When the third world gets to second base

Had 12 hours to kill at Bangkok Airport so we decided to jump the Airport-Link train and head for the centre. Simple. Twenty five minute ride to the end of the line (seven stations from the airport). Grabbed a cab with a couple from Germany and got out at the Royal Palace.

Ignored the Royal Palace and went looking for food. Not much by way of street food and finally found a place that looked promising. Went in, came out. Buggered if I was going to be in Bangkok for a day and eat French Fries and burgers. Found a chain that did passable Thai/Chinese - more than passable in fact given that the dish Andrea ate nearly blew her head off with the chilli heat. And she likes chillis (thats my memory of Bangkok 38 years ago. Pointing at what looked like fantastic food in a market and having to run for the water trough and dive in to put out the fire in my mouth).

Anyway to cut a long story short this story is about affluence and traffic. Phnom Penh is 85% motor bikes and tuc tucs and 15% cars - as was Bangkok in 1977. Now it seems the ratios are reversed. Barely a tuc tuc in sight and relatively few motor bikes. The result: gridlock. We hailed a cab at 6pm and asked to be taken to the closest Airport-Link Station. Our flight was boarding at 11pm. At one stage I thought we might not have allowed enough time - you do the maths. We sat in traffic for an hour and a half moving less than a car length every ten minutes. I swear the traffic lights 100 metres ahead changed at least 20 times before we reached them.

We made the station at 7:30 and were at the airport at 8pm. Easy.
It's ridiculous to want people to remain poor but there is a cost to affluence and status and its called gridlock. Poor Phnom Penh doesn't know what's coming.

Cambodia/Laos Day 14 - tuc tuc tuc tuc t...

Day 14. Phnom  Penh.  A  city of motor bikes. Five  abreast, three up, meandering,  dashing, slicing, on the wrong side of the  road, weaving through oncoming traffic, daring cars to run them down, on the footpaths, across vacant lots, deftly avoiding pedestrians; pulling carts loaded with building materials, people, rubbish;  side cars designed as ice cream vans, as night market  food stalls,  for delivering produce, fish, ice, rice. Tens of thousands of them playing a giant game of 'chicken'.

Pedestrian crossings exist but are  totally ignored. Only once did a  car stop for us as we crossed a road. He took pity on us - we had made it  to the centre (half way point) but were stranded, frozen at  the prospect of taking  on the next tsunami of bikes and cars. Didn't  see a single accident - remarkable.

Oh, I  forgot  to mention the swarms of tuc tucs and their drivers, each  intent on outdoing the others with their decor and design.-

Cambodia Day 11 - 13 Suk Veasna - Temple Guide, The Blacksmith and others

Day 11. Flew fro Vientiane to Siem Reap.Got abused by immigration for not getting my departure card stamped on arrival - go figure?

Day 12. Day of Temples. Second 4am start in row. Spent 7 hours with Sok Veasna, our 22 y old guide with an obsession with pretty girls and the havoc they wreak on the world. His 20 word take on the Hindu epic, the Ramayana,  was priceless. Many years ago I saw Peter Brook's theatre version of the Mahabharata, the sister story to the Ramayana. It ran over three nights, a total of ten hours. Vesnae's took less than a minute  (there may  be more to it as  it's an epic poem  which runs over several hundred pages).

"A big fight between two gods over the Goddess Lakshmi  aka  Sita  which involved  all their forces. So God  versus God, man versus man,  animal vs animal  (the Ramayana is full of mythic animals  - monkeys as minor gods  (Hanuman), giant birds (Garuda) which carry the gods into battle, seven headed cobras etc etc)  all to win the favour of the beautiful girl. Pretty girls always cause too much trouble!"

I said I couldn't comment as I had avoided that problem. Andrea  glared  and stored it away for the future.

Veasna had apologised at the outset for his poor English and then proceeded to talk and play the comic for the remainder of the day. We fell in love with hi and his quest to understand women. He was concerne3d that he  would never be attractive to the  pale skinned Cambodian girls as he was too dark. If that were  to happen he said it's called: "Frog eat Goose" (their frogs are big brown monsters similar in appearance to our toads).

Beautiful temples, Great Hindu/Buddhist history.  You  had to be there. (Some photos on this blog)

Day 13. Became a blacksmith  for a  day. Made kitchen knife using a sledge hammer and an angle grinder- with a  little help from a master blacksmith and his three assistants.He was 69 and as fit as a malley bull. The knife began life as a length of steel reinforcing rod. I wielded one of the hammers and the sound of metal on metal rang through the  streEt as we changed the shape of that thing until the magic happened. I did bit of angle grinding to remove  the black coke from the surface and he did the  final shaping and sharpening. Luckily I had an interpreter as no one  spoke a word of English.  His  workshop was a ramshackle patchwork of corrugated iron thrown together to protect the space from  the sun, no walls, set up  in front of his humble house.fro there he produces scythes, hoes, cutting impleents of many shapes and sizes at the  rate of about 20 a  day.He's been doing it for fifty years.