So much has happened..

WHILE I TRAVEL

Global terror intensifies, and home territory looks horribly vulnerable. At the same time I am in Vietnam experiencing a culture and environment still coping with the horrendous effects of war, dealing with poverty and corruption, but today feeling rather safe and optimistic. It's a different world, far from the face of terror today. It's a strange feeling being away from London when it's under attack. I feel guilty not being a part of it. I am staggered by the brutality of the London police shooting a man in the head 5 times. Such facts are daily realities in Israel, and will be increasingly in England. But Israel is a lot easier to police. We have enjoyed relative liberty and safety for a long time, but it can't continue in the same way. I can't help but think of all the juicy vulnerable targets in England I could strike at if I were a terrorist. I am thinking of home and Egypt and wondering how anyone can stop people who want to kill themselves to kill. Sounds trite but there we are.


ANG-KOR BLIMEY GUVNA

Siem Reap is surrounded by mind-evaporating temples from the Khmer Empire 1000 years ago. It's SE Asia's premier Wonder which means that 5:30am sunrise at Angkor Wat includes several hundred tourists. Low season. It's testament to the sublimity of the sight/site that hoards of chattering tour groups can't spoil it. The whole walled area of AW is 500 hectares (that's big). The temple/mortuary (for it might be either) itself is encrusted with age and surmounted by 5 enormous lotus bud turrets like missile silos sprouting out of a craggy and weirdly symmetrical island. The temple faces West, and the sun rose behind it, streaking the sky with pink like a demented artist.

I bought a book on Angkor from a shoeless urchin-

segue way into

DO YOU FEEL LIKE A SPOONFED TOURISTIC CHIMP?

Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam are paved with backpacker stepping stones. Travellers are all doing some cocktail of the 20 or so key spots. Little shoeless urchins walk around with boxes containing a selection of academic texts on Khmer Rouge, the Vietnam War and the temples, as well as your normal guide books and the Da bloody Vinci Code. And Mr Nice. Why Mr Nice? Who gives a shit about Howard Marks? Every place has its three or four things that tourists do, and people crowd you in the street offering to facilitate your doing of them with a motorbike or some kind of wheelchair bicycle contraption. The backpackers all go to the same couple of bars, usually the ones in the South East Asia Lonely Planet guide, which I've got. I do indeed feel like a spoonfed touristic chimp sometimes, travelling from one highlit place of interest to the next, learning about massacres and genocides and getting pissed and making transitory relationships. Don't think I'm complaining. A cynical self-critic hangs around me like a friend with whom I sometimes can't be bothered but usually find entertaining. Sometimes he is yawning at my neck, and sometimes keeping me awake with interminable whining.

I could leave the beaten track I know, and have done over the last few days. But when you have two weeks to travel through Vietnam, you gotta move your ass. And there's so many friendly people around offering highly convenient all inclusive bus tickets. I feel less like a walking sack of cash here than I did in Cambodia. In fact, in Cambodia I felt more like a fat cow at a meeting of hungry butchers.

BACK TO THE TEMPLES

I bought a book on Angkor from a shoeless urchin and painstakingly read extracts to Dan while we strolled around examining bas reliefs and distinctively Khmer architectural features such as porticos, vaulted ceilings and cruciform passageways. The place is encrusted with Time and stokes the imagination with exploits of another era as I'm sure Machu Picchu must do. Bas reliefs surround the temple detailing Hindu legends and Khmer military exploits. The most memorable one depicts the Churning of the Ocean of Milk.

The Churning of the Ocean of Milk - a cockeyed and half-arsed version

Around 1000 gods and 1000 demons both crave the elixir of immortality, obtainable only by Churning the Ocean of Milk. Must have been some kind of cheese. The foes decide to co-operate. They each tug on an enormous snake coiled around a god/mountain, thus turning the mountain and churning the milk. They keep at it for 1000 years (which makes one wonder why they need the elixir of immortality anyway) when - FUCK! - the mountain begins to sink.

Enter Vishnu, who seems to be THE DUDE in all these Hindu legends. He is incarnated as a tortoise. He supports the mountain until the job is done. The gods nab the elixir (thank gods) and many gifts appear, including a three headed elephant, worth a fortune on the ivory market. And thus, cheese is born.

N.B. My irreverent tone in the foregoing passage is not due to any scorn of the Hindu religion or its legends. In fact I love the legends, and Vishnu is a GEEZER.


FACES

The Bayon temple has over 200 faces staring out North, South, East and West from over 50 enormous turrets. The faces are HUGE and weirdly benevolent. No-one knows if it's some buddhisatva or the face of King Jayavaraman VII. I was unable to shed any light on this. Dan and I walked round the temple for an hour or two, literally FACE TO MASSIVE FACE. At the end of the day we happened back past the Bayon, and decided to have another look. 'Oh my god!' exclaimed Dan on approach. 'Have you seen the faces?' Faces, you say?


CHILDREN

Many children hang around the temples. As young as 6, they have a startling knowledge of history. Leeching onto you ('Hello, where you from?') they follow you around spewing out interesting facts about Angkor and Cambodia and then beg for dollars to 'help me at school'. How can you refuse?

In fact children working the streets is endemic along the S. E. Asia tourist trail. They roam around the streets of Phnom Penh, hitting and poking you if you refuse to buy their postcards. There are hundreds of them. I feel a moral quandry about whether to support child labour, combined with an increasing hard-heartedness owing to the sheer number of people who want cash out of you. However this is balanced against the desperation of the kids, and the effect of seeing children wheeling their hideously deformed friends from tourist to tourist. In Saigon chewing gum selling kids are still working the tables outside the bars at 3am, mostly barefoot. So sometimes I bought and sometimes I didn't and mostly I just felt sorry.


BREAKFAST AND PHYSIO

In Angkor Wat Dan and I had breakfast with a couple of English girls, one of whom was a North London Jew (I know - they're everywhere). That night we bumped into them in a bar and played drinking games with a guy called Hedley who later vomited twice on the floor of the Martini club. What was amazing was his utterly blasee attitude about it. I think his brain had shut down all unnecessary feelings to keep him alive. His friend Will was unsupportive, and Dan and I took care of Hedley before emotionally blackmailing his friend to remove him forthwith to his bedchamber. We drank with the girls until 4:30am and then decided to head straight for Angkor Wat for the sunrise. Sadly we just missed it, but sat for a long while staring at the brightening sky reflected in a crystal pond in the compound, clouds occasionally breached by leaping frogs. The girls were both trainee physios and worked our hamstrings in an ancient library. Needless to say we never saw them again. Beware girls who physio and run.


DEAD FISH AND BLIND MASSAGE

Our guesthouse, evocatively named 'The Dead Fish Tower' offered free head massage to all guests. Dan took advantage of this to discover that 'head massage' actually means 'quick shampoo'. We stormed off to get massaged by blind people instead. In a dank crepuscular room I lay face down on a table with my head stuffed in a cushioned hole. My masseur enjoyed clicking bones. 'Is it good to pull each toe until it cracks?' I wondered. Then he folded my leg back onto my bottom and sat on it until it gave out with a deafening POP. I yelped in agony and limped for the rest of the day. Where's a physio when you need one?


PHNOM PENH AND THE KHMER ROUGE

The capital of Cambodia delivered to me the mess of the country with startling vivacity. The poverty and desperation of so many people, bearing scars from the insane Khmer Rouge regime of 25 years ago everywhere are juxtaposed against a stunning confluence of rivers and an exhilerating buzz on the streets. The place is alive, monstrous, fascinating.

My friend Eelco, a Dutch pilot, ska sax player and all round great guy whom I had initially bonded with impersonating fish on Perhentian Island, Malaysia, had a stopover in Kuala Lumpur and flew down to PP to meet me. We went to S21, Tuol Sleng prison, used by the Khmer Rouge to torture 'intellectuals' before sending them off to be executed in the killing fields. Intellectuals was a broad term that included teachers, foreign language speakers, anyone who wore glasses. The place was originally built to be a school, with a series of multistoried buildings facing into a large central courtyard. However, all the classrooms had been converted into cells.

There's something horribly symbolic in the way that schools and temples were transformed into places of detention, torture and death. In the Khmer Rouge 'experiment' education and spirituality meant brutal repression and hideous cruelty.

For high ranking KR officers, there were individual classrooms, which still had the shackles and torture implements lying rustily in the centre. Photos of the brutalised corpses found by the Vietnamese invaders in 1979 hang on the walls. Rank and file prisoners were put in brick cells of 2 square metres crudely put up inside classrooms. Blood stains remain on one of the floors. Medieval instruments of 'interrogation' are in glass boxes. A gallows stands in the centre of the courtyard next to a large pot that was used for dunking people in shit.

But the most affecting is the display of 4000 portrait photos of prisoners taken by the Khmer Rouge before the subjects were executed. The faces are confused, stubborn, normal. Young and old, male and female. All women had the same bob haircut required by the Pol Pot regime. Some had number tags pinned into their chests. They look terrifyingly alive as they stare out at you.

Our guide had been separated from her family at 10 years old and forced to work rice fields 7 days a week dawn to dusk on 6 spoons of porridge a day. A huge amount of rice was produced by the millions of Cambodians who had been evacuated to the countryside and forced to farm, but most of the produce was sold abroad by the government. I saw the killing fields south of Phnom Penh with its dug out mass graves and dizzying tower of skulls. The Cambodians I spoke to told me they don't talk about it, but they all remember. The sheer nonsense of it befuddles me. Two million people killed, for an incomprehensible experiment. All cars, trains, clocks destroyed. Families separated, men and women kept apart. Barely any children born in the 5 years of the regime. Teenage guards at prisons and the killing fields worked for 6 months to a year before being killed themselves. No Cambodians even knew who was in charge at the time. And now amongst the population live people who killed, tortured, perhaps as much the victims as those they killed. I don't understand how the Cambodian people with minimal education can even begin to deal with what happened not thirty years ago. Especially when it makes no sense.


HEART OF DARKNESS

A seedy gothic bar red lit and filled after midnight with tourists, ex-pats, groups of locals, and plenty of working girls. In fact basically all the Cambodian women there are working girls which is a fact I was unaware of at first, thinking that a particular girl 'just liked me'. Always have had a high opinion of myself.

Other entertainment in Phnom Penh includes 'happy herb pizzas'. I indulged in one with an Alex from Texas and a Claire from Edgware, plus 3 other random English girls. I became one of the world's leading pool players for 15 astounding minutes, before suffering an attack of paranoia that a disgruntled motorbike driver was going to break into the cardboard box where I was staying and slit my throat. Actually he didn't, and I employed his services the next day (as moto driver) to his immense gratitude. When you walk in tourist areas of Phnom Penh you get offered, in this order:

Moto? (ie. I'll drive you like a maniac where you want for $1)
Tuk tuk? (ie. I'll trundle you where you want in my golf buggy for $2)
Smoking? (ie. would you like to be overcharged for some shit weed?)
Opium? (ie. would you like to be massively overcharged for some shit opium?)
Boom boom? (have a guess)

With the patience of a wildlife photographer, I said 'no thank you' to each of these requests, which came with relentless regularity from every person I walked past on backpacker alley. My guesthouse was based on a wooden deck that spanned out onto the lake. Bats flew under wooden bridges at night. It was cool.

Colonially, I became rather fond of spending happy hour (5-7pm) at the Foreign Correspondent's Club, which is high above the street and looks out onto the gorgeous Tonle Sap river at sunset. I met some charming Ozzie vets called Kate. My last night in Phnom Penh was spent in Heart of Darkness with Israeli Avi, Edgware Claire and French Sabrina. We danced to shit music and then finished up sitting on the lake as the sky whitened. I packed my bag and boarded the bus to Vietnam.


HIDY HIDY HIDY HO CHI MINH CITY

I love Vietnam. I love the food, the business, the persistence and optimism of the people. Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) is a big dirty city. Great! It's a whirling maelstrom of motorbikes, driven with outrageous audacity. As in Cambodia, it's customary to drive for about 300 metres on the wrong side of the road before turning left. I hung about, went to some bars with a Canadian metaller called Yakob, and did a fair amount of eating.

I ate some strips of beef that I cooked on a personal barbeque at the table. I made friends with a Vietnamese guy in a bar who spends his days in marketing and his nights trying to pull foreign girls. He likes Jamaican girls the best because of their bottoms. His friend was wearing a Dutch football shirt in hommage to his Dutch girlfriend, who also has a big bottom. I think Vietnamese men are bottom-starved.


WAR AND DESTRUCTION AGAIN

The War Remnants Museum is an excellent museum, rather anti-American in stance as one might expect, with an intense selection of war photographs, and a gallery of paintings and sculpture. The US dropped 4 times the amount of explosives on Vietnam than they did anywhere during WWII. The museum included foeti in jars deformed by the chemical warfare deployed by America. The courtyard contains aircraft and enormous guns. I spoke to some Americans who felt uncomfortable. We call it the Vietnam War, but they refer to it as the American Aggression War. The guestbook was filled with anti-American comments from tourists. The war was totally misguided and carried out with insane brutality. I found myself wondering what would have happened had they not invaded. Would the feared 'domino effect' have taken over South East Asia as predicted? Certainly large areas of Laos and Cambodia would not be scarred by craters now. And the Pol Pot regime might never have happened. But these are all what ifs. Some Vietnamese still hate the Americans, but most are looking forward. There is a great drive to become a developed country.

My Vietnamese seamstress friend Hoi's father fought for the US-Saigon army during the war. As a consequence of that she was unable to find work as a lawyer and had to drop out of law school. Most Viets that I speak to say there is a great difference between South Vietnam and North Vietnam and some ill feeling. Saigon is very much a Western city these days, even with hammer and sickle flags draped from lampposts.


A DIRTY BEACH

I 10 hour bussed it to Nha Trang, a rather long beach flanked by mountainous outcrops and coasted by litter. The sea was warm and the waves were high, making the dodging of plastic bags rather difficult. I played pool with a Vietnamese guy called Ben who rather liked me and ended up dancing with him and his 'sister' (not actually his relative) at the Sailing Club, which has big noisy parties every night in a picturesque outdoor setting on the beach. I wisely stashed my bag behind the bar for safekeeping and then unwisely forgot to pick it up before wandering off down the beach with Yakob the Canadian metaller. The beach turned out to be crawling with unbelievably persistent working girls, so I ran away. The next day I picked up my bag. Everything was in it except my nail clippers (darn it) and spare batteries. 'Phew! there's my camera', I thought, only to discover that the rechargable batteries in it had been replaced by dead AA ones, and the battery compartment filled with water. Now the bastard doesn't work. Do you think I could find anyone at the Sailing Club to hold accountable? You might as well try tracking down a dog whose shit you've just stepped in.

Wandering along the beach with my guitar I was called over to a large Vietnamese Californian family whose parents had just married, and were on their honeymoon with their three enormous daughters, who seemed significantly older than their father and mother. They gave me beer and we sang some songs. The new husband had grown up in Nha Trang but skipped the country at 10 years old. His mother and brother (the latter was also there at the beach - he had a piercing whistle) had failed to make it to the bus in time. He had arrived in Boston alone. Apparently there are 300,000 Vietnamese people in California, who are slowly bringing their whole families over through a lengthy sponsorship system. The guy I met was unable to do that because he had changed his name. They gave me a bowl of sweet tofu to taste - delicious!


HOW LONG HAVE I BEEN IN THIS GORGEOUS PLACE?

Hoi An is a small town filled with mazy streets, Chinese temples, tailor shops, and a fantastic market. It's riverside is fringed with sweet cafes serving some of the most delicious food I have had in Asia. Hoi An has plenty of its own specialities from the large Chinese influence, and I have been stuffing my face. I had a suit made for some reason, and was invited out fishing by the seamstress, Hoi. On the back of her bike we sped off some 10 miles out of town to a little village, where we met a few of her friends. They didn't speak much English, or really any, but that was okay. We caught three tiny fish, that flapped on the rock for a while. It's amazing how long they live out of the water. Eventually they found their way back to the polluted river. We sat up at a rooftop cafe and drank beer with ice, smoked cigarettes and chatted. Her friends were lovely. We communicated fairly well considering they didn't speak English. They insisted on paying for everything - Vietnamese culture. Then we went for the obligatory Pho Bo (beef noodle soup) on the street. You sit on plastic kindergarten chairs and get a huge bowl of soup with white flat noodles, strips of beef and vegetables. Simply add fish sauce, chilli paste, and leafs of various herbs, and then scoff with loud slurping noises.

The next day Hoi took me to the Marble Mountain - a huge, um, marble mountain, out of which have been carved a range of pagodas and grottos. Dark caves streaked with green and red contain huge Buddhas. The view from the top reaches the spectacular coastline. Whenever I see a giant Buddha I am always beset with the notion that he might get up and start stomping around smashing buildings and throwing people around. Not sure why. She also took me to meet her family, and to the place she grew up. It has been nice to see a real side to this place, outside the tourist cafes and western faces. I think I could live here, even just for the noodle soup.