A Cook's Tour (27 page)

     Misha exhaled as the plane touched down. ‘When I was in Bulgarian paratroopers – we like this plane very much,’ he said. ‘Of course, we were all wearing parachutes.’

     I stopped taking photographs at Angkor Wat. No camera is adequate to the task. It’s too big, too magnificent to be captured in any frame. There’s no way to convey through simple images the sense of wonder when you encounter the cities of Angkor looming up out of the thick jungle. Mile after mile of mammoth, intricately detailed, multileveled temples, bas-reliefs, jumbo Dean Tavoularis-style heads, crumbling stone structures choked in the root systems of hundred-year-old trees. This was the center of the mighty Cham empire, which once extended as far as Nha Trang and the sea to the east, all of what is now South Vietnam to the south, to occasional sections of Thailand and the Indian subcontinent. The work, the time, the number of artists, craftsmen, and laborers it must have taken to construct even one of the hundreds of structures is unimaginable. Looking at the densely populated reliefs, you are utterly intimidated by the impossibility of ever taking it all in. The KR did its best to ruin Angkor for all time, laying mines all over the grounds, destroying statues and shrines. Looters and unscrupulous antiquities dealers knocked off as many heads as they could, stripped the temples of what they could carry, and sold them on the black market in Thailand and elsewhere. But the UNESCO people are there now, painstakingly restoring what they can. The mines have, for the most part, been removed, and you can wander the interior of the dark stone piles, a waiflike Khmer kid by your side, telling you what it all means, pointing out the two-tongued figures in dark corners, urging you to give the saffron-robed bonzes tending to small Buddhist shrines a few riel. The dark, clammy interiors smell of burning incense and go on and on forever. Standing at the foot of a great stone head, I could only imagine what the first Frenchmen who’d stumbled onto the place must have felt like.

     The cheap bastards from the TV production company had booked me into yet another depressing sinkhole in Siemreap. I took one look at the lobby, and, fully aware that I would be staying in even rougher environs over the coming days, decided to splurge. I checked myself into the Raffles-operated Angkor Grand a mile down the road. I figured one night living like a colonialist oppressor would be good for me. I had never enjoyed a high-pressure shower with unlimited hot water the way I did that night – glorious after all the lime-encrusted dribblers I’d been standing under in recent weeks. There was an enormous pool, three restaurants, and a bar and sitting room, where uniformed help in pointy hats and green
kromahs
made girlie drinks decorated with umbrellas. When I returned to my room after a massage, a swim, and a croque monsieur, there was a garland of fresh jasmine flowers on my pillow.

     I took full advantage of my luxurious surroundings, because tomorrow the ordeal would begin. The crew was nervous. I was nervous. The plan was to take a hired boat out onto Tonle Sap, cross over to the mouth of a river, and chug upstream to Battambang. The following day, we planned to rent a 464 and driver and travel seventy to eighty kliks over the worst, most heavily land-mined road in Cambodia to Pailin, near the Thai border. This was not an auspicious time to be visiting with the Khmer Rouge. Recent developments in the capital indicated that the government was planning to revoke its agreement with Ieng Sary, the leader of the KR’s Pailin faction, and bring him before an international tribunal for war crimes. The mood in town, we assumed, would not be good.

     The road to Pailin. It’s not a Hope/Crosby movie – and Dorothy Lamour is definitely not waiting in a tight-fitting sarong at the journey’s end. I’d wanted to go up a no-name river to the worst cesspit on earth and, for my sins, I got my wish.

     I set out from Siemreap in the early morning, along with Chris, Lydia, and Kry. Kry, who is something of an expert on the Khmer Rouge, had been to Pailin before, during the last fighting. But the moment we set out for Battambang from a muddy creek off the lake, he was struck dumb, nearly speechless for the duration. From the very get-go, things did not go as planned. Our skipper and a mate, who concerned himself mostly with a noisy, clanging, and dubious-sounding engine, couldn’t agree on exactly where to find the mouth of the river. After crossing open water, we floated around the lake, looking for landmarks, broiling in the late-morning sun. I ate a packed lunch from the Angkor Grand of
saucisson sandwich
, Camembert cheese, and a nice bottle of Côte du Rhône and waited.

     The river, when we finally found it, was wide and clean and pretty to look at. But after about thirty miles, as we approached a floating village, our skipper, without warning or explanation, pulled over to a waterborne police station bobbing on fifty-five-gallon drums. A few uniformed officers in death squad-chic sunglasses and two very dodgy-looking characters in red
kromahs
and olive drab fatigues stood there waiting for us. Without asking, the two fellows in
kromahs
and military clothing boarded our vessel and sat down by the skipper at the helm. The cops waved us on.

     Now, the red
kromah
is an almost universally worn accessory all over Cambodia. It’s worn as headgear, as a scarf, as a bustier top for women, as a sarong. In a pinch, it can be used for pulling an oxcart out of a ditch, as a carryall, or as a diaper. But when worn by unsmiling, unfriendly strangers with bloodshot eyes, attired in military garb – who’ve just boarded your privately engaged boat without asking – the red
kromah
takes on a sinister aspect. One’s mind naturally flashes back to footage of the newly victorious KR riding into Phnom Penh on the backs of tanks – just before the mass murdering began.

     A few moments later, I noticed that our boat had slowed almost to a standstill and that our new additions were arguing with the skipper, pointing in a direction decidedly opposite from where the river was taking us. I looked to Kry to translate, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. Not a peep. He stared off at some fixed point in space, apparently oblivious. When, at our uninvited guest’s instruction, the boat changed course, coughing and clanking up a narrow no-name creek perpendicular to the river, I barked to Kry, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’

     ‘We take shortcut,’ said Kry, quickly slipping back into what seemed to be a coma.

     ‘
Shortcut
.’ The word filled me with dread. When has a shortcut ever worked out as planned? The word – in a horror film at least – usually precedes disembowelment and death. A ‘shortcut’ almost never leads to good times. And in Cambodia, with our skipper suddenly piloting the boat up a shallow, twisting, foliage-choked, water-filled ditch, deep into who the fuck knows where, with two who the fuck knows who giving the orders, I was not feeling too secure. I consulted my Lonely Planet guide and was dismayed to find that this particular body of water did not appear on the map.

     Upriver we went. For hours and hours, with no end in sight. The trip was supposed to take six hours. It had been nearly nine. The terrain grew roughter, then narrowed with each three-point turn. We pulled and pushed in waist-deep muck, tearing free of clinging vines, just barely clearing sandbars and mud flats. This trip was beginning to make the river journey in
Apocalypse Now
look like the Love Boat as the scenery got more primitive, the few signs of life becoming more backward and desperate-looking as we pushed farther and farther into the bush. The few sampans or boats coming in the opposite direction squeezed by without any of their passengers even acknowledging us. They eyed our olive drab-garbed passengers, then turned away, their faces showing what surely looked like fear. There were no longer greetings of ‘Hello’ or ‘Bye-Bye’ from the riverbanks, just glowers, stunned looks, silent hostility, indifference.

     I saw nothing for hours but the occasional hut protruding from the water, or high atop stilts on the bank, men and women in rags, near naked in
kromahs
, squatting by the water’s edge, rubbing unguent into sick pigs, washing clothing in the brown water, sharpening machetes against stone. I was becoming concerned. I hadn’t seen a single house, not a single building with what could be called walls, not a TV aerial, not a power or phone line in hours. We could have been traveling up the same body of water a thousand years ago, with no discernible difference. What if our engine breaks down? What if our propeller fouls? What if one wing nut shears off, leaving us dead in the water? Whom could we call? Even if we had a cell phone? (Which we didn’t.) No one on this boat, I suspected, could even have described our location. Which of a thousand similar gullies, canals, streams, creeks, and ditches were we on? And how far up? My American Express representative was not waiting at the next stop. Where would we sleep if we had to spend the night out here? There was nothing but water, mud, flooded rice paddies, jungle, and the occasional construction of bare sticks and bamboo – like a child’s collapsed and forgotten tree house. And my mysterious fellow passengers, what about them? Who were they? Where were they going? What were their intentions? The scarier-looking of the two, who’d been smoking Alain Delon cigarettes, gave me something that looked like a smile when I offered him a Marlboro, but that’s all I had going for me.

     Deeper and deeper into the weeds we went. Mile after mile of nothing but demolished huts, muddy riverbanks, waterlogged and useless sampans. Once in awhile, there would be a chicken, a rooster, a water buffalo, or a pig, and a few of the tall, bare sugar palms in the distance. We rounded another turn, and there, in a village now sagging and sinking into the water, two more passengers were waiting for us with their bags packed. One of them was wearing a Tweetie Bird T-shirt and camo pants. Great, I thought. My executioner. Killed by a guy in a Warner Bros. T-shirt.

     It was getting darker, and still there was no sign of Battambang – or anything else even resembling civilization. I wasn’t looking for minimalls or office buildings any more. Evidence of electric power would have sufficed. Bugs were feasting on me. As the light failed, wood smoke began to curl over the water, and the river began to widen a bit. A few families bathing together on the banks provided some encouragement. More smoke, coming from cooking fires. I saw a house on stilts with actual walls. Another good sign. The river became busier. Flat rafts pulled by rope towed motorbikes and their drivers across the river to the other side. More homes and shelters. The skipper was listening his way upriver now, all light almost gone. The smoke thickened, and then I saw my first electric light, hazy in the distance. Soon, torches, more lights, a surreal image in the heavy smoke and near-total darkness. Shrill Khmer music and drums echoed out over the river from distant loudspeakers.

     After tying up at the bottom of a steep, muddy bluff, hands reached out from nowhere and helped us off the boat and up a slippery slope. Dark figures grabbed at our bags and hauled them up the hill. Soon we were loaded into a van and taken to the fabulous TEO Hotel, Battambang’s ‘best.’

     White tile floors, white tile walls, white stucco ceilings. The hotel was a big four-story blockhouse, free of decorative features. A sign by the front desk depicted the black shape of an AK-47, circled and bisected in red. The usual Cambodian hotel industry’s hospitality features were in evidence: A door off the lobby with a sign saying karaoke massage in red letters. Translation? ‘Whores available.’

     My room was more white tile, a central floor drain – as if the whole room had been designed to be flushed with the press of a lever. The bathroom worked on the same principle: Turn on the shower, hold the calcified showerhead over your body while sitting on the toilet, and everything goes. The single roll of toilet paper was waterlogged from a previous guest. A smooshy packet of something that could have been either soap or a condom sat on a shelf over the sink. In the bathroom drain, a wadded-up Band-Aid floated on a raft of hair and soap scum. I didn’t mind. At least I wouldn’t be sleeping out in the bush with the cobras and the banded kraits and the mosquitoes. I showered as best I could and bounded down to the TEO’s empty restaurant, where an eager waiter helped me select dinner from another colorful menu of photographs.
Congee
, green curry,
pad Thai
,
amok
, the usual collection of stir-fry and hot pots, the menu about half Thai, the check payable in riels, dollars, or baht. My waiter, after hearing that I was en route to Pailin, volunteered that he had been there once, having hoped to strike it rich in the gem trade. He came back with only malaria to show for his efforts. He said sadly, ‘Bad people in Pailin. Bad people.’

You saw the signs first.

     Little orange ones, every hundred yards or so, all along the road. warning! land mines! There was a helpful picture of a skull and crossbones.

     Try to imagine the worst road in the world: sixty miles of unpaved trail, alternately bone-dry ruts, hillocks, potholes, and crevices so deep and so steep that one’s vehicle nearly topples over onto its side. The cars only a few feet ahead actually disappeared from view into ruts and depressions in the road. Trucks so dangerously overloaded with wood and hay that they towered ludicrously nearly fifty feet in the air – with whole families sitting on top. Vast pools of puddinglike muck, stagnant water from adjacent flooding rice paddies. And, of course, the usual road hazards of broken oxcarts, diverted streams, checkpoints, roadblocks, crumbling bridges, and armed bandits.