Siam I Am

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Siam Chronicles 12 - Step by Step, a Falter to Kep

Houses of Trash and Trashed Houses

Tacking South on the Siroccos
I was rubbernecking rapt as the bus mapped a course to the Southeastern tip of Cambodia. Steadily, the huts became enshrined upon great piles of trash, a jumble of bright colors tumbling into dun ponds where the children dove and bathed, the moms swished laundry into tumescent billows, and the dads schlepped sickly fish up from drop nets.
Before long the houses themselves were cobbled from the dross, erupting seamlessly from the family landfill at jaunty angles. My favorite had availed itself of a highway sign fallen into desuetude, which was cut to size and installed as a wall. Unbeknownst to the occupants inside, the left side of their domicile now bore the single word “HELL” in red ten foot letters.

The Lost Resort
The chateaus had been shelled and gutted as oysters of decadence, twisting with rebar which spindled into the sky like withered trees. The view was still the sea, the melody was still the ceaseless chunnering of the waves, but it was a last conceit for the extinct elite, for the miles of bombed out buildings belonging to the bygone best of the best. The effete resort town of Kep had been a bright beacon of the capitalist west. Now it was a jeremiad to how the Khmer Rouge had been able to tyrannize a destructive power comparable to a meteor shower.

Marooned on Rabbit Island
Rabbit Island does not have any rabbits. It does not look like a rabbit. I want to be clear on this, in case the nonsensical cognomen invites the fantasy of a flowering of fluff-balls roistering fetchingly round the left ear of a dyad of pointy volcanic outcroppings.
The plan was to get a feel for what island life was like without any of the tidy assiduities of rampant tourism. The family hosting our short stay commenced the circumvolution upon on our soggy arrival, during which I almost flipped backward into the sea with my ever-present grace and aplomb until Alex’s steadying hand averted the aquatic acrobatics.
This is tiny Rabbit Island, encompassed in a gesture.
Those are the purportedly uninhabited islands rounding into the horizon, which are actually infested with Vietnamese squatters, promulgating rifles, who give the expression “get off my lawn” more than the usual amount of emphasis.
This is our little room with the charming oil lamp and hugely necessary mosquito net.
These are the three sticks of bamboo doing a shabby job of screening a hole, politely referred to as the bathroom.
This is the shower –a large blue drum of green scum indented by a ladle so dirty that it might have been carved directly from the earth itself. Rustic, charming.
We swam, we got salty and stuck to things, unwilling to substitute salt for slime in the “shower,” and I drew until dusk closed curtain.
The single generator that fed the three flickers of fluorescence was to cut out at ten sharp. So when at 9:40 the light went out right as I was about to upset a comeback win at rummy 500, it was far from good. It was an atramentous night, the clouds covering the stars and moon, with the sporadic frisson of lightning far away foretelling impending deluge. The flashlight had been smartly secreted to a place so secure and impenetrable that it was probably playing poker with the grail and Bush’s DWI records. That left only the oil lamp, which was of poor construction. Any attempt to touch it made it triturate into tiny pieces, anointing the wicker of the walls and floor with highly flammable fluid but doing nothing whatsoever to produce a utile light.
At this juncture I attempted my blind gambit for the “bathroom.” What I did not know is that the five diseased dogs casing the joint come alive at night, and they are not friendly. The white of their teeth whipping at my retreating posterior was the one thing I could see through the portiere of darkness. Our bungalow was an island amidst an eddy of circling canines, endlessly yelping their sanguinary plea to the sea.
So it was that we peed off the balcony and crawled into bed, deciding to leave first light. And we did indeed leave the island, but took some part of it with us - in our hearts and in our undershorts - but that's a story for another time.

1 Comments:

At 10:15 AM, Blogger Mooms said...

Brilliant, as usual. Up to your old standards. I will be posting the best of your pictures at my blog: http://cunninghamclansouth.blogspot.com/

The pictures of Angkor Wat are already up there.

 

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