A Cook's Tour (28 page)

     Black SUVs bounced by us, KR gangsters and illegal timber merchants behind tinted windows, armed goons riding shotgun. The occasional white 464s were the good guys, the minesweeping outfits, still hard at work in northwest Cambodia. The occasional full-color billboard depicted on its left-hand side a happy farmer walking with his son through their fields. On the right-hand side, the same farmer and son were shown being surprised by an explosion, the stumps of their arms and legs sprinkling brightly colored blood. Our vehicle was a hired white 464 with a very worried-looking driver. He didn’t like us. He didn’t like where we were going. He seemed unhappy about what the road was doing to his car.

     From time to time, we crossed a bridge over a deep gorge or rocky stream. Rotten, moldering planks bounced and crumbled under our wheels, the rocks and water below visible through gaping holes as we slowly edged forward. Some bridges were actually suspended from cables – so we had to worry not only about the planks disintegrating under our tires but also about the whole structure swinging unreliably from jury-rigged supports. Overloaded trucks came to a full stop at each bridge as driver and passengers assessed their chances, then sped across as quickly as possible, hoping that it would be the next vehicle that might plunge through the splintering planks onto the rocks below.

     Bounce, jolt, lean, grind, crumble, drop, bounce, jolt. We often had to stop and wait for an old woman, a pantless child, or an armed teenager in fatigue top and
kromah
sarong to remove a big rock or a row of sticks from our path – makeshift roadblocks and tollgates – and wave us on.

     I began to see more guns at the checkpoints. And skulls. Arranged on display atop small birdhouselike platforms and shrines by the roadside were small piles of human skulls and thighbones. A warning? A remembrance? I don’t know. As we got closer to what used to be the front line of the last armed conflict, I saw a rusted-out, bullet-pocked APC (armored personnel carrier) by the side of the road. Then a burned-out Chinese-made tank.

     The armed guys at the last checkpoint did not look happy to see us. What about the casinos? Didn’t these people want our business? I began to get the idea that I would not soon be enjoying a mai tai in the main lounge, entertained by the comedy stylings of Don Rickles. The likelihood of a buffet or a station to make your own omelette seemed increasingly remote. My driver kept looking in the rearview mirror as he drove along at a breakneck clip of ten miles per hour, echoing my waiter from the TEO with occasional remarks that there were ‘bad peoples . . . bad peoples’ here.

     We stopped in a small village to eat and to stretch our ruined backs and necks. At a roadhouse next to a market, a group of agitated Khmers were rather too enthusiastically watching a Thai kick-boxing match on a television in the dining area, shouting and pumping their fists in the air anytime anyone got hit. I had a bowl of some warm beer on ice and some
tom yam
, a sort of Thai noodle soup. It was the best thing I’d had to eat since arriving in Cambodia – Thai food. Everything was increasingly Thai here, the closer we got to the border. Thai food, Thai money, Thai television. After a meal and a rest, we set out again, with about two hours to go until Pailin.

     ‘This was where the front was,’ said Kry awhile later, speaking up for the first time in memory. He pointed out a craggy mountain peak and a pagoda. ‘KR used to dump bodies in this mountain. Thousands of bones up there inside the mountain.’

     Just outside Pailin, the road was actually graded – probably to accommodate the lumber trucks. (They’re cutting down every tree in Cambodia to sell off to the Thais, a practice that is leaving the countryside even more devastated and that threatens, each rainy season, to flood Tonle Sap, Bassac, and Mekong, drowning the capital.) We sped along the road, no one speaking, and then we were there.

     Pailin. Unpaved, littered streets, mangy dogs, sullen locals who glared at our arrival. A few signs indicating karaoke massage, a barber, a few gem retailers selling chip-sized rubies and sapphires, a run-down, hopeless market. No casinos. No neon. No jumbo parking lots, new entertainment centers, dog tracks, or air-conditioned necropolises filled with one-arm bandits and Keno. No Seigfried and Roy. No Debbie. No Steve and Edie. Nothing but naked hostility, squalor, and scary-looking guys with guns. The Hang Meas, Pailin’s only hotel, was a smaller, drearier version of the TEO. Same cautionary sign in the lobby about AK-47s. Same karaoke massage booth. Same white tiles, creepy stains, drain in the floor.

     I ate some soggy stir-fry in the hotel restaurant, then took a ride around town on the back of a motorbike with a young man who wanted to show me where I could score some good rubies. There wasn’t much to see. Ramshackle buildings, two-story businesses, a pagoda. The homes with the satellite dishes and the SUVs and new 464s out front belonged to the KR. Apparently, only Communists get to make money in Cambodia. I bought some overpriced and undersized rubies. Yes, there are uncut rubies strewn everywhere – by the riverbanks, in front yards, in the soil – but they cut the gems in Thailand, and they rarely make it back from the other side of the border – like most of the country’s resources.

     We sent Kry off to talk to the official in charge of tourism and information, a former high-ranking figure in the KR. Unsurprisingly, considering recent developments in Phnom Penh, he didn’t want to talk about Pailin’s future as a destination resort. He was not interested in showing us the casinos. The casinos, it turned out, were about thirty kliks beyond Pailin, in the jungle and mountains near the Thai border.

     ‘He say you want to go there to shoot film? Maybe you get shot,’ said Kry when he returned. The KR official did not care to talk about economic development or Hard Rock hotels or anything else to do with tourism. He wanted to talk about what the KR would do if Ieng Sary was in fact indicted and dragged before the courts. He wanted to talk about returning to the jungle. Rearming. Going down fighting with their leader in a blaze of glory. Not what we wanted to hear.

     That night, at 3:00 a.m., someone began pounding violently on Chris’s and Lydia’s door. Lydia, whom I had seen leaning out of fast-moving cars to get a shot, who has filmed on paratrooper bases, in jungles, and in minefields without fear, told me later that she jumped out of bed and huddled in a corner, shaking as Chris finally opened the door. Fortunately, it was a drunken Thai businessman back from an evening of karaoke massage, confused as to which floor his room might be on – not a KR security cadre with radiophones and alligator clips.

     The next morning, I ate breakfast in the hotel. I was depressed. Things had not turned out as I’d hoped. Two days of travel up a no-name river and across the worst road in the universe – and for what? This was no gamblers’ paradise. The ‘vice capital’ was the same collection of dreary whorehouses and bars as everywhere else, only less welcoming. The citizens seemed stunned, lethargic, frightened, angry – not what you want in a destination resort. My dreams of becoming some kind of Southeast Asian Bugsy Siegel were shattered. Everyone wanted to leave, Kry and our Khmer driver more than anyone. The food, particularly compared to the delights of Vietnam, was uninteresting – mostly watered-down Thai, served under conditions incompatible with freshness. While I sipped my instant coffee, two guys in fatigues pulled up on a motorbike and dumped a dead deerlike creature on the ground with a
plop
! They dismounted and went to talk to the chef. Two children in rags hurried to the carcass, probing the large exit wound by the creature’s neck with their fingers, then sniffing them while flies gathered.

     ‘That’s an endangered species, actually,’ said a voice in English.

     Tim and Andy stood there in head-to-toe leather motocross outfits, covered in road dust, behind me in a dark corner of the hotel’s dining room. Tim has penetrating pale blue eyes with tiny pupils, and the accent of an Englishman from the north – Newcastle, or Leeds maybe. Andy is an American with blond hair and the wholesome, well-fed good looks and accent of the Midwest. Behind them, two high-performance dirt bikes leaned on kickstands in the Hang Meas’ parking lot.

     Tim owns a bar/restaurant in Siemreap. Andy is his chef. Go to the end of the world and apparently there will be an American chef there waiting for you. Kry, looking exhausted, joined me for breakfast, saw the two men in dusty leather, and nodded hello.

     ‘Kry! How’s it going, you bastard?’ said Tim.

     ‘Not bad, Tim. How are you?’ replied Kry.

     ‘Still hanging at Happy Herbs?’ asked Andy.

     Everyone knows each other in Cambodia, it seems. We were on the other side of the country – in the middle of nowhere – and Kry and the two motorheads were acting as if they bumped into one another like this all the time.

     ‘You see Misha?’ asked Tim.

     ‘We saw him just now, coming in, talking to some KR guys,’ said Andy.

     ‘He was on the plane with us to Siemreap,’ I offered.

     ‘How’d he get here from Battambang?’ asked Tim. ‘We didn’t pass him on the road.’

     ‘Maybe he take helicopter,’ said Kry.

     ‘Ahhh . . . yesss,’ said Tim with an evil cackle.

     The two men were on a road trip across Cambodia’s back roads – a daunting obstacle course for most travelers, but rollicking good fun for dirt bikes. They’d intended to travel from Pailin down to Sihanoukville and the sea but ran into trouble after encountering an illegal logging camp in the jungle and had had to turn back.

     ‘We’re going to try another route,’ said Tim, ‘but if things don’t work out, we’ll see you in Battambang maybe.’

     We couldn’t get out of town fast enough, but our driver misunderstood Kry’s instructions and headed toward the Thai border, grumbling under his breath. It was an hour before we figured out that we were headed in the wrong direction, inching along miles of jungle road, passing small farmhouses with satellite dishes on the roofs, the telltale black Toyota Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, and SUVs sitting outside of neat homes in the middle of nowhere. Everywhere were felled trees – as if an army of indiscriminate lumberjacks had simply waded through, chopping down everything in sight. The clouds hung low around the mountaintops, and the people, when they saw our car and our cameras, appeared shocked, as if we’d disturbed them while bathing. Our driver looked frantically unhappy. When Kry finally pointed out that we wanted to go in the opposite direction – back to Battambang – the driver nearly wept with relief.

     The whole way to Pailin, our driver had kept his vehicle at a steady ten miles per hour. On the way back, he tore along at a reckless thirty miles per hour, oblivious to any damage he might be doing to his suspension or undercarriage. He’s scared, I realized. Really scared. When we passed a company of black-clad militia in full parade formation a few yards from the road, their heads turning in unison to watch us, our driver sped up even more, glancing nervously in the rearview mirror for the next twenty miles. At a checkpoint we’d passed the day before, there had been one or two rifles – clapped-out M1s or Chinese knockoffs. Now, the same checkpoint bristled with AK-47s. The whole way back, our driver was spooked. Every innocuous-looking civilian we passed on the road seemed to fill the guy with terror, a potential lookout radioing ahead to the ambush party. I never thought I’d be happy to see the Hotel TEO again, but I was. When you’ve been to Pailin, Battambang seems like a megalopolis.

Midnight in Battambang.

     Tim drove one motorcycle, with me on the back, hanging on for dear life. Andy drove the other, with Misha behind him. We raced through Battambang’s quiet streets at high speed, making a god-awful noise, roaring over a narrow pedestrian bridge toward the far end of town to a strip of bars and brothels. Generally, when you’re a Westerner encountering a roadblock, you try to bull your way through. Fully aware of your privileged position as a white man with money in his pocket, you slow down, just enough to be polite, maybe smile a little, then try to breeze through – as if roadblocks and checkpoints and armed police or military can’t possibly be intended for the likes of you. And this usually works, I was told. It was certainly what Tim and Andy expected when we came upon a floodlit square, a line of uniformed policemen stopping traffic. We slowed down a little but, in typical expat style, did not stop.

     Suddenly, things got very dicey.

     ‘
Stop!
You stop now!
’ screamed a uniformed cop with more confetti on his chest than the others in firing position around him. It’s unusual in an Asian country to see someone visibly angry. It’s just not done. When one loses one’s cool and one’s control, starts screaming and yelling and making faces, one is usually considered to have lost the argument. Hence the term
losing face
. The rule did not apply here. The cop doing the screaming was absolutely livid, his voice cracking as he shrieked in English and Khmer for us to stop and get off our bikes. His face was contorted with rage, muscles twitching beneath his skin like a nest of rattlesnakes in a thin cotton sack. There was the sound of
klick, klack, klick, kachunk
as six policemen flicked off their safeties and racked rounds into their weapons.

     ‘Oh shit,’ said Misha, who’d been shot already at one of these impromptu affairs.

     ‘Fookin’ ’ell,’ said Tim, stopping and turning off his engine. Andy did the same.