Siem Reap

Siem Reap had changed out of all proportion when I reached there nine months later. The old spreading tree, under which I had eaten so many meals, had disappeared to be replaced with a bank of shops, yet more restaurants and a boulangerie. Tourists had almost completely taken over the town, with puffy pink German, Israeli and British faces and their accompanying tightening shorts on display just about everywhere. Locals had taken refuge from the spreading Mexican restaurants, inside - at the old market, where you could still get authentic Khmer food, coffee and a not unreasonable bargain on a Cambodian made white cotton shirt.

The dusty tuk tuk journey from Siem reap airport, into town, recalled that fateful journey when I had proposed to the woman who, one day later, was to become my wife at the gallery Colors of Cambodia. However, on this newly dusty journey, I noticed that new hotels were sprouting up everywhere along that route into town - like so many dubiously wanted toadstools and were, no doubt, a necessary evil if the town is to continue to grow from the tourist US$.

Siem Reap seems to have lapsed into a reluctant symbiotic relationship with tourism. Tourists need that launch-pad to propel them towards the ancient joys of Ankor Wat, temples and their all too enthusiastic brush with another’s poverty, while Siem Reap is in desperate need of money to develop the town after the atrocities which occurred in Cambodia not too many decades ago – which left the whole country devastated.

Once more I trundled up the steep staircases to my attic studio apartment - above the Colors of Cambodia gallery. I almost literally dropped my camera, in my haste, and placed my tablet on the small wooden table provided, tidied away the red suitcase then immediately sprung downstairs to see what the children had been doing in my absence – wonders it would seem. On the walls were new watercolour and acrylic paintings, while gathered around the tables, inside, were advanced students drawing stunning artworks from photographs. We unpacked the boxes of materials I’d brought from Malaysia, and set about stacking them in the store-room, for use after I had gone. There was a buzz of excitement as I renewed old acquaintances, and then started planning for the following few days of my visit.

Despite its growing tourist trade, the ever present WiFi internet, and the nightly drunks – Siem Reap still holds both a charm and an undeniable peacefulness for me. It remains one of the few places where I can easily write poetry and prose, dance without hindrance and probably make no end of a pratt of myself. Ankor Wat – that grand Wat (monastery temple) mesmerised me on my first visit. It provoked me to write the lengthy poem – Colors of Cambodia, which I have since included in the book – A Story of Colors of Cambodia. Siem Reap/Ankor seems to lull me into a more balmy cultural existence. Maybe it is the centuries of culture layered in that tragic land, maybe it is the sight of oh so many Buddhist temples or maybe there is just something so very amazingly different about Cambodia and, in particular, Siem Reap.

On the last trip to Siem Reap I was in awe. Cambodia seemed very familiar, yet very different at one and the same time. There was a similarity to Thailand, and in particular Chiang Mi, while some of the rural villages reminded me of Perak and Malaysia’s kampongs. Yet there was always that difference, that undeniably Cambodian difference which pronounced itself in the language and in the local food, which was in no way similar to Malaysian food, but bore a slight resemblance to Thai cuisine – especially the salads. Street food seemed to be a disappearing art in Siem Reap but, aside from the fried insects, I could still find the spatchcock chickens and the Chinese influenced Gu Tsai Guay (fried chive cakes), on the rare occasion I was at the Old Market early enough. The wonderfully aromatic Vietnamese coffee still seems to be available – if you know someone who knows where to look – I had the Khmer artist Seney scout some out for me.

Harold Wilson may have said that a week may be a long time in politics, but a week in Siem Reap seems no time at all. I fairly flew around snooping in art galleries, attending exhibition openings, drinking at the Foreign Correspondents Club – which you no longer have to be a foreign correspondent to enjoy, and generally poking my nose into whichever art farty goings on would allow me to. And that was it. Schools visited, Art History lecture done, friends made and I was off again, back to Malaysia with the promise of a slight trip to the Philippines in the New Year.

Battambang

The desiccated rat lying under the restaurant dining table was, probably, not the worse experience of my life, but it was, nevertheless, an eye opener to the northern Cambodian city of Battambang (pronounced battenbong).

   It had been a not unpleasant journey from Siem Reap to Battambang. The sun perpetually glinted into the aged bus. Practically clichéd ladies in straw hats rode by on even older bicycles and mid-aged ladies proffered dried chilli fried insects – with curry leaves, which they held aloft, in rattan baskets, to bus travellers. As we ambled past rural Cambodia on roads evidently not used to speed, rice was being harvested in miles of paddy fields and small tractors, with long trailers, heaved weighty loads of rice sacks along the side of the ever dusty Khmer road.

   The four hour journey (from Siem Reap to Battambang) was laced with intermittent sleep, fields, small villages, the ever-burning bright sun and glimpses of the tastiest baguettes outside of France, or so I was led to believe by one traveller just returned from Paris. Neither the sleepiness of the countryside, the oddness of the cuisine nor the seeming calm everywhere were to prepare me for the under-table deceased rodent, nor for the snub given by a workshop who had forgotten to close their classroom doors.

   It was a time of learning. It was a time when mindfulness was tested to its limits. However, that mindfulness eased me through minor confrontations without my more natural recourse to choice English words and colourful phrases honed and hammered into shape by the wilds of my not-so-dear Essex (land of white ladies shoes and sparkling white handbags – for dancing around). I resisted the call to use that 15^th Century vulgar expletive beginning with ‘F’, or raise my whole bowman’s hand or, indeed, give the one finger salute when one American harpy commanded me and my students to exit from their workshop at Phare Ponleu Selpak. True, and in retrospect, she was only protecting the sanctity of her workshop, but there were no signs to indicate a workshop was taking place, nor their need for privacy. That female had a most rude and offensive manner but, in the fullness of time, we sailed beyond her turbulent maelstrom, past her harpy-clad rocks into the calming waters of that near serene charity art school.

   One day past the harpy and dead rat incident and I was back at Phare Ponleu Selpak, this time giving my own talk about Art History, or rather a truncated version of 150 years of modern Art condensed into two hours. The student crowd could not have been more attentive as they sat cross-legged on the wooden floorboards. Shafts of light coming through wooden walls gave the room a fantasy ambiance, and made it entirely conducive to the sharing of visual delights. It was a little surreal, however, to be talking about Surrealism and having to stop after each sentence so that my translator (himself an artist and one of the founders of the charity Art School) could relay my thoughts. My gesticulations got lost in the translation process. There was I - all full of gusto and wide gestures, and there was my friendly translator calmly wrangling my meaning into Khmer. I have no idea if the travails of Andre Breton or the Gaudi inspired Salvador Dali actually reached those polite and intense students, I hope they did.

   When not being translated, I headed to the San Puoy mountain temple and trundled my way up God knows how many steps, past just as many monkeys and eventually was awarded with a stunning view over the flat fields of Battambang. I was lucky. It was nearing sundown, sun rays highlighted gold covered images of Buddha and aspects of his teachings and the whole ambience was just too celestial. I say too celestial as I had to drag myself away and begin the descent, down those worn steps again - in the failing light. It was then, having survived the mountain steps and being driven to a local (now infamous) Cambodian restaurant, that I was confronted by that ignominious dead rat.

Singapore

Merlion city was awash with business types, drizzles of rain and a focused rushing towards year end and year beginning.

    Singapore was just where I had left it several months beforehand - at the end of the Johor Bahru causeway and wagging Malaysia like some perverse dog’s tail wagging it’s slightly dowdy body. I had half expected, indeed wished for, an all lit-up Singapore in preparation for the Christian festival of Christmas. It was not to be. True, there were pockets of tinsel-mass – all glitter and huge baubles, but the overall feeling of Christmas had escaped, or had just been nudged out of the way by Deepavali. There, at the end of November, where Europe was all be-decked with Christmas cheer, holly and mistletoe, Singapore was still clasping its soft white office-worker hands and praying to Mammon. Christ was forgotten, and if he was remembered at all it was on Facebook or on those car stickers which preached to the cars,  SUVs and mosquito-like motorcycles behind.

    And then, rather surprisingly - there was ‘poo’. 

 

    It was unfortunate. I was loitering in an MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) station to the north of Singapore island. I had been awoken early to get my lift into Singapore. I was a tad hungry and still a great deal sleep deprived. It was my breakfast time and, on the way to breakfast, I espied a squat vending machine peering from out of a Singaporean news kiosk. Intrigued, I ventured closer. It was a vending machine such as I had not encountered before. Its sole function seemed to be to exude reconstituted instant mashed potato into a waxed paper cup, just that, nothing else. I was curious, perhaps not curious enough to try that machine’s wares as there was a red lit sign towards the right hand side, near where the mashed potato should dollop into the aforementioned receptacle. 

 

    Aside………I have to confess to nostalgia for instant mashed potato, or at least the kind of powdered potato, refreshed with hot water, which no doubt that vending machine would proffer. Back in the days of my impoverished youth – that is before my days of impoverished teens and all the subsequent impoverishments of the intervening decades, there was Cadbury’s Smash – instant mashed potato at its finest. The TV advert ran – For Mash Get Smash. I remember that advert involving metallic futuristic aliens but cannot, for the life of me, remember the connection between aliens and mashed potato. 

 

    Here in Asia, a certain Colonel’s Southern American fried chicken comes with a small plastic tub of reconstituted mashed potato and a drizzle, a mere drizzle that is, of brown cornflower thickened ‘gravy’. It too reminds me of Cadbury’s Smash and I further confess to a mild addiction to that soft, powdery pseudo-tuber, pseudo-victuals.

 

    Back to that vending machine - the blood red sign, adjacent to the dispensing area of the mashed potato vending machine, read – POO. I did a double-take, and to this day I cannot fathom why that sign said POO. Perhaps it was some malfunction of the LED display, or perhaps it was a consumer warning – I shall never know, but I noted that warning and moved on mashless, hungry and pooless. 

 

    There comes a time in every man’s life when he yearns for the comfort of coffee and books. Ok, not every man’s life – maybe just a few cruddy, fuddy-duddy minority’s lives are afflicted by that particular yearning – but that day mine was. Still suffering the pangs of a breakfast not eaten, that yearning drove me to shoot to the fourth floor of the Ion building, off Orchard Road, in Singapore.

    The day was characteristically hot. I was tired from a distinct lack of sleep on the drive down to Singapore and the passage through customs and immigration which, while not too lengthy, was nevertheless was wearying. Sleep was knocking my head with Gargantuan or was that Patagruel’s weighty mallet. I headed for the Books and Coffee corner of ‘Prologue’. Why Prologue I hear you mutter. It was simply because it was there, and the additional fact that the comfy chairs of Starbucks were all full, and the fact that Borders had long since closed its doors to the book browsing public in Singapore.

 

    Coffee and/or cakes came with a free book. Free that is if you had spent S$16 or more on a single purchase – I had. There was a slight, perhaps meager selection of aging books available for ‘free’ - perhaps books that no one in their right mind would have wanted to purchase at the proper price. After a reasonable exorbitantly priced ‘Flat White Coffee’ sleep eluded me. Sleep just would not come, not even when I leaned my tired head against the double-glazed picture window displaying Orchard road and its tree lined fairway.

 

    I was left in a bizarre limbo between wakefulness and the comfort of a leisurely sleep. Chattering Chinese customers, nattering netbooks and tattling toddlers forbade me the nap I so richly deserved. I just could not knock-off, nor could I claim any portion of 40, not even 39.99 winks.

 

    Later, one meeting down and another were in the offing. Singapore was in danger of losing its luster. I was still a little titillated to be there - breathing in the essence of dollars and imagining what life must be like for the moneyed, and I momentarily regretted being simply the son of an apple-farm tractor driver - but suit-wearing, kow-towing and working under a boss was not for me. In the streets the sign sang – LIVE WELL, NO SMOKING BY LAW and SWING IT STRONGER. That last could have been an advertisement for Viagra, but turned out to be one for double-strength fish oil. Perhaps a better advert would have targeted hair loss - as there seems an inordinate amount of men with bald or balding pates in Singapore. I chuckled a momentary chuckle, and then swept my lengthy graying locks under my equally faded John Lewis fedora.

 

    Meetings were eventually met, galleries were eventually visited, and the final metallic S$1 was collected from the MRT ticket dispensing machine. I headed back across the causeway, back up the North South Highway to my little Chinese enclave on the fringes of the city whose muddy waters merged beside Mogul inspired mosques. I was washed out with the high life. I needed to wallow once again in inefficiency, waste and a bureaucracy so bureaucratic that Franz Kafka would instantly have written an entire series of books about it.

Bald(ing) but Brave

There comes a time in a man's life when he is made to realise that he is not immortal, may be not even long lived, but entirely human and perhaps even a little frail. Such a moment hastened its unwelcome way into my life this very day.

 

   I was minding my own business and looking at the images from our latest book launch. It was then that I saw it. It was there, thumbing its metaphorical nose at me. It was the sole cause of today's woe. That alien, that monstrosity of a barely covered morsel of human flesh, shone in the camera flashlight, giving the lie to my youth, and the certainty of my mid-life onset.

 

   It was a crisis. It was a moment of utter dread. That casually caught image, captured within a fraction of a second by a nosey lens, revealed to the whole world, and most of all to me, that I had nurtured, at the near unobservable rear of my noggin - a much dreaded and seemingly insidious - bald patch.

 

   It was a bald patch to end all bald patches. Gone was my personal myth of my peter pan looks, gone the Wilde like portrait in the loft. Gone was the idea that I might remain unscathed by the passage of time and live on – an immortal, slightly wrinkled but nevertheless handsome and still youthful looking.

 

   It was a revelation. It was thus revealed. Though I had no monk like intentions, I had evidently developed the makings of a tonsure. Should I wear my hat more? Should I wear it less? Was the hat the cause of the hair loss, or would the hat prevent it. I was at a loss. Would I go forth forever conscious of my depletion, obsessed by my poignant baldness or would life return to almost normal once I got used to yet another sign of creeping age. It was a sixty four million dollar question but I don’t have a sixty four million dollar, drat!