Bloody Computers

Apologies for the length of time it's taken to write this up, you can blame it on perpetually unreliable computers. In addition to not being able to upload photos for a while, I wrote a lot of text earlier and lost the lot when the connection went down. If I'm not careful this blog will just turn into a picture of me sitting in front of a computer screen and swearing loudly - I needn't have left home to do that. To stop this turning into a never ending chore I've just decided to whack up a few photos while I've got the chance somewhere else - here they are :

Back to the throng of Bangkok for a rest and a chance to decompress after being in Pa Do Tha and teaching the kids. We've spent so much time here now that it sort of feels like a second home when coming back to it now. We arrived to scenes of two significant events - the build up to the World Cup (mercifully downplayed here - I'm certainly glad I was out of the country for the inevitable blanket coverage at home), but more importantly in the eyes of your average Thai, the King's 60th anniversary of being on the throne. Anyone who has been to Thailand will have an idea of the reverance with which the King is held, the scenes locally were utter madness in any direction.


The streets bulged with hundreds of people everywhere wearing yellow shirts bearing slogans such as "We Love The King" - I can't see this happening at home with our own royal family. The celebrations lasted for around four days, and the coverage on television even had the power to displace the World Cup, much to the chagrin of the assembled England fans, ho ho ho.






My sister Kate and her boyfriend Tim arrived on the tail end of this, and we spent an idyllic couple of weeks lounging around on beaches with them and stuffing ourselves stupid with grub. It was an absoloute joy to see them both as they arrived in Bangkok airport, and their faces were a total hoot when they saw that we'd come out to meet them !







The first stop on the tourist trail was the floating market, where hundreds of rickety looking canoes barge their way around the waterways and tenacious merchants literally grab potential customers alongside with hooked rods.










The best thing I can say about it was that it was quite photogenic (rivalling Angkor Wat in terms of digital cameras per square metre), very very geared towards selling tat to tourists. I don't know what I was really expecting, I had this naive notion that there might be lots of locals buying their daily essentials, not the deluge of trinkets and crap that was actually on sale.

Continuing a vaguely nautical theme we decided to head off to some of Thailand's oft acclaimed islands. The first stop was Ko Phi Phi, near the top of the Andaman coast (on the left hand side of Thailand's 'tail) in the Krabi province, not that far from Phuket. Phi Phi is in fact a pair of islands, the developed Phi Phi Don and Phi Phi Lee - which has no permanant guesthouses but plenty of visitors by boat (and also the place where the film The Beach was filmed, obviously tourism rocketed in the area after this came out, leading to mass and unmanaged guesthouse developments).


Phi Phi was one of the worst hit areas in the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004 - the village of Ton Sai sits in the middle of the sand isthmus between the two main areas of the island. Buildings and lives were devastated as two huge waves from both sides of the isthmus met in the middle at around 10am on 26th December 2004. Evidence of the rebuilding effort is everywhere, and it's a tribute to the efforts of the people here that the place is almost completely back up and running.





A longtail boat (so called because a spindly prop dips straight into the water from a large four stroke petrol engine) - a familiar site around the islands, acting as taxis and small fishing crafts.








They are pretty quick as there is nothing to them, but they're very affected by weight distribution - we four landlubbers were frequently told to stay in the middle as the boat was tipping precariously to one side. He needn't have worried - all Asker siblings have a well developed sense of balance due to the "Repel Boarders" technique of displacing others from sofas in the living room. Avast !





Phi Phi Lee, at the beach where er, The Beach was filmed. I hope you enjoy the view, it cost us 200 baht a throw to step foot on the sand. Paying to go on a beach, eh ? Ppphhp.











I leapt at the chance to go snorkelling - my only previous experience being a few half arsed attempts in Kavos (where there really wasn't that much to see apart from discarded fag-ends). Kate and Tim were kind enough to pay for a day's snorkelling as a present for my birthday, with a handy DVD thrown in as a souvenir. On this you can observe not only the beauty of the near-depths but also Dan acting like some sort of barbarian nincompoop by trying to crack open a coconut husk on a rock - repeatedly and without success.

I had originally intended to go on an extended SCUBA diving trip whilst on the islands, as Thailand's many islands have some of the best dive sites in the world, and it's damn cheap to get PADI certification to boot. It has long been an ambition of mine to get into this properly - I had tried it before on an introductory lesson and loved the feeling of being able to move in three dimensions and investigate things at my leisure. My plans for this were scuppered a few years back when I had a bit of bother with one of my lungs, which meant an immediate end to my SCUBA designs. Alas I was to be told on Phi Phi that I would probably never be able to go diving with SCUBA equipment, as a previous problem of this sort would mean that nobody in their right mind would sign me off, much less take responsibility for it whilst under the water. A huge disappointment, but we had already gone snorkelling by this point, which was immensely enjoyable and satisfied some of my desire to see what was lying below the waves.


On our way to the second day's subaquatic antics - the sights this time were truly stunning, and by this time we'd got the hang of diving down towards the coral (taking care not to disturb it with hands or the fins). The visibility was particularly good, and the blues and crimsons of the fish were vivid - looking at the coral below was like something from another planet. One advantage of snorkelling of SCUBAing is that you are much more maneuverable, and more able to get alongside the fish as they swarm and idle around. A good trick is to get up close, then stop completely still - they seem to forget you're there - the sunlight glints and sparkles from hundreds of silver bodies centimetres from the face mask, and an eel flitted between my fingers.


Before Kate and Tim arrived, Dan and I had been dining intermittently at a superb vegetarian restaurant hidden away in the backstreets of Banglamphu, and we noted with interest that they offered classes to learn how to cook up to ten of their dishes. Kate and Tim also expressed an interest, so it was courtesy of Mai Kaidee (left, at the market) that we found ourselves learning how to cook up a variety of top quality nosh. Staying in Pa Do Tha had really brought home how easy it is to eat well with fresh ingredients and a minimum amount of fuss, against the backdrop of seeing how those ingredients are grown and harvested. I have also just finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond - a brief history of the last 13,000 years which argues that advanced civilisation, invention and resistance to disease became possible through the rise of sedentary farming - groups of people with a stable and rich source of food are able to support a more diverse type of society when the majority of people do not have to directly hunt or gather their own food supply (and as a side effect are able to develop arms and go and impose their will on weaker societies - oh well). All of this got me thinking about my own diet and eating habits - my cullinery cock-ups at home are famously bad, though the floor has often been well fed. When living away from home as I have done for the past couple of years, it's no secret that left to my own devices I tend towards convenience (and thus processed crap, pretty far removed from the wholesome stuff on the hills). It turns out that this does not have to be the case ! Eating well apparantly can be quite easy (and more importantly, quick). Mai certainly seems to think so - she has been cooking vegetarian food around Bangkok since 1988, and through sheer hard work now has three remarkably busy restaurants open in the area around Banglamphu. She has plans to open another internationally, perhaps in London, and her guest book is chock full of praise from people all over the world. She is notable also for popularizing the use of brown rice - unprocessed rice which apart from being extremely nutritious is also (in my opinion) nicer than bland old white rice. Traditionally it was seen as low grade rice, used to feed prisoners or dogs, but they may have been getting the better deal all those years.


Spring Roll skins being made - just water, flour and salt.
















Obviously being a purely vegetarian course this was of most practical use to Dan, but the recipes themselves looked easy enough to modify to cater for a carniverous diet too. I'm fairly indifferent as to whether a meal includes meat or not - much of the time when I'm cooking at home I can't be bothered using fish or chicken as it's too much hassle (and when you're talking about my cooking skills, leaving it out altogether is a lot safer). During the course of the morning, we alternated grub-spoiling responsibilities for the following :

• Tom Yan Soup
• Isaan
• Fried Veg with Ginger / Cashew Nuts
• Pad Thai, a favourite of street vendors on the Kao San road
• Peanut Sauce
• Spring Rolls - unfried and all the nicer for it
• Massaman Curry
• Green Thai Curry
• Pumpkin Hummus
• Green Papaya Salad

All of the food takes literally a few minutes to cook, in a single wok directly over a gas cannister. The important part is obviously the preparation - I had a go at cooking the peanut sauce and pumpkin hummus, they didn't turn out that badly even if I do say so myself. Which I do.

Mai frequently burst into song during the proceedings, warbling on with a ditty called the "Sap Cooking Song". I think the lyrics translate as something like "Yum yum yum yum yuuuuumm !". Not inappropriate at all - every one of the leguminous feasts were tasty, but we were given a bit of a treat with the dessert - brown rice and mango sticky pudding. It were grand.

Other Photos

Some of the other photos ...

Hilariously, this is me going for a hike with a hangover and looking happy about it. Happy in the same way that when you're so uncomfortable all you can do is laugh. Tee hee hee ! Gopp made me a bamboo walking stick because I was lagging behind so much.











The Art Of War says "Know The Enemy" ... I think I got to know ours quite well. Note the cheeky expressions ... listen lads, I know that that you'd prefer to muck around and talk to your mates than pay attention in class because, well, having fun is a lot better than not having fun. I also know that you think you won't get caught ... I know this because I was wearing the same expression twenty years ago, and I can safely say that Not Getting Caught is a skill and an artform (not one I ever perfected either). Frequently when teaching, the phrase "herding cats" leapt to mind.



And if you think using allusions to warfare is a bit steep, chew on this : on the last day, the kids had somehow procured projectile weaponry (made of bamboo of course). I am very glad that we left before an arms race could develop. Still, they were good enough to let me have a go, and with the patronizing hubris displayed by so many adults towards the young, I thought I'd show them how it's done ... and cocked it up, naturally.






Our guides at the home stay (l-r) : Gopp, So La, Su Pat, Oh










Bamboo is used for everything - Su Pat grabbed a small shoot as he wasn't carrying anything else at the time












Our co-workers on the hills



























Break time on the hills













Karen girl holding a recently shed python skin


















Two Ndong Por (The Old Man) - a bit of a dude all round.


















The posh new kitchen


















One of the many hounds that prowled the village. This one was our favourite - he had a face not unlike the bear in Gentle Ben. Here he is lazing around under the solar panels.
















Before the shower got installed at the new house, this was where we took our baths and washed our clothes. Very refreshing ! Though we had to share it with ...











... the water buffalo. Dan allayed my concerns after seeing one of them take a dump in the river upstream from us. "If one's done it, a thousand have !" - dunno how this makes it better, but strangely it did.









Sunset in the village



















Mystery Fruit

Teaching

The first session of teaching got off to an admittedly ropey start - I had no idea what sort of standard of English the kids (seven in total, age 7-10) were at - my attempts to go over numbers and colours were met with blank stares - and the concept of 'classes' seemed to be at best academic (ho ho). There was regular migration between rooms in spates of bored osmosis. After a bit of re-planning on the hop, the after lunch session got slowly better as I spent the rest of the day going over the alphabet, determining just how much they knew and the range of abilities within the classroom. Dan had it a bit easier with the older kids, but it was always going to be a learning process for myself as well as the students. The weekend provided some needed space to think things through and come up with a proper plan. And also to think about how I would present myself when teaching - a fair amount of armchair psychology comes into play here, and my natural approach to teaching would to basically be as nice and friendly as possible (though maintaining an essential distance between myself and the students). They are young children after all, and I personally always enjoyed learning more (and as a result made more of an effort) when I genuinely liked the person who was teaching. I don't think there's anything wrong with being a bit jokey on occasion - I believe this has the side benefit that it's easier to let them know when they're properly misbehaving as a change in expression or a slightly raised voice has much more of an effect than if you're constantly blowing off steam and shouting. I remember certain teachers being like this, and when they got properly angry, the reprimands were nothing out of the ordinary. Any teaching professionals reading this will probably be rolling their eyes or thumping the desk in incredulity, but it's what worked for me.

Next week things improved gradually. I'd had time to reflect and plan out a rough sort of lesson plan, and more importantly, make some guesses on the abilities of the students. The numbers in the class varied from hour to hour, but there were five kids who turned up every time and a few who turned up sometimes and just arsed about. I think the school is also used almost as a sort of creche so the children have somewhere to go while the rest of the family works in the field, so you can't get too disheartened if some of them don't seem bothered about being there. Over the course of the week I would teach various concepts and nouns, try different approaches and see what held their attention - it helps to have a sort of objective or goal as to what needs to be achieved. I decided it would be best to concentrate on the basics, revisiting things until they stuck as it was obviously impossible to teach everything in a couple of weeks. The problem is that kids (obviously) get bored with doing the same thing all the time, and concentration spans tend to go in phases. The morning and afternoon sessions were two hours long with a short toilet break in the middle (I must stress this was not our choice, and we asked whether it would be better to have shorter lessons - though it's not really up to us to start restructuring things in the school). To their credit the kids concentrated on things for a lot longer than I'm sometimes able to.

There were certain situations, integral to the day of any teacher, that I was not looking forward to. For example, I wasn't sure what I would do if one of my class started seriously misbehaving, or if they were upset about something. There was an incident concerning the second with a young girl named Sugaiya one day seemed very withdrawn and not really concerned about what was going on around her. I initially tried to involve her with the class activity of matching different cases in the alphabet, but I could tell she didn't want any part of it. I decided that involving her any more in the group work would be unkind, as she seemed on the verge of tears and making her stand in front of her classmates umming and erring about some incomprehensible alphabet would push her over the edge. I also didn't think that involving the main teacher would be a great idea as I had a feeling the answer would come as a tap on the head and an order to pay attention (sure enough that's exactly what did happen later). There's a limit to how much you can comfort someone if you can't speak their language, let alone someone so young (and also there's the question of what sort of physical contact is acceptable here - is even putting an arm around someone considered inappropriate ? I suspect it would be less of a deal than in England, but you never know). So the best I could do was let Dan lead the teaching while I sat with her and offered a tissue, probably just another adult talking some nonsense language.

There were good days and bad of course - it was hard sometimes when the children really didn't want to be taught, but I think overall it was a very positive experience, especially towards the end when Dan and I took the classes together. It took a few days to really work out that the trick was to get the students to do most of the work, not to just stand there talking (which really didn't achieve much) - explain a bit, get them to write it down and practice hand writing while the sun streams in through the window. You also have to maintain a sense of humour and give them a bit of cheek back occasionally, if only to let them know that you're a human being as well. Towards the end Dan and I were working on perfecting the art of doing boring essentials when they were in the mood to learn, judging when the kids were flagging and then changing to something fun to bring them back round. Anything that involves drawing seems to be a very good way of getting them to work (which, frustratingly, seems to translate as "repeat what I say" or "write this down" - very hard to get them to do anything different to this if you can't speak their language). It also constantly threw me the way you could teach something one day, with no discernible results, only to have the kids repeat it flawlessly the next day (it constantly made me smile hearing things repeated back in an exaggerated form of my own accent, especially the vowels of certain words - they could have easily passed for East Berkshirians).

I tried to remember what it was like when I was at school at that age (6-10). I seem to remember not really being all that into it and mostly being a cheeky sod to my teachers - well the sandal's on the other foot now alright. The kids did occasionally play up, and shamefully I didn't always find it easy to discipline them ... a case in point : one child got up from his seat, marched up to the window and spat out of it - I was on the verge of reprimanding him for his 'outrageous' behaviour (inverted commas because it's quite common behaviour for adults in the street in certain parts of the world). He then spun round, cracked me the biggest grin I've ever seen, saluted, and marched military-fashion back to the bench. I gave him a very stern look whilst biting my bottom lip to stop the huge laugh that was about to come out. I also found it funny the way kids are basically the same wherever you go - there's little influence from the outside world, yet classrooms are instinctively filled with paper planes, chinese burns, piss-takings on the drawing abilities of one's peers and the old trick of balancing a pencil on the upper lip to look like a moustache. I was disproportionally amused to see one of the girls copying down a picture of the sun and automatically adding a big smily face to it. And the word 'Apple' seems to be very popular (a staple of learning English it seems), the kids seem fond of shouting it as we walked around outside of school. I drew 'Two Red Apples' on the board and there was almost a riot, as was the case when I gave out some coloured pens (which some of the girls then used to colour their nails instead of working). I spent the rest of the day whistling the 70s funk theme tune to the old series of Grange Hill - the one where it shows a comic strip with someone swimming and a sausage on the end of a fork. Winner.

Ah yes, this is a school photograph all right. All the elements are there : bored expressions, one kid looking the wrong way, the joker of the piece pulling a silly face. Right, that's it ! I'm not taking another !

The Songthaew Remains The Same

First off, congratulations to Chris and Beckie who have just got engaged - very pleased for you both !!

So it was on a Wednesday evening a couple of weeks ago that we set off for Pa Do Tha, a village in Thailand's Tak Province, on the Myanmar border inhabited by members of the Karen hill tribe. A leapfrog journey over 24 hours from Bangkok to Mae Sot, Mae Sot to Umphang and Umphang to Po Da Tha. Across rolling hills of thick green jungle in the back of a Song Thaew (literally "Two Benches" - a converted pick up truck, fast becoming my favourite mode of transport), gazing at the breathtaking scenery while the wind buffered my face. Along the 1200-odd billious twists of the Mae Sot-Umphang road and into the sort of terrain SUV adverts use for location (and most drivers of said vehicles never see). Loaded up with items such as aluminium sheeting, vast amounts of water and vegetables and a huge gas tank, ready for whatever greeted us at the other end. I shall recount the experiences we had with teaching in a later post, as this will simply get too long to read otherwise, here's all the other tomfoolery we got up to :

On arrival at the village, it was clear that they weren't exaggerating on the Go Differently website - this was very much a working, rural area - people, dogs and livestock mingle easily with each other, in and around the houses and the air is constantly abuzz with the sounds of insects in the undergrowth and in the air. 'Check your boots before putting them on' time. I knew from the time of sending the email confirming our times that this was going to be a test of my expectations of comfort, and an exercise in pushing the boundaries of them, but it's a world apart from sitting in an air-conditioned internet cafe when you have to put your money where your mouth is. I had concerns about several things when I arrived, the product of preparatory imagination, and it's interesting now to look back and see how quickly those were dissipated and then replaced by others in the first few days of the stay. For example, the availability of fresh drinking water, quality of food, being around livestock (particularly chickens) and the political situation so close to the Myanmar border (I believe some of the hilltribes had in the past been displaced by the neighbouring military).

The first evening we broke the ice with some of our guides and people in the villages by sharing some of the local moonshine and passing around photos of my own village (of sorts) and family. I think the booze is fermented using rice, and it does indeed taste a bit like Sake - with the difference that you never know just how strong it's going to be (I initially thought it was quite weak - an opinion I quickly revised). And yes, I do know that it's usually Bloody Stupid drinking homebrewed spirits, but all the others were doing it, and they called it "Happy Water", so I knew it was alright. The food was nothing to worry about either, and I'd even go so far as describing it as the best we've had on the trip so far. All done by hand (well, machete) over a wood fire over a few hours, and in the main vegetarian using 95% lcoal produce grown on the hills. Delicious. Then off to bed, which turned out to be a mat on the wood floor of the hut, which despite technically being under a roof was more or less outside. Directly above the chickens rattling about and the bellowed gruntings of the pig sty next door, fireflies dancing and flickering their arpeggiated constellations in the pitch darkness.

Life in the village was for the most part quite simple, the whole society being built around getting up at daybreak for breakfast, going out to work on the hills (or going to school) until evening, then coming home and sleeping. There are about 40 houses, one for each family. The houses are made almost entirely from locally sourced materials, mostly using bamboo (which is also used for such things such as fences, dog bowls, nail trays for carpentry and coffee cups). The families are on the whole quite large by Western standards - I asked some of the children how many siblings they had, and the average was about five or six (though my parents both come from families not much smaller than this). The society is very much a collaborative one, but it occurred to me that you would get far less specialization, and more emphasis on everyone knowing how to do things for themselves (e.g. ability to repair a motorbike, cultivate crops and cook properly with no concept that you do one or the other). Though the level of technology is at a very basic level, there are a few concessions to the march of technology in the wider world - some government provided solar panels supply each house with small amounts of electricity, stored up in car batteries and used with a single flourescent light in the evenings. The hut we stayed in for the first few days even had a handy inverter fixed on the wall which meant you could charge your mobile phone up from the wall socket - followed by a brisk 20 minute hike up the hill for network reception. We asked our guide, Su Pat, how long this had been in place. He said about a year and the effects, not all of them positive, were felt almost straight away. For example, the flourescent lights attract a much higher number of bugs and biting insects in the evening, and the opportunity for people to watch films and listen to music late into the night mean that getting up for farming gets harder and so the quality of work decreases. Transport between villages and around the hills is either by foot or motorbike - the odd 4x4 makes an appearance, but these are by no means ubiquitous. I think if there was a sudden lack of oil and fuel it would have a noitceable effect, but life could continue without that much difficulty.

From my crude observations I would guess that all the agricultural work in the area is, unsurprisingly, done by hand - I saw only a few tractors, which seemed to be used for transporting people rather than used on the land itself. Sowing the corn (which we later 'helped' with) consisted of groups of Karen villagers moving in lines up the hill, clutching parasols for shelter from the sun. Each group appoints someone to hoe out the lines of holes whilst the others threw in seeds and food, stamping it in by foot. As manual labour goes, this perhaps isn't the most strenous, but keeping it up in the fierce mid day sun and into the evening takes a lot of stamina. And water (which we drank by the litre, yet strangely the locals didn't seem all that bothered about). We joined in with this for a couple of days over the weekends, and they got to practice speaking English with us (the secret to making the day pass quickly is to natter away to your neighbour a lot). Umphang Kee seemed like a nice enough place - prettier than Po Da Tha, perhaps a bit more developed (bigger school, next to a huge grid of solar panels on the outskirts).

The atmosphere in general was very informal, in the village, school and the wider area, and it took a few days for us to adjust to this. Initially it could sometimes be frustrating to arrange something and have it not happen, but after a few days we worked that that's just the way things work around here, and everyone knows what the deal is. I think this a very pleasant way of doing things, unrushed and uncomplicated - people get up when it's light, go to bed when it's dark, eat when they're hungry. Everyone knows each other, and is comfortable with each other's company, so no offence is taken when someone doesn't turn up for whatever reason, or they just turn up on the doorstep for an impromptu English lesson. Decision making for the village as a whole is performed by a meeting with a representative (I would guess the eldest man) from each house having a say. The atmosphere in small groups of people is very, very easy going - though I obviously couldn't pick up on everything that was going on, it seemed there was none of the competitiveness or points scoring that you get in conversations at home sometimes. I don't know how often people seriously fall out with each other, or how they work things out afterwards (you can't just disappear or avoid them after all) - I would suppose that you just make sure that you don't make trouble for yourself in the first place. I appreciated the outlook that comes with people that are so comfortable around each other that there are often long periods of unawkward silence, with no need to speak for the sake of it, or just pointing and something and smiling. People say hello and smile just as a matter of course as you walk around the village - I don't know if this is the same in rural areas at home, but it made a welcome change from a population refusing to acknowledge each other. A world away from surly restaurant owners of Bangkok, or the reserved insularity of the Tube at home.

There was no shortage of insects in the area - despite preparing for this, covering myself in DEET and sleeping in trousers and long sleeved shirts under a net, I think I must have been bitten close to a hundred times during the stay. My arms looked like a pair of gherkins, dyed pink. When the work had finished on the house near the school, we moved over there to give the Old Man his house back, and discovered that we shared our residence with an army of frogs. The amphibious swines croaked and bellowed through the nights at a ridiculous volume (comparable, say, to a car alarm going off in the next street). It sounded very much like an orchestra of guiros (the fish shaped percussion instrument that, coincidentally, features heavily on the Grange Hill theme), and not completely unlike the belching competition the kids had in the morning. The frogs kept this up for a few nights, then fell strangely silent when three dogs moved in under the house ...

If you happen to get up in the middle of the night, and the sky is free of clouds, you can see the night stars more clearly than anywhere I've ever been before. The lack of any sort of light pollution or smog means you can view the refracted histories of the galaxy's raging gas giants unspoiled. Strings of photons, bending around the gravity of huge unseen masses, millions of years out of date. Spanning the sort of distances expressed by numbers so ridiculously large that, when printed or written down, cease to have any real meaning. Numbers so gigantic that when comprehension comes it brings with it a special sort of vertigo, bruising the mind and menacing the soul. Marathons of nuclear fusion, forging the heavier elements and releasing the light required for Life, yet only by the merest fraction of chance actually reaching the only known place that Life does exist. So they might be ascribed some meaning by being observed ... by a 27 year old bloke who's other senses have just told him that he's standing in a load of cow shit. How humbling astronomy is !

Early to bed, Early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. After two weeks extensive research of this theory, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that it is wholly untrue. However, I do think there may have been some subtle health benefits to all this - the food was definitely the best quality we've had on the whole trip (and delicious because of it's simplicity), and the clean air was a relief from the pollution of the cities. Er, apart from the wood fire lit under the hut to drive away insects. Towards the end of the stay I started to wonder how well I would fare if I had to live in an environment like this for an extended period, and how unfounded some of my initial concerns had been. There were still a few things that irritated me e.g. insect bites, no real amounts of privacy, no independance of meal times, but I realised that I had adapted to other things surprisingly quickly e.g. washing in the river, living in close contact with animals etc. My copy of National Geographic had a couple of appropriate articles which got me thinking as well. One of them was an assessment on the burgeoning problem of allergies in the increasing sterility of the developed world, and how severe allergic reactions are almost unheard of in rural communities such as this - the proximity to livestock giving young immune systems a vital kickstart, and perhaps develops them more overall.

The first weekend we were given the opportunity to bump our way along the Umphang river with the aim of eventually ending up at the Te Lor Su waterfall.The mud from the farms runs off into the river after the monsoon rains, merging slowly with the river and leading to a 70s two-tone effect for a time. The rich brown water glistened in the sun and churned in the eddies and vortices - it looked just the bit in Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory (the one made in 1971) where they visit the chocolate river and Augustus Gloop goes up the pipe. Augustus ! Save some for later !


Over rocks and under waterfalls in an inflatable dinghy, drinking cold lager at ten in the morning - this is my sort of outdoor activity. We stopped halfway at the hot springs so Dan could disgrace himself by getting covered in mud.









On to a trek through the jungle to the Te La Su waterfall, Asia's largest and 6th in the world. An incredible sight.











300m of brilliant white cascading water over limestone crags, and the best shower in the area.

















On the way back through the next day, we stopped to pick up some supplies and a load of guitars - playing some badly rendered one-handed blues in the back of a pick up and holding on to the roof with the other is the new way to travel. On arrival it was discovered that the third fret of one of the guitars was missing - back home most people would either pay for a shop repair or discard it as rubbish - here they just get out the machetes and carve a new one from the firewood - same applies for making plectrums from water bottles. After lunch we went up into the jungle on the hills to cut bamboo for the repairs on the house near the school. Um looked distinctly nervous and offered a redundant "Be Careful !" as he set us loose with a load of machetes. I enjoyed myself immensely, stalking through the trees looking for suitable shoots to hack down, while the insects took chunks out of me, glasses sliding off the nose, clambering up and down the preposterous gradient. In the end the humidity and insects proved too much and we decided to bundle up the spoils and make our way down the hill, hurling the 6-10 foot shoots down as we went. I drank a litre of water straight off as Su Pat and the others cut them to size.

They did significantly better than us ...














Friday the 2nd was my birthday, marking 27 years of confused bumbling about and talking rubbish. Dan and Su Pat made sure I had a very memorable day, made all the more enjoyable by the fact that I was somewhere that was genuinely interesting (rather that the usual plan of going to dingy pubs in Reading or London). This did not negate the need for booze, however (and given that in coincided with the end of the first week of teaching, I think it was utterly deserved). The only problem was that in order to get hold of some hooligan juice we'd have to hike 7km back to Umphang (foolishly we declined the offer of lifts on the back of motorbikes). It was a nice day for it, and the school had finished an hour early so off we went with grins that stretched from ear to ear. It took rather longer than the hour or so we'd been quoted - and I was beginning to wonder if we'd ever get there, and when we finally arrived the heavens opened and we had to hole up in the internet cafe for a bit (with beer, natch). By the time we'd got round to buying a load of cans for later (plus a few Road Beers, safe in the knowledge that the bags would get lighter as the journey progressed), it was threatening to get dark. It dimly occurred to me that our hosts might be wondering where we'd got to. Sure enough, five minutes into the return our rescue party turned up with concerned looks and motorbikes. So we got a free lift back and a motorbike race to boot, rad. In the evening a lot of people came round for a feast in the hut, and to witness a good luck ceremony for my benefit (conducted by Two Ndong Por, the Old Man that we stayed with on the first few nights) - this involved tying lots of bits of string around my wrists and smearing bits of chicken on my T-Shirt.

I was initially a bit perturbed about all this, thinking it was some sort of voodoo thing, but I noticed later on that a lot of the kids (and some of the adults) had these bands on as well, so I think it was a nice way of making me feel properly part of village life. And it's not every day you get to witness something like this (let alone be the centre of it). The only problem is that they didn't clean the chicken off my jacket and it was covered in red ants in the morning - at least they made a go of it).




The next morning I was greeted by the Mother Of All Hangovers (quelle surprise) and a proposal to hike 10km over to Umphang Kee (the next village). It was hard. Very hard. My cranium moaned the whole way. And our reward when we got there was to go and work on the hills sowing corn for the weekend. Over rickety bamboo bridges. In the blazing sun. With pythons and tarantulas to keep us company. Spleeeeendid !


Gopp found a tarantula in the fields. Fantastic. He kept hold of it all day.


















A sample of the corn used for planting - the pink dye is a sort of insecticide.



















The scene from our front door. Nice. Also the setting that saw the lads saddle up in another beaten up old pick up that wouldn't start properly. Their mission was to go and woo the girl of Su Pat's amorous designs by turning up with a load of Happy Water and guitars. So they bumped their way down the hill, to lots of cheering, expecting it to start so they could zoom off to romantic success. Unfortunately, it broke down immediately, and they all had to get out and push. Gopp and I would have helped them, but it was more enjoyable to just stand there and take the piss, and besides which we were too busy laughing our arses off to move. They did manage to get over to Umphang Kee eventually, but ended up getting far too drunk and the poor girl went off in a huff. Ahhh, people are the same the world over, eh ?

You rotten bastard ! This feathery thug and his ilk woke me up every morning at four. They sound like the Rude Boys of Slough high street, offering bellowed speculations on whether "Matty's just done one". Shut up !













Get a load of people round a fire with some guitars, and it's the best thing in the world. Funny that these lads spent most of their efforts in pursuit of booze, playing guitars and getting all moony over women. Stone The Crows ! That's the same as me ! Who knew ?!

Cheong Ek / S21

A word of warning : some of the text and pictures below are quite distressing, it might be wise for some of my younger relatives to skip this bit.

















From the ancient splendor around Siem Reap we headed down to Phnom Penh. A much more bleak and distressing period of human history revealed itself as we took a visit to two significant sites of the attrocities committed during the period that the Khmer Rouge held power. Between 1974 and 1979, the Cambodian population of seven million was decimated (around half died, mostly through starvation - 1kg of rice was used to feed 400 people - but also in the detention camps and killing fields scattered through the country).

The Communist Party Of Kampuchea (later named the Khmer Rouge) launched a series of insurgencies across Cambodia from 1968 onwards (against the backdrop of the Vietnam war in neighbouring areas and helped by sympathetic North Vietnamese forces, so reducing the ability of the Cambodian army to oppose it). During the 1970 Cambodian Coup Prince Norodom Sihanouk was deposed by General Lon Nol, who assumed emergency powers and founded the Khmer Republic. In the intervening years, the Khmer Rouge organized themselves winning support from people throughout the country, who thought they were for the restoration of Sihanouk (then in exile in Beijing). Backed by Chinese and North Vietnamese power, they made significant gains in territory and support. By 1973, American assistance ended and by 1975 the Lon Nol government was sufficiently weakened for the Khmer Rouge to seize power. On 17th April 1975, under the guidance of Saloth Sar (or 'Pol Pot' - Political Potential) they did exactly this, marching into Phnom Penh. Initially welcomed, within hours people were being ordered to leave their homes, being told that it would take a few days to find 'enemy combatants'. In reality what happened is that a systematic process of relocation was started, to enable restructuring towards a wholly agricultural based communist society. Classification of people was undertaken, dividing those as either suitable for agricultural work, or an 'intellectual' (including students, engineers, doctors, anyone wearing glasses or having 'smooth hands'). The latter were asked to identify themselves so they could be sent back to the cities - in reality all were shipped off for interrogation in places such as Tuol Sleng (commonly known as S21, a prison converted from the Tuol Svay Prey high school in May 1976 and one of 167 prisons).

Roughly translated Tuol Sleng means a poisonous hill, with additional overtones of bearing guilt - a quite sinister combination of words, and something that would give a terrible foreboding to the place before the context is even known. The classrooms of the former school were converted to prison cells, measuring 0.8m x 2m for single prisoners on the ground floor and 8m x 6m on the upper floors for mass detention. The number of staff at S-21 numbered aroun 1,700 of which 54 worked as "Interrogation Units" - some shockingly young, between the ages of 10 and 15. Detainees were subjected to awful and degrading daily routines and punishments, kept fixed in positions in lines by ankle shackles, stripped of clothes and dignity and having to ask permision to urinate or defecate into small iron buckets (receiving a beating if they failed to ask). Bathing happened as infrequently as twice a month, consisting of the prisoners being rounded up and squirted through a window for a short time with water. Needless to say disease and skin rashes were rife, with no chance of medicines for any sort of treatment. Mealtimes were at 8am and 8pm and consisted of a bowl of rice, prisoners were deliberately kept weak to prevent any sort of defiance or suicide attempts (this was clearly a concern for those who ran the place as there were reams of barbed wire around the windows, and prisoners were constantly observed). Their physical deterioration was further compounded by the routine and sickening application of various tortures, not limited to systematic rape, beatings and the use of insects applied directly to the body.

A typical room, still pretty much how it was found on the ground floor. Box used as a toilet, with bar and fastening used to hold prisoner's limbs during interrogation.















View from a window at Tuol Sleng.














20,000 people came through Tuol Sleng, the prison holding around 1,200 - 1,500 at any one time. Imprisonment generally lasted from 2 - 4 months, though significant political prisoners had their misery and terror extended up to seven months. Nearly all ended up in killing fields such as Cheong Ek after interrogation. On their arrival at Tuol Sleng they were photographed, interrogated about the details of their lives so far, stripped of clothes and any possessions before being manacled and placed in cells. The photographs of the prisoners stand side by side with their interrogators (most aged 14-18) in the museum part of the site - the feelings of abject terror shown so clearly their faces as they await the horror of their unknown, immediate future are palpable. Only seven people managed to survive, one of them an artist who's paintings elsewhere in the museum show all too graphically the abhorrent treatment inflicted on himself and others.

Regulations at Tuol Sleng that prisoners had to abide by.


















Walking around a place such as this, which has only been changed slightly in it's conversion to a museum, is a deeply unsettling experience - inevitable comparisons are raised with respect to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, and the accounts of the guards questioned since trot out the same 'excuses' of following orders, not having a choice with a few expressing no guilt whatsoever, being thoroughly dehumanised by their training. However, our guides over the course of the day were quick to point out that the Khmer Rouge concentrated wholly inward on the genocide of their own countrymen, there were very few outsiders to suffer the same fate. Recounting the history of the place was clearly very emotionally hard for our guide, who was one of only 10,000 to escape to Vietnam during these four years. She was seven at the time and lost her father, sister and brother to the Khmer Rouge. How she manages to take people around the museum every day, recounting the attrocities against and murders of people who died, possibly in the same circumstances as her own family, is incomprehensible - she confided that she still cries every day about the past. On the walls of the museum, photos of key members of the Khmer Rouge have been violently vandalised - the photo of Pol Pot has been ripped clean off the wall.

When prisoners had outlived the necessity for questioning, they were inevitably led off to the killing fields, of which Cheong Ek is one of the largest. In the photo on the left, each dip in the ground is an excavated mass grave. Around 20,000 people arrived here, none ever escaped (which makes piecing together the history all the more difficult - there are still many uncertainties over what actually happened during this time). One thing is clear, however - that this was the site of one of the worst examples of inhumanity in recent history (and still something which many people at home still do not know the details of - I only had a very rough idea of what went on before coming here). 9,000 human skulls were discovered by farmers in 1980, alerted by an appalling stench whilst working the land, in mass graves just outside of Phnom Penh. 86 mass graves were found in all, yet more bodies remain unexhumed with 11,000 under a lake. This was one of 340 'Killing Fields', scenes of 'production line' murder where people were lined up, their skulls smashed with bamboo (the use of bullets being too expensive to waste, and bamboo is light and easy to wield - so the beatings could continue without the inconvenience of getting tired). They were then kicked into waiting pits - some may have still been just alive when buried.

Part of the Buddhist Stupa memorial - the chilling sight of thousands of human skulls, piled floor to ceiling and classified by approximate age and gender.












Our guide, Sosul was about our age, and gave us some vital insights into the effects felt by people immediately after the Khmer Rouge were deposed and the attrocities discovered. Most people in Cambodia lost at least one family member during this time, and he himself lost his uncle. He said that education has been decimated because of the repression of any form of free thought or learning during the four years - there is still a desperate need for native doctors, teachers, scientists, which is making progress in the city bit in rural areas (most of the country), the emphasis is on farming, driving etc. The need for good schools in the country in turn proliferates ignorance in terms of learning from the past and nurturing the desire to think about progress - incredibly the teaching of history for some children was stopped altogether. He said it also breeds a culture in which parents exploit their own children for short term monetary gain (begging from tourists otherwise they are given no food).

The Cheong Ek memorial, like S-21 where blood still stains the floor, is a very 'raw' reminder of the past. By this I mean that amongst the birdsong and butterflies of the neighbouring fields, pieces of bone and clothing poke up through the ground as you walk about - it took a few seconds to register that we were literally walking through human remains in our sandals. I don't know how long it would have taken us to notice this had Sosul not pointed it out, but they were everywhere - some lying in piles near the trees. Everywhere you look there are huge dips in the floor where the graves had been excavated - some bringing their own macabre evidence as to the circumstances of the dead e.g. headless corpses denoting traitors or nakedness indicating women who had been raped first. Babies were thrown against trees, music was played from speakers to drown out the screams of the victims and the cracking of bones.

The sharp leaves of these trees were used to cut throats, using the produce of the land against those who tended it.














On January 7th 1979, Vietnamese forces entered Phnom Penh and deposed Pol Pot, causing mass defections of Khmer Rouge officers to form the new government. Pol Pot was driven into the countryside, but conflict between the old Khmer Rouge and the new government continued until Pol Pot's trial and imprisonment in 1997. He died in 1998, trials for the remaining perpetrators have been maddeningly slow in coming (though there has been progress recently with international backing), and there are apparantly still elements of the Khmer Rouge in government today. You have only to drive through the countryside to see the effects of the restructuring that took place, Cambodia is still very much an agrarian based area, and there is little development of infrastructure outside the two main cities.

































The streets outside Cheoung Ek.