Browny-White Woman on Pink Bicycle

Leo finally won his Oscar (well done, Leo!) and I finally got on a bike in the real world.

OK, so many of you might be thinking, ‘You rode a bike? Big frickin’ deal, my six year old rides a bike!’

Artist's impression of me & my bike (source)

I used to like using the spinning bikes at the gym, and imagining I was racing down sun-lit country lanes, but the thought of riding on a real bike on real roads terrified me, probably because I’m from England and we treat cyclists there like we treat mosquitoes on holiday; like an irritating, always-there, tedious fact of life.

If you never did things you were afraid of, though, you'd just spend your entire life indoors, wearing a tin-foil hat and storing your pee in plastic bottles. With this thought in mind, I channeled my inner Peggy Blomquist (without needlessly murdering anyone, of course,) and headed out on the pink mountain bike rented from our apartment hosts.

'I'm actualised, you know!' (source)

Cycling here in Siem Reap is actually less like Russian Roulette than I thought it would be. For a start, the landscape is very flat, so there are no hills to navigate.

Secondly, the traffic moves pretty slowly, and there’s very few boy and girl racers zipping around, which right away makes the road a safer place.

There’s plenty of 4x4s, but they don’t think they own the road, and don’t plough thoughtlessly across roundabouts and junctions, or try and face down other drivers in the manner of a Clint Eastwood cowboy.

They drive on the right here in Cambodia, but the ‘give way’ rule seems to simply mean people take it in turns to flow in the rest of the traffic. As you approach a crossroads, you simply slow down and move across; everyone else does the same thing, and no-one crashes into anyone else.

Someone about to overtake you will beep to let you know they are there.

The only accident we have seen involved a Westerner on a motorbike. Taking a right turn, he cut straight across a cyclist, knocking him off his bike. The cyclist seemed to somersault in the air, before landing, luckily, on his arse. By the time the Western guy had realised what had happened, and pulled over the side of the road, the Cambodian cyclist was up and off, with no apparent injuries.

That said, I’m still very cautious; I’ve just about mastered the art of looking over my shoulder before making a turn or moving out without madly wobbling about, and I find that aggressively riding in the middle of the road is a far safer tactic than clinging to the kerb too tightly.

I’ve now cycled into town and back twice and done one dirt-track ride. The dirt track ride was the most fun, because every child you drove past would play the ‘HELLO!’ game and that never gets boring.

I’m actually enjoying it, and thinking, ‘Jeez, if riding at home was this easy, I would do it all the time!’

'This is for you and the bike, kid,' (source)

Siem Reap (be sure to buy extra loo roll) (Cambodia, February 2016)

Our second week in Cambodia is marked by an Unfortunate Case of Burning Bum. Traveller’s Trots. Delhi Belly. Whatever you want to call it. I spent about 3 days in our rented apartment clutching my stomach and doing sicky little burps, watching episodes of The Inbetweeners on YouTube and feeling VERY sorry for myself. 

It does turn out that your stomach can adapt pretty quickly to less than hygienic cooking standards, (once the pain of being poisoned is over) but I’m still going to avoid the place where I saw a rat running between the table and chairs and the place with dead, squashed cockroach in the loo. 

Then when I feel better, I go out and get drunk on super strong margaritas. The resulting hangover is far worse than the stomach bug I’d endured earlier. Never again! Oh, that looks like a nice bar…..

We’re in the town of Siem Reap, which is the North West of Cambodia and probably best known for the famous Angkor Wat (which shamefully, we still haven’t visited yet.)

The town was under French control in the late 19^th century, and the influence is clear in the architecture. The central tourist area, commonly referred to as ‘Pub Street’ is set out on a grid, with many little alleyways coming off the sides. The buildings and narrow alleyways have a very French feel to them; often two storey, open verandas, an ‘open’ upper floor where you can sit and watch the hustle and bustle of the markets and street vendors.

Our first impressions are not good though. We take a $7 taxi from the airport to ‘downtown’. The taxi driver keeps asking us if we have booked anywhere to stay yet. It’s a mistake to say that we haven’t, because he tells us he can take us to a hotel he knows. When we respectfully decline, he gets in a mood, and tries to drop us on a dirt road just off the highway.

‘We wanted to go to the town centre,’ TC says. ‘we’ve paid $7 to go to the town centre,’

‘This is town centre,’ he says. 

‘No it’s not, this is a dirt tack off the main road,’ says TC. ‘can you at least take us to a pub, or a coffee shop?’

‘You can get coffee in there,’ he says, pointing to a squat yellow building that looks like a Shell garage. 

‘I don’t think we can get coffee in there,’ I say doubtfully. 

‘I’m only supposed to do one stop,’ the driver grumbles. ‘this is it,’

‘But we aren’t anywhere,’ I say. 

Huffing and puffing, he drives a bit further down the road and stops outside a grim looking café.

‘You get out here,’ he says, and starts unloading our cases. He drives off without saying goodbye. As I look around, I think, we have made a dreadful mistake.

We sit in the grim café and have $1 cans of coke, book up a place, and then find a friendly tuk-tuk driver who takes us to ‘Pub Street’. It’s all a bit garish and loud, and reminds me a bit of the main strips of party towns on Grecian islands. It’s actually only two streets that are really like this. Once you find your way to the quaint alleyways, with the quirkier bars (like the Asana, a roof-top bar we went to last night – you wouldn’t know it was there unless you’d deliberately gone looking for it.) the place has a much nicer, homier feel to it.

We spend 3 days in a hotel, then find a longer term hotel apartment let. It’s a family run place – they live in the flat downstairs. Their children are very sweet and speak perfect English.

Its here you notice a marked difference between Thailand and Cambodia. The children here in Siem Reap seem to go to school, for a start. There are two schools right by our apartment. The children always want to engage you in a conversation, probably to practice their English, and will follow you down the street, asking questions, or simply spy you from a distance and yell, ‘HELLO! WHAT’S YOUR NAME?’ and then dissolve into fits of giggles. They all ride pushbikes, though we’ve seen some kids that look about 8 or 9 gadding about on motorbikes. 

Our apartment is about a 20 minute walk from Pub Street, down a couple of dirt tracks and then along the main ‘river’ road that splits the way in and out of town. 

Cambodia to me seems more organised than Thailand; there’s still rubbish piled up here and there, but less of it, and the buildings are less ramshackle and higgledy-piggledy. We didn’t see any of the shanty-town road side slums that we saw in Bangkok.

That said, this is still a country recovering from a long and bloody history of conflict and genocide. The BBC website explains it simply and well:

In the four years that the Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia, it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century.

The brutal regime, in power from 1975-1979, claimed the lives of up to two million people.

Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside.

But this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost.

Whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.

When he came to power, he and his henchmen quickly set about transforming Cambodia - now re-named Kampuchea - into what they hoped would be an agrarian utopia.

Declaring that the nation would start again at "Year Zero", Pol Pot isolated his people from the rest of the world and set about emptying the cities, abolishing money, private property and religion, and setting up rural collectives.

Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed. Often people were condemned for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.

Hundreds of thousands of the educated middle-classes were tortured and executed in special centres.

The most notorious of these centres was the S-21 jail in Phnom Penh, Tuol Sleng, where as many as 17,000 men, women and children were imprisoned during the regime's four years in power.

Hundreds of thousands of others died from disease, starvation or exhaustion as members of the Khmer Rouge - often just teenagers themselves - forced people to do back-breaking work.

There are still an unknown number of landmines in the countryside – no one knows where they are, because no record of them being planted was ever kept. It’s estimated that landmines have claimed 63,000 victims in Cambodia alone. Most of these causalities are men, and it’s a common to see amputees begging or trying to sell things to make money.

We go to Genevieve’s Fairtrade Village, a shop that sells bags, clothes and jewellery made by land mine victims. Of course, I HAVE to do my bit to help, and buy a bag, that’s made of dark green silk and old bike tyres. Sounds hideous, is actually lovely. So lovely I'm afraid to use it.

Cambodia’s official currency is riels, but they mostly deal in US dollars. You’ll often find you get your change as a mix of both currencies; the riels tend to make up the US cent portion of change. 

I’ve been reading a lot about how Cambodia is a country full of work-shy, violent thieves who see tourists as walking piggy banks. We haven’t experienced any of this personally. There does seem to a thread of sadness running through Cambodian people, mixed in with hope that things will get better. It seems options for work are limited. 

We got a tuk-tuk back from town today, and the driver thanks us for giving him work. He’s been there two hours with no fare. He travels 20km to get to Siem Reap, and spends 4 days at a time in the town, sleeping in his tuk-tuk. The look on his face when we ask him to take us home almost breaks my heart, and I feel weighed down with a sadness I didn’t feel in Thailand. 

Again, I’m reminded of my good fortune, the money in my bank, the good chances I had in life that I wasted.

Titty Titty Bang Bang (Bangkok, February 2016)

The Chiang Mai to Bangkok night train takes almost 15 hours. It is a distance of approximately 425 miles, so this is a pretty slow train. First class private carriages were booked, so we had to slum it with the masses in second class. It’s not a surprise that first class tickets sell out swiftly, as they are only about £15.00. 

The sleeper train experience summed up in bullet points:

• ·         The seats fold down to make beds
• ·         Cold, dreadful, dreadful food.
• ·         The toilet is basically a hole – you’re excreting right onto the tracks as you ‘speed’ over them.
• ·         It’s hard to sleep when you feel like you’re in a washing machine on a high spin setting
• ·         No one brushes their teeth before bed, or when they get up. Only saw one other person in our carriage do this apart from us.
• ·         Cockroaches
• ·         Wonderful vista of slums as you get into the station.

In my old career, which I won’t mention here as many of you know what it was, outraged customers with leaking toilets or broken boilers would say things like, ‘this is like living in the third world,’ Oh! Unhappy customer! If only you could see what I can see, smell what I can smell, you’d realise; your centrally heated, carpeted flat with the minor leak from the loo is a FRICKIN’ AMBROSIAL PARADISE of gorgeous heavenliness.

These homes on the sides of the railway lines have been build from whatever people can find; bits of wood, bits of plastic, torn sheets. They have open views of the platform and of the trains rumbling past. People shit in the river that runs past, the banks of the river are clogged with about 30 years worth of plastic bottles, beer cans, crisp packets, animal bones, the rubbish that people throw out of the train window. It stinks. It stinks more than the vilest, most putrid thing you can imagine. It stinks like Glasto portaloos cranked up to 111.

If lucky, bed is a bare mattress on the floor, if not, it’s a bit of cardboard. How terrifying it must be to have to try and fall asleep there at night. Their washing hangs from bits of string tied from one ‘wall’ to another. 

I want to drag every person that has have uttered the words ‘this is like living in the third world’ and make them spend a night in one of those shacks.

 I am suddenly hyper aware of my designer trainers, the money in my wallet that’s more than what these people make in 6 months, the food in my belly, the Kindle I’m reading my books on. I said before that to Thai people we are rich, even if by a Western definition we are NOT.

The opportunity to go to school, work, make money, rent a roof over your head makes us rich. Again, I am not going to get into discussing poverty in the UK, that’s not what this is about. I just think that I had never really been truly grateful for being born in the UK before.

The hotel we check into is a faded glory; it has impressive marble floors, gold fittings, a huge pool. But there’s something very eerie about it. The layout doesn’t make any sense and we get lost on one occasion trying to navigate our way to the lobby without using the lift (turns out you can’t.) There’s doors and staircases that don’t go anywhere. There’s a feel of The Shining about the place, and I would not have been surprised to see two little girls standing at the end of one of the spooky, empty, long hallways.

You can navigate fairly easily around the stretch of the Sukhumvit Road, using the Sky Train, which basically only goes two ways (up and down the road, linking to the Metro in the middle.)

Along the road are enormous shopping malls. These places make Westfield look like Hemel Hempstead. There’s one centre that is exclusively high end designer brands; Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Armani, Dior….all the shops are brand new, plush, shiny-shiny. There’s pubs and cocktail bars in the basement serving European lager at over £6 a pint. Pretty much each stop along the road has a mall like this, and they are building more. We saw signs for three more developments on our way to the airport. 

Scam-rama-Sam – Or, How we got ‘Derren Browned’

One day, we decided to walk to the Old Town. We take the Sky Train a few stops – I actually give away books (unheard of) at a second hand book store, and then we walk.

There’s a man taking photos of hedges that have been cut into elephants. He blocks the pavement.

‘Sorry!’ he says, laughing. ‘Elephants are lucky when their trunks are raised!’

‘That’s OK,’ we say, and try and walk on.

‘Where are you from?’ he asks, and follows us down the street. It’s hard to extricate ourselves from him, and before we know it, he’s engaged us into a long conversation (interrupted only by a phone call from his ‘wife’) and then is herding us into his friends tuk-tuk to take us ‘to the Export Centre’ because they have ‘a today only offer for tourists’

We go about 2 minutes up the road and get out (traffic is so slow, it’s quicker to walk.) Tuk-tuk man looks fucked off; he’s not going to get his commission for taking us to the Export Centre and then mind-fucking us into buying boat trips and fake emeralds. 

We should have known, really. When Lucky Elephant man asked us where we were before Bangkok, and we said ‘Mae Rim,’ he has no idea where that was, despite telling is he is originally from Chiang Mai. This is a bit like someone saying they are from London, but have never heard of Ealing. 

Here be the lesson: don’t trust a man that gets a mysterious phone call from his wife right before his tuk-tuck driving mate rocks up. Wish we could have called his bluff on that one, and said, ‘that wasn’t your wife!’ Cest la Vie!

The Ballard of the Lonely Middle-Aged Man

For our last night in the city, we move to another hotel. This one is much nicer; it’s lovely and we wish we’d found it first. However, to get to it, you have to walk through some real sleaze.

Loud bars, full of lonely, fat, white men, drinking beer and talking to pretty young Thai girls. I hate it, it makes my skin crawl. I don’t judge the girls (if you don’t do this, you’ll probably be sleeping in one of those shacks on the railway embankment.) but I do judge the men. I judge the look of hungry desperation on their faces. I judge them for being so stupid, they think these girls genuinely enjoy their company, genuinely enjoy having to do what they do with them

The only bar on this street I’ll go in is a pool one, and only then because there are two Western girls in there having a drink. The whole place revolts me.

We had planned a trip to the Khao San Road, and I am glad we didn’t. Soi 4 on Sukhumvit Road was enough for me and my prim and proper sensibilities.

We leave Bangkok early on a hot, sunny morning, and I am not sorry to go. 

 

Further Mysteries of the Thai Way of Life

 

Police smoke and use their mobile phones while riding along on their motorbikes, setting an excellent example of road safety. 

Shops play the explicit versions of songs. I can only assume this is because they don’t understand the lyrical content of them, and so don’t mind that children are hearing things like: ‘I’m gonna….. ……and then…… …..and your friend…..ass…..tits…..suck it….bitch, fucking bitch…’ (you get the idea.) 

They have a very odd idea of what Western food is, so you get odd combinations of things, like a pretzel stuffed with cheese, sweetcorn and mayo (actually pretty tasty) or an ‘English breakfast’ that’s a frankfurter and an poached egg on a baguette. My advice – if in doubt, stick to the Thai options on the menu. 

Green tea flavoured Kit-Kat Cornettos. 

Never giving you milk with your tea (I’m guessing  this is because Brits are pretty much the only people in the world that put milk in tea.) 

Never giving you a receipt for anything you buy, ever. Looking at you oddly when you ask for one, then going, ‘No, we don’t do those! Idiot!’