Big girl’s blouse

Bad Ass MoFoI’m often uncomfortable, as in fear for for my safety uncomfortable. Sitting in passenger seats in fast moving cars, sitting in passenger seats in slow moving cars, walking through Eastbourne town centre at eight on a Friday night, scuba-diving, drinking milk that’s a day out of date … that sort of thing.

But around guns I’ve always reckoned myself pretty cool. Apart from the time at school a four-foot psycho called Wingnut explained to me that with his blank-firing cadet’s rifle that if he got really close and discharged it directly into my ear then the force would be enough to evacuate my brain out the other side. (He went on to be expelled for disabling a milk-man with a high-speed ball-bearing.)

I’ve hung out with former child soldiers in Cambodia (see picture) and fired off automatic machine guns. Didn’t even flinch.

But I was particularly uncomfortable on Friday night when, as the first arrival at Tippler’s Bond party, somebody went the whole hog and discharged some sort of fire-arm about three feet away. And it wasn’t a cap-gun. So I was the first departure as well.

It was, apparently, a starting pistol. Don’t care. Call me old-fashioned, but I remember the days when you could walk into a bar in Brussels and the only danger came from paranoid drug-dealing Albanians with sharp knives and big fists …

12/05/2006 | Omphaloskepsis | 2 Comments

Genocide, suicide and enterprise

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the safest place to hide from wild monkeys is in the back of a stationary motorcycle taxi. Thanks to that prior knowledge Mrs K, Charmaine and I avoided serious harm in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Siem Reap is the home of Angkor Wat, one of the few true wonders of the world. The sunrises are spectacular. We woke at five o’clock on three consecutive mornings and managed to miss them all, though. The town itself is small and poky, a raggedy collection of touts and vendors, cripples and glue-sniffing five-year-olds.

Mr. Pros was our driver for three days. He picked us up, dropped us off and waited for us. He took us to the best place for lunch, ferried us around on shopping trips and yet we didn’t share a single word of a common language. He clocked on to the size of the girls’ bladders and stopped every fifteen minutes outside the public toilets without our asking, grinned, laughed and drove off again. I liked Mr. Pros.

It is said that Pol Pot nurtured his distaste for the monarchy and bourgeoisie when his sister was a dancer at the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh. Having sat through a “cultural evening with buffet dinner” and an hour’s worth of traditional dance I can state with some certainty that I may well have become genocidal had I been forced to watch it more than once a lifetime. To top it off, Mrs K got food poisoning from some dodgy “morning gror-ly” and spent three days contemplating suicide.

Prior to that she had the following exchange with possibly the sweetest and shrewdest seven-year-0ld girl in Cambodia.

-Hello
-Hello
-ooohhh you very very beautiful and he very very handsome. What your name?
-Mrs K
-ooohhh very beautiful name. Where you from?
-Malta
-But where you born?
-Malta
-No, you born in a HOSPITAL.
-And you, where you born in a hospital too?
-No … I born at home. Because I Cambodian.
- …
-(pause, followed by devious smile and sideways glance) You want to buy baby?
-You’re selling a baby?
-Yes, baby over there (points out baby)
-Well, it’s certainly a very sweet baby. How much?
-Ten dollar.
-Well, that’s a bit too much.
-Okay, Mrs K. See you later.

01/10/2006 | Asia 2005 | No Comments

An interlude from Chau Doc

Have only nine minutes left before my time runs out … so I’ll be brief.

Sat in a pizza joint on the Phnom Penh riverfront, trying to persuade the waitress – through the medium of mime – that if she insisted on me tasting the “happy” herb topping I’d likely pass out and/or be sick, when I saw a monkey.

The monkey was on a lead and being fed rice and Red Bull by its owner, a local expat. Quite a crowd had gathered. One gentleman, who had only one leg and was selling knocked-off paperbacks, was quite smitten. He then produced a rather large and very hairy spider. For a dollar, the monkey’s owner bought the tarantula and placed it on the floor in front of the monkey. The monkey pushed it around with its feet for a bit, before picking it up, plucking the legs off one by one and eating them with an enormous monkey grin on its face.

It was a special moment.

Off on a two day tour of the Mekong Delta, so lots of photos to follow. Felt like Colonel Kurtz today sailing into Vietnam.

PS the last email from my mum contained the words “morphosing into a gun slinging, beer swigging, morose alcoholic…” and she wasn’t talking about my dad.

11/14/2005 | Asia 2005 | No Comments

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