Phnom Penh Stories

It took a few days, and a few pains in the rear, but I'm finally getting to like Phnom Penh.

The last few days have involved searching and haggling for a new motorcycle. After consulting several shops, a few websites, Mike Cho, and scores of conflicting local armchair advisors I am now the proud owner of a 2001 Honda XR250. A tune up today put the bike in prime condition and it purrs like an adolescent tiger.

This bike is completely unlike the Minsk. I loved that Minsk, but it was truly a bucket of bolts. Its tenacious battle against decrepitude was its charm. This Honda however is a refined objet d'art. Everything fits perfectly together. Everything is clean and silver. It does not wet the concrete with motor oil during the night. It idles with a hum rather than a rattle. There seems to always be more power available at any speed in any gear. There is about a foot of travel in the shocks. This bike is, I declare breathlessly, dreamy.

The room at my guest house offered the sort of accomodation I would be pleased with if I were suddenly incarcerated. On two of the four viable walls were large placards exclaiming that while brief visits from prostitutes were acceptable, overnight stays were not. Also, after a visit, prostitutes were to be escorted out in order to ease the fears of the worryful night watchmen. I woke one night at about 3am, dying of thirst. I went downstairs, got a bottle or water and joined a group of insomnia-struck Europeans watching a live premier league soccer match. Every fifteen minutes or so a man would descend the steps leading his "visitor" to the gate. With a nod to the watchman, he would turn around and sleepily ascend the steps as the choir of soccer enthusiasts winked and nodded to one another. Back in my room I wished I could float an inch above the historically stained mattress.

I had met some of these fans on the bus into Cambodia. The previous night we stayed up late drinking Angkor beer and trading tales of adventure. Ronnie, from Germany purchased some hash which he mixed with tobacco and rolled into a Marley-esque spliff. I wisely passed for several rounds but finally decided that a couple hits might bring a nice mellow end to the night.

The hash took effect with the light snowfall of a beginning high. Conversation got funnier and details were explored to their illogical ends. Nobody could remember what they were talking about but of course that was ok because nobody's attention span could bear the course. I remember thinking to myself, this tobacco and weed thing is great! Then my vision started to become confined. The dimmer switch was slowly being turned counterclockwise. I squinted around and my pals squinted back, saying, "Dude, are you ok?" "Yeah, I just... uh... what did you say?" By this time it was completely black. I couldn't see anything and no matter how hard I tried to get un-high, my very-highness stubbornly remained. As gradually as it had been extinguished, the light returned. I'm not sure how long I was in the dark - maybe a half-hour. When my vision was back to normal my focus moved from my mind to my body. I looked at my arms and they were beaded with sweat. My face was dripping and my shirt was completely soaked through. This would have been very awkward if the happy pizza had not arrived while I was orbiting.

Here in Phnom Penh you can order a tomato and onion pizza for four dollars. You can order a happy tomato and onion pizza for four dollars as well. The difference is that the happy version has a not-so-thin green layer of hash underneath the cheese. My friends had paid an extra dollar and ordered a very happy pizza. As I sat in the dark squinting and time traveling, they were scarfing down ten or fifteen hits worth of hash each. An hour later, after a long and utter silence, two of the happy people decided to go to back to their rooms, twenty feet away, and go to bed. They stood up like newborn deer. Their leaden eyelids hung very low and the concentration they exuded in locating the direction of their room was palpable. Actually we were on a balcony and besides heading down stairs there was only one way to go. They started to feel around, as if touching the walls and furniture would jog their now very distant memory. Everyone agreed however that they were very bold to attempt any movement whatsoever, and while verbal discussion was impossible, empathy of a sort was certainly being spent. Someone had turned on the slow motion cameras, slurring our movements and drawing our words out into long series of indecipherably basso tones. By the time I left, the two men were closely examining a door in the hallway looking for clues of its existence in their past lives. Thankfully my bi-annual rendezvous with Mary Jane is accomplished.

The cops got me again yesterday. I made an illegal left turn and was totally in the wrong. Of course, left turns here are different and so are traffic laws. Cambodia however is much more stringent than Vietnam. After the turn a cop jumped out in front of me, his arm held out straight and his aviator sunglasses mirroring my deflated expression. There was no refuting this officer's uncanny resemblance to Patrolman Ponch from CHiPs. His hair curled out defiantly from his white motorcycle helmet and his teeth gleamed gotcha like a Colgate sponsored Cops episode. He motioned for me to dismount, which I did. I had been told to simply drive around the police, but outside of running this man over that would not have been possible. Now, off my bike, I was guaranteed a ticket. My bike has no license plate (along with a quarter of the vehicles on the road) and I have no driver's license and no registration or ownership papers - apparently a major infraction. The three police on the scene conferred and I was informed of my one-hundred dollar fine in perfect English. The language barrier would not get me out of this one.

I stalled and stalled and counter-offered and argued. It took about twenty minutes, but I whittled the fine down to ten dollars. Exhausted and slightly trembling from the exercise, I paid my ticket and drove half a block to the motorcycle shop. After retelling the experience to a rapt audience of mechanics I was disapprovingly laughed at. They informed me that the largest fine levied by the traffic police is 2000 riel or fifty cents - but stopping in the first place was far stupider than my overpayment. I was actually proud of myself for cutting my ticket by 90 percent, but as it turns out I paid 2000 percent of a normal ticket price. The mechanics just kept chuckling and nodding their heads as they replaced turn signals and tightened spokes on disabled Yamahas and Suzukis.

When I was in Phu Quoc, Vietnam I met a frenchman named... Jacques of course. He is the DIRECTOR OF SECURITY FOR THE UNITED NATIONS IN CAMBODIA. I capitalized it because it just seems right. He lives in Phnom Penh and when I told him I would be arriving there shortly he offered to let me stay at his house. His house is three blocks from his office in a swanky neighborhood crowded with foreign embassies. White Land Rovers and Land Cruisers litter the streets, dunked in an alphabet soup of acronymed logos. Jacques' house is a seven bedroom affair with a second-story terrace bigger than my SF apartment. His girlfriend graciously prepared a room for me and later that night she even made dinner. We drank a couple of Klang beers and Jacques smoked some Cambodian cigarettes which he buys for the unbelievable price of fifty cents for twenty packs. Klang means strong, but it just happens to be an apt brand name because unlike most Asian beers these actually contain the devil's poison. Jacques is a pretty amazing guy and that evening he filled me in on his history.

Child of a military officer, he joined up himself and climbed the ranks from private to colonel before finally choosing not to reenlist. He has been stationed in Lebanon, Chad, Syria and throughout Europe. He's been everything from a tank commander to a U.N. observer and he speaks at least four languages fluently, including Arabic. The guy is probably pushing sixty and he's in much better shape than me, waking up at 5:30 every morning to go running. Fed up with Cambodia, he is now lobbying the U.N. to relocate him to Iraq. That's the country where the U.N. office doesn't exist anymore because it got blown up. When I woke up this morning, at a reasonable hour of eight, there were fresh croissants and a thermos of coffee waiting on the kitchen table. Are these people nice or what?

Tonight I met a young buddhist monk named Eson and have made an appointment to visit his temple, learn about buddhism and the political landscape of Cambodia, and help him to set up a blog. Just out of curiosity - how cool is that?