Wednesday, January 25, 2006

King's Island






Thunk! A green coconut lands heavily at my feet, splashing white sand onto the hammock I’m rigging in the shade of two towering palms. Craning my neck and squinting upwards, I can make out the brown legs of Maran, a teenage fisherman who accepted $4 to ferry me across the channel to this putting-green sized atoll somewhere off the thickly forested coast of Southwestern Cambodia. Two more coconuts (whump, thomp) drop somewhere in the underbrush to my left. Abandoning my hammock for the moment, I hastily backpedal a few steps further into the grove to join Maran’s friend Kuhn on the porch of a driftwood shack, where he sits cross-legged, carefully twisting chicken feathers around a weighted wire hook to make a squid jig. Running my fingers across my scalp, I wonder for the umpteenth time where exactly I have managed to lose myself.

The idea to explore the scattered islands that lie between Sihanoukville, a beach town 150 km southwest of Phnom Penh, and the Thai border was, like most Cambodian projects, easy to put into motion but impossible to plan. Starting out, the only thing I knew with certainty was that the islands were out there somewhere beyond the sunset. The maps I checked agreed on the general position of two large islands at the eastern edge of the Gulf of Kompong Sohm, but each cartographer had apparently inserted a sampling from a different Jackson Pollack painting to represent the archipelago that lay beyond. How many islands there were, what they were shaped like, whether people lived on them and how it was possible to get there and away – the details, if you will – were a mystery that only grew foggier as I roamed about town searching for the informed sort of speculation.

“Yes, no problem,” said the first local I approached for information, pounding the backseat of his motorbike. Remembering my experience in Phnom Penh the week before, when, over the course of an afternoon spent looking for the Japanese embassy, I was dropped off in front of a brothel, outside a karaoke club and (close but no cigar), at the Lucky Sushi Bar, I hesitated before hopping on the bike.

“Islands,” I said, having long since abandoned my Khmer phrasebook in favor of exaggerated gestures and broken English. “Do you know where I can ask about a boat?”

“Islands, islands,” he replied, nodding enthusiastically and waving a hand in the direction of the Ecstatic Pizza Restaurant and Massage Parlor. “No problem, I know.”

He didn’t know, of course, but en route to whatever destination we were rumbling towards, I spotted a hand-lettered sign reading DIVE TRIPS. Leaving the bike and driver puttering at the curb, I ventured inside and found a deeply tanned old man with long white hair pulled back in a neat ponytail standing against the back wall gazing at a nautical chart of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Henri had nothing to do with any dive shop, but he had sailed around the world twice in his youth, and more applicable to my quest, had seen the islands I was searching for.

“There is a boat, you see,” he told me, searching carefully for the English words. “Between this town and the Thai border. It is popular with the travelers. I have taken it twice, and both times we made a stop at an island, perhaps off the headland, perhaps further along. There was a small village. I did not get off, but it seems to me that you could do so without trouble. But my memory is not so good and I am drinking absinthe since yesterday, so perhaps you should make certain at the ferry docks in the morning.”

Somewhat skeptically, I thanked Henri and motored back to my guesthouse, where the manager of the Endless Summer restaurant confirmed that the boat to the Thai border did exist, although he had never heard of it making a stop anywhere. Figuring that at worst the ride would give me a chance to scout the archipelago firsthand, I purchased a ticket and soon found myself squeezed between four Canadian women, a hung-over Cambodian fisherman, eight sacks of rice and a clump of extremely unhappy chickens on the roof of a narrow riverboat as it chugged across the harbor and into the open waters of the Gulf of Thailand.

As we rounded the cape that separates Sihanoukville from the Gulf of Kompong Sohm, I suddenly understood the mapmakers’ dilemma. Islands were scattered about in all directions as far as the eye could see – some big and mountainous, others barely more than sandy reefs protruding from the gentle waves, each and every one calling out for exploration. The boat splashed along through a shallow channel separating two islands that I nicknamed Jekyll and Hyde, one a morass of steamy green jungle and rocky cliffs, the other offering an empty white sand beach backed by coconut palms and banana plantations. A few fishing huts were tucked into quiet bays on this peaceful island, but few others betrayed any hint of a human presence. Even the mainland, visible in snatches where the chain of islands parted, showed no trace of road-dust or power-line scars in a verdant forest canopy smothering the rounded hills.

After two hours, with the noon sun reflecting hard off the boat’s white roof, it became nearly impossible to tell the difference between bay and channel and between island and coast; where one patch of sand ended and another began. I was watching dolphins romp in the bow wake when suddenly, a sign of civilization intruded upon the sublime - a red and white radio tower protruding from a nondescript atoll scarcely wider than an interstate highway. Peering over the bow, I could make out a cluster of tin roofs hugging the coast at the base of the tower. As we drew closer, two crewmen began throwing chickens and rice onto the lower deck. The Canadian women had their guidebook out and were frantically scanning the horizon for Thailand. Amidst the flurry of activity, I jumped over the rail and unto a rickety dock extending back into a warren of wooden shacks perched on stilts above the shallow little harbor. With a belch of black smoke and one or two feeble chicken squawks, the boat was suddenly gone, leaving a vague scent of sunscreen and paint lingering in the salty air.

Here I was.

Wherever that might be.


My presence on the dock of the fishing village had not gone unnoticed, but the frantic swarm of moto-drivers, fruit vendors and beggars that greet travelers at arrival points in most Cambodian towns failed to appear. Instead, the three wiry young men who had met the boat flashed white smiles and went back to sorting through cases of foodstuffs, while one dark-eyed little girl ducked out from behind a doorway to shout, “Hello.”

Most of the village existed on the docks themselves, houses connected by a maze of weathered planks snaking this way and that a few feet above the quiet waves. Walking towards shore, I passed by general stores and brightly decorated teashops with tables in the shade. The main street was swept clean and overhung with bright pink bougainvillea blossoms. Like nearly everything on the island, it had a calming sort of logic about it, a sort of timeless appropriateness. Where else to put a street but here, between the docks and the hillside, where people had always walked and would tomorrow too?

There was a sense of wholesome vitality in this village, a quality hard to find in war-ravaged Cambodia. The people gossiping over fresh loafs of bread and baskets of papayas in the marketplace were poor, but not desperate; there was no aching look of frustrated urgency in the eyes of the men sorting through goods brought by the morning boat. I walked very slowly down the sun-splashed little street, soaking in the easy sense of calm that can only come from being in a place where no one expects more from tomorrow than they have today.

A gust of wind came off the sea, shaking loose a few pink blossoms and sending a gang of little boys running barefoot after their volleyball.

Later that evening, after a group of children checked me into an airy room with clean sheets at a guesthouse on the hill above town, I found a path to the shore and settled in to watch the sunset. A sailor shipwrecked on this side of the island would assume it was uninhabited. Patches of tide-swept sand filled the gaps between jumbles of rock smoothed by millennia of waves, while trees fought voraciously for sunlight on the steep hillside behind the beach, their highest branches heavy with a plethora of colorful fruits. I entertained the idea of climbing up to pick some before realizing that if I fell, no one would know where to look for me. For that matter, even I didn’t have the slightest idea what this island was called or how to find it on a map. The last entry in the guesthouse registry was from two years ago. As the light turned orange, I forgot to wonder where I was and gazed off at other islands beckoning from across the waves.

The next morning I awoke early to the shouts of children playing soccer among the palms. As I walked down the hill to the market for breakfast, a man puttered by on a new motorbike, smiling as if he owned the world. A golden emblem on a thick necklace bounced against his healthy stomach where his shirt parted to the breeze. A well-groomed Pomeranian stood on the man’s lap with its front paws resting on the handlebars. It showed me little white teeth as its owner drove past.

Down in the village I bought a plateful of sweet potato fries and a ripe mango that a little girl expertly sliced with a flourish of her machete. While buying the food, my eyes were drawn to a round-faced young woman with long dark hair who was sitting behind a sugar cane juice stand in the shade of bougainvillea blossoms. Weighing the potential vulnerablities of my stomach and heart, I brought my food to her table.

The long-haired beauty hid a smile as passer-bys shared a laugh over her proximity to a foreigner. Without looking at me once, she took some fresh stalks of sugarcane from the pile at her feet and began feeding them into a metal grinder that she turned by hand. When the stalks were dry, she carefully brushed the dirt from a block of ice and chiseled off enough chips to fill a small plastic bag. Finally, she ladled the pale green juice over the ice, dropped in a straw and handed me the bag.

“What?” I asked in my best Khmer, pointing at the drink. “What is this?”

The beautiful girl looked at me as if I was morphing into a snake, then broke into a smile, turned away and finally, looking back for just an instant with hair in her eyes, said, “T’uk m paao.”

“I like T’uk m paao,” I replied with a big smile, exhausting my Khmer vocabulary, but she just blushed into her shirt collar and started cleaning the juice grinder. I turned my attention to the crowd of children who had solemnly surrounded my table.

Shyness disappeared in no time. The kids showed me that they could count to ten in English, I taught them how to play ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors,’ we confirmed that everyone liked T’uk m paao, and then the whole crowd pulled me away from the table and deposited me with shouts of glee on the hard-packed dirt of the town volley-ball court. After much frenzied and physical Rock, Paper, Scissors, three boys small enough to run under the net without ducking joined me on the court while the rest lined up on the sidelines. My partner gave me a thumbs up and tossed over a ball. I could feel dark eyes watching from behind the juice grinder as got ready to serve.

Thirty minutes later, red of face, pouring sweat and thoroughly embarrassed at getting my ass handed to me by a pack of six year olds, I shuffled back to the table in the shade. Figuring that the dignity I had just lost on the court could be partially salvaged by a display of generosity, I called the kids together and ordered T’uk m paao all around. It was there, surrounded by jubilant hordes of sugared-up elementary schoolers, that Mr. Ken So Khut found me.

Ken arrived on the back of a motor scooter, a slight, dark-skinned man of about forty with floppy hair, threadbare clothes and a wry sense of humor. “Oh shit man,” he said, catching my eye with a doleful expression. “Let’s get you out of here.”

He brought me on the back of the scooter to a quiet tea house near the ferry dock where we ordered cold sweet tea and a plate of spicy pickled vegetables. Thankful to be out of the heat and for a chance to speak English, I bombarded Ken with questions.

“About 300 families live here,” he explained. “Fishermen, for the most part. I came here from Phonm Penh to work for tourists but nobody comes. You’re the first I’ve had in almost a year.” He laughed a little sadly, fingering his shirt.

“What did you do in Phonm Penh?”

“I was a kickboxer,” Ken replied, his eyes brightening up. “274 fights. Then I studied English but I had no money so I drove a moto-bike. Then I came here. Six years ago.”

“I saw a man this morning,” I said, “riding a bike with a little dog. Is he a fisherman?”

Ken laughed.

“Ah, you mean Oueng. He owns everything here, the ice factory, the shops, the restaurant, all the fish - even the guest-house where you’re staying. He’s from Thailand, got lots of money.”

“How can he own the fish,” I asked, confused. “Isn’t almost everyone a fisherman?”

“Yeah, but how can they sell the fish without using Oueng’s ice? He buys everything and ships it off to Thailand. Thai boats come in too, right off there, they come in at night and shine the big lights into the water and all the fish come to the light and they scoop them out and go home. There’s no more fish here now. The local people can’t keep up. They have to go far out at night now too. It’s dangerous in those little boats but the price of gas is high and there’s not enough fish to cover expenses if you just work the daytime. They need something new, new jobs, but there’s nothing else. Two more years and Oueng will go back to Thailand and these people won’t even be able to buy rice. We need tourists to come. We're dying for tourists to come. Say, do you want to explore some islands with a fisherman tomorrow? You would be their first tourist!”

The first tourist. The first syphilictic penetration. I thought of the girl on the beach in Sihanoukville who only knew the Japanese words for hello, thank you, hard and painful. And then I thought of those beautiful islands across the channel.

"Sure," I said to Ken. "I'd love to."

His face split into a grin. "Thanks. They'll be so happy. It will make a big difference for them."

The boat waiting for me at the docks the next morning was a long narrow canoe with a thick coat of red paint, powered by a motor that that looked like it had been salvaged from an old weed-whacker. Ken acted businesslike, shouting instructions to Maran, the bemused young fisherman at the helm. At the last minute, another young fisherman joined us in the bow, and as Ken tossed over the mooring line Maran casually started the motor a-whirring and piloted us out into open water.

Islands were scattered about in a loose ring surrounding a shallow bay, backed to the East by the Cardamom Mountains, a roadless wilderness nonetheless bearing fresh red scars from recent clearcuts. Schools of silver fish broke water in shimmering, panicky waves as our boat cut through the gentle currents. Not sure if the crew had a destination in mind, I pointed to a tiny atoll with a small hut surrounded by a grove of lofty palms. Maran nodded, cutting the engine as we drew closer and letting the nose of our craft nudge up a perfect curve of sand.

We spent the whole day in this manner, with me gesturing towards beach after beach, Maran guiding us in and the two fishermen killing time by foraging for tropical fruit or casting handlines while I poked around, swam and relaxed. The islands were overflowing with voracious life - ghostly transparent crabs scuttling about on the tideline, huge red starfish in the shallows, giant clamshells too heavy for one person to lift and coconuts littered about in the shade of airy groves. I felt like Captain Cook.

Ken met the boat on the docks and exchanged a burst of Khmer with Maran. "He wonders if you had a good time. And do you want to come hear his band play tonight?"

"A great time," I replied. "I'll be there."

Ken came up to the guesthouse to meet me that night, and we motored down to the docks on his bike. The street was quieter now, people resting in hammocks and crouched over cooking fires, the flickering glow of candles, soft conversation. He turned off the street and slowly maneuvered the bike through the wooden alleyways, ducking low under tinroofs and emerging at last onto the concrete expanse of the fishing docks where Maran and his friends were gathered around a small generator. Maran came over to say hello, smiling shyly, while his bandmates plugged in amps and arranged microphones. I sat down with Ken on some plastic crates and sipped a glass of Coke poured by a teenage girl who couldn't stop herself from giggling.

The band took their places, lovingly holding worn instruments. The lead singer, another young fisherman, had high cheekbones, a wide nose and deep dark eyes - a face from another time - and when the guitar kicked in and the drummer slammed away he started jumping in place and singing urgently, fast and hard. The music rolled around the docks, drawing Mr. Oeung out of his restaurant, patting his belly, pulling in a crowd of excited little boys, eyes shining, their mothers and fathers too, everyone clapping, and then beautiful young women riding four to a motorbike who immediately started dancing while their brothers hung back shyly and watched from the edges of the crowd. Ken jumped up and pulled me into the middle of the circle, dancing at me like a kickboxer as the band launched into a rollicking Khmer folksong, the notes carrying far out over the dark and empty waves. When it was over, with everyone walking off to bed a a little sweaty and a little euphoric, Ken and I bumped back up the hill through silence that rang.



"I have to leave tomorrow," I told him. "I'll come back, but tomorrow I have to leave."

"At least you came."

The next morning the boat from Sihanoukville pulled in and I found a spot on the roof between a redfaced man from Liverpool who was trying to convince two sunburned college girls to join him to for the New Years in Pattaya. I played rock paper scissors with the kid's on the dock.

"You just come from there? How was it then?"

The Englishman had turned his attention away from the girls for a moment.

"It was beautiful," I told him. "I wanted to stay."

"Yeah? Doesn't look like much. What's the place called anyway?"

I didn't know. The boat was pulling away.

"Ken!" I yelled. "Ken, what's the name of this island!"

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted over the groaning diesel engines.

"You don't know! It's Koh S'dach!"

"It's what?"

"It's King's Island! It's the island of Kings!"

And then I couldn't hear him anymore and we waved at each other and the little boys made fists and flat hands and chopping fingers until we were out of sight and laboring on through the islands towards Thailand.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

A great week for the Oyaji

Oyaji is a mildly derogatory word used to describe middle-aged Japanese men with traditional attitudes about the importance of workplace hierarchies, filial respect and the role of women in society. In truth, Oyaji deserve much of the respect they demand; these tobacco loving, suit-wearing old farts are the men who turned Japan from a war-ravaged wasteland into one of the richest countries in the world through their discipline, hard-work and dedication. To this day, they control the Japanese business establishment and powerful government bureaucracy. Still, it's hard to be an Oyaji much of the time, what with one's daughters insisting on finding their own boyfriends, young punks who feel that they are entitled to take vacation time, Prime Minister Koizumi's determination to shake up the Liberal Democratic Party and the utter lack of respect with which some of the popular media portrays the older generation.

However, two events in the past week have given the Oyaji cause for a celebratory trip to the local Hostess bar: the triumph of Tochiazuma in the January Sumo Tournament and the spectacular downfall of Livedoor, a company built around a popular internet portal.

Tochiazuma is a promising young wrestler from the rank just below Grand Champion. His recent victory came in dramatic and convincing fashion, as he threw down Grand Champion Asashoryu in the final match of the tournament to clinch the championship and avoid a tie-breaker rematch with the up and coming wrestler Hakuho.

It wasn't anything about Tochiazuma's wrestling style that had Suntory whiskey bottles tipping upright across Japan on Sunday night. Of course, sumo fans everywhere were happy to see a wrestler rise to Asashoryu's level, but for the Oyaji and other Japanese nationalists, the cherry on top of the sundae was the fact that unlike the Grand Champion, Tochiazuma is pureblood Japanese.

Sumo is as much ritual as sport, an ancient activity with roots in Shinto, Japan's national religion. Its champions are supposed to exemplify the very cultural values that the Oyaji treasure - masculinity, dedication and selflessness. For many Japanese nationalists, the idea of a foreigner rising to the level of Grand Champion was unthinkable until the mountainous Hawaiian Akebono did just that in 1991. Since then, more and more strapping young men from all over the world have decided to give sumo a try, figuring (shhhhh) that it can't be much more than a glorified form of king of the hill. It's easy to empathize with the poor Japanese - imagine how Americans would react if Latin sluggers began infiltrating the Major Leagues and dominating our national past-time!

In recent years, Mongolians have spear-headed the foreign invasion, let by the formidable Asashoryu (Hakuho, who finished second in the January tournament, is also Mongolian). Other foreigners competing at the highest levels include pot-bellied giants from Russia, Georgia, Estonia and Greece. Until Tochiazuma's startling victory, the wrestler thought to have the best chance of unseating Asashoryu was a young Bulgarian judo champion named Kotooshu, who was recently promoted to the second highest rank. The 21 year old has bulked up significantly in the past year, attracting legions of fans and garnering several endorsement deals. To borrow a line from my favorite sports columnist, there's comedy, there's high comedy and then there's watching a pock-marked giant in a loincloth eating yogurt on Japanese TV. "Yum," says Kotooshu in painfully rehearsed Japanese,
"It tastes like Bulgaria."

Recently, the sumo powers that be (an oyaji stronghold if there ever was one), imposed a strict quota on the number of foreign wrestlers allowed to practice their sacred sport. Although foreigners currently wrestling will be allowed to stay, up and comers hoping to break into the big time will have to compete for a single membership spot at each of the sumo training centers, or stables. In effect, the Oyaji have traded quality sumo for Japanese purity, denying entry to skilled wrestlers purely on the basis of their nationality. Through no fault of his own, Tochiazuma is now a hero to the xenophobes, the first sign that the policy of exclusion is working as planned.

The charges of corporate fraud brought against Livedoor in the past week have ignited a media frenzy. The internet portal company allegedly manipulated its stock price by falsifying earnings statements...or something along those lines. Like the Enron scandal, although everyone knows that someone in the company did something naughty, only a few people seem to grasp exactly what kind of fraud was committed.

At any rate, like Tochiazuma's victory, the details of what happened are not important. The Oyaji are gloating because their arch-rival Takafumi Horie has been disgraced. http://takada.air-nifty.com/online/images/horie.jpgHorie, the 32 year old founder of Livedoor, became a celebrity by taking on the Oyaji establishment. A university dropout and tireless self-promoter, he amassed a tremendous fortune as his company rocketed up the Nikkei Stock Exchange. Speaking frankly of the need for Japanese companies to ditch tiresome institutions like seniority based bureacratic hierarchies in favor of a more free-wheeling, talent driven way of doing business, Horie sent tremors of fear through smoky corner offices. As his company and celebrity rose in prominence, Horie became more bold, trying to buy a baseball team and thereby break into one of the most exclusive Oyaji clubs of all. Last year, his company tried a hostile takeover of Fuji Television, an unheard of tactic in a society that values stability and consensus over individual initiative and raw capitalism. During last years Election, Horie even decided to run for office, taking on one of the most prominent and old-fashioned representatives in politics and calling his campaign speeches "boring."

Horie lost the election, which in retrospect was a sign that the establishment would no longer tolerate his impudence. On Monday night, only 24 hours after Tochiazuma's win, television news helicopters covered Horie's arrest on the streets of Tokyo and the Oyajis skipped back to their hostess bars.

Tochiazuma's victory and Horie's arrest are signs that on the official levels where the Oyaji have consolidated power, Japan is still an extraordinarily conservative country. For all the resources spent on internationalization, it is difficult to imagine another society reacting to the presence of foreigners with the kind of xenophobic intensity the sumo quotas represent. Likewise, while Japan is full of talented, fiesty young entrepreneurs like Horie, their chances of succeeding in business - and thereby injecting a sorely needed burst of creativity - are minimal as long as the Oyaji insist on the prioritizing seniority at the expense of talent. Even the rock stars who show up on TV in the edgiest fashions this side of Times Square know enough to use polite, deferential speech when addressing their audience in case the suits who print their record contracts are listening.

If the Oyaji's grip on power isn't broken soon, they might wake up one day to find out that their worst nightmare has come true. Instead of getting a demotion at the hands of a man like Horie, they might be fired flat out when a Chinese firm takes over their company. For the Oyaji, that would be the kind of humiliation for which no sumo championship could begin to compensate.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Perceptivetravel.com

Since I didn't manage to finish my piece on King's Island in time to post before the weekend, allow me to point anyone looking for an armchair expedition in the direction of the new ezine perceptivetravel.com. The inaugural issue contains a hilarious piece about a journey Rolf Potts took to Northern India in search of instruction in the secrets of tantric sex. What he found out....involves monkeys.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

A few feet to one side...


The following passage is by the poet Lew Welch, and was used by Gary Snyder to preface his road poem "Night-Highway 99."


"Only the very poor, or eccentric, can surround themselves with shapes of elegance (soon to be demolished) in which they are forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace. We remain alert so as not to get run down, but it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all."

The words rang true for me in Cambodia. Eloquent and succinct, they capture the heart of the philosophy that I'm so drawn towards.

Lew Welch disappeared into the mountains behind Gary Snyder's house in the early 1970s, leaving a cryptic note behind. He was never seen again.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Getting Off the Boat

One of my goals for this website is to post completed stories rather than breaking up an experience into narrative sections that start out ambitiously but taper off into hasty conclusions when they should be gearing up for a climax. That said, I can't resist posting the first half of a piece tentatively titled "King's Island," about my journey to an isolated archipelago off the coast of southwest Cambodia. Part II will follow later this week.



King's Island, Part


Thunk! A green coconut lands heavily at my feet, splashing white sand onto the hammock I’m rigging in the shade of two towering palms. Craning my neck and squinting upwards, I can make out the brown legs of Maran, a teenage fisherman who accepted $4 to ferry me across the channel to this putting-green sized atoll somewhere off the thickly forested coast of Southwestern Cambodia. Two more coconuts (whump, thomp) drop somewhere in the underbrush to my left. Abandoning my hammock for the moment, I hastily backpedal a few steps further into the grove to join Maran’s friend Kuhn on the porch of a driftwood shack, where he sits cross-legged, carefully twisting chicken feathers around a weighted wire hook to make a squid jig. Running my fingers across my scalp, I wonder for the umpteenth time where exactly I have managed to lose myself.

The idea to explore the scattered islands that lie between Sihanoukville, a beach town 150 km southwest of Phnom Penh, and the Thai border was, like most Cambodian projects, easy to put into motion but impossible to plan. Starting out, the only thing I knew with certainty was that the islands were out there somewhere beyond the sunset. The maps I checked agreed on the general position of two large islands at the eastern edge of the Gulf of Kompong Sohm, but each cartographer had apparently inserted a sampling from a different Jackson Pollack painting to represent the archipelago that lay beyond. How many islands there were, what they were shaped like, whether people lived on them and how it was possible to get there and away – the details, if you will – were a mystery that only grew foggier as I roamed about town searching for the informed sort of speculation.

“Yes, no problem,” said the first local I approached for information, pounding the backseat of his motorbike. Remembering my experience in Phnom Penh the week before, when, over the course of an afternoon spent looking for the Japanese embassy, I was dropped off in front of a brothel, outside a karaoke club and (close but no cigar), at the Lucky Sushi Bar, I hesitated before hopping on the bike.

“Islands,” I said, having long since abandoned my Khmer phrasebook in favor of exaggerated gestures and broken English. “Do you know where I can ask about a boat?”

“Islands, islands,” he replied, nodding enthusiastically and waving a hand in the direction of the Ecstatic Pizza Restaurant and Massage Parlor. “No problem, I know.”

He didn’t know, of course, but en route to whatever destination we were rumbling towards, I spotted a hand-lettered sign reading DIVE TRIPS. Leaving the bike and driver puttering at the curb, I ventured inside and found a deeply tanned old man with long white hair pulled back in a neat ponytail standing against the back wall gazing at a nautical chart of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Henri had nothing to do with any dive shop, but he had sailed around the world twice in his youth, and more applicable to my quest, had seen the islands I was searching for.

“There is a boat, you see,” he told me, searching carefully for the English words. “Between this town and the Thai border. It is popular with the travelers. I have taken it twice, and both times we made a stop at an island, perhaps off the headland, perhaps further along. There was a small village. I did not get off, but it seems to me that you could do so without trouble. But my memory is not so good and I am drinking absinthe since yesterday, so perhaps you should make certain at the ferry docks in the morning.”

Somewhat skeptically, I thanked Henri and motored back to my guesthouse, where the manager of the Endless Summer restaurant confirmed that the boat to the Thai border did exist, although he had never heard of it making a stop anywhere. Figuring that at worst the ride would give me a chance to scout the archipelago firsthand, I purchased a ticket and soon found myself squeezed between four Canadian women, a hung-over Cambodian fisherman, eight sacks of rice and a clump of extremely unhappy chickens on the roof of a narrow riverboat as it chugged across the harbor and into the open waters of the Gulf of Thailand.

As we rounded the cape that separates Sihanoukville from the Gulf of Kompong Sohm, I suddenly understood the mapmakers’ dilemma. Islands were scattered about in all directions as far as the eye could see – some big and mountainous, others barely more than sandy reefs protruding from the gentle waves, each and every one calling out for exploration. The boat splashed along through a shallow channel separating two islands that I nicknamed Jekyll and Hyde, one a morass of steamy green jungle and rocky cliffs, the other offering an empty white sand beach backed by coconut palms and banana plantations. A few fishing huts were tucked into quiet bays on this peaceful island, but few others betrayed any hint of a human presence. Even the mainland, visible in snatches where the chain of islands parted, showed no trace of road-dust or power-line scars in a verdant forest canopy smothering the rounded hills.

After two hours, with the noon sun reflecting hard off the boat’s white roof, it became nearly impossible to tell the difference between bay and channel and between island and coast; where one patch of sand ended and another began. I was watching dolphins romp in the bow wake when suddenly, a sign of civilization intruded upon the sublime - a red and white radio tower protruding from a nondescript atoll scarcely wider than an interstate highway. Peering over the bow, I could make out a cluster of tin roofs hugging the coast at the base of the tower. As we drew closer, two crewmen began throwing chickens and rice onto the lower deck. The Canadian women had their guidebook out and were frantically scanning the horizon for Thailand. Amidst the flurry of activity, I jumped over the rail and unto a rickety dock extending back into a warren of wooden shacks perched on stilts above the shallow little harbor. With a belch of black smoke and one or two feeble chicken squawks, the boat was suddenly gone, leaving a vague scent of sunscreen and paint lingering in the salty air.

Here I was.

Wherever that might be.

Back to Hokkaido...

"So you must have a lot of snow," asked my Dad on the phone last night.

"Nah, not so much this year," I replied. "Only about a meter."

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It's good to be home, but Cambodia is still on my mind and in my body. Shaving off 4 weeks of beard, pounding red road dust from my clothes, paying $5 for beer, waiting for traffic lights and shoveling out my driveway couldn't dislodge the sense of moral urgency that I picked up in Southeast Asia. That, and whatever stomach bug(s) Tyler and I acquired does not respect national boundaries or climate zones.

Apologies to those who faithfully checked this space and were disappointed at the lack of updates over the last two weeks. I'm working on several stories about the trip right now, one of which should be ready for posting later today or tomorrow. From now until August, new pieces will be up twice a week, with links and other tid-bits on a semi-regular basis as well.

For now, here are a couple goodies from the 8th grader's winter holiday homework, that old classic:


How I spent my winter vacation

By Kotarou Nagata

" Today is Christmas Eve. Its present is my father's lecture. About my studying style. My father is unusual, I think."



How I spent my winter vacation

By Rikito Yamagishi

" Today is Christmas. Santa come to my house. Shuld kill Santa! But, Santa kill me. I am die....."