by
evilhippy
@ 2008-04-24 - 06:33:42
Nothing very funny or amusingly catastrophic has happened to me lately, so I have some slightly boring observations and a normal amount of opinionated hyperbole for you before the next photographic onslaught.
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A week or so ago Greg and I entered a whole new country via the Thailand/Cambodia crossing at Aranya Prathet/Poipet respectively, and the first thing we saw was the truly startling gap between Thailand and Cambodia. Literally.
Border crossings often invoke a sense of vagueness about reality and the world, a grey fuzziness in place of hard fact; if you've you ever wondered where one country ends and another begins, as I especially used to as a child, then the lack of specific borders when you come to them in adult life makes it all seem incomprehensibly abstract, all over again.
I mean how can any country know itself unless it knows exactly where it begins and ends? How can there be such a thing as citizenship or nationality unless there are precise defined boundaries to whom and where falls into which nation? What happens to the people, if there are any, living right across the borders?
As it is, what with problems of smuggling, immigration and border disputes, the physical definition of where two countries split and become separate independent territories is probably best left to chance geography (rivers are very popular this aeon) and perhaps even itinerant bureaucracy. When people sporting arms rather than armchairs, real guns instead of stapleguns start doing the bargaining, that is when trouble starts. Usually, anyway 
In the case of this crossing there is a very grey area indeed, and an amount of land that you enter immediately after you leave Thai border control and well before you waltz, lamb-like into Cambodian national territory. There exists between The Kingdoms of Thailand and Cambodia a territorial limbo, a neutral parcel of land that more or less constitutes an economic demilitarised zone where, as a tax haven, certain monetary interests just flourish: like casinos.
Gambling corporations have entirely taken over this thin little piece of the world that, in diplomatic and certain legal senses, doesn't actually exist. Between the two countries in a space less than the area of six football pitches there are at least a dozen massive casinos, all bright lights and dim clientele, where you can take part in ritualised `mathematics for morons` classes that always cost more than anyone can afford.
After that stunning display of commercial enterprise and my personal dismay, Cambodia appears charming in a recently-touristorised (think `terrorised` but inverted 180 degrees) way. It is more desperate for your dollar than Thailand or Laos by a large margin, but still has some of the most exotic buildings I've seen in this part of the world yet - the ancient temples at Angkor hardly need mentioning as being more exotic than most, but this sense of grandeur seems to have permeated through the ages and infected the architects of a more modern Khmer society as well, leaving Cambodia with modern Wats, temples and civic structures just that little bit more ornate, oversized or grand than elsewhere in former Indochina.
The French colonial past here is something you can't but notice everywhere, and the fact it was called simply `Indochina` - because by the time they broke the Tricolor out and began divvying up the peninsular it was of no importance itself (it was then Siam and various smaller neighbouring kingdoms) as a resource but was merely between China and India on the trade routes - betrays in one tiny way the simplistic and rather unkind way European colonial powers viewed the rest of the world.
The classic English failing here is in the West and East Indies, and indeed India itself as all these probably derive from the word indigenous, or so I recently surmise as them having at least the same stem or something. If no-one else offers a better etymological theory - or that there was any other reason for any of these three places to be named as such - then I'm gonna go on believing it, so don't just keep it to yourself if ya know something more accurate! 
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I got distracted again didn't I: from the border we haggled in the customary fashion with a variety of taxi drivers and low-grade con artists, the way they all work together to give a false impression of prices and charge tourists many times the proper rate is as disheartening as always - if only this overcharging benefited anyone in these unimaginably impoverished countries then I'm sure none of us, the travelers and tourists, would mind in the slightest. I certainly wouldn't.
The sad fact though is that, as usual, these few taxi men and false beggars and overpriced service operators that prey on helpless tourists always seem to be far, far too happy to be working in any honest way.
Now call me a nasty little cynic but I know that people doing honest work simply don't look this happy. There is a malevolent little gleam in their eyes, a counting of the extra money they are, basically, stealing from you when they give you a price, and time and time again I have proved my instincts correct on checking things out and getting proper prices afterwards. I haven't been wrong about a single ripoff in 6 months - to be entirely fair about this, I have to admit that this was part of what I did for a living for years back in England.
Nor would these shysters do any work for the benefit of others and look quite so painfully smug and greedily anticipating of the haul to come.
And this happens in every country worldwide, I'm sure - as it is, I think about the one place the regular taxi forces wont be trying this with the visiting foreign types is London, because of the strict regulations about getting a licensed Hackney carriage and learning The Knowledge and all that, I would stick my neck out and say that London Cabbies, the genuine ones, are likely to be among the most trustworthy in the world.
The ones in my home city of Southampton are sometimes thieving shites mind you, but it's only ever a case of a few quid more on a big fare or just doing it off the meter - not the 1,000%-inflated prices I've been offered out here. But whaddya gonna do - laugh in their faces?
Yes, yes that's precisely what we do
One other thing that gets on my nerves, and Greg's for totally different reasons - is when the tuk-tuk or taxi drivers or massage shop workers or random motorcyclists say in very hushed tones "You want something?", "you want smoke?", "Marijuana?" or anything like that, we have both of us taken to shouting VERY loudly "NO WE DON'T WANT ANY DRUGS!!!!" in the hope that these guys get arrested for drugs offences in their own country.
And I hope some of them rot their lives away and die in jail. And why would I be so harsh when I used to smoke an awful lot of the same said wicked weed myself?
Well, the other scam in Asia - all Asia, by all accounts - isn't just to sell tourists drugs; at many times the going rate I might add; but also to tell the police immediately afterwards and identify them, claiming that they saw the deal rather than conducted it.
The result?
All those horror stories you hear about Westerners rotting their lives away in a Thai jail. The people responsible for almost all of these tragedies are the ones who sold whatever it was to the victims, and then got a second cash payoff from the cops to stitch them up!
So yes, I hope some of them get a taste of their own despicable medicine.
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At length (here because I keep getting hauled off on tangents by my own mind, there because the trip took 3 hours over a notoriously bumpy road) we arrived in Siem Reap, I did what I've already said before; partied, danced, templed, blogged; and also stayed for the latter part in a very cool guesthouse which I almost completely failed to photograph, but which was absolutely brilliant.
It was run by a small group of Khmer/Cambodian men and a local girl, and although I can't say about the girl, the first lot were absolutely flamingly gay in a way that just wasn't even pretending to be subtle.
It was all I could do not to laugh as they sashayed about the place like an entire deck full of queens, simpered over the men and gossiped with all the women guests, and, well, you just notice in pretty much everything they do. None of the guests seemed to be so outlandish - most were groups and couples it seemed - so I think it just happened to be that way, and not that it was actually a gay bar or restaurant as such.
There is one in Siem Reap according to the Good Book, and maybe they were all ex-employees or something.
Anyway, much joking and banter aside between Greg and I (well it was too good a chance for a laugh to pass up) the restaurant itself was priceless. A large warehouse with no full floors, it was instead divided on the ground level into a long galley-style kitchen, a long bar running parallel to that, several seating areas at slightly different levels, a full wine cellar or at least a giant 800-bottledisplay rack of French blanc et rouge, an indoor carp pond, and the crocodile pit.
Yes, crocodile pit, with 9 (minimum) live crocodiles ranging from 2 and a half feet to about 8 feet long, and yes, it was all open topped. In addition the kitchen staff would supply you with some small trisected fish with which to feed them, and I passed many a happy hour tossing halves of silverfish to the little crew down there. I stopped short of giving them my own names, but only just
And yes, you could touch them if you leant in and they reared up, and yes they would fucking have you if you tried to get too close. Crocs that size; 8 feet; of almost any species have the strength and weight to take off a human arm, and if you fell in, well... well you wouldn't want to have started any long books, that's all I'm saying.
The warehouse was properly outfitted for partying, and also highly precarious if you partied too hard. There were 4 levels available for customers in total, and at the apex of the roof there was even a fifth platform for nothing else than looking down at the debauchery below, I assume. None of these had any barrier at the edge and each occupied a different part of the warehouse corresponding to the floor plan.
The kitchen had two huge diagonal steel tracks, guides for winched platforms bearing trays of food and drink so that the upper levels could be served without the staff running up and down, and could also simply be served directly to tables and platforms on the winch platform's route by giving them a holler as was arriving. Very effective I thought, making the customers and some metal rails do the work of your staff.
It was all very ingenious and effective, slightly over the top, and something I would no doubt have thought of myself had I been in the restaurant business in a place as relaxed as Southeast Asia: D
They even had a joke pool table - much like normal one, but the surface wasn't baize or felt but some rough, coarse and uneven material not at all unlike roofing felt. It took us two games to realise that either we were having a joke played on us or it was just par for the course in this bar to
The name of this establishment was Dead Fish, purely for marketing purposes according to the menu (I guess they got asked it a lot) and there was even a sign out front saying, instead of a date of establishment, that it was the
Dead Fish Bar
Died in 1999
:D
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Apart from that, and mentioning from my old notes that mopeds or scooters in Laos all want to use the pavements as roads and seem to think they have right of way (most annoying because the riders are always young kids who practically crash into you rather than use the road as normal people do). Everyone else - and tens of thousands of people use scooters rather than cars - uses roads only, so it's pretty clear this behaviour isn;t officially condoned ) and that we left Siem Reap this morning (now yesterday morning but it's almost the same day to you guys back home) and are now in the Cambodia capital of Pnohm Penh, that is pretty much us up to date now.
All I got to do is post another couple of hundred pictures, of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia and the tail end of Kerala and Chennai in India, and we are, as they say, now cooking with gas
Well it's another valid Star Trek ripoff and that's all that matters.
