Into Cambodia

*** Fair warning - unpleasant images after the halfway point***

Next stop was Phnom Penh, Cambodia.  Cambodia is a place not short on issues, having spent the twentieth century being successively ruined by the French; the Americans/Vietnamese; a ridiculously diverse number of internal factions; and finally and more comprehensively destroyed by the four-year reign of the communist regime of Pol Pot.
This last managed to set Cambodian against Cambodian, killing what amounted to a quarter of the entire population, and reduced the remnants to a miserable agrarian lifestyle of subsistence farming. The rice they managed to produce was 'collectivised' and sold to China for guns, leading to mass starvation. Schools, hospitals, factories and offices were all closed. Money was eradicated and the central bank was blown up.  You can read the details yourself.

So Cambodia today is up against it:  corruption is endemic; the rule of law is notional; the countryside is thoroughly landmined; justice is arbitrary; medical and educational services are pretty bad, largely because the doctors and teachers were all killed; poverty is widespread; anyone over 40 has survived a genocide and so is likely working through some issues beneath the surface.   So it's easy to come here with some fairly dire expectations.  But subsequent to the unpleasantness they have seen exceptional growth and a fair amount of foreign investment.   

The first thing you'll notice about Phnom Penh is that it is busy. The traffic is unrelenting. When on foot we'd wait at the side of the road for a natural break in the traffic from a traffic light or something, only to realise after ten minutes that it wasn't coming.  Then we'd notice a local just stride in front of traffic, gesturing indifferently at the oncoming cars.  

The largest family unit we've seen on a single moped is six.

The next thing you'll realise is that any preconceptions you might have about the maximum working payload of a common scooter or moped is about to be shatteringly confounded.   The local variety of tuk-tuk is a scooter towing a trailer with benches in it.  Families travel en masse on a single bike (not that that's specific to here; we saw that in Thailand too). Trade vehicles are just mopeds with elaborate brackets and trailers attached, pulling everything from mattresses to steel bars.

We had seen these old pop bottles full of amber fluid previously, sold from bamboo stands on the side on the road in the Cameron Highlands.  I had assumed they were selling some manner of home brew, but I subsequently found out here that they were full of petrol.  Evidently a Pepsi bottle is all you need to top up the moped's tank.  The colour difference between bottles implies dubious contaminants though.

We spent one day at a sanctuary for bears run by FreeTheBears.org, an Australian charity started by a granny from Perth, who set up the organisation after reading about the plight of bears in Asia farmed for their bile.  Naturally if it involves doing something awful to animals for a bullshit medicinal reason, you can generally blame China without looking it up. This is no different: farms in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and China catch bears, put them in small cages and insert catheters to drain their bile to be sold for nonsense. The bears live for about 2 years before infections or liver cancer kills them.

They are also traded as pets and their body parts are used in food - bear paw soup being a Cambodian delicacy, coming in at US$150 a bowl.

This park, which lives on a separate compound in the Phnom Penh zoological park, does not have any breeding programs, nor does it rehabilitate for release (unless the bear is a wild one that just needs patching up because its been caught in a trap or something): it just finds caged and abused bears and gives them a better life. They aren't released into the wild again because there is nowhere deemed safe for them to go, owing to the illegal activities mentioned above and also because of the staggering rate of Cambodian deforestation, and they often have no skills for the wild because they've been captive all their lives.

The two Asian bears are the Asiatic black bear (or Moon Bear):

And the very dog-looking Sun Bear (or Honey Bear):

We did somewhat envy their facility to jump in the pool when they felt like it.

We were there to check out the facility and lend a hand with some of the bear-keeping stuff.  One thing they create -as the bears never now have to forage for their food- are "enrichment exercises". These are foodie treats hidden inside of hollowed out medicine balls and bamboo sections, which make the bears work a little for their goodies.

We helped out making them up. Today they contained a mixture of bananas, dried dog food, honey, some manner of local vegetable and some morning glory - a local spinach that grows on the river banks. After thoroughly coating ourselves in honey as an offering to the ant gods, we took these out and threw them to the bears.

Chan thinks this qualifies as one of her annual meals that she cooks for me.

This was quite cute.

"Whats all this green shit?"

"Dunno, but it comes out easily enough"

In the afternoon we spent some time in the kitchen, preparing food for the bears.  I felt a lot better when they took the cleaver off Chan and had her weighing portions for the different bear group sizes instead. When it was all prepped, the bear enclosures were emptied and we set about hiding the food in interesting places for them to 'forage' for.

Release the bears:

Outside of the bear facility, there are several other animals that have been rescued from one place or another by other NGOs and housed here for their own safety.  This gibbon was being kept as a pet, chained by its ankle, which is why it has no fur there now. 

Gibbons are monogamous, unlike monkeys, but she has not taken to any of the males they've introduced her to, so she's on her own.  Picky, picky.  But because she used to be a pet, she has no problem with human contact.  When she sees someone she knows, she offers something to be scratched.

Asian otters were also present, so that my record of being shouted at by the world's otters is 2 for 2.

There were also some monkeys here, but they were only caged because the were juvanile.  Once they've figured out climbing and other monkey business, they get let out.  This poor sod had an altercation with an older male who gave him a serious bite on his head, blinding him in one eye.  This has buggered up his depth perception, so his jumps between platforms were more faith than judgement.

One of the kids who worked at the park was taking a nap with a couple of the baby monkeys that had been rescued from the pet trade, after their bottle feed.  There are definitely worse jobs.

Our guide assured us that this boy is 18.  But he also said his parents have a lot of kids and might've forgotten his age.

Having contributed to one worthy cause, we thought we'd keep up the good work by going to Friends The Restaurant, a tapas place run by Friends International.  FI work with all manner of vulnerable and marginalized kids, and in this restaurant they train them up as chefs and front-of-house staff.  The restaurant is now world-renowned and the queue was in the street when we got there.  We had reservations, naturally.  Our karmic goodwill took a bit of a nose-dive after we ordered, however.  We had the Khmer-style Scotch Egg (described as "adventurous"), which is made from a fertilised duck egg - with a baby duck inside.  It tastes like egg, but a bit meaty and with hints of corrupted innocence.

I have made a friend of horror

We were in Phnom Penh, but I was cynical about visiting the genocide museums fir the victims of the Khmer Rouge.  I was reminded of the museum in Santiago that made all the effort in the world to describe the actions of the junta in Chile, but little in the way of its background and motivation, and therefore - to my mind- failed to achieve its primary purpose: to preempt and prevent this kind of thing happening again.

I found the commentary at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek a bit more helpful in that it gave testimony from victims and guards, and some pre-history to the events.  What we were less impressed with was the repetition of lurid details, not because we were squeamish, but because it distracted somewhat from the larger picture. It sometimes felt a bit too much like our emotional reaction was being dictated to us by rote.   We don't need to see replicas of the murder weapons where no originals survived - that only adds artificial ghoulish spectacle.

There have been reports before now of tourists taking selfies with the skulls or with the tree that was used to kill babies, because people are often odious fucking cretins. Thankfully, the atmosphere on the site when we were there was one of quiet reflection -as one would normally find at a war grave or cenotaph- and we found the audioguide and headphones isolate you and your thoughts quite effectively.

The central stupa houses hundred of human skulls recovered from the mass graves.  It's an odd contrast of reverent (stupas are built around relics of the respected deceased) but also coldly clinical - the tiers of the display are sorted by age group and forensically colour-coded by the likely cause of death.  I think it's walking a very fine line between striking memorial and ghoulish spectacle, but I am culturally alien to here and so my opinion counts little.  Chan was bothered by the encouragement to take photos and the lack of any mention of consultation with affected families.  

The other half of this particularly grim tour takes you back into town, into the school that was turned into S21: the notorious prison and torture center.  From what I had read previously, I expected a ghoulish London Dungeon-type exhibit showcasing goreand torture methodology.  It wasn't really like that.  The ground-level rooms are largely empty, except for an iron bed frame and a photo on the wall, each showing one of the last 14 victims of the facility, who were hastily murdered when the town was being liberated by the combined Vietnamese-Cambodian rebel forces. 

The upper levels have exhibits detailing the murderous policies and privations of the Khmer Rouge, with a special exhibition on the forced marriages organised by the regime.  Men and women were paired off by committee and forced into relationships against their will. If they failed to act the correct part, they ran the risk of being taken away for tortured re-education.

One of the particularly shocking facts was the complicity of some in the west  -particularly a delegation from Sweden- who came to observe the country during the height of the regime, saw the state of things and then went away to write a completely false rosy report for the rest of the world. Because no other information left the country, the UN would only recognise Cambodian representatives from the Khmer Rouge for twelve years after they were ousted.

The translation isn't wrong - the KR had a bizarre vernacular which made the sentences sound like that in Khmer.

I've read that Cambodians don't normally speak of the Khmer Rouge: they deal with things by burying them down deep and trying not to think of them.  The more pragmatic among them (adopting a rather Buddhist attitude) accept it as a thing that happened that cannot now be undone.  What this does to a national psyche, I cannot imagine. The commentary at the killing fields implores the listener to learn their lesson, and that of the genocides in the USSR, China, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Chile and of the native Americans.  I take his point, but I wonder what lesson they've taken from the ordeal, when so many of them were involved from both sides and yet none of them speak of it to the younger generations.

Evidently the evening constitutional consists of walking/jogging around the national monuments every evening.  It is possible, however, that they were just trapped like us by the constant traffic and couldn't cross the road to escape.

Ending on an up-note:  the city really grew on us.  The whole place is a glorious mess, but it's getting better.  I was reading the other day about the chap who took over the dirty and dysfunctional water utility service and turned it around.  He sacked all the lazy and corrupt staff, improved sanitation and piping, modernised the payment system such that money actually appeared and almost got shot for his trouble by an army officer who was irked because he received an actual bill.

We will be coming back to Cambodia in about a week, but we're popping over to Laos first.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Kambodscha ist korrupt und chaotisch. Die Auswirkungen des Völkermords der Roten Khmer sind heute offensichtlich. Die Museen sind stark und störend, sondern auch informativ. Trotz der Probleme, gefällt uns die Stadt von Phnom Penh und wir hoffen, dass es bald verbessert.

Pantanal

Ok, this one is pretty cool. I’ll do the commentary first and then dump all the best photos at the end.  So skip there if you want to show absolute contempt  for my journalistic efforts. I’ll respect you more for it.

We took a flight to Cuiabá, a place tourists generally only go to to visit the Pantanal, which It is a vast tropical wetland area in Brazil and is notable for it’s incredible biodiversity including jaguar, puma, caiman, macaws and capybara, to name a couple.  Oh and it’s 80% submerged for half the year and filled with piranhas.  Personally I’d never heard of the place until Chan saw an article about it in a magazine a while back.  Here’s an image I borrowed from Wiki:

We booked a tour with Joel at Ecoverde after reading around, as he is in Fodors, Lonely planet et al and makes a point of organising small tours of 2-8 and has a reputation for being a good egg.  Our guide, Djalma (you can check out his photos here) had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the local flora and fauna, be it behaviour, habitat, morphology, evolution, scent, scat or even just the best way to provoke an otter into fighting you.  More on this last in a minute.

Shown here trying to see if I’ll eat some random plant he’d just found, as you get your laughs where you can find them in the bush.

After we were picked up from our hotel, we joined the rest of our party: a Swiss bloke and a German couple.  So there was an opportunity to practise mein Deutsch. I had to try and describe an armadillo to them later on.  Take a memo: it’s either Gurtelteir (belt beast), or –my favourite- Panzerschwein (tank pig).

The tour was 4 days/3nights and involved us staying at two lodges at either end of the Transpantaneira highway between Poconé and Porto Jofre.  It’s 147 km of dirt road and 122 wooden bridges, some of which were in a decent state of repair.  Some weren’t there at all.  We travelled in our ‘safari truck’ which consists of some benches welded onto the back of a pickup.

It did make for a good view, and I have spare vertebrae anyhow.  We drove to our first lodge, which was on a working fazenda, where we took a ride about the local countryside by horseback.  I have never before ridden a horse and my bottom is more or less recovered now, a week later.

 
Born in the saddle, these two

I think, after 3 hours(!), that my horse and I had developed a relationship of mutual respect and affection.  That’s what I took the perpetual bit-chomping and ankle-nipping to mean.  He also made a point of not drinking water when I led him to it.  Such a joker.

“Listen, I’ve got a job to do and I’m gonna do it, but if you look at me crosseyed I will fuck your shit right up.”

We came back from that, went out trekking in the bush, saw some bits and bobs and Chan got bitten by fire ants. They have a special tree they live in with hollow branches.  They all emerge when you disturb it to fight you off – which was interesting and horrifying at the same time.

The following morning we got up at shit o’clock to go looking in the woods again.

Spot the ninjas

We spotted some capuchin monkeys, or they spotted us, I’m not sure which.

A bit later, we jumped in the boneshaker and got back on the Transpantaneira.  Even though the name implies that the road crosses the entire flood plain, because it’s Brazilian it actually stops in Porto Jofre, which is only about halfway across.  This is a good thing as the completed road would’ve knackered the drainage pattern and messed everything up. So what they’ve ended up with, with this half-arsed road to nowhere,  is one of the great wildlife-viewing areas of the world. Ditches on either side of the roadbed have become favourite feeding grounds for kingfishers, capybara, egrets, jabiru storks, giant river otters, and caiman.  You absolutely cannot move for caiman.

These guys only eat fish and occasionally each other.  So we discovered it wasn’t unusual to find them chillin’ with the capybara.

At some point Djalma gave us the ‘managing expectations’ speech in that, while there are a ton of animals in the Pantanal, nothing is guaranteed.  Everyone’s here to see Jaguar, but there’s a good chance they won’t.  They’re not scared of us, but you don’t get to be a successful apex predator if your food can see you.  The ‘bonus’ list of things to spot were: jaguar, giant anteaters, giant armadillos, tapir, giant otters and puma.  But today was Chantelle’s birthday so we kept them peeled.

The first really cool thing we saw was a family of 30 or so capybara crossing the road.   They have the ‘don’t give a shit’ look nailed, by the way.

“We’re crossin’ here, bitches”

The bridges on this road are something else. When we were there there was only a week or so left before the wet season started and the use of the diversion tracks around the most battered bridges becomes not an option.  A good 20% of the bridges were a bit of an adventure.  Here’s our driver and Djalma doing a bit of ad-hoc maintenance:

“This plank’ll do; the truck can’t weigh more than 3 tons”

Some were more of an obstacle.

This route we’re taking here will be underwater in about a week.

Anyhow, we saw a family of storks in their nest, with junior trying to figure out this flying thing.

Then, as it was starting to get dark, Djalma noticed some giant otters in the distance.  He got out and started to call to them.  Evidently the haste with which they came to see us was not due to their inherent friendliness so much as it was to give us a kicking and see us on our way.  He was making the noise of another otter calling, and they are particularly territorial. Take a look.  I particularly like the raspberries they blow when they realise we ain’t all that.   The occasional jerkiness is me swatting away mosquitoes the size of albatrosses.

“Go on; fuck off!”

Unreal.

Very eventually,  we made it to our other lodge in Porto Jofre.  When I tried the taps in the bathroom and the water came out brown, I assumed rusty pipes or something.  But no, that was pumped straight from the river, so the showers resulted in a different definition of ‘clean’. The electricity we had came by way of a generator so was switched off in the afternoon.  In both lodges the food was simple but good, and there was always cheap Skol beer available (not that Skol, they might not have clean tap water but they’re not savages).

It did look a bit like an internment camp.

We were here to make use of the river, as many animals come to the river to drink, eat or find their prey eating and drinking.

There’s probably a dodo or something out of frame on the right.

We were on the water for about an hour when we saw the tell-tale signs of something interesting:  a load of other boats clustered with cameras out and trained on something on the bank.  I heard them before I saw them: a roar that called to the caveman in me to get the fuck right out of Dodge.  It was only a pair of jaguars! The guides conferred and we ascertained that this pair had been in an altercation with another two and had come off somewhat second.   They emerged from the grass and the male was obviously limping, but looked like he was walking it off.

O .  M  .  F  . G

We sailed around for a bit, found some black howler monkeys, who, like the black bear, aren’t always black. Because fuck convention. 

We sailed a bit more and…found another Jaguar.  This one was a female, hunting alone.

“Shhh, I’m huntin’ wabbits.  heheheheh”

Okey doke.  Doing ok for jaguar so far.  We turned around, sailed for a bit, and then found the original pair sleeping it off. They are cats, after all.

 
“You should’ve seen the other guy”.  “That’s nice, dear”

We sailed around for a bit more, finding a horde of Capybara. These are supposed to be a bit tricky to find too, by the way.

Just to make an absolute mockery of how hard these guys are to find, after lunch we found another female jaguar stalking the water’s edge, looking for prey. Djalma pointed out that you could tell she had a cub somewhere by the swollen teats.  Mums in the audience will sympathise, no doubt.

 

Capybara are cute, but Chan noticed one on its own downstream, and never has so much ill-fortune been projected onto a giant rodent.  Fortunately for him and unfortunately for our photo-op, she circled back around to her cub, who was nearby somewhere. The capybara did the clever thing.

“Fuuuuck Thiiiiis!”

We made our way back up-river and there was another goddamn jaguar.  By this point I’m convinced they’re as common as pigeons.  He was moving around in the reeds when we got there and while we were all sat there like lemons, waiting for him to emerge, we noticed he was up on a ridgeline to our right, watching us indifferently.

“What are you and how do you taste?”

Then he went for a wander:

So that wrapped the day up.  We got up at 5am the following morning we went for a last drive in the dark, where we saw a local owl and then briefly saw a tapir but it was scared off by the Swiss bloke shouting.  After breakfast we went for a final walkabout. It’d been quiet until we were almost done, when we went around a corner and saw this chap:

  

We thought at first it was a jaguar cub, but it turns out it was an ocelot.  It’ll do.

So we got back on the truck and made our long, long way back.  Just as we were rocking up in Poconé for our change of ride, the rainy season happened in our faces.  The streets changed from bone dry to inundated in 5 minutes.  It was bizarre.

 

It was an adventure, to be sure.  And we saw the big puddy tats.

Here’s the photo splurge for the tl;dr crowd: