Letter from Thailand

A spot of rain

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-10-11 – 02:29:19

I finally arrived at the main road transit depot of Cambodian capital Phnom Penh two days after I’d set out from Bangkok under the impression that it would be a good idea to get the bus rather than a plane. After diving through an excitable congregation of taxi drivers who looked set to batter each other over a customer, I climbed into the back of a spluttering three-wheeler manned by a friendly Khmer who introduced himself as Sonny, and headed off towards my hotel. As it turned out, Sonny was either unwilling or unable to take me to my desired choice of accommodation. He cheerfully waved away my protestations telling me he new a better place anyway. “I take you Angkor International Hotel!” he roared enthusiastically over the din of the evening traffic and his own chugging motor. The Angkor International Hotel, I thought. Sounds like it might be alright. In fairness, it didn’t look too bad when I got there and when I was told the room rate was a mere $15 I decided to skip the hassle of searching for somewhere else.

One of the first things to trigger surprise among foreigners new to Cambodia comes when they try to pay for their first taxi and the driver refuses to accept. What appears to be a token of good will, albeit an incongruent one when looked at in the context of the crippling poverty and ludicrous competition among the hoards of taxi drivers standing at every corner, eventually reveals itself as salesmanship when you wander out of your hotel three hours later to discover your driver, armed with a winning smile, waiting for you. And he is your driver now – and as such you shall be paying him a daily rate. Travellers tend to instinctually shun any tagger-on of this kind, but it actually proves far cheaper than hoping in and out of a variety of taxis while you make your way about town. It also gives you the chance to get to know someone from the country you’re visiting; and so it proved with Sonny.

A cursory examination of my room at the Angkor International revealed a basic, slightly shabby offering not substantially different from any other of a million hotels around Southeast Asia. What did stand out though, were some of the hotel rules mentioned in a laminated card pinned to the inside of the door. I’d noticed something similar in the first Cambodian establishment I stayed in, namely, a card which indicated by means of a colourful illustration that no smoking, intravenous drugs or hand grenades were allowed; but this went one better. Among ‘Check out time is 12.30’ and ‘no additional guests permitted in rooms after 11pm’ was rule number five (and I’m serious, this is actually true) which read, ‘All firearms and explosives must be stored in the safe deposit box at reception’. You have a gun, eh? You have a bag of explosives? No problem – just check them in.

My first night in Phnom Penh involved myself and Sonny nipping around the city’s dusty streets as they fell into the all-encompassing darkness permitted by the absence of street lights, and flying up the tourist strip which banks onto the swollen Mekong River. I was fairly wasted from the journey from Bangkok, and was only faintly aware of the thunderous rain laying waste to the city outside as I drifted off back in the hotel. I got up early the next morning, all set to get my mission to write an article about the prevalence of firearms in Cambodia underway, and wandered downstairs to grab some breakfast ahead of Sonny’s appointed arrival. The lift wasn’t working so I trotted down the stairs to the lobby. When I got there I discovered the Angkor International Hotel’s fatal flaw – it was completely flooded.

Tan-brown water was spilling through the door from the road outside and lapping up against the reception desk. I hunkered down and could see from my vantage point on the bottom flight of stairs, that the entire street outside was equally deluged. It was a surreal sight and I fully expected such a striking occurrence, i.e. swathes of a central district in a capital city being entirely underwater, to be making the news all over the world. As I started to take in the reaction of the Khmers however, it became apparent that we might not have been dealing with something all that out of the ordinary. “Morning Sir!” chirped a smiling staff member in a camp red bellboy outfit as if nothing biblical was happening outside.

Between staff members in the lobby, a congregation of touts peering in from the doorway and normal punters wading their way past the hotel, there were at least a dozen Khmers in sight – and none of them looked in any way bothered. So, suitably assured that we were not about to be washed down the Mekong into the South China Sea, I whipped off my flip-flops and jumped in.

The Museum

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-10-08 – 21:55:16

This is one of a couple of articles I wrote after a recent trip to Myanmar. Some of the stuff I put together found a home, but nobody wanted this one so I might aswell stick the fucker up here. The army conviscated my camera before I went in, but I got a sneaky shot of the name on the wall outside the building when I was heading off. The bastards would have had my head if they knew I was a journalist!

Burma’s military junta arrested the last four leaders of the 2007 pro-democracy movement still at liberty on 12 October, effectively ending the two-month long protests which swept the country. One year on, Robert Carry reports on how the country’s Defence Services Museum is being used to re-build support for the army; starting with the nation’s school children.

The teenage faces of the diminutive but heavily armed soldiers standing guard outside the cavernous Defence Services Museum in central Yangon register surprise verging on alarm at the sight of a western visitor. Cyclone Nargis, which cut through the country back in May killing at least 78,000 and leaving a further 56,000 missing, decimated tourist figures already hit hard by the ruling military junta’s violent response to last year’s pro-democracy protests. Entry visas have become difficult to secure and the authorities have been diligent in their efforts to root out foreign journalists attempting to reveal the extent of the neglect and repression the Burmese struggle under.

The formalities conducted at the doorway of the sprawling, mothballed complex consist of a search by an armed soldier, the seizure of cameras, payment of a fee and the issuance of a visitor pass. Although the museum was constructed just 15 years ago at a cost of around €6 million, the 60 tattered showrooms that make up its glum interior suggest up-keep funds are limited. The World Bank says some 40 per cent of Burma’s national budget is spent on its military, although it is estimated to be around 400,000 strong.

Bringing along a local guide meant one was not assigned from among the uniformed ranks. ‘Pha’ however, was virulently anti-government and as such was nervous about walking into an establishment swarming with military.

A high wall just inside the museum’s main door is covered by a pyramid of portrait-style photos of men in military uniform. It outlines the structure of the State Peace and Development Council (SPDC), the body through which the all-pervading military runs virtually every aspect of the country, and the faces featured are those of its top generals. The benevolent countenance of senior general Than Shwe sits at its pinnacle. A brief stop to examine the pictures prompts a bout of nervous shuffling, murmuring and gesticulation from the group of soldiers and green-clad staff members standing at the doorway and Pha, sensing the tension, indicates that the tour should proceed.

The dimly-lit ground floor consists mainly of disintegrating exhibits glorifying the exploits of the junta. Stern-faced photos of generals past and present are everywhere, alongside dusty flags and emblems of the country and military. As we silently wind our way through banks of life-sized model soldiers kneeling around antiquated communications equipment and military transporters, the booted footsteps of the staff member assigned to watch us in the otherwise visitor free wing are clearly audible over the slap of our flip-flops. The echoing footfalls remain close by, stopping when ours stop for the duration of our time in the museum, although the individual responsible never comes into view.

Prominently displayed on the ground floor is the landmine exhibit. It features an endless range of grenades, anti-personnel mines and anti-tank charges. Running along the walls are graphic diagrams depicting how to set trip wires, direct blasts and maximise shrapnel spread in order to kill as many people as possible. If you lay a flat stone or a solid piece of metal underneath a trip-wire detonated grenade, the blast will be directed upwards into the face of the person who triggers it, rather than into their legs.

The British military cut across Burma in the 19th Century and after a series of long-remembered battles, a programme of detentions and mass executions quelled the remaining dissent. By 1885 the Burmese King had been deposed and the country incorporated into India. By the 1930s however, an independence movement drawn mainly from monks and students and led by the mercurial Aung San, began an armed campaign. Although the military pioneer was shot along with several members of his cabinet-in-waiting just months short of the final hand over of power, he is hailed as the father of the nation by the Burmese people. He is also the father of Ang San Suu Kyi; the Nobel Peace Prize-winning public face of the present day pro-democracy movement who is currently under house arrest.

Historical exhibits from the time of Aung San proved difficult to locate – they’re severely limited and hidden away in a corner of the second floor. There are however, ample exhibits detailing the Yangon City Water Supply System and the nation’s various power plants.

The war the army is locked into against nationalist ethnic minority groups such as the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) fails to merit direct mention in the museum, likewise its campaign against internal dissent which has seen thousands of pro-democracy activists shot or imprisoned since the junta came to power.

A coach-load of stern-faced primary school students arrived for a tour of the facility shortly before we left. The message espoused within the walls of the Defence Services Museum is not often put to adult members of the general public as people rarely visit of their own volition. Children however, are a different story. According to Pha, the junta obliges schools to bus their students onto the premises to be wowed by the array of tanks, missiles, fighter planes, and impressive claims of the soldiers.

“Burma has a poor human rights record,” says Jo Becker of the Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch. “But its record on child soldiers is the worst in the world.” The military is understood to have forcibly recruited children as young as 11 and some 20 per cent of its active duty soldiers are believed to be under 18.

Recruited children are however, unlikely to be driving a tank or flying a fighter plane; youngsters can expect to engage in combat against opposition groups, burn villages, round up villagers for forced labour and even carry out executions. Human Rights Watch interviewed two former Burmese child soldiers, aged 13 and 15 at the time, who admitted to being part of units which massacred a group of 15 women and children in the restless Shan State in early 2001.

We stroll back outside, hand in our passes and retrieve the confiscated camera. We leave the children to learn the names of the generals running their ruined country and to examine the exhibitions on how best to lay a land mine.

Pha’s name has been changed to protect his identity.

'Pearl of Asia' (me hole)

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-09-30 – 23:00:38

After a bizarre day amidst the exquisite rubble of Cambodia?s famed Angkor ruins which had, among other things, brought me into contact with a barefoot Cambodian six-year-old who could converse in Irish, I headed back to my gangster-run hotel and booked a bus ticket to the country?s capital, Phnom Penh, for the following morning. In comparison to the rip-off express that had taken me from Bangkok to the Cambodian town of Siem Riep, a journey which saw me and my fellow travellers subjected to an stunningly imaginative range of scams and bald-headed thievery at the hands of the trip organisers, this last leg of my journey was relatively event-free.
The reason for my visit to Cambodia, and Phnom Penh in particular, was that I wanted to pen an article about the effect the massive stockpile of weapons various foreign powers had shipped into the country during its long, tragic wars was having on the Cambodian population. That said, I?d read a lot about the city whose wide boulevards, French colonial architecture and glittering temples had earned it the nickname 'The Pearl of Asia' up until it was ravaged by the ultra-Communist Khmer Rouge, and I was looking forward to doing the tourist thing.
As the bus cut towards the city centre and the corrugated Iron shacks made way for more sturdy structures, the extent of the damage wrought by the Khmer Rouge, who deported Phnom Penh?s population to the countryside after they sacked the city in 1975, became obvious. With a fair chunk of its people living rough or in near derelict buildings, its thrashed roads and the absence of luxuries such as street lighting or 24-hour electricity, it was clear Phnom Penh was a long way from regaining its pearl status.

As our bus pulled up to the depot a group of about 50 Khmer guys who had been sitting around their motorbikes and tuk tuks near its entrance leapt to their feat and started running alongside our slowing vehicle. They banged on our windows, shouted at us and generally clambered over each other in an attempt to get our attention. When the bus came to a stop they crowded tightly around the door, which meant the passengers, many of whom were clearly petrified of taking the plunge into the shouting crowd, would have to push their way through banks of grabbing, potentially pick-pocketing hands.
The bus depot was nowhere near anything in particular, so everyone was going to have to get a taxi of some description. I decided then, that the best thing to do would be to pick a bloke from among the heckling mob in the hope that he?d help me get through the crowd and into the back of his tuk tuk as quickly as possible, lest I be commandeered by another driver. I stood on the top step of the bus when the doors flung open, while the rest of the passengers fidgeted and waited to see how I would get on, and signalled to a comparatively big, tidily dressed Khmer guy who was waving at me and pointing to a tuk tuk parked behind him. I ignored the pleas of the rest of the drivers, some of whom were attempting to climb onto the bus in order to lay claim to one or other of the passengers, and gave my man the thumbs up. He gave a triumphant yelp and, as I?d hoped, burst his way through the rest of the drivers towards me. With my backpack on front-ways and my wallet in my hand in my pocket, I jumped into the heaving mass of manic Cambodian taxi drivers who by this stage looked like they were going to flip the bus over if the rest of the passengers didn't get a wriggle on and alight. I could feel hands tapping up my pockets as soon as I hit the dirt where the footpath was supposed to be, but my shouting driver bullied his way through and put an end to it with some stern words in Khmer. I'm sure they meant little beyond 'this one is mine!', but did the job all the same and he dragged me clear of the feeding frenzy and into his spluttering three-wheeler.
I threw a look over my shoulder at the unfortunates who had opted to place their bags in the storage compartment of the bus rather than keeping them on board as they tried to fight their way through and then free of the heaving mob of grabbing hands. It was a hairy 'oul welcome to the city and at the risk of sounding sexist, one I would have been all the more uncomfortable with had I been a lone female traveller. Happily, my chosen driver turned out to be a decent guy who not only brought me to my hotel, but proved to be a key ally in my bid to emerge from Cambodia with a decent article.

Where in the fuck did you learn that?!

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-09-26 – 00:07:26

Although not usually one for temples and the like, I spent a full day happily wandering around the vast ruins of Angkor in north-western Cambodia, oohhing and aahhing with the rest of the international contingent and snapping away with my camera like I knew what I was doing. The first main attraction was the ornate, five-towered main temple of Angkor Wat, which was ringed by a vast, green moat traversable by a stone walk way that cut straight through an outer wall and right up to the five towers at its centre. The visual impact provided by the immense structure and its reflection that bounced off the lake-like ring of water around it was considerable on approach, but even more so up close. Practically every stone in the whole almost endless building had been lovingly hand carved by ludicrously talented long-dead masons. Lavish depictions of the Hindu God Vishnu churning the sea of milk leapt from the walls and ceilings and ancient battles played themselves out on either side of 200 metre long walk ways.

I left the main Angkor Wat wondering if it could beat and the Bayon temple, a short bumpy motorbike ride away, did just that. The Bayon looked modest in comparison to Angkor Wat at first but as I made my way towards its pyramid-like centre, I started to notice huge, car-sized faces smiling at me from the stone. It was like a magic eye picture – at first there’s nothing discernible until you look closely and incredible images start leaping out at you. 15th Century European style stone carving was all goblins, gargoyles, sour-faced saints and dying Jesuses but the big, life-like faces at Bayon grin back at the people gazing up at them.

The Ta Prohm temple was my final stop off at the ruined complex and again, it proved to be quite something. It was yet to be restored and the creeping jungle was well on the way to enveloping it completely. Metre thick vines crept around its columns and through its hallways creating a man Vs nature type display so implausibly spectacular that it appeared to belong on a movie set rather than in the real world. This was a view shared by the makers of the famed Tomb Raider film, which stared a gun-toting Angelina Jolie, and much of the movie was shot within Bayon’s walls.

    The complex itself was well worth a look, but the most interesting thing about a wander around the Angkor ruins was the way ingenious if impoverished Khmer people use the temples to make a living. While much of the entry fee is sucked into a black hole of corruption and Vietnamese-owned companies, there are still dollars to be made by those with the capacity to charm money out of western pockets. When you arrive at the ruins you are met with bands of Khmer kids selling snacks, water, postcards and hand-made braclets – and they have it down to a fine art. Although often met with rude and dismissive foreigners who can sometimes forget they are dealing with hungry children and that they are guests in someone else’s country, the children ignore the brush-offs, keep smiling and skip onto the next potential customer.
        One particularly persuasive young guy, whose cheerfully optimistic outlook shone through both his dire economic circumstances and a nasty facial birth defect he had been lumbered with, convinced me to choose his mother’s eatery out of a string of basic outdoor café’s which ran along one side of Angkor Wat’s moat. While he scurried off to get me a menu, a girl of about six wandered up to my table carrying a box of bracelets made out of woven bamboo strips. Given her age and the fact that her sales pitch initially consisted of smiling at me and waiting for a response, I came to the hasty conclusion that she probably didn’t speak any English. I shook my head in the negative, on account of the fact that I was OK for bamboo bracelets, but she wasn’t deterred.
        “Where you from?” she eventually asked.
        “I’m from Ireland,” I answered, feeling sure she wouldn’t have heard of it.
        “Ah! Conas atá tú?” she chirped, smiling ever more broadly.
        I glanced around, expecting to see Jeremy Beetle hiding behind a palm tree, before looking back to the kid. “Tá me go maith. Agus tú féin?”
        I sat there stunned as the exchange continued through the full range basic conversational questions and answers as Gaeilge (I’m fine, what is your name etc) and finished with her counting from one to ten in my obscure native tongue. I was astounded; this metre-tall, barefoot Khmer kid had better Irish than a fair chunk of the Irish populace. She informed me that she and her other hawkers learned off a few basic questions and answers, as well as how to count, in as many languages as they could knowing it would impress the tourists into making a purchase. Feeling sure that this particular tale, i.e. the one about the time I came across an impoverished Cambodian child beggar who could speak Irish, meant I was obliged to whip out my video camera and get her to repeat the feat on film. She was happy to oblige and so, I walked away with video evidence to back up my new anecdote and a fetching bamboo bracelet.

So it's basically a temple, yeah?

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-09-15 – 00:28:12

My joyful journey on the scam bus from Bangkok to Cambodian capital Phnom Penh brought me to the town of Siem Reip; the main jump off point for the two million annual visitors who come to marvel at the nearby UNESCO World Heritage Site of Angkor. The ruined complex was the centre of a Khmer empire that had its hay day from the 9th to the 15th Century, when it was abandoned to the jungle in the wake of a Thai invasion. The size and complexity of the ancient city, the largest preindustrial metropolis in the world, is mind-boggling. It had an urban sprawl of 400 square miles and contained over one thousand temples built around its implausibly big centre piece of Angkor Wat; the world’s largest religious monument. The city was bigger than the urban area taken up by Dublin city, Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, and Dublin South county combined (for those of you in Ireland). It was also four times larger than the second best of its generation; the Mayan city of Tikal in Guatemala. The ruins were essentially re-discovered by the outside world when a team of French archaeologists came across them, choked in creeping vegetation, in the late 19th century.

Personally, I’m not one for temples. I find it hard to get excited about churches, cathedrals or striking pieces of architecture of any kind. I normally eschew large inanimate objects in favour of using the people of the countries I visit as my source of knowledge, culture and entertainment. The Khmer people however, have a very special relationship with the Angkor ruins. Right now, their country is at an extremely low ebb and is struggling with everything from domineering neighbours encroaching on their territory, western paedophiles arriving to use lawlessness and poverty as a means of getting to its children, and the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime that systematically sought to wipe out all knowledge and culture from its territory. The country is weak and more-or-less at the mercy of the often nefarious attentions of outsiders. The ruins however, stand as an inarguable demonstration of the fact that things were not always this way – the Khmer people were once the world’s strongest and most advanced. And Angkor acts as more than a symbol of a time long gone; it is looked on as proof that it is in the Khmers to be strong again.

    So, symbols of the ruins are emblazoned on everything. There’s a picture of Angkor Wat on their national flag, it is emblazoned on their money and every second guesthouse, hotel or restaurant has some reference to the complex in its name. The country’s extremely drinkable national beer is called Angkor, and there’s even a rip-off version called Anchor. So, given that I was in a town just up the road from the place, foregoing a visit was out of the question.
   A lot of the predominantly American foreigners staying in my gangster-run guesthouse, many of whom were planning on spending a full week exploring the ruins, enthusiastically told me about how spectacular a sunrise at Angkor Wat was. I foolishly allowed myself to be carried along with this notion and informed one of the guesthouse guides, a teenage lady killer called Jay who had taken me to a war museum earlier that day, that I wanted to get up at 5am to get started on a day looking at the ruins like the other tourists.
“Go at 5am?” he spluttered, with eyebrows raised and a look that said, ‘And I thought you were cool.’
As it happened, I got up before dawn and met Jay outside under a cloud covered sky that quite clearly said there would be no breath-taking sunrise visible on that particular morning. I said “8am?”, Jay nodded with tired relief and we both trudged back to bed.
   After a couple more hours in the scratcher we spent 20 minutes rushing down the dirt tracks Cambodians lovingly refer to as roads on a motorbike that didn’t come with helmets. We jumped off at the pay point at which, interestingly, only foreigners had to pay. Personally, I thought this was perfectly sensible. It was the Khmers’ ancestors after all who had built the damn thing. The uproar such a notion would bring about in Ireland however, if only foreigners had to pay to go to our museums and historical sites while the Irish were allowed in free, did make me chuckle.
   After paying we had another 10 minutes on the bike through a forest before it opened up onto what was, literally, the most stunning sight I’ve come across since stumbling past an all-girl international beach volleyball match between Brazil and Argentina while on holiday in Cuba.

Sight Seeing

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-09-06 – 01:58:01

Waking up in a backstreet guesthouse run by Cambodian gangsters wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. One of their number, a small, heavily tattooed teenager, knocked on my door at 8am to ask if I wanted any breakfast and they turned out to be pretty decent cooks. While I was eating in the guesthouse’s modest café, another of the lads approached and introduced himself as Jay. He offered to take me on a sightseeing tour of Siem Riep and the Angkor Wat ruins. Angkor Wat was very much on my to do list. The sprawling, ornate ruined complex hacked out of the jungle once served as the administrative and religious centre of the Khmer empire that controlled most of Southeast Asia and for sheer visual impact was said to only be rivalled by India’s Taj Mahal and Peru’s Machu Picchu. First though, I wanted to check out another stop off on the tourist trail Jay suggested – the Siem Reip war museum.
I had read quite a lot about the conflict that ripped across Cambodia from the early 70s to the mid-90s and in particular the role of the infamous Khmer Rouge. The bloody-minded, ultra-communist group gathered support from among Cambodia’s rural poor amid the fury generated by the USA’s bombing of the country as part of its war in neighbouring Vietnam. The Americans backed the corrupt, ineffectual Lon Nol regime that was in power at the time and the Khmer Rouge, buoyed by swelled ranks and weapons from Vietnam, Russia and China, toppled Lon Nol’s forces and captured the capital Phnom Penh in 1975. The KR idealised national self-reliance and a simplistic, classless rural lifestyle. They set about realising their agrarian utopia by forcing all city and town dwellers into the country where they were pressed into labour camps.
What followed was one of the most horrific genocidal massacres in recorded history as the KR began to see enemies everywhere. They murdered around one million people with many more succumbing to overwork and lack of food. They were eventually ran out by the Vietnamese but the Khmer people very much bare the scars of the terrible period in their recent history.
Myself and Jay cut across Siem Reip on the back of his moped and despite the fact that he was a gangster and his crew had been ripping me of ever since I left Bangkok, I couldn’t help but like the guy. He fancied himself as a playboy and he spent most of the journey chatting about the various lonely foreign women he had comforted, some of whom he said, still sent him money every month. His situation was exactly the same as the Thai scenario in which Thai bargirls cop off with foreign guys who, upon returning home, subsidise their ‘girlfriends’ in the hope it will keep them out of the bars and other mens’ clutches – only with the gender roles reversed.
What we found at our destination was not so much a museum, but a battered collection of munitions, arms, tanks and artillery left over from the conflict. Jay waited outside with the moped while Sam, a 30-something Khmer Rouge survivor, took me around the displays and told me his story. Practically every member of his family had been killed by the Khmer Rouge in one way or another while he was a small child, and he had, on several occasions, witnessed their deaths.
“I was too small to pick them up or hug them so I just sat and watched them while they died,” he said. Sam’s uncle was the only other survivor in his family and he was determined to spend his life fighting the regime. Sam, still little more than a child, would tag along after him from one battle field to another. Sam held up his a mutilated right hand and explained that when he was 13 he picked up a fuse from a land mine which immediately detonated. He also had a deep scar along the side of his eye from the shrapnel burst. He was lucky to be alive, he said.
The stacks of muddy rocket launchers, stricken artillery pieces and piles of AK47s were interesting, but what Sam had to say added a bit of humanity to the normal, detached curiosity you get when hearing about a distant, nasty event. I felt quite uncomfortable when he encouraged me to pose with various guns that had killed God knows how many people, but I went along with his routine.

I did however, feel quite sorry for the guy – his job was to retell that story and relive those experiences for every punter that walked through the museum gates. The weapons were rusting away as the country outside attempted to move on from its nightmarish past, but Sam was stuck there among the skeletons with it the war still raging and his family dying around him.

'No hand grenades, guns or hard drugs in rooms please'

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-08-30 – 01:18:25

Travellers opting to bus their way across the 400 miles from Bangkok to Cambodian capital Phnom Penh leave themselves open to a range of scams and rip offs, but this was a fact I didn’t across until I was already onboard. Myself and my other passengers realised something might be up after discovering references to the Bangkok-Phnom Penh ‘scam bus’ in a copy of the Lonely Planet travel guide and as things turned out, the book’s passage gave a stunningly accurate account of what happened.
Rather than stopping at petrol stations on the main route we would cut across some dirt road and arrive at the home of a friend of the driver or one of his two buddies travelling with him. There would be an outdoor squat toilet and a wooden table sitting in the sun with a few packets of crisps and warm cans of coke and the driver would pick up a commission for bringing customers. At one re-routed stop off the trio disembarked and returned soon afterwards carrying a moped which they lugged on board and plonked down in the middle of the isle.

We stopped two kilometres before the border town of Poipet in a shabby eatery with a Thai cop car parked outside. After some discussion between the policeman and our trusty guides, they asked us for our passports and the equivalent of €50 in Thai Baht saying that they would arrange our visas once we hit the border. Cambodian visas cost $20 and are payable in US currency, which is what is used in Cambodia. Things got fraught when I refused to hand over my passport or the cash saying I’d arrange my own visa, and they got worse when other passengers followed suit. Our disgruntled cop, with gun on waist, got particularly irate and threatened to force us all back to Bangkok. Happily, they eventually backed down under a barrage of abuse from the over-excited female American contingent and we headed off.
When the border crossing was in eyeshot we stopped and one of the driver’s mates jumped out and sprinted up the road. Thinking nothing of it, we pulled our bags out of the bus and headed towards the visa point. We marched through the Thai exit point, and across the no-mans land which, interestingly given the absolute destitution on the Cambodian side, is crammed with five star Vegas-style hotels, and up to the Cambodian entry point. While the paid passengers were whisked through, we were met by an official who demanded we pay €50 blips in Baht for entry. While two of the American girls from our bus argued heroically I got talking to a group of Aussies who had taxied to Poipet and had just paid $20 dollars. It was then that I spotted the guy who had sprinted from our bus standing a few paces behind the Cambodian immigration guy. It was an intricate operation – even some officials were in on it. We paid anyway, given that our other option seemed to be a bus back to Bangkok, and set off down the dirt road to Siem Riep – the town that serves as a jump-off point for the famed Angkor Wat. Sadly, although thousands of tourists ply the route daily, the Cambodian government hasn’t put any tarmac on it yet – apparently because a Thai airline which operates flights to Siem Riep pays to keep the road in bits and flights full.

The last leg of our journey should take three hours, but our driver saw to it that it took eight. The reason behind this part of the scam was because he and his mafia buddies ran a backstreet guesthouse on the outskirts of Siem Riep – get the tourists arriving in the middle of the night and they’ll be so knackered they’ll agree to stay in your gangster-run rat hole. And so it proved – it was the only hotel I was ever in that was run entirely by a gang of lads aged between 16 and 25 but we were all too tired to care and stayed there anyway. The boys, I found, had an interesting take on running a hotel.
The standard spiel at the check-in desk started, “Check out time 12 o’clock.”
It ended with, “you want marijuana? I send lady to your room?”

I was comforted somewhat when one of the American girls who shouted, “What the hell?” and pointed to a sign over the door of the entrance. An illustration indicated that visitors were not permitted to bring guns, hand grenades or hard drugs into the establishment.
“I’ll sleep better knowing that,” I said, and headed off to bed.

The Fun Bus

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-08-22 – 05:00:48

I decided that for my next trick I was going to go Thailand’s neighbour Cambodia - to have a look at the affect the massive weapons stockpile it was lumbered with by decades of devastating upheaval was having on its troubled society. I’d heard that gun crime was endemic and that tourists were prime targets, but also that enterprising Khmers were using their unwanted armoury to generate cash in more creative ways. There was a firing range outside Phnom Penh where it was rumoured that for a price, visitors could fire everything from Bonny and Clyde-style Tommy Guns and Nazi lugers right the way up to Rocket propelled grenades and B2 missiles. To cap it off, those with more macabre tastes could use live animals such as chickens and cows for target practice.
            Flights from Bangkok to Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh were relatively cheap, but I’d heard you could bus it for the equivalent of just twenty quid. Sadly, the 400 mile Thailand-to-Phnom Penh-by-road trip has become legendary among Southeast Asian travellers for being one of the most scam-infested journeys it’s possible to take. Sadly, this was a piece of information I didn’t come across until I started reading my copy of the Lonely Planet Travel Guide once I’d taken my seat onboard.
I was the fifth passenger to climb into the 6am minibus set first for the border town of Poipet; the others being two American girls in their early twenties who had just met five minutes previously and a middle-aged Mexican couple with decent English, the male half of which was blind. the plans was that after getting visas sorted at Poipet we were to head onto Siem Reip, a town that serves as a jump off point for people visiting the stunningly impressive Angkar Wat - the sprawling, ruined 12th Century capital of the Khmer Empire which once controlled most of Southeast Asia. After stopping off for a night (or two), a daily bus would tackle the final 150 miles or so to the capital.
        Lone travellers are always eager to strike up conversations and so it proved with one of the Americans who started chatting with me, loudly and apparently for the benefit of the rest of the passengers.
    “Where do you come from?” She drawled in a Californian brogue.
    “I’m from Ireland,” I said, waiting for the punchline.
    “Ahhhh. Cool. I’m gonna call you Ireland from now on,” she beamed.
    “OK so. I’m goin to call you L.A.”
    “But I’m from San Francisco!”
    “I don’t care. Your name is L.A.”
    So the whole bus had a laugh and quickly became friends, which was just as well because we were to end up being stuck with each other for two more turbulent days.
            About a dozen more travellers got on but our little group kind of stuck together. We chatted away, information emerged and some of the stuff I was reading in the Lonely Planet Cambodia edition in a section entitled ‘The Scam Bus’ began to sound familiar.
            The book continued: ‘Many unsavoury characters are involved in the travel business and carry on like some sort of mafia, giving Cambodia a bad name. Welcome to the scam bus, notorious throughout Asia for ripping off foreigners.’
            It first dawned on me that something untoward might be in the offing when it emerged that some passengers had been charged twice as much me while others had shelled out the equivalent of just two euro for their ticket. It wasn’t possible to make the journey profitable at that sort of price and it set alarm bells ringing. We passed around the book as our bus broke free of the Bangkok traffic and made out across its empty countryside. I settled into my seat and wondered where the two Thais and the driver they sat beside at the front were going to make up the shortfall.

You can do wha?

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-08-14 – 03:33:02

I arrived back to Bangkok after my five-day cat-and-mouse game with the foot soldiers of Myanmar’s military junta nursing a residual terror at what might have come up had I been that little bit less fortuitous. The experience however, also reminded me of how jut-wrenchingly exciting journalism could be and I decided that I was unwilling to spend any more time re-writing press releases or detailing the wonders of some condo development or other for the property magazine I’d been working for. There were clocks ticking down back home, and I wanted to look into some of the more interesting stories floating around Southeast Asia before I headed back to the cold wet rock.
My trip spent gathering stories of the survivors of cyclone Nargis while dodging the Machiavellian attentions of one of the world’s most despicable regimes was a good start, but it also set the bar quite high. Writing about coastal erosion in Vietnam or the lack of landfill sites in Singapore wasn’t going to cut it. Happily, as is so often the case with the best stories journalists write, something which could only be described as astounding dropped into my lap.

        “Go to Cambodia,” said my fellow Irish ex-pat Chris between gargantuan mouthfuls of Café 22’s famed fried breakfast one sunny lunchtime.
        “Cambodia?”
        “Yeah. You can fire a rocket launcher in a firing range over there,” he added, jabbing an oversized sausage onto his fork.
        “Wow.”
        “And if you pay a few dollars extra they’ll give you a water buffalo to use for target practice,” he continued blandly, biting into his skewered victim.
        “Eh, wha’? I don’t think I’m up for that now to be honest.”
        “Mmm. Well, you could go and shoot a few guns or whatever. Help reduce the country’s weapons stockpiles,” he continued, wagging the half-eaten sausage to emphasise this crucial, community-minded point. “Then you could check out whatever else people get up to while you’re there.”
        “That could be a runner,” I said, my interest thoroughly perked.
        “And, you haven’t heard the best bit.”
        “What’s that?” I asked, wondering what bizarre piece of information could possibly top what I’d just been told.
        “It’s only a dollar for a beer.”
        So, as Chris coolly shuffled back to the secondary school he works in as an English teacher, I set about researching an article about the over-availability of weapons in Cambodia.
        My first major concern was that Chris might have been taking the piss and that no such thing might be in the offing. However, after rooting around in various travel guides, I discovered that the Lonely Planet – the bible of gap-year trusafarian travellers the world over – made mention of Cambodia’s firing ranges, the use of heavy weaponry and even the tragic role of water buffalo in the macabre tourist attraction.
      I decided that looking into the whole grizzly affair was a must, but it all seemed a bit too easy. I wanted to broaden the scope of the article and make it less voyeuristic by looking at the wider issue of how prevalent guns were in Cambodian society beyond the ranges. So, in the spirit of participatory journalism, I set myself a challenge – I would establish whether or not it was possible for a foreigner to go that step further than what went on in the controlled environment of shooting ranges by buying a gun. It would, I decided, be a good way of gauging exactly how prevalent and easily available guns were in a country that still carried a Wild West reputation despite being at relative peace for over a decade. Being neither criminal nor insecure American, I didn’t actually require a gun for anything. I decided, therefore, that I would probably do some sort of celebratory jig and then either hand it back or take it apart and dispose of it.
        To me it all made perfect sense, but when I began spreading the news of my next adventure among my ex-pat buddies some were a tad alarmed.
        “In the past two weeks you’ve fought a professional Thaiboxer, sneaked into Burma only to be chased back out by soldiers and now you’re going to Cambodia to fire a rocket launcher and see if you can buy a gun?” asked Ben, a 40-something English guy who was the elder of our group.
        “Sounds a bit weird when you put it like that Ben but yeah, that’s basically the plan,” I said, starting to wonder if my time away from my beloved Ireland had precipitated some sort of mental illness.

Escape

by letterfromthailand @ 2008-08-09 – 03:49:36

            Fascinating stories were rising out of the cracks in Yangon’s shattered streets as its recovery from cyclone Nargis got underway and I spent my time gathering up as many as I could. However, I planned to take a trip into the Irrawaddy Delta region, where storm damage was worst and casualty figures highest.
            Burma’s tourist industry practically collapsed when the junta brutally suppressed last year’s monk-led pro-democracy demonstrations. Since then tourguides with too much time on their hands have been hanging around street corners hoping to come across an un-escorted foreigner – a commodity which has all but dried up since Nargis finished the job the junta started. However, every time I attempted to broach the subject of how one might gain entry, ostensibly to make a small donation to the aid effort in person, I was met with the same answer: “Impossible.”
             As it turned out, the military had set up roadblocks on all roads leading south from Yangon to the delta and all foreigners were being turned back. However, after much coaxing, I eventually convinced a guide, which was sent to take me of a tour of Yangon by the travel agency, to have a go at getting me into the delta. ‘Pha’, ever eager to subvert the authority of the junta he despised, telephoned a monk who was an active figure in the pro-democracy movement that swept the country this time last year. His monastery, located deep in the delta, had been badly damaged and the village around it practically wiped out. The monk agreed to host us should we arrive, and would back up our story if necessary.
            The plan was that we would buy packs of food, rent a car and head north before looping back down towards the delta, hopefully avoiding the roadblocks as we went. Sadly, in the two days before we were due to leave, we noticed a car following us as we made our way around Yangon. The driver and passenger made no attempt to conceal themselves, and would come inside and pull up a table whenever we stopped for a bite to eat. We returned to my hotel the night before we were due to head into the delta to find a group of soldiers standing directly across the street from its main entrance. I’m not convinced they had any firm evidence to suggest I was a journalist, but there were hardly any foreigners in Yangon at that time. I fit the profile, but there were so few visitors that they could easily follow them all. Either way, the game was up.
             A visibly furious Pha was convinced I was about to be arrested, and told me I should make my way to the airport at the earliest opportunity. I gave him the cash to make the donation to the monastery in his own time and bid my goodbyes. I went to my room and packed my stuff but couldn’t leave that evening because the army guys, visible from my window, remained where they were. At 5am the next morning I was ready to leave so after ensuring the coast was clear from my window I ran down stairs, paid the remainder of my hotel bill to a sleepy bellboy and grabbed a taxi to the airport. Four-and-a-half hours later I was back in Bangkok with a bank of stories of the junta, the cyclone and the people struggling to survive the terrors of both.