so funny. I just do.

Sign of immaturity, I guess.

For me, though, the most exotic languages I've come across this year are a family called 'Hmong-Mien'. Like other SE Asian languages, they tend to contain loads of exotic stuff like lexical tone, classifiers* and (for Western folk) virtually unpronouncable consonants with weird descriptions like "retroflex" and "uvular stop". But the main reason why I found them so interesting to learn about was simply this: there are something like 100 languages in the Hmong-Mien family, and I'd never even frikkin’ heard of them before.

I mean, in one sense this isn’t in the least bit surprising: Hmong-Mien languages are mainly spoken by so-called 'hill tribes' in remote parts of Vietnam, Laos etc., so not exactly the kind of thing you’d regularly come across in everyday life. But still, when you consider that 90% of all the languages in Europe fit into just three families (Germanic, Latin and Slavic)**, a whole family of languages is a pretty huge thing to hide from a Word Nerd for so many years.

Imagine my delight, then, when I found myself actually talking to people of the Black Hmong tribe last weekend, as we trekked side-by-side with them through the hills around Sa Pa in northern Viet Nam. It was quite an adventure: I visited their villages (pigs and buffalo were notable features), injured my head on their low rooves, learned a couple of Black Hmong starter phrases (like ka mun qi for “Hello” and o chou for “thank you”), admired their amazing kimono-meets-cowboy traditional clothing, bought a Hmong jacket which I’ll probably never wear, and had my taste buds thoroughly tingled by their delicious apple wine and their sticky rice with lime, salt and peanut paste, barbequed on hot coals inside bamboo bark. Yum!

The down side: the Hmong people haven’t yet mastered the art of the Soft Sell, and I was quite annoyed at times by their pushiness. (Imagine the phrase “Buy some’hing fom miiiiiiiiiii????” being screamed into a megaphone by an angry parrot.) But never mind … you take the good with the bad.

Sa Pa itself, meanwhile, is a far-northern mountain community, just a handful of kilometres from the Chinese border. It’s full of tourists, but the hills and mountains around the town are home to some absolutely jaw-dropping, expletive-producing scenery. It’s certainly the prettiest part of Viet Nam I’ve seen, by a factor of at least two to the power of 25, possibly more.

We caught the overnight train there from Ha Noi, and as the sun rose, we found ourselves in a minibus, ascending along winding roads with the silhouettes of rice terraces creating dramatic shapes around us. In some cases, nearly an entire mountainside seemed to have been carved into terraces, one above the other, hugging the contours of the landscape and forming imaginary Mayan pyramids in the mist.

Later in the day, when the air had cleared, we got a much clearer view of the terraces – a little less mysterious, for sure, but no less

beautiful. Then our chance came to see them up close: we trekked for “five kilometres” (I put that in quote marks because it’s what the travel agent told us, but there’s no way we did less than eight!) down a mountainside to the Hmong villages of Lao Chai and Ta Van at the bottom. It was a stunning walk.

Along the way I had one of those 'movie set moments' that one occasionally gets while travelling. In this case, the thing that inspired it was a couple of Hmong houses hidden amongst impossibly lush vegetation on a river bank, and the movie in question was Apocalypse Now***. I almost expected Robert Duvall to turn up any moment and deliver his "napalm in the morning" line. Guessing I'm not the first traveller who's had that thought ... or indeed the follow-up thought, which was basically "How the Hell did we ever convince ourselves that it was ok to bomb the f!#$%k out of a country that was a) so incredibly poor and b) so incredibly idyllic?

But, y'know, travelling in places that used to be considered 'enemy territory' will do that for ya. Which is one reason why I recommend it ))) 

Anyway ... the journey down the mountain was rather challenging – I got a touch of altitude sickness part-way down and had to stop frequently to prevent my insides from imploding – but the rewards at the bottom more than justified the pain. Long, low wooden houses sat in rice fields half-submerged in muddy water, gardens and yards were strewn with animals and farming equipment, and sheaves of corn hung drying out under wide verandahs.

All this was set against a backdrop of terraces ascending towards cloud-covered peaks, with a river snaking through the whole scene, occasionally breaking into stretches of rapids. This place was definitely like none I'd ever seen before ... so, y'know, that was a good thing )))

The next day we hiked in the opposite direction to another Hmong village, and this time I liked the place even before we got there, on the strength of its name alone.

Unfortunately, although the village of Cat Cat was very cute, and the surrounding scenery once again fantastic, it seemed to Yuliya and I that the whole place had 

been turned into a kind of living museum exhibition. The people of Cat Cat were living what I'm sure more or less amounts to a traditional Hmong lifestyle, but all of it appeared to be done a little self-consciously, in the presence of an unending trickle of tourists wandering through their village and going "Ooooh" at the general Hmonginess of it all.

Actually, the general status of the Hmong around Sa Pa raised interesting questions about the meeting of 'traditional' and 'modern' (which is to say wealthy and industralised) cultures. As I mentioned, Sa Pa is a tourist town full of hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and the usual palaver. Hmong women hike up to the town every single day in full traditional costume, babies on their backs and daughters alongside. They stride up the slopes, long strands of hemp fibre wound around their wrists, weaving the strands together as they go*** and looking for foreigners to sell stuff to. You get the feeling that a significant % of the female population spends their whole day like this, wandering the hills and speaking English to foreigners.

The daughters of these women, meanwhile, grow up surrounded by travellers from all over the world – hearing their stories and their foreign perspectives on life, picking up the slang expressions they use, and getting used to living in 'international company' from a very young age.

Seems to me there are at least two ways to look at all this (and probably some more I haven't thought of). First you could ask whether, and to what extent, such extensive contact with the external world risks corroding the culture of these previously isolated hill folk. Or you could view it from the opposite end and ask: does the need  

to 'Hmong it up' for the tourists, with all the trad clothing and weaving and rice-harvesting and so forth, keep them stuck in a kind of developmental tar pit, in which they can't move their lifestlye forward because it would take away the 'primitivity' which is now their major source of income?

I s'pose the answer depends on how shrewd, tough and determined the Hmong people really are. In my brief encounters with them, they seemed to have all these qualities in spades ... but I guess we'll see what happens.

Btw, just like with the flaming alcoholic runners, there's an added twist here too. Notice that everything I said just now was about Hmong women and their daughters, not men or boys or all of the above. That's because the male folk have no part at all in this interaction with foreigners. Outside the villages, I saw maybe two in two days. They stay at home, presumably tending the rice terraces, feeding the buffalo and what-have-you. So, I mean, where does that leave Hmong culture? Don't you find that kinda weird ... that one gender spends all its time with foreigners, and the other has no outside contact at all? I just can't quite imagine the effect (if any) this would have on family life ... but in any case, I'm intrigued.

One last random and intriguing thing about the Hmong, to which I've alluded a couple of times but haven't really explained: they make almost all of their clothes from hemp, which they get from the marijuana plants that grow in and around their villages.

Our guide in Cat Cat invited me to pick a leaf from one of these plants and check that it was 'the real thing' (though I'm not sure how I was supposed to do that, not being terribly wise in the Ways of The Ganja). I asked "Do people here use marijuana for purposes other than making clothes?", and the guide said "No, because they know that if they get caught, the government will take the plants away, and then they won't be able to make their clothes".

So there you go ... if my guide is to be believed, it implies both an Indo-Chinese govt showing tolerance towards the cultivation of 'drugs', and a people who live surrounded by marijuana leaves and yet never chop them up, roll them up and smoke them.

Once again, I mention this for no particular reason apart from that it's yet another example of the "Hey, weird ol' wide ol' world we live in" thing that I was talking about before.

Ok, time to end this rather long ramble and get some sleep. Next up: Angkor Wat.

("Angkor what?")
("Yes, wat.")
("What?")
("Mm-hmm, that's right.")
("Huh?")
("Wat.")
("Yeah, that's what I'm asking. What?")
("It's, y'know, part of the name.")
("What name?")
("I've already ... oh, forget it. This is turning into the George W Bush / President Hu joke.")

Bye!

* Btw, in case anyone's remotely interested, classifiers are extra words that precede nouns in some languages, providing information about what kind of thing the noun is. To get an idea, imagine if you had to precede the word "umbrella" with the phrase "long, pointy, stick-like thing" in English ... but also imagine that we had a single word which meant "long, pointy stick-like thing". If the word was, say, "smurg", you'd say "Dammit, I left my smurg umbrella on the bus again!", to indicate that the thing you left on the bus was pointy and stick-like. These terms don't fit into any of the 'word classes' (noun, adverb etc.) that we discuss in relation to European languages, so they're fun in the sense of being totally alien. Least I think so )))

** Of the others, three (Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian) belong to the fascinating Finno-Ugric family, and there are also a few mysterious ‘isolates’ like Euskara, spoken in the Basque provinces. If you have a taste for weird exotic theories and academic mysteries, check this one out. It has baffled linguists for decades, and the more ‘respectable’, and some wild theories have been proposed. My favourite: that Euskara is a cousin of the Ainu language, spoken by the minority indigeous population on Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. Seems unlikely, but if a connection between the two were ever definitively established, it could challenge some of our ideas about humankind’s early global migrations, and thus about the genetic links between European and Asian people. I love fringe theories like this… which, y’know, probably just proves that I should get out more ;-)

*** Film about the US/Vietnam war, but completely different to all the others I've seen (and the only one worth watching i.m.h.o.). An extremely atmospheric, surreal, drug-laced and disturbing film that nearly sent its creators insane. (I'm not kidding.)

**** (to make the thick hemp thread from which most Hmong clothing is woven)