Phnom Penh dresses for Casual Friday. Every motodop wears neat khakis, a pressed blue or checked shirt, and a baseball cap. Even the beggars wear (ragged) button-down shirts. Food stands look like Silicon Valley board meetings.
I couldn’t figure this out until I went to the market, where stall after stall sells western high street clothing. Gap, H&M, Royal Robbin, Mothercare, Banana Republic—all mixed in together, and all a dollar or two a garment. I’d never noticed all those ‘Made in Cambodia’ labels before.

Sarom, my motorbike driver, tells me sorrowfully about the good old days, when he worked as a croupier and his wife had a job in a textile factory. Now the government has closed the casinos, due to mafia activity, and the textile factory has shut down too. I had just read an Economist article that reported that the inhouse Director of Human Rights at Reebok had proudly shut down a supplier in Thailand, where the workers had been forced to work a seventy hour week. The article was scornful, as am I. Great job. Now what? Those women will go on social security—except, oops, there isn’t any.

I wish well-meaning woollies would think before campaigning to boycott products made in dollar-a-day factories. Improve conditions, by all means. Regulate child labor, too. But don’t take away families’ livelihoods just because you don’t know what a dollar actually means locally. This isn’t France, where Ministry of Labour inspectors patrol carparks waiting to prosecute employers whose staff work more than 35 hours a week. It’s the real world, the one without safety nets, where ‘cradle to grave’ can be a pretty short trip.

I had a huge appetite for sleep and a grumpy morning face as a teenager—still do. My poor sisters, six and eight years younger respectively, have bitter memories of being growled at every Christmas morning when they bounced in shortly after dawn full of Santy excitement.

But this year I’m in Cambodia, seven hours ahead of Ireland, and waiting for my family to wake up so I can call them. And at last I know how Claire and Caroline felt.

Happy Christmas, all.

The first mistake was going to a tourist restaurant instead of to one of my beloved market stalls. We western types seem to be afraid of street food—in New York I would have eaten my own foot before I touched a hot dog from the Hebrew Nation pushcarts. After months in Southeast Asia I’m convinced that a woman who makes just one dish, and who takes enough pride in it to pack her little tables constantly, is less likely to serve up a plateful of dysentery than the staff in an unseen kitchen who wrestle with a huge range of unfamiliar, westernized ingredients just waiting to spoil. In this case, farang pork did me in. By the time I got to Kampot, 150km south of Phnom Penh, I needed to spend two days in a hotel room with good plumbing and enough satellite TV channels to distract me from my guts.

I also distracted myself with Dervla Murphy’s first book, Full Tilt, her tale of cycling from Dunkirk to Delhi in 1963, at the age of 31. My namesake always makes me feel very trepid. In the first chapter alone, she is attacked by a pack of starving wolves in Yugoslavia and escapes only by shooting two dead and wounding a third. A few pages later, she has to pull the gun on a Kurdish would-be rapist, and then defend herself from Azerbaijani bandits who try to steal her bicycle. On a bus in Afghanistan, a gunfight breaks out over fares and she gets hit with the butt of a shotgun, breaking three ribs. She cycles through the coldest winter of the century in Europe and through 115-degree heat in Pakistan. And she did it all with just one pair of trousers and two shirts. I had to turn back to Destiny’s Child on MTV whenever the excitement got too much for me. As bicycling Derv(a)las go, I decided, I suck.

I redeemed myself slightly by getting back on a motorbike the following day. That was the second mistake. A Honda Baja 250cc dirt bike this time, which looks cool but is hideously uncomfortable. The seat is so narrow that you have to choose which buttock to perch on it—and I am no J.Lo, especially after an involuntary week-long crash diet. But I do like the name.
    “Baja,” I practiced with narrowed eyes , “Yeah, goin’ down to Baja.” The water buffaloes rolled their eyes.

Khmer Rouge activity and armed poachers kept Bokor National Park off limits until a couple of years ago. According to the Lonely Planet, “The road up to Bokor is one of Cambodia’s most exciting, but in terrible condition for the first 25km and only passable on a motorbike or in a sturdy 4WD vehicle.” Naturally, I hadn’t read this in advance. Unlike Dervla Murphy, I don’t choose roads for their excitement value, particularly when that relative term is applied in a place like Cambodia. By six kilometers in, I had forgotten all about my churning guts and was focused rigidly on my already-broken hand (a casualty of an earlier motorbike in Vietnam). Occasionally, there was a meter-long strip of asphalt, just to tease. For the rest of the way, the road was a collection of lethal, apple-sized rocks on a sandy base. The bike groaned and skidded up the twisty track, and every so often I recognized the sickening feeling of the back wheel sliding to the left while I lurched to the right. I was sweating with fear.

    “I hate this,” I whined, “I want to walk.” My friend Urs, who had volunteered to drive, wasn’t having a great time either. He cut banana leaves and camouflaged the bike in the jungle growth, while I kicked rocks with my Tevas. We made a little pile of stones to mark the spot and started walking. It was 2.30, which left us plenty of time to visit the deserted hill station at the top and arrange beds at the ranger station, I thought. The third mistake.

Of course, I hadn’t looked at the guidebook. I’m too cool for that now. I didn’t realize it was twenty-two kilometers to the top on a rocky road and a very empty, churning stomach. As we climbed, the temperature dropped and the vegetation changed from coconut palms to heather and pine trees. It looked incongruously like New England or County Clare. In Southeast Asia, I’ve liked the old colonial hill stations best—Dalat in Vietnam, Kalaw in Burma—but in Bokor I was too nervous to enjoy the fresh climate and the view. The few vehicles we passed were heading down. Eventually, we stopped a Swede on a dirt bike.
    “Are we far from the top?”
    “Oh no, not far,” he said, perched on his bike “In maybe two kilometers you come to the first buildings. The ranger station is 10km after that.”
    “Does anybody stay in the first buildings?”
    “No, they’re abandoned. But it’s great up at the top. Hill station is beautiful. Have fun!”

He roared off. It was nearly sunset, too late to walk down, too late to get to the top before dark. At least there would be a full moon.

The first buildings turned out to be abandoned villas that were once owned by King Sihanouk, part of a complex called the Black Palace. Now they were completely gutted. Everything had been stripped and sold during the famine, and only the walls and marble floor tiles were left. They were pocked with bullet holes and covered with graffiti. Even the shell, though, still looked ready for Architectural Digest—some French playboy’s villa on a mountain, with a magnificent terrace that looked all the way down to the sea. The sun was sinking behind the pines and miles away we could see little boats head out into the Gulf of Thailand for the night’s fishing.

We decided to camp for the night. I’m not a very experienced camper, and felt an abandoned palace would be a good place to start. Pleased, I immediately sat down to eat my emergency peanut and candy rations, saving the cookies for breakfast at dawn, should I live that long. The moon rose, bright enough to read by, and cast shadows against the villa walls. The largest gecko I’ve ever seen hunted by it’s light. A bullfrog croaked. It was all absurdly beautiful.

Urs made me rehearse grabbing my bag and hidng in the undergrowth if we heard people approach—rangers, bandits, or maybe armed poachers. By now I was terrified. At 8 o’clock I put on a second pair of trousers, my spare t-shirt, socks, a fleece, and a hat, and lay down under my mosquito net. The net was oddly comforting, a wispy physical barrier against the ghouls and predators that lurked in the shadows. Whenever I closed my eyes, visions danced. I knew I was a scaredy-cat, but I hadn’t known just how powerful my imagination is. Now leering, melting faces loomed, and packs of werewolves pounced, and hideous supernatural bandits poked AK-47s in my ribs. (I’d gone to the shooting gallery in Phnom Penh and now I knew exactly what an AK looked—and sounded—like.) And I wasn’t even asleep yet.

    “What’s that!” I hissed maybe thirty times.
    “A plastic bag. A frog. A dog in the valley. Maybe a mouse.” Urs answered patiently each time.

It rained, but I was snug in my palace and glad I’d lugged the extra clothing. I did sleep a little eventually, though I checked my watch by the light of the moon every hour or two. Khmer supernatural bandits don’t work on full moon nights, apparently, because I survived to watch the Gulf of Thailand appear from the mist at dawn. Bliss it was. Even my gut felt better after multiple self-administered doses of adrenaline. I celebrated with raisin cookies and iodine-flavored bog water.

We set off to walk the last ten klicks to the hill station. The French had built Bokor town in the 1920s, and it was abandoned first during the Indochina War and again during the Pol Pot years. When the Vietnamese invaded to overthrow the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Bokor was a key place for all sides, with its miles of visibility all the way to Vietnam. For several months, a Khmer Rouge unit holed up in the Catholic church while Vietnamese troops shot at them from the Palace Hotel half a kilometer away.

It’s an eerie and fascinating place. The few buildings left are covered with an attractive red lichen and the walls are bullet-scarred and graffitti-scrawled. One local tout, in particular, has hit on an enterprising marketing strategy—inside, the church walls are covered in a series that reads:
    “Pon here with Greta. She from Sweden. 1/6/99. Pon Motorbike Taxi Kampot 695-XXX”
    “Pon here with Derek. He from England. 17/7/99. Pon Motorbike Taxi Kampot 695-XXX”
On another wall: “Backpacker go home!”

The Palace Hotel at the summit is straight out of Stephen King. In the early morning the fog swirled through the ruined reception and ballroom. We climbed to the roof terrace and imagined the parties full of bored French colonials wearing white silk, and, later, the Vietnamese snipers perched behind the bar. We took pictures of bullet holes in the windows. Philistine that I am, I find modern ruins much more interesting than ancient ones. Bokor, I decided, is my Angkor.

I was sorry to leave when we started back down the track. All I’d eaten for a week was boiled rice and raisin cookies, and my dry Pot Noodles weren’t much use, so I was flagging when we got back to our palace digs an hour or so later. I was bracing myself for the remaining 20km slog back to the bike when a 4WD pulled up. It was a Khmer pharmacist in a Ministry of Health jeep, on a pleasure jaunt away from his work on an anti-TB campaign. He was incredulous that we were walking, and we decided not to mention our camping trip. He thought we were even stranger when we requested to be let out six kilometers from the base and scrabbled in the undergrowth to retrieve old Baja, but I’d gone beyond caring. My night on the mountain had calmed me to the point where I didn’t squeak on the way back down, though the road was ‘exciting’ as ever. Still, I didn’t breathe out until we were back on Highway 3 heading for Kep.

Dervla Murphy has nothing to fear from me.

At the clinic in Saigon, I was treated immediately by an efficient team: GP, radiologist, orthopedic surgeon. It’s a good system. I paid western prices, which subsidize free operations for locals in need. Plus, conducting the consultation in French distracted me from the crunch of bone-setting. My fellow patient was a Parisian ex-pat who had cracked a rib falling in the bathtub; between us we made a good sample of foreigner injuries.

On the follow-up visit, as if to provide an authentic western experience, my orthopedist was distracted and perfunctory, and barely took the time to swipe my credit card for fifty bucks. My cast was loose since the swelling reduced, and sure enough a couple of days later my little finger, splinted like Dr. Evil, was once again at an alarming angle.

Since just about every ex-pat busts a hand on a motorbike at one time or other, I had plenty of advice on where to go. This morning, I brought the hand to the promisingly-named Sihanouk Center of Hope, a public clinic on the outskirts of town. I waved my cast at the staff nurse on duty and showed him the x-ray. Immediately, he brought me to the head of the emergency room line and then, anticlimatically, through a door marked ‘Minor Procedures’. I presented the arm to a very nice doctor, somewhat embarrassed by the red wine stains and ‘I Heart Gary Glitter’ graffiti that were my souvenirs of the Cambodia Daily staff Christmas party. I decided not to tell him I’d fallen off a motorbike, though he probably took one look at me and guessed.

With the help of four, count ‘em, nurses, the doctor sawed off my cast, reset the splayed finger and somewhat clumsily wrapped a new cast for me. This one is long enough the I have trouble manoeuvering it into my jazzy homemade sling, and it’s smearing my clothes with plaster, but it feels better.

On the way out through the full waiting room, I asked where and how much to pay.
   ‘Nothing. You are guest in Cambodia.’
   ‘What? Can I make a donation?’
  ‘No. But come back in four weeks and we’ll take cast off.’

In the waiting room, people sicker and poorer than me nodded sympathetically at my shiny new cast. I was reminded of the wry joke in Scary Movie, where a girl leans out the window, shouts ‘Help! White woman in trouble!’ and, immediately, twenty police cars roar up. It’s not far off the mark. I’m embarrassed that my European face wins me special treatment I neither need or deserve.

I met my Phnom Penh pals for a quick beer at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, a few blocks from my hotel. It was too short a distance to bother with a motodop home. In any case, I’m so averse to bargaining for fares that I’d usually rather walk.

On a dark street near the market, two young Khmer guys said hello. Normal. I walked past, fast as usual, but not so fast that one didn’t have time to reach past my arm in a sling and grab my left breast. Hard.

They were gone before I could react, and I got back to the hotel safely. When I told my friend Porter the following day, he looked worried and said he should have made sure I’d taken a motodop, an attitude I would have dismissed as unnecessary Southern solicitude before.

I’ve dealt with these kinds of minor assaults many times. So have most women I know. I’ve been groped on the New York subway and on an Aer Lingus flight. I’ve been flashed at, heard lewd insults, endured unwelcome, lingering hugs. But despite all this experience, I can never get it together to shout, kick, slap, or ridicule. My first reaction is still always disbelief, followed by disabling politeness. By then it’s usually (and thankfully) too late.

The fear that follows is never a direct response to the incident itself. I’ve experienced mostly minor stuff. The fear comes from the realization that I’ve been lucky again. The fear comes from the reminder that there will probably be a next time, and that by walking city streets alone at 10 pm (or 10 am) I am taking a risk. That men who would smile politely if I were walking with a 6’3” Southerner like Porter regard me differently when I’m alone. That if some creep in Brooklyn or Bangkok, Peoria or Phnom Penh, decides to get nasty there may not be much I can do.

I hate these reminders. I hate feeling angry and stupid. I’ve promised myself that the next creep will get a nice mouthful of plaster of Paris.

Take the rutted roads of Burma and the bomb craters of the Mekong Delta rice paddies and you’ve got Cambodia’s Highway One. Almost immediately, rural Cambodia looks poorer than Vietnam. The dogs are skinny. The paddies are brown. One market seemed to sell nothing but green bananas. The huts are mud and thatch, a leading indicator in my Three Little Pigs school of comparative economics.

The only Khmer on the minibus was a middle-aged man who wore aviator glasses and a comfortable paunch. He translated the driver’s instructions when we all had to get off the bus in order to push it through a particularly bad stretch. I sat with him at the lunch stop. He was a civil engineer from Phnom Penh, and was coming back from a medical checkup in Saigon. His 22-year-old son lived in New Zealand now; the 18-year old in France.
   “But I tell him to take English lessons there!”
He himself hadn’t learned English until the 1980s; at school they had studied French. He spoke well, but admitted he didn’t enjoy language study. He liked maths and science, but one had to speak English on all the major construction projects now. He read the Cambodia Daily for practice.

He was courtly but self-contained, and I wondered how to ask how on earth he had survived a regime famous for liquidating urban, educated professionals. Finally I asked if he’d had to give up his job in that time.
    “Oh yes. We were all given a day to leave the city. We were forced to do hard labor in the countryside, and every month I had to provide a written curriculum vitae saying what I had done before. They checked it every month. ‘Civil engineer.’ But I was not singled out.”

I was relieved, and felt bolder. He talked about the bad years in a general way, and mentioned that his 12-year-old refused to believe the stories.
    “Twelve? Your son is very young.”
He hesitated. “My first four children were killed. Age six, four, three, and a baby less than one year. The youngest, the breast milk dried up, and…”
His eyes welled up. I hadn’t yet seen the tree on which the Khmer Rouge bashed babies’ brains out, but I knew the stories. He took a bite of steak, this man whose child had starved. He blew his nose on a napkin. After a while he smiled.

    “Now we have three more children. Oldest born in 1980. My wife and I, we have a joke together. We say, ‘Old factory, new product line.’ “

In Cambodia, I am constantly hitting the snooze button on my biological clock. 50% of the population is under 15, and at least half of those are the sweetest, most biteable babies and toddlers you ever saw. If you don’t believe me, ask Angelina Jolie.

The real proprietor of the sugar-cane juice stand I went to yesterday was a two-year-old girl with bangs, a wavy pony-tail, and a red gingham dress like a tiny, Khmer Brigitte Bardot. First she stared at the pale freak who sat down, until, bored, she trotted off and came back with a box of matches. After several tries she lit one, dropped it in fright and then burst out laughing. Her parents looked on adoringly. Then she climbed on Dad’s motorbike, standing up on the seat. (Child passengers always stand up on bikes and motorcycles in Phnom Penh, for some reason. It’s quite something to see tiny kids balancing on the frame of a pushbike while an older brother pedals and a sister sits on the carrier.) She put on Mum’s sunglasses and steered that bike like a Saigon taxi-driver, and I was glad it was still on the kickstand. ‘Vroom!’ she said, or something like it.

One child in five dies before the age of five here. Many are orphans; street kids with old faces are everywhere. But oh, the others, the lucky ones—they lead kid lives that are richer and just plain funner than the cocooned, scheduled, and sedentary western kids I know. It really does take a village.

I visited the War Remnants Museum in Saigon today (shortly after learning of Kissinger’s new gig). The broken hand curtails me writing about it, but I have a new appreciation for the life of antiwar protestor Phillip Berrigan, RIP. (Via wood s. lot.)

See also a New York Times piece on Berrigan.

My first view of Saigon was from the back of a speeding motorbike taxi, known as ‘hug taxis’ in my favorite piece of Vietnamese slang. I looked at the sky to avoid seeing the thousands of would-be killers who swerved way too late for comfort each time. My driver cornered like a lunatic and I clutched my left hand, which by now was livid and shiny as a corpse and a peculiar shape. I secretly hoped it was broken, so I’d get to be a cool kid with a cast. Then I remembered I haven’t needed to dodge Christmas exams in fifteen years.

    ‘Here is hospital.’
I struggled to get the fare out of my money belt. The driver wore sunglasses with pictures of iridescent eyeballs on the lenses.
    ‘What you do your hand?’
    ‘I learned how to ride a motorbike in Dalat yesterday. Then I fell off.’

It’s broken in three places. I have to wear an elbow-length cast for four weeks, and I’m already sick of it in the tropical heat. But at least it’s the left hand. I have enough trouble with chopsticks as is.

I hired Daniel to take me on an overnight trek in Kalau. He was an excellent guide, despite indulging in the longest, loudest, most prolonged belching sessions I have ever had the opportunity to share a mountain with.

Daniel’s grandparents arrived in Burma from Kerala in 1890. He has visited India only once, on a two-week holiday, but under Burmese law he is classed as ‘foreign’. Kalau is an old British hill station and has a large population of Indian and Nepali descent, imported as civil servants by the British, who didn’t want to train the Burmese. Over a hundred years later, their descendents are still resented for this former favored status, and are allowed limited freedom of movement and property rights. Perhaps because of this discrimination, the ‘foreigners’ in Kalau have struggled harder to learn English than the ‘natives’. Daniel learned English at Catholic school and from the BBC World Service, and we managed to have good chats as we walked.

He took me to a village school, where seventy or eighty kids sat in a single room, supervised by three teachers. They were divided by age into four groups, and each knot of kids chanted the day’s lessons by rote. Schoolbooks were ancient and scarce, and pencils were donated by the few tourists who passed through. In the middle of the room, the youngest teacher was cutting a child’s hair.
    ‘The parents won’t do it, even though we tell them,’ she explained. ‘Often, we cut fingernails too.’

Among the only teaching materials was a map that the head teacher had made. Burma, divided into regions, each region carefully stuck with a mosaic of representative products. Teak chippings. Tiny paste rubies. Rice grains. Scraps of cloth. Wheat, vegetables, coal. She had rigged a little electrode plate by the names of each province; if you touched it with an old ballpoint, the region would light up on the map. The children had played with it so much that now the battery was dead.

The map had won her a prize at a state competition: three dollars, which she had used to buy ingredients for a meal for the children. She needed to give them incentives to come to school, she explained, as their parents often wanted them to stay at home and help with farming. The oldest child in the room was about nine, the youngest a squalling one-year-old tied to her sister’s back.

As she carefully pointed out the products of each region, Daniel said:
    ‘It is simply amazing that this country is kept so poor.’

Little paper, few pencils, few books. The one gleaming item in the schoolroom was a laminated mission statement that I was to see in every classroom I visited. Though the teachers could barely speak the English they taught, this McKinsey-worthy effort was proudly written in English first, then in bubbly Burmese script.

’Our Mission is to Create a Learning Society to Equip Knowledge Workers for the Information Age.’

The future knowledge workers of Burma chanted the two-times tables. 80% of them will not get to middle school.

Later I tried to explain to Daniel that there were poor people in America too, though the poverty was on a different scale. I told him about a school I’d visited in Brooklyn, where the teacher complained that she’d used her own money to buy a uniform for one little girl, whose father had immediately sold it. He didn’t believe me. How was this possible?
    ‘Well, sometimes people don’t have homes to live in, so they live on the street. Housing and food are very expensive, and if you don’t have a job or a family to take care of you…’
   ’But why don’t they simply take some land and grow food?’
   ’You can’t do that. They don’t have the money to buy land. And they don’t necessarily know how to grow food.’
   ’So all the land is owned by somebody? There is none free to take?’
We pondered this for a while.
   ’It is very strange that people are poor in America,’ he said
   ’Well, it’s very strange that people are poor in Burma, too.’