Kissing Cousins

Recently I read on Facebook that my cousin had turned 60. This seemed incredible to me. First of all without applications like Facebook, the day could have passed without me noticing at all, secondly that the day I would turn 60 loomed a mere 6 and bit years away. That gave me pause for thought. But not for too long lest I scared myself witless! Holy shit! 6 years! Neither of my parents had lived beyond 61 and none of us kids have so far made that holy grail. My cousin, on the other hand came from much longer living stock so the fact of her turning sixty was what I peferred to focus on.
Those six years that separated us as children so that we were never really children together, we still had a major influence on the lives of the other. I was only two when I convinced this cousin that she should never have children, something she thanked me for about fifty years later. Apparently I was sitting in a highchair at the time squishing a banana through my fat little baby fingers and smearing it all over the place. As she watched in absolute revulsion, my cousin swore that she would never bring a baby into the world.
While I was busy being a kid and a rebel teenager, my cousin was a child of the sixties and her actions sent ripples down through the tom tom drums of the family gossip line. She kept her maiden name after she married, one of the first women I knew who did that. She even dared to suggest that her husband take on her name as she was supporting him through University at the time. While she scandalised and amused the family she also paved a way for me, her life showed me that there were more possibilites for girls in the world than the nuns and my mother led me to believe.
She traveled, she studied and lived in China,she broke boundaries and lived her own life and in doing so was an shining example of a woman born of that time.
In adulthood, our paths have rarely crossed but when they have, I am thrilled to see that childhood distance shrink to the size of our commonly held beliefs. One thing I appreciate and honour more and more as I grow older is the blessings of role models in my life, they are still breaking ground for me! And today I honour the woman who has unknowingly been a role model to me since the day of the squashed banana, Happy Birthday Sally Ann!

Walking with Hitchcock in Kampot

                             
                       Wandering around the shabby chic remains of the French occupation of the Southern Cambodian township of Kampot, feels like sleep walking. The air is languid, a slight breeze may lift the tips of your hair but is never enough to take that sweat stained glow from your face. The wide streets and avenues give lie to the both the population (30,000) and the business of the town. A busy Kampot would buzz the way of a drowsy bumble bee in the afternoon, usually it just putters along like a big old sleepy town in the middle of it's afternoon nap...morning, noon and night. 

                 The only real bustle of human activity is when the colleges disgorge the largest percentage of the population by far, the teenagers and for a few brief hours the riverside promenade becomes a Kampot version of American Graffiti on scooters. The kids pile three on a bike, they are so slim that four could easily fit on the same bike and cruise the riverside, talking on cell phones, flirting with each other and giggling like... well, like the teenagers they are.
Further back in the old part of the town, where crumbling colonial buildings- their walls plastered with equally weather battered posters advertising Land for Sale, another frantic mating call is heard. This time an avian call, the call of the yellow beaked swallow and coming from strategically placed speakers on more than a few rooftops. Bunkers squat greenly, grimly, stubbornly on rooftops like some Dali-esque version of stalag. 

Which in a way it is, a Swallow Stalag. Birds are a serious business in this mainly subsistence farming area.  Across Asia the demand for swallow's nest is rising with one kilogram fetching as much as USD$5,000. In a bid to boost the incomes of mostly subsistence farmers, the Government is encouraging this unusually lucrative style of farming. 

The effect whilst walking around the town at sunset is slightly Hitchcock, the frantic nesting of god knows how many little birds desperately producing the longed for swallow saliva in order to stitch together the nests that will hatch their young. The saliva contains water-soluble protein, carbohydrates and micro-elements such as calcium, phosphorous, iron, sodium and potassium which in human terms means that it contains antioxidants that helps to boost the (human) immune system.  As soon as the birds have finished making a nest, it is swiped from beneath them or while they are out on the evening riverside promenade. I wouldn't be surprised if they put Viagra in their water! 

The nests are used for 'tonics', an alcoholic brew said to be beneficial in skin diseases and good for the lungs as well as for an Elder Tonic.
In China the nests are called "The Caviar of the East" and considered a tonic for longevity and totally anti oxidant. 
Kampot is slightly kooky, a painting slightly tilted in the frame but a town tinted so exquisitely that you forgive the incessant chatter of sexed up swallows, smile as you don a kooky Cambodian hat and aim to duck to saliva dripping from the rooftops.

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Cruising Cambodian Cuisine, street style

You can wander the street food stalls of any SE Asian country and see things you never thought to put in a pot. The most favoured dish by far on any Cambodian street stall is the delicious morning breakfast broth and noodles called Pho. I like to wait for later in the day and order Fish Amok because I just love to say the word Amok, not to mention the coconut laden soup that arrives laden with mysterious pieces of fish and accompanied by a bowl of rice.

The eternal infernal sound of a random cycle walla making his rounds in Phnom Penh, a slow sad haunting kind of monotone bleating out from a speaker located somewhere on the bike slash shop. For days I think he is a propaganda person, delivering and election promise or a party line. Eventually I traced the sound to the machine and the man beside it. In fact he is selling something that is considered a delicacy here in SE Asia but which rarely if ever makes it to the average birang style sit down eatery.
Pong tea Khon or duck egg foetus is egg-zactly that, a 14 day old foteus boiled alive and eaten while it is still warm, often washed down with a can of beer.

Mmmm, glad I am a vegetarian right now! Another local delicacy is crispy fried spiders, which again for obvious reasons I have not tried but here is a pic taken by a friend of mine in Phnom Penh recently. She didn't taste the spider either, and I am still waiting to hear back from her about the accompanying sauce. The spiders are bred in holes in the ground or else hunted down in the forests north of Skuon, possibly they became a delicacy during the Khmer Rouge years.

At this point you can either carry on and hunt down all the weird things that people like to eat in the comfort of their own home and which is equivalent to Soul Food. It's not for me to judge or to turn someone's kitchen into a freak show. There are still some delightful options for people who prefer to get their protein in another way..drinks are good! Coconut shake, the exquisitely golden sugar cane juice and cheap beer.

Kampot Pepper Pot

Located in the southern coastline of Cambodia, in a place where the river the river meanders through rice fields seeking the nearby Gulf of Siam land shaded by the Elephant Mountains are the world famous pepper plantations of Kampot. This pepper is the champagne of peppers, at least according to the gourmets who praise it's opulent aroma to the skies and back. Beyond the shabby chic of Kampot town where French Colonial architecture blends an exotic patina into the  more practical modern Cambodia response, there are fields of black gold.

The pepper is grown organically with such interesting fertilizers as bat dung and crushed up rice field crabs, the use of chemical fertilisers are banned in the production of the only crop in Cambodia to carry a Geographical Protection Indication listing.  The taste is sublime, I have to say and the fragrance mixes in nicely with the frangipani scented breezes skipping along the fertile fields of Kampot.

All Kampot Pepper is harvested by hand. The riper red peppercorns are actually picked individually as the timing needs to be perfect for them to obtain their red colour when drying. After harvesting, black and red pepper are dried in the sun for a few days. White Pepper is soaked in water for 48 hours to soften the husk which is then gently rubbed from the core before being cleaned and also dried. And in the market here abouts, fat jars of preserved green peppers!

Finding Mr Fixit, Cambodian Ingenuity

Kiwi's are known for their 'No.8 Wire' approach to fixing things, we are a nation of Do It Yourselfers Or at least we used to be. Some of my favourite childhood memories include Saturday mornings with Dad in the local hardware section of some department store. My childhood soundtrack included my fathers cry of "What? How much? I could make it/fix it myself for half the price!" and invariably he did. I think that kind of ingenuity has long since disappeared with the growth of the throw away era, it's the death of the creative expression of the shed man if not the death of the shed man altogether.
The word 'broken' used to also imply that the object was also able to be fixed but this is sadly no longer the case. Broken is just that, its fucked so throw it away and pay a ridiculous amount of money to replace what you already know is a substandard product. As has happened recently during the dying days of my Mac, more recently the power cord thingy crapped out. The little green for go light had flickered on and off for days before going totally on the blink. I called my friend in Phnom Penh. He resists telling me yet again to buy a new computer and simply sends me a link to the Apple shop in the city. $USD95.00 for a new power cord.
WHAT? HOW MUCH? I could buy a new computer for three times as much!
I looked on Ebay..cheaper for sure but then there are all sorts of delivery issues. Some companies only deliver within the US, some deliver from Hong Kong but then the Post Office here doesn't deliver but expects you to trek daily to the parcel counter in the hope that your parcel has turned up and that they can locate it. I got in contact with the lovely Carole who is arriving in Cambodia in the New Year and asked if she could oblige and she had the thing ordered within seconds, promising not only to meet me with it but a chance to join her for dinner and have a lovely girly talk and drink session. It's something I am looking forward to with great pleasure! But there is all this In The Meantime Time when I should be writing, looking for work and writing some more. The Muse is within me and prodding me out of bed in the mornings to scribble into my notebooks and getting pissed off at my slowness. Without my keyboard, I have to admit I am lost. I can just about type as fast as I can think but can't write at the same speed. Then obviously I am having communication withdrawals as well.
Then one day bumping along the rusty red road between the village and the town, I happened to spy the local Television repair guy. He worked from a space beneath his humble wooden Khmer home, the dirt floor littered with televisions and video players, coiled up bits of wire and such things. The sight brought me back to reality with another bump or maybe it was a pothole, it any case it shook a thought loose that I had long since tucked away in my memory banks. The broken thing was fixable! Cambodia people are like we were forty years ago, resourceful, creative, able to FIX things! All I had to do was find Mr Fixit.
Encouraged by this thought, I bounced happily into town and sat at a cafe planning my search for Mr Fixit.
As I thought and planned I was aware that the cafe/bar was preparing for the silly season and wiring up new speakers for the sound system. I got into a casual conversation with the guy who was doing the wiring, eventually the subject of finding Mr Fixit came up and the guy volunteered his services. Last night, with a pair of scissors, a soldering iron, a bit of wire and some red duct tape, he sorted out my problem in the space of a few minutes but with a style that would have had Steve Jobs rolling in his grave.
Why are you laughing? he asked me.
Because you have just solved the biggest problem of my day with a few simple objects and I bet Steve Jobs never thought about that when he made Apple Mac's one of the most expensive laptops on the market!
Seems Mr Fixit is a guy of many talents, he works at night at a bar shaking cocktails and also is a bit of a local rock star. He is like we used to be, a man for all seasons and has not yet caught the one trick pony disease of the West. He is pretty cute too!
Long live ingenuity and thanks to Mr Fixit.

Cambodia, a modern history lesson

Today on the road we met a man who walked with us a while. He was scouting for plastic on the roadside,  bags of plastic to be recycled attached to his bicycle hung in perfect balance from all four corners of his bike. He was wearing an orange construction hat and his clothes were shabby enough to suggest a slight nuttiness on his part. We greeted him as one does in rural cambodia if one happens to be a birang here on a happiness hit, which is also just as nutty.
There is the Happy Hello, a high  pitched Hello issued from the stretched out cheeks of Westerners who are anyway unaccustomed to greeting people on the street where they live, much less with the kind of enthusiasm we offer back. It’s a kind of Smile til your Teeth Show Smile accompanied by the kind of wave you did from the school bus to your friends when you were a kid, then the head slightly lowered in an echo of subservience whilst maintaining eye contact as if to show them that we are a hundred percent more friendly than we actually ever behave at home.
For those who can’t quite raise the enthusiasm or lower their heads, there is another kind of Hello, the Slightly Embarrassed to be Confronted mixed with the loss of the privilege of observation Hello. Its the kind of Hello which is a hello and a keep away at the same time.
Anyway here we are on the road, the cycle man walking with us. I notice that he is wearing an old suit jacket, the collar of which peeked out from beneath his floppy shirt. . As we join in step, Sonia offers him a Happy Hello and because I think he might be Mr Bojangles, I call him Sir. Immediately he removes his orange construction helmet and offers us a courtly bow. He then addressed us in perfect English which told of a life lived long ago in another time and place. For just a few precious seconds, the shabby junk man in a tattered suit became a prince of the court, a diplomat, a gentleman of a long lost palace. Then his stream of English ran out, the sun came out from behind a cloud and his eyes glazed back into his present madness and the moment was gone.
The man was probably my age, he had lived through much more interesting times, those years were adding weight to his life now, no doubt. And now here he was, a remnant of those times, his life, his memories and his ghosts but such is the way of the road that he could in that precious one moment, with his bicycle leaning against him on that rusty red dusty road, dressed in his Mr Bojangles suit with his orange helmet tucked perfectly in his arm, offer me a slice of Cambodian Modern History in one courtly bow.
Sonia and I walked on chatting as he peered in ditches and stopped to stuff drink bottles into his cache, he was happy to talk amongst himself and kept offering a Happy Hello to our backs. Eventually our stride out stepped his slow inspection, as we turned a corner he offered us a happy goodbye and a soft thank you.

Writing to the beat

I came across a copy of On The Road recently and plunged myself into the pages, rolled around in all the "mad gone" craziness of a life on the road described. I learned that Kerouac taped pieces of paper together and sat at his typewriter until the whole book was written. He ended up with a roll of manuscript that eventually became a book.
I am captivated by that idea, of the telling of a tale in one epic attempt, of a narrative that runs like a roller coaster ride. Years of travel writing has taught me how to phrase carefully enough to have my story picked up and published but in the doing of that I sometimes wonder where the actual ownership of the story goes. Sure the editor has a fancy version, one you could read aloud in a living room with your aunt present but the depth of the real experience is lacking. That's the difference between me and those vanguards of The Road. They were trying to bring something new to something old, they burned out early, bugged out on women, left a trail of dented bumpers and fatherless children in their wake. They explored ways to tell the truth of the world and excelled with excess, were obsessed with the truth of the moment and didn't give a damn or were too drunk to care.
I wondered how it would be if I sat down and wrote my life on the road to the beat of the poem of the highway. All the thoughts and stories and insane happenings, the heartbreak and the tears. What if I caught all those beautiful butterflies of memories and stuck them all together in a continuous stream? What if I really explored all the deep deep moments of realisation, of profound connection and disjoined desire, of love gone wrong or just gone or lasting only the distance of the length between the upturned corners of a smile, a kiss by the roadside? What if I sewed the story together with all the thread of truth that has the sight and sound and taste of the sound of sobs issuing from the third floor window of some unknown kitchen while there below I am basking in the clear light of my own happiness? What if I explored the question of why it is that strangers who meet on some foreign road will wave at each other in passing when they wouldn't even graze eyes with a stranger in their own town? What if I wrote about all the mad bad gone things of life on the road? What if I took ownership back and turned these stories upsidedown, took them apart, sliced them in thin slivers of truth and then spat it all out whole like catsick on a carpet? What if I did that and then stalked away like a Siamese cat, my tail in the air and totally unconcerned?
What if?