Just A Holiday in Cambodia
Trip Start
May 20, 2005
1
13
18
Trip End
Jun 10, 2006
Phnom Penh,
Cambodia
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Reading: Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
Hello all, greetings from southern Thailand. I'll be in residence in Krabi until the end of February, spending as much time as possible rock climbing and striving to become as buff as my genes will allow. Don't expect much.
Thanks to Sarah, Matt and Franco for helping to ship my climbing gear.
Kafka on the Mekong
From Vietnam, I took an unplanned detour into Cambodia to meet up with Zarina, a Kyrgyz friend who was traveling to Cambodia and Thailand on a university field trip
A Victim of the Kamer Rouge
. Zarina is a much better networker than I and pre-arranged lunches and dinners with a cast of expats.Thus, on my second night in Phnom Penh, I found myself in the home of two Minnesotans. George- an example of the great Greek Diaspora- had been in Cambodia for about six months with an aid organization, Veterans International. We talked philosophy, played chess and generally had one of those evenings you grow to miss when you are a traveler. George, like me, loves finding what he termed as 'cracks in the universe'- paradoxical situations which are absurd, shadowy and largely unknown to the masses.
Lots of people like to reference Orwell when talking about the last few years since September 11th. With secret prison camps in Eastern Europe, the 'rendition' of suspects for torture in places like Syria and the extra-judicial black hole in Guantanamo, I think its time to break out the Kafka. But, these types of situations are not new or confined to 'War on Terror'- a subject I've been happy to keep clear of while traveling.
In 2002 and independent of the 'War on Terror', Uncle Sam took the opportunity to test out a new policy. Cambodia, completely dependent on international aid, had its arm twisted to sign a treaty with the US concerning Cambodian citizens who committed crimes in the US. In essence, once the convict completed his (excuse me for being sexist, most convicts are men) time, he is deported back to Cambodia.
Pretty logical on the surface. If you are convicted of committing a crime and violate your visa/ green card rules, you should be deported
Average House
. Rules are rules, right?In practice, it smells. Large numbers of people- like my friend 'Bia Hoi Loi'- fled the region when the bottom fell out in the late 1970s. Lots of them were kids at the time and have few, if any memories of 'home.' They would be much more at home at a Dairy Queen than a noodle stall.
On the whole, the émigré community from Indochina has been doing remarkably well. Nothing makes me smile more than hearing about a star linebacker from some high school football team down in Corpus Christi (Texas) with a Vietnamese name.
But, its not all roses. Many of the guys who became deportees grew up wholly in the States, went to public schools and were poor. The most isolated are the ethnic minorities hill tribes- many of whom provided the backbone of the CIA's secret armies during the war years. Gangs are big, offering protection and sense of community to the maladjusted émigrés who've landed squarely in the underclass.
For the deportees, their biggest mistake, besides committing a crime, was not getting US citizenship when they had the chance
Boat in Kep
. Not knowing any better, many émigré families were content with Green Cards (permanent residency permits for the US). Regardless of the legal formalities, I feel these guys are part of our society, in most cases nasty by-products to be sure.If you're originally from poor little Cambodia, you've got a special plane waiting for you when you get out of jail- forget notional concepts of 'rehabilitation.'
Once they've served their time, they arrive in an INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) holding prison where he awaits deportation. Unfortunately, the INS process is opaque. I remember one good friend once calling the INS 'a transplant of Soviet bureaucracy in the US government.' Age and type of crime are not considered by the INS: a teenage shoplifter gets the same treatment as an adult murderer. Really. Nor are family ties- like wives and children left destitute. No case by case review.
At some point, the directive comes down to deport the guy.
They are then flown to Cambodia, chained at the wrists and ankles, and left at the airport with nothing
Cave light on a shrine
. They might as well have landed in Kinshasa, Congo. With no knowledge of the local language, customs or family networks, these tattooed, gangsta-speaking inner-city boys are way out of their element. Oh, don't forget that they are recognized convicts with no work skills in a desperately poor land which shuns them. George told some horror stories about the first few arrivals. Luckily for the newest ones, Vetrans International (associated with Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation- serving their country with honor and dignity) has stepped in to fill the gap.So, the Veterans International paradox: They are funded by the US government and private donations to help adjust the deportees with lessons on local language and culture as well as job placement. The better George does his job, the more young and confused boys will arrive in Cambodia shackled at the ankles. There are about 1,000 more potential deportees.
A humanitarian band-aid to a Kafka-esk process.
How I Spent my Christmas
When I was younger, Christmas morning was the most important event of the year. We never celebrated religiously, of course, except for attending few Midnight Masses for the experience. It was the gifts that were the true calling of Christmas. Sure there were birthdays but X-mass was the big daddy of gifting
Children killers
. We were allowed to open just one gift on X-mass eve, making X-mass morning open season for the other gifts. What consideration went into choosing that single X-mass Eve present!
This year, I awoke in Kraite at about six in the morning with a different sort of expectation. My X-mass eve gift was a fried spider during a stop on a long bus ride from Phnom Penh. I was eager to get to Laos, a country I'd never visited, and twisted Zarina's arm to leave Phnom Penh and join me. I also wanted to make the journey up the Mekong by boat. Kraite was the staging point for the leap into Lao.
We began our trip in a local shared-taxi to the end-of-the-world town of Strung Treng. We were 8 people in all; smashed into an old Nissan compact. Four men in the back with another 4 in the front: Zarina, a middle-aged woman on her lap, Mr. Eyes (controlling the wheel) and Mr. Feet (working the pedals). Cambodians are small people and I felt super-sized. The front of the car was artic from the A/C while the back was the kind of hellish tropical hot I missed out on in Vietnam. A touch of the tiger cage!
Countryside
We peeled out of the car about 4 hours later. Zarina's frostbite would heal and I re-hydrated with water and other beverages.
The boat leg was next. Up the Mekong in a little speedboat- what a thrill! This concept frightened Zarina, who's studying in Hawaii, loves the ocean but is not yet fully confident on all things maritime. When we saw the boat, I was relieved to see two life preservers (just for the foreigners). The boat was about 10 meters (30 feet) long with a car motor slapped on the end of a long pole. The longtail. I'd been on them many times. Besides being very noisy, I felt the boat was safe-ish.
Then two things happened:
First, a propane cylinder was jammed- more roughly than I'd consider safe- between the wood hull and soon-to-be hot engine. Hmm. When in Rome...
Second, a mattress (double) was strapped to the front with a thin nylon rope. As soon as we hit speed, it would act as a foil, bending upwards and side to side from the force of the wind and waves
Eating Ox
.Zarina, life jacket on, was not pleased but put a brave face on it. The boat was just wide enough for two people and we sat near the front, one row back from the mattress. It was pink with Teddy Bears on it. "Hope it was Happy" was printed in English on it.
During the two hour ride, I considered the possible trajectory of a flying mattress as we wizzed past rocks and sounded like Armageddon coming.
I calculated that the two guys in front would get a face-full of "Hope it was Happy" before it slapped the boatman into the water, leaving us pilotless at extreme speed. The nightmare scenario was that it would lodge itself to the engine and catch fire and triggering combustion in the plastic fuel bladder or, worse, the propane. But, I was never good at physics so who knows.
At the Cambodian border check, Zarina's Kyrgyz passport was a hit. She went through the habitual motions of explaining where her little landlocked nation was situated, trying to avoid the use of "Russia" and India as geographical reference points. It took about 20 minutes- all smiles. They had not seen such a passport in all the time they been working- 4 years. Once through, we were met by a young man who organized a 10 minute scooter ride to the Lao checkpost as part of our Kraite ticket. The Laos border was pleasant, quick and very quiet. No travelers on Christmas.
Once in Lao, we waited for other non-existent travelers before boarding an empty Sagawath, a semi-truck with a people-mover trailer on the end
Fisherman off Rabbit Island
. It was empty so we got to ride with the driver in the cab. I held myself back from acting on the childish impulse to have the horn honked. You quickly get the sense that Laos is a quiet, laid-back place where that sort of thing is unnecessary. My kind of land. We arrive at the end of the road 30 minutes later and got on another longtail boat to a small island in the middle of the Mekong, Don Det. Our $19 transport package from Kraite was cashed out by that point and we had to walk. We were lucky to find a cheap bungalow with excellent views of the sunset and a hammock- where I finally killed off that Lawrence book in a brutal war of attrition- 20 slow, frustrating pages at a time.
