Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

Nathalie Abejero

Dude where’s my pipeline?

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And a painful show that was. What I want to know is how other countries’ media covers domestic disasters. I have newfound respect for CNN–but just— since moving to Southeast Asia. CNN-World surprisingly maintains semblance of journalistic precepts, which at CNN-US have been bumped by corporate interests. I’d almost forgotten the comical cowboy antics of on the ground reportage that eclipses the gravity of events until we got streaming domestic feed for the hurricane coverage. Does anyone else feel like slapping these reporters?

Katrina turned the media spotlight on Louisiana’s function in the US economy, despite the state’s economic ailments. Prime location at the anal terminus of the artery of US commerce that is the Mississippi River imparts heavy responsibilities. It supplies 25% of the nation’s seafood. The rigging industry provides 15% of the nation’s oil. It supports the rail and shipping traffic for petroleum, petrochemical, shipbuilding, and aerospace industries, as well as the international trade bound for points north. Direct hit from a Cat 5 Katrina would have upset the economic landscape not just for Louisiana or the region, but also for the entire country.

These activities deal the Mississippi delta an ecological blow, one of the consequences being oxygen-depleted coastal dead zones. The US Gulf Coast is one of a growing number of hypoxic regions around the world, the largest in the western hemisphere. Healthy wetlands provide a natural buffer against storms making landfall. Unfortunately, wetland ecology loses out when weighed against the billions in industries sustaining immediate and material human needs.

Louisiana and the coastal states are in an ecological quagmire that has been begging attention for decades. With the increasing frequency and power of Gulf storms due to global warming–does anyone doubt the phenomenon exists anymore??— it’s a double whammy that may just rearrange the geography faster than the Army Corps of Engineers can counter.

The Big Easy meets Katrina

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Intoxicated fumes of breath and a clammy handshake. Missing teeth in a captivating smile….

N’awlins’ reputation precedes it and this is the first impression, before the jazz and blues spin rhythms with the muggy air, before the Cajun spices mount the offensive. Have you been where elegance and refinement consort passionately with the grit and grime? Indolence is King so strap your principles on and hang tight or lose ‘em. It’s a schizophrenic transvestite full of wit, this crazy town. And you’ll never forget her.

Knock back some Southern Comfort. This show will be painful.

Fish tales and banana jams– Koh Kong or BUST!!!

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The blistery summer sun finally yawned and shifted attention elsewhere, allowing a lively tropical storm to play in the Cardamom Mountains. Screeching winds and driving torrents of rain obliged the topographical audience of trees and flora to bend and sway in spirited waves. Onstage in the heavens thunder raged while spectacular light shows illuminated our path. Range Rover engineers were done proud on those unpaved jungle passes. Such backdrop commands resonance with the soul, a harmony of earth and spirit, a communion of–

–what the–?

As we awaited transport to cross the river, a curious contraption, defying the tedium of logic, bobbed into view. It asked to be stared at rudely. The apparatus comprised planks of wood wrongly secured atop three rowboats tied together, and was propelled by a small outboard motor looking for all the world embarrassed at such indignity. Fierce currents crashed around rocky protrusions in the water as our vehicle boarded the raft. Sigh. This is for the brave of heart, and I can only doggie paddle. My useless colleagues are unperturbed.

I used to wonder at some of the stories from the field. But they were written in the stars and I am now convinced. At the next channel crossing, at a restaurant stop, my autopilot checklist overlooked a key variable. [Minimal animals, check. Refuse control, sigh, check. No (uh, cross out)– Minimal (mmh, not quite)– PASSABLE! odor, check. Staff lacking symptomatic lesions, scratches, welts, redness in the eyes, swellings, festering wounds, other evidence of disagreeable heaven-forbid-transmissible condition, welllllllllll–squirm–sigh–oh alright, check. All systems go.] Nature called– texted, actually (calls are expensive in these parts). This way, pointed the cook cheerily, and the corners of my relaxed disposition soon dropped. A stilted outhouse stood over the water three meters into the river, the toilet a hole cut out of the wooden floor. Like Koi in a pond trained by daily feedings that an approaching human meant chow, finned creatures and what appeared to be a pig (who knew pigs swim) gathered enthusiastically beneath the outhouse at my approach. As I prematurely thanked lucky stars that I did not have fish or pork, the iced coffee I’d just consumed snickered at departing wits: the icehouse was next door downriver. [Sigh Of Relief exit stage right. Gag Reflex enter stage left.]

Nestled with its back to the jungle, embracing the Gulf of Thailand, lacking paved roads and bridges, far, far from Apple Pie and Elvis Impersonators and the newly snuck-in UN Ambassador and Gray Bureaucrats sealing the fate of the virgin oil field just discovered off its coasts, the poor island city of Koh Kong bears all the charm of an isolated seaside town, where the pace sips a coconut-papaya shake beneath a swaying waterside palm. Its proximity to Thailand allows it to siphon electricity and cable channels from its neighbor. But the conduits are shut down during heavy rains, pitching Magnavoxes and Pioneers and the karaoke on all three city streets into silence. Despite the severe poverty, its people are a positive lot with a ready smile, and they know that better days are coming.

Besides the offshore drilling that will replace the venturesome capitalist’s ten-cent-coconut-papaya shake (or was it a mango-coconut-papaya shake?) with a martini-shaken-not-stirred-charge-it, there is the planned highway linking Koh Kong with Phnom Penh. The ink had not dried on the approved construction project when land prices soared to US levels and hands shook on business deals. The initial phase bulldozed the road in front of our survey site, and access to the health center was via large mounds of dirt and a displaced canal, so off went the shoes and hitch went the britches. But it is rainy season and, really, water buffalo dung is just mashed vegetation.

How can you build Character when it keeps trying to escape?

That’s when the banana dropped. A little Khmer girl was scampering about in the dilapidated clinic, daughter of one of our interviewers. In her small hand was a small banana, peeled, the sweet kind, the kind you can pop whole into your mouth it is that small. Banana scrawled itself onto my mental shopping list while the banana in the little girl’s grip fell to the ground in a careless instant. Unfazed, she picked it up, took a bite, and looked about. I sought cover. But little girls with dirty little bananas in their dirty little fists are quick and the banana was soon being offered to me with the sweetest smile. Kick her, dirty banana will go away, Evil Nat rasped. Angel Nat on the other shoulder —it’s got wings— said kindly, Take the banana.

All eyes turned towards this unfolding drama. Kick her— The little girl looked at me. Take the banana— My team looked at me. Kick her— I looked at the banana. Take the banana— The banana looked at me. [Overhead two pressure systems collided. Tears from timid clouds rained down.] Everyone on my teams are Khmer, hired and paid by NCHADS, —It’s dirty!!— the STI surveillance unit of the Cambodian Ministry of Health, —That isn’t the point!— in turn receiving funds from the US-based ngo FHI, —Kick her!— which in turn works with monies disbursed by the big kahuna in the alphabet soup of development, USAID. [The cauldron of the heavens bubbled and boiled over as oxygen molecules fleed the scene.] As the only foreigner I’m the manifestation of privilege, –Take the banana!– dollar behind the paycheck, a face to link to the billions in foreign aid each year. Each move however insignificant, —Kick her!— in judging eyes directly victimized by our policies, is America incarnate. [Electrons hissed and prepared for landing. The very air cackled and spit!!] Take the banana!! What are you gonna do, the silent universe vortexed ominously. Kick her!! What are you gonna do, the wealth of nations sneered. Take it already!! Kick her!! Take thE BANANA!! KICK H– WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO, you arrogant, bomb-happy, neo-colonialist hypocrite preaching at masses too starved to care– KICK HER!!! TAKE THE BANANA!!! –trawling the world looking for more–more!!–like you don’t have enough and wheRE ARE YOU GONNA GET IT YOU’RE AT THE ENDS OF THE EARTH HERE!!! [Roar of thunder!!!] WHATAREYOUGONNADO?!?!?!

[Tha-dump-tha-dump-tha-dump. . . ]

I took the banana. And crossed bananas off the shopping list.

Images of Cambodia

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Culinary delights for the uncompromising palate.


Welcome to Cambodia (overland crossing at Poipet border).


All manner of vendors and sellers descend upon stopped vehicles.


View from the back of a tuk-tuk of some lakeside dwellings in Siem Reap.


Angkor Wat, in the Angkor Archaeological Zone


Bayon, in the Angkor Archaeological Zone


Ta Phrom, in the Angkor Archaeological Zone


Ta Phrom. These massive root systems have been removed from the other Angkor sites, but the French left them during their administration of this particular site.


With frequent and strong rains during the monsoon seasons, houses are typically raised off the ground.


Roadside gas station in the provinces


Gas station in Phnom Penh around the corner from my first apartment


The local barber shop


Psar Toul Tum Pung, or Russian Market. The Russian population in Phnom Penh frequented this market in the 1980s so it was named such.


Independence Monument, the most easily recognized landmark in Phnom Penh.


Elephant Sambo being taken for a walk on the riverside in Phnom Penh.


The Royal Palace

Cambodia: How to do the Poipet Border Crossing

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Border crossing from Arranyaprathet, Thailand, into Poipet, Cambodia, is more stressful than the other way around. The casinos are right on the border, with sellers and market stalls outside. $40 rooms are had here if the onwards journey is postponed and a night’s stay is necessary. Otherwise, the main street just straight out from the border is lined with guesthouses of various price ranges. My $3 room was clean with a solid lock on a rickety door. The bus station was off this main road to the left, if walking away from the border, for my early morning bus ride.

If you purchased a trip from Bangkok to Siem Reap (Angkor Wat) or Bangkok-Phnom Penh, there is the possibility of a scam in Poipet. This can go along the lines of the bus breaking down, so if you want to get to Siem Reap or PP by nightfall, you have to pay extra to get on a bus that was leaving “right now” and happens to have extra seats. That’s an extra several dollars to $15.

If you took the train from Bangkok it will be around 2-3pm by the time you cross the border and need onwards transport. Touts of all sorts will approach you with options. Be mindful of the following ticket prices to adjust your bargaining (Phnom Penh-Siem Reap is roughly the same distance as Poipet-Phnom Penh, and also Poipet-Siem Reap as this latter trip’s road is in BAD shape):

A one-way ticket on a comfortable, clean, air-conditioned bus with a bathroom from Phnom Penh-Siem Reap costs around $12-$16. The cheapest ticket option where locals can ride roofside on a packed ‘taxi’ minibus for this same trip is around $3-6.

Just remember: If you haggle too hard, you’ll get shafted and may end up in another town altogether, late in the evening with no options (like we did, see below). Keep your cool, ask questions, pay fairly, and you’ll get safely to your destination.

My second trip through Poipet:
see my first border crossing into Poipet

First we stopped in Bangkok.

Although K has been to red light districts before, nothing quite prepared him—or me—for the Patpong mob scene in Bangkok. (Ah that mob scene was only the beginning…) That friendly smile…? It translates to “FRESHIE/SUCKER” hereabouts where people need just the slightest encouragement to keep harassing you for handouts or a sell. The gals came twelve-strong to our table in one of the fine evening establishments—with a ladyboy along just in case Keith’s taste ran the other direction—in a show of pressure that other foreigners walking in did not get. Tiny Asian gals crowded around K, who was trying to keep a shocked expression under control (unsuccessfully) at the whole situation and the vaginal acrobatics happening onstage. It was quite the amusing scene, until I saw one of them grab at his money and he let her take off with it.

–I did not! That was small change from the beers— which was about 20 dollars for two bottles, I might add. {{Edit to add upon K’s insistence that the girl only managed to get a 20baht note from him, which is about $0.50}}}.

So the next day I not-so-jokingly mentioned that if he EVER went out to Patpong for a bach party one day I will have to put a lock on him—

–A chastity belt-of-sorts? The boy asks, pleased at my apparent jealousy.

NO, a lock on your wallet, said I crossly.

Bangkok had all the comfort of any large bustling city. I was keen on the chocolate cakes here, which were moist and dense like a good cake should be (Cambodia did NOT get this memo). There is clean food (or minimal rotavirus–hey what’s the plural of virus? virii? viruses? anyone?), malls (there are no malls in Cambodia–not a huge loss, but the AC’d interior of a mall is nice once in a while, not to mention clothing designs that run around the vicinity of “normal”), and movie theaters (my movie critiqueing is getting dull by the day in Phnom Penh–we only have Khmer movies there). Oh and the pagodas and wats and the large Emerald Buddha that the Thais stole from Laos but tell tourists its theirs (the Laotians are quite bitter about this).

Bangkok was nice. But soon I sadly conceded that we must move on from the comforts of the big city. Onward ho, to a Kampuchean adventure.

K canNOT miss out on the experience of Poipet, so we did the do-it-yourself-border-crossing en route to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat in neighboring Cambodia. We hooked up with two female backpackers from the UK and New Zealand for the trip from Poipet to Siem Reap (and Angkor Wat)—for safety, I erred in assuming–and the combination of so much white skin put more than a bit of attention on us. The English hereabouts Cambodia is fine up until the actual exchange of cash, after which suddenly linguistic faculties fail and our deal with the locals to take us to Siem Reap went down the drain. There was no improvement in the road between Poipet and Siem Reap from when I came through a few months ago, so we bounced around the back of the flatbed of the pickup truck transportation we found, hanging on to our backpacks for dear life, which were sitting atop heaps of smelly days-old river catches. Those gaping patches of bridge?—our driver hummed right over them without hesitation. And what we thought was our transport to Siem Reap instead dumped us in Sisophon, three hours short of our destination, for a scam stop.

–As soon as our pickup truck rolled into Sisophon a feeding frenzy of the street sharks descended. Loud, broken English and Khmer were hurled about around us, and all we could make out was that they wanted us to get on another pickup and pay more. Now the thought of leaving the containers of fish I was forced sit on was appealing, but the deal we made was to ride this crowded (fish containers, old Khmer ladies, kids, and some dead unplucked chickens) pickup from Poipet to Siem Reap… not pay more money in Sisophon. The gals were quite aggressive back to our scammers, and they finally talked the guys down to a reasonable fee, but the journey doesn’t go smoother from here.

For some reason the men in the truck decided to abduct us. Having no familiarity with Sisophon, I looked at N, who through her work in the country knew the road we were taking was not the road to Siem Reap, but by then it was too late. They drove too fast for us to jump off, in circles to disorient us, and straight into a slum area, telling us we need to “come in and talk.”

Finally the vehicle slowed down and as the driver changed gears to reverse the truck into a gated house I jumped out of the back and grabbed everyone elses bags. N and the Brit followed suit. Luckily the Kiwi didn’t pass out from fright. Amid angry yelling back and forth from the men telling us we should come back and “be reasonable” we started trekking up the road away from the house, expecting at any moment to have a confrontation. They were demanding payment, for what I have no idea since they didn’t take us anywhere. We were all truly apprehensive about the whole event and I was mentally calculating which of the men needed to go down first should they decide we needed to be rounded up and marched back. I was afraid they might come after us with weapons; from my readings on the web that scenario certainly was not so farfetched in this country. Thankfully they let us be, perhaps they were too dumbfounded at our decisiveness, or they thought we would be too scared to walk out of this neighborhood and come crawling back for their help.

Luckily N had her phone, via which she beseeched upon her Khmer colleagues back in Phnom Penh to guide us back on track. We were in the middle of slum areas, with no idea where the bus station or the city proper was, and everyone on the sides of the road looked for all the world hostile and unfriendly. Four foreigners sporting large backpacks trekking about lost makes for quite a target, but we were not hassled. N called her translator and asked her to tell people around us to point us in the general direction of the bus station, and she sought random women posing relatively small threat to us to hand to phone to so that the translator can instruct the lady to point us to the direction we were seeking to go. She did this systematically several times for over an hour to make sure we were still traveling in the right direction, so that we finally managed to arrive, haggard, hungry, dirty, tired–but in one piece–at the bus station.

The moment we arrived we thought we made another mistake. It was filthy there, with garbage everywhere and stray animals poking their noses into everything, searching for food. Several broken-down stripped pieces of improvised transport littered the area. There were only men there, about a hundred of them, all gaunt, rags hanging off their starved frames, eyes gleaming like hyenas looking for meat. We stuck out like a beacon and they all immediately descended upon us in droves to offer their services, tripping over each other and trying to outscream everyone else in their desperation to make some money that day. Fist fights broke out around us as they beat on each other for our attention, and Nathalie, unknown to me until much later, was punched in the lip in the melee. I steered the other two girls over to where I saw a uniformed officer. When Nathalie saw our intent she hastened over and told us NEVER to seek police help if we were in trouble. We looked around and there is literally NO help available should these people decide to get some mob action started to take our shoes, clothes, bags, or money, and that is the most sinking feeling in the world. In not so few moments I found myself cursing the existence of this country and wondered for the millionth time what my wife was thinking when she plunked herself down on this hellhole.

The Khmer street sharks did not leave us be, crowding around and forcing their services on us–a moto taxi, a hotel room, food, etc etc– and we could not get a moment’s peace to even converse with each other to get a plan in gear. You just can’t think in that situation! Finally N broke away, snarled at the ones who followed her to get away, and got back on the phone. She asked her colleagues at the NGO in Phnom Penh to help us obtain a taxi out of Sisophon. Finally, after what seemed like days, via contacts of contacts from Phnom Penh to Battambang to Sisophon, her friends were able to help us get a legitimate taxi driver at the bus station and negotiate a fair fee for our onward transport. We were back on the road–the right road this time–to Siem Reap when the heavens opened up and poured down a storm.

Welcome to Cambodia! Why did we leave Bangkok???

And all this time with me yelling, “NO smiling! Hard look, hard look! You’re giving them reason to harass us!!!” Poipet is one of the most notorious border crossings, but nothing prepared us for that ordeal. I did not expect the chain of events we went through, and I just thank my lucky stars that I had some Khmer friends just a phone call away to help us.

Despite that nightmare, I am actually still quite taken with this country, which has a lot of potential and promise in its future. K understandably was not so keen on the whole scene, but after spending some time in Phnom Penh with me things slowly got better. It is still quite primitive for what he is used to. I think the way he handled the whole situation just made me fall more in love with him. Sappy I know, but how many people can find a gem of value in an experience like that, especially when it was unnecessarily forced upon him by someone who claims to love him?! What a trooper I married eh?

–Yeah, great experience of a vacation N, thanks– {{I didn’t hear sarcasm in that did I? he he}}}

Thailand: Scene in Bangkok

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People believe that spirits share the space that humans inhabit. When a house is built, a similar-looking smaller house is built and placed at a prominent location on the property, to house the spirits that were displaced by the humans moving in. This is done to pacify them or else bad luck will befall the new tenants. Many accidents plagued the building of the Erawan complex in this photo. These events stopped when this spirit house was built and dedicated.


Khao San Road, the backpacking mecca of Bangkok.


Jasmine vendor. The smell of jasmine is just heaven!


Fish vendor. The smell in the meat market is NOT heaven!


The absolute BESTEST iced tea in the world is at this particular street vendor in Bangkok! Drinks are put into small plastic bags that look like mini grocery bags, they stick some ice and a straw in there, and voila! (Edit in 2007: sadly this site has been developed with four megamalls on each corner so my cafe vendor is gone :(


Iced coffee to go!


Boat Lunge-ing 101. Boats take you up and down the canals and river for a scenic view of Bangkok–for a mere 10cents each way. They come in at a sideswipe angle at high speed. The boat never comes to a complete stop and people just lunge on or off. I have no idea how they don’t fall right in the water and get crushed.


This is at the Reclining Buddha. Keith was smitten by the wats, pagodas, and temples of Asia and we visited as many as he can get us to. These structures are actually resting places for prominent residents and monks.


Young monks were waiting with us for the boat to go down the klong (waterways).


Riverside dwellings along the Chao Praya