Moto Mayhem, Riding the Rails… more

 

Moto Mayhem, Kampot’s semi-annual funky-bike drag race, took place at the end of April. It was a blast, as the estimated 200 hundred attendees would attest. Races were divided into three categories 50cc Chalys, 100 cc Daelims and 110cc Honda Wins and such. Newer bikes were excluded to keep the contests fair and anything over 110 was deemed to be too fast and getting into the possibilities of accidents and danger. Didn’t want to get too serious about it, it was just for fun. There was only one mishap which caused no injury. All dragsters were required to wear helmets.

Last time it was held outside of town with few spectators who were inclined to attend. This time the organizers got the bright idea to ask about using our Olympic stadium. With a concrete track, a viewing stand and location in the heart of town, it was the perfect spot. It took a bit of negotiating and convincing to get the authorities behind it, going all the way to the top gun to get approval, but in the end they realized it was going to be harmless enjoyment. It was put together by an all volunteer crew.

A 100 meter section of the track was reserved for the race and all the proceeds from the one dollar registration fee for dragsters – about $60 – was dedicated to purchase building materials to improve the space. Great trade-off. It was actually only the second time I’d been in the space and the first in daylight since I came to Kampot nine years ago, and I was impressed, they really are trying to make something worthy of it. In addition to the running track there’s a football pitch, which is somewhat scruffy to date, and a basketball court, so the city is committed to improve it.

There’s always the fear that they’ll sell it off for development and build something new far out of town. That’s exactly what the big timers in Phnom Penh talk about doing to its Olympic stadium. ‘It’s’ too valuable to be used for sports’ they say. Sure, that’s exactly what the capital needs: an Olympic stadium, the only public space outside of the riverside, turned into condos and malls, but that’s how people with money think and, I expect, many people in government too.

The Daelim class was won by a woman who’s married to a westerner. Four of the sixty racers were women. Curiously, she was approached by local bigwigs and told she shouldn’t be competing in that kind of race or hanging out with foreigners. Knowing her, I’m sure she told them – in a respectful way – to fuck off. And the winner’s time? 100 meters in 9.7 seconds, the same as an Olympic athlete.

The only drawback that I heard mention was that it took too long; it started at 1pm and finished at 5. There were only 2 racers at a time, the organizers thinking more would be potentially dangerous so it took a long time to go through the list. There were lots of curious locals and it seems likely a lot more people, both local and expat, will want to partake in the future so it may start to take too long and adjustments have to be made.

The weather for much of April was very unusual with frequent rains and, in some places in Cambodia, low temperatures. Whereas April in Kampot usually sees temperatures above 35C – 95F – and as high as 37, it rarely went above 32 or 33. And instead of severe drought, we had rain fall in 9 days in the first half of the month with one day of 77mm: That is an exceptional amount for any season. Now as I write in the beginning of May the temperatures are more normal, 36 lately. Kampot being near the sea, which serves as a modifying influence, never gets as hot or as cold as the interior of the country. Now in mid May, we’re having rain or at least heavy clouds almost every day, more like September, height of the rainy season, than May

On a related note: A sewage outfall in the north of Phnom Penh got so nasty recently that the many people living in houseboats who fish farmed from them were forced to flee by it’s rankness and the death of their fish. A government spokesperson said the fish deaths had nothing to do with the sewage, but was a result of global warming. Yeah, sure. Besides the fact that temperatures recently have been below average, climate change wouldn’t change conditions from one day to the next.

Sewage is generally thought of as toilet water, but in Cambodia very little of that goes into the sewers. Almost every house has it’s own septic tank. If you’re in Cambodia very long you’ll see funky old tanker trucks roaming around; they’re pumping out septic tanks. Some of the older houses have no tanks and some owners don’t empty their tanks in a timely manner, so it slows into the sewers, but except for that relatively small amount, there’s no shit in the sewers, it’s almost exclusively gray water – wash water – and rainwater. In America it’s all mixed together and sent off to a sewage treatment plant, even though gray water makes up more than 90% of the total. In a sense that is not an efficient way to organize waste water processing, since there’s no reason whatever that rainwater needs to go through the same complex process that toilet water does. Gray water can easily be processed in a plant if necessary, but the best, most ecological way is to filter it through wetlands, they do a great job of cleansing that wash water. Of course that takes up a lot of space.

The problem in America is the high cost of duplicating pipes and the difficulty in leaving sewage treatment to the individual. In Cambodia it seems to be no problem.

As usual after Khmer New Year in the middle of the month there was a precipitous drop in travelers. Some bars will always have some customers, but most are really slow. In this part of the world you have to make your money in high season and hope you can break even when the customer base fizzles out.

I finally got a chance to take the train. I hardly go anywhere anymore, so when the chance came I had to ride the rails. I’ve always loved trains and have even taken Amtrak across America – a 3 day trip – more than once. Amtrak’s a luxurious ride, but slow and lumbering. It does go up to 80mph – 130kph – but on a 3000 mile trip, it still feels sluggish and endless. A high speed train could do the trip in 10 to 12 hours.

The train from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh, with stops in Kampot and Takeo, is hardly luxurious, but it’s a fine trip nonetheless. And while it does take 7 hours, the extra time is well spent. Kampot to PP takes 5 hours and since it takes two hours from S-ville to KP, it leaves at a leisurely 9am from KP, which fits right in with my dislike of early morning departures. You can bring your bicycle for an extra dollar, moto for two dollars, even a car, but not from Kampot.

The train I took was on a Sunday, it had four passenger cars and was mostly empty.

You could lay down and take a nap if you had a mind to it since some of the cars have (somewhat strange) lengthwise seating.

That makes it a bit awkward to look out the window, something I always want to do. On trains gazing out the window is far superior to road gazing since on the train you mostly see beautiful unabridged countryside rather than roadside trash, referring to both buildings and pure garbage.

Still with the empty car it was not a problem turning sideways to look out. The one car with more normal transverse seating was uncomfortable and also had suspension problems and bounced around a lot so I opted for the longitudinal. The cars are very clean and well-maintained, the toilets impressive, they were spotless, spacious – never seen one so big on a train – and spiffed out with brass fittings.

None of the seating was very comfortable, but would only be a problem in a crowded train. Besides you get to walk around, you’re not stuck in a seat with only small breaks to exercise your legs and move your bum. When you get tired of the air-con, you can open the car door and, while holding firmly on to the handrails of course, hang out the doorway and breathe hot fresh air while the countryside rolls by. I noticed unused stations along the way, and certainly the train should stop in Kep.

I was disappointed in the state of the tracks. They were fine as far as being straight and level, there was no getting tossed back and forth, but often the sections were not welded together. It’s brand new track so they were just being cheap and saving money by only bolting them together. When they’re not welded you get the clickity clack sound and with each clack a jerking or vibration. Otherwise the ride would’ve been smooth and perfect: certainly, magnitudes better than a bus ride.

The train rolled into Phnom Penh at 2pm, right on time. They give themselves lots of leeway: there’s a 20 minute break at Takeo for food; we were holed up on a siding for about 15 minutes – with only a single track, one train has to wait while the other passes by; it also moved at a snails pace once it got near the city. And good news: trains are now running every day, though on weekdays they operate in only one direction.

In fact that was the second time I took the train here. The last time was in 2002: A world of difference for sure. The train pulled into Kampot station at about 1pm, six hours after leaving Sihanoukville. I didn’t see any passenger cars so I went back to the ticket office and was told there were only boxcars on this line. The Battambang line still had passenger cars. After an hour lunch break and shuffling back and forth for I don’t know what reason, the train took off at 2pm.

The car I chose had a stack of poles upon which people were sitting, there were also several hammocks strung up. A local guy next to me asked where my hammock was… he was clairvoyant, I always carried my hammock with me back then. When I pulled out the hammock a woman said one dollar. I looked askance; could that be? She then said niyeah laing, literally speak fun. It turned out to be a lot more comfortable in a hammock than a real seat would’ve been let alone sitting on top of a stack of poles. Though maximum speed was 25kph, it mostly trudged along at 15kph. Still even at that slow pace the car bucked and bounced quite fiercely at times, making the hammock a perfect ride since it evened out that jostling.

At one station people had to move aside as 100kg sacks of salt were loaded on which were more comfortable to sit on than the poles. And at one point, with all the crew at the ready, while the train was moving, the logs were quickly, almost frantically, shoved out the boxcar door. We chugged into Phnom Penh at 11pm, a 9 hour trip for 175kms. It was an experience, all right, but I prefer the new incarnation.

Both lines shut down in 2003 and the new tracks were supposed to have been finished in 2008 or 2009, but it took until 2013 for the new tracks to be ready, the ballast wasn’t properly laid the first time and quite a bit of remedial work needed to be done. Freight trains were running for 3 years until the new passenger service was inaugurated.

In mid may it was announced that China is proposing to build new rail lines from the capital to Seam Reap and the Vietnam border as well as a high-speed train to Sihanoukville. I’m not sure if the traffic to S-ville would warrant the extreme cost of high speed, but whatever, any improvement is welcome. The question is what the Chinese will extract in compensation. Refurbishing the old lines cost $180 million and the right-of-way was already there. I expect that building those lines new would’ve cost several times as much. Trains are the most efficient way to travel, especially if powered with electricity.

Kampot radio is on the air. It’s now only on the internet – kampotradio.com – eventually maybe it’ll also be broadcast on FM. It’s mostly music now provided by Darryl who’s put the whole thing together, but people are quickly picking up time slots for talking and/or DJing. Yours truly is doing a daily weather report – I’m Stan the weatherman here in Kampot – which will expand from strictly weather to include more topics but mostly related to climate, I’m hoping for a call-in show, but that part is not ready yet.

An amazing thing happened recently on Kampot’s riverfront. I’ve been complaining right along about cars parking in the riverside park, then about a week ago they all, with a few rare exceptions, began parking on the curb where they belong. It’s more than just a problem for walking and enjoying the riverside, heavy vehicles wreck the paving tiles and are hard on the tree roots. I checked around but saw no signs. Then talking to a friend I discovered that the police had come by and told everyone not to park there. The surprising part is how almost everyone knew that prohibition without any signs. Regardless it’s a very welcome change: it was getting uncomfortable, and sometimes difficult to walk there.

A final note about the old bridge. It’s usable but not great for pedestrians. The old sections have narrow sidewalks, the new sections that replaced the bombed-out part have none so you’re dodging traffic, or I should say, traffic is dodging you… not a pleasant experience. It wouldn’t be that difficult and not even that expensive to hang a pedestrian walkway off one side of the bridge. In addition to serving people who need it for transportation, lots of people would go there just for the view. It would be a tourist attraction.

 

Speed Bumps Are Dangerous

So said Kampot’s mayor – here called governor – when suggested by an expat as a means to slow traffic down on the riverside. Previously, there were two speed bumps on the stretch in front of the museum and governor’s mansion until the last time it was paved when they weren’t replaced. So maybe they were dangerous, but they did cause most drivers to slow down and the danger was to those who were going too fast to begin with. A big part of the problem is that most traffic during the dinner hours is young people cruising back and forth along the riverside with many young guys showing off and acting like cowboys.

The traffic, in other words, is totally unnecessary, serves no legitimate purpose, only casual fun for youth. The government is aware of the problem. Some time ago barriers were placed preventing through traffic through the most congested area, but, needing to be maintained on a permanent basis, they gave up after a week or so.

It remains dangerous: A friend lost his leg to a young motorbike speedster; a tuk-tuk driver lost his life in the same accident that totaled my car because of a car going way too fast; I saw a guy get hit straight on by a speeder – it was late at night, but still in a congested bar area; I got hit and scraped up a bit by a speeding motorbiker who was going too fast to notice I was crossing the street on my bicycle. Really, the tales of damage and hurt are plenty, as I’m sure the government is painfully aware. So what’s to do to slow down traffic if speed bumps are out? The city can’t just leave the poor bastards who are hit and maimed or killed to their fate because of inaction.

A big part of the problem is that river road is being turned into a major thoroughfare both south of old town to serve the new passenger port and north of town heading up to the east of Bokor mountain. That doesn’t change the necessity of making the road safe, something needs to be done.

In planning parlance it’s called traffic calming. If a street is needed and appropriate for traffic you do your best to smooth it and keep it moving. If it’s not needed then you work to slow it down, make it a safe and pleasant place to be in. The case of the riverside is a bit tricky since it’s home to a congested area of restaurants and clubs at the heart of a thoroughfare. That’s where calming comes in. One possible device is rumble strips, the ones used on highways to denote school crossings. The ones being used on highways are not strong enough to really slow down traffic so they’d need to be sharper to really jolt drivers into slowing. There are also speed humps: they’re more gradual than bumps, but still make driving fast very uncomfortable.

Another is curb extensions. What happens there is that the street is narrowed at crosswalks. Requiring traffic to fit into a narrower space forces it to slow down. The crosswalk can also be raised a bit and a roughened surface added to further discourage speeders. In addition to slowing traffic down curb extensions reduce the distance pedestrians have to cross, making it much safer for them. The third advantage of calming is that it encourages people to find alternative routes.

While we expats love the lackadaisical way much is done in Cambodia, at a certain point a little government intrusion is the only thing that’ll make us safe. The country’s infrastructure has improved immensely in the 15 years I’ve lived here, so I give the government a lot of credit. But because the growth has been so fast the government gets overwhelmed. The anything-goes, no-need-to-think-about-it attitude that worked just fine when there were few vehicles on the road turns into total dysfunction when the streets are filled with them. Organization is the only answer. How to get the government to be more responsive is the challenge.

Kampot’s old bridge is another case in point. Seven years ago after the new bridge was finished the old bridge continued to be used, though before too long a height barrier was placed at the entrances to prevent large vehicles from crossing. Then about 3 years ago the bridge was completely closed because rust in certain spots had made it hazardous. They even made it difficult for pedestrians and bicyclers to cross it.

There was an obvious need for it. Large numbers of motorbikes were being funneled onto the new bridge making it much more congested and a lot of people were forced to travel out of their way requiring extra time and fuel.

Also it was clear that the problem with the bridge was minor, not structural, and a lot of people wanted it open. It wasn’t sturdy enough for heavy trucks but no problem whatever to carry lightweight motorbikes.

Then the PM came to town, heard about the people’s wishes and ordered the bridge opened. Three days later it was open for traffic – motorbikes and bicycles only – and in one more week the surface had been improved and the space made safer. Cost was never a factor, I’d guess the whole project cost the equivalent of 100 or 200 square meters of asphalt pavement.

I counted the traffic a bit before noon on a weekday and in 10 minutes 150 vehicles used it. That’s 900 in one hour and about 10,000 daily. Considering most people use it twice, that’s at least 5000 people who’ve benefited from its opening. And that in a city of only 50,000.

Why was it necessary for the PM to light a fire under the local officials to get that improvement done?

Another example of missing government is represented by the kids playground on the river near the new bridge. It is fabulously popular for parents and children who gather in droves every afternoon. It’s the only public playground in the city whereas there should be one in every commune at least. It was financed and built by expats at a cost of $8000. Much of the work was volunteer so the city would have to spend more, but still a pittance compared to what’s being spent on streets and sewers.

In other words the only impediment to more playgrounds in Kampot is the indifference or disconnectedness of local politicians. Part of the problem is that there’s no mechanism for people to voice their ideas and complaints to government. Furthermore, I consider an important reason for that disconnect is that local officials are not elected, all are appointed to their posts by the ruling party. In essence they only have to keep their bosses happy rather than the people, though I must reiterate that they do a reasonably good job and have accomplished much. Nonetheless, local officials are often not responsive to citizen concerns.

In the same vein, even as the city is expanding there seems to be no provision to increase park space. The city should be inventorying potential future park space. There’re lots of nice spots around town that’d be perfect for them.

On a related note I had a chance recently to visit a waterfall about 5 kilometers above the Teuk Chhou rapids on the edge of Bokor park that’s been recently opened and improved for visitors. For a long time the Chinese builders of the Kamchey dam wouldn’t let anybody up into that area. It’s in a dramatic setting and would be very exciting in rainy season. Even with our unseasonable rains there was only a trickle of water coming down. For the hordes of locals out for a good time out of the city for Khmer New Year, the lack of water wasn’t much of a loss.

That points up the pent-up desire of Cambodians for experiences of the natural world.

There’re lots of trails in and on the edge of Bokor park, but they are most often not maintained, so passage can sometimes be very difficult. On one trail I used to frequent a blown down tree blocked it some years ago and I couldn’t find a way around it. A couple kilometers out of town and five kilometers from Sihanoukville Road is a trailhead that leads to a creek that’s smallish, but still very beautiful with giant boulders and rushing waters in rainy season. It goes through a dense forest and has a very nice hidden waterfall, but the waterfall’s so hard to find, I once had a Khmer guide ask me where it was. I’ve only managed to see it once from above after hiking on the trail at least 10 times. So far the only way to be sure to see it is to go up the creekbed for about a kilometer, climbing over those giant boulders, and I just haven’t been up to it.

Many people both foreign and local would enjoy that forest experience, but the trail’s poorly maintained state and lack of markers to tell you where you are and how far you have to go, make it difficult. The only national park I know of with marked trails is Kep National park, but they were done by a private individual. There is one marked trail up on Bokor where the casino and luxury developments are happening, but nowhere else. When are the authorities going to wise up to the need for its citizens for natural experiences and to the opportunities to boost tourism that maintained forest trails would provide? It sure wouldn’t cost much. There were hundreds of people flocking to the recently opened waterfall, there’d also be many to enjoy a simple mountain trek.

BTW, a friend recently went up to the casino on Bokor. Even after years of being open, he was the only customer.. millions of dollars for a luxury development that nobody wants to be part of. The only good to come of it are improved roads. In the 95% of the park not up on the plateau where the ruins remain from its past, there are beautiful natural forests and dramatic creeks, but no way to enjoy them.

In a western society, at least in my experience in Portland, Oregon, solutions can be sought even if not always found, with citizen participation. When a problem is identified the government draws up proposals and then they’re put before the neighborhoods involved and the general population at which time public hearings presided over by planners and elected officials are held. In Portland citizens are generally given 3 minutes each to talk and voice their opinions.

Cambodia’s system of elected commune officials actually, at least in theory, offers more power or influence to the grassroots than the system in Oregon, where for instance, the city of Portland with half million people has five councilors elected at large. On the next lower level in Portland is the neighborhoods which have a lot of influence but whose leaders are not elected and have only advisory powers.

Here in Cambodia the entire country, both urban and rural, is divided up into communes and every one has an elected leader and council to represent their constituency. There are about 1700 communes in the country as a whole and in Phnom Penh there’re about 100. (In fact I wrote up and had a bill introduced to the Oregon legislature back in the late 1970s to do something very similar since many areas of the state have limited elected representatives. However, at least in Oregon, every little town – sometimes with as few as 40 or 50 people – district and county has an elected leader and council.)

Here in Cambodia there are only 2 levels of elected government, commune and national, nothing in between. Every post in between is appointed by the ruling party. This is a problem for the opposition since even if they get a large majority of votes in a city or district, they have no say in who that leader is. In the last national election the opposition received more than 60% of votes in Phnom Penh whereas the city is run by the ruling party. While campaign promises don’t always mean that much, based on what the opposition has said, the city would be governed much differently under their leadership. This is not to say that local elected leaders would necessarily be less corrupt, just that in the end result, the people are given the power to change their government and its policies.

Once again park space is a good criteria for judging responsive government. Surveys of Phnom Penh residents consistently show a desire for more greenspace, while the government is doing just the opposite; reducing greenspace at every opportunity and making no plans to increase it in the future. The capital has a dismal 1% of its area devoted to greenspace and that includes inaccessible traffic circles. The people who run the government have their villas and the ability to enjoy the countryside so they seem to be blind to the needs of the average citizen for greenery, a respite from the endless concrete of a dense city. Phnom Penh has a lot going for it, especially in job availability and entertainment, but most people you talk to would rather live elsewhere, not a good sign.

Unfortunately the system will never change as long as the ruling party is in power. And who can blame them? Democratization of the electoral system would only result in a loss of power for them. It’s very common for parties in power to use whatever means, including underhanded ones, at their disposal to retain that control. It’s no different in the US and many other democratic and nominally democratic systems.

It made sense early in the country’s democratic organization to have limited offices to vote for; the people being largely uneducated and the country just recovering from its trauma, but the people have grown a lot over the years so it is time for power to be disbursed and decentralized with local leaders closer to their constituents.

Politics in Cambodia has been going downhill of late with the fate of the country’s fragile democracy coming into question. That reflects on the poor state of democracy and free discussion in the region as a whole with only the Philippines and Indonesia coming ahead of Cambodia on a democracy scorecard.

The ruling party has been going through great lengths recently to suppress the opposition, but with social media giving corruption and unresponsiveness no place to hide, it’s up for debate whether the ruling party’s many accomplishments will outweigh the feeling on the part of many that they’re being used, that their needs are ignored and that the wealthy and powerful enjoy impunity.

For us expats the question is whether the country’s political problems will impact us.  Hard to say.

 

International Village, Kampot

 

About 5 kms out of Kampot towards Sihanoukville is an area informally dubbed International Village. In Khmer circles it’s called Ghost Thief – Khmaut Jaio – probably not a good name for a newly created ‘village’ of westerners. I put the village in quotes because it I usually associate that term with a place that includes a core of houses close together whereas there they’re all spread out over a large area. I guess there are about 50 westerners scattered in 3 or 4 square kilometers, almost all living in newly built houses, many quite unique and special. Land originally sold there just a few years ago for $5 or $6 per meter. Now it ranges between $12 and $20 though if you’re patient and keep your eyes open, plots can still be found in the general area for $6 to $8.

It’s an indicator of how many expats are settling down here. The international moniker is especially poignant since the expat community includes so many different nationalities. One night at Neil’s Irish bar I counted 10 nationalities out of about 15 patrons. There were the usual suspects from America, UK, Ireland and Australia; also represented was Germany, Netherlands and Belgium and then a few outliers like people from Finland, Hungary and Uruguay. If you look at a week’s patrons then add France, Italy, New Zealand, Israel, Jordan, S. Africa and recently a guy from Lithuania stopped by… and I’m probably forgetting some.

It’s a totally different experience from back home where everybody is just a good old fashioned American. Sure I love my friends back there, friends of a lifetime, but it’s really a pleasure to be able to relate to, in fact, actually create a community of the world, escapees from the dull and mundane lives we’d be living back there.

It’s also a great pleasure to be in a place where people don’t separate by age: everybody can be friends here. I’ve gotten so used to that, the only time I notice or realize how old I am is when I look in a mirror or see a picture of myself amongst my friends. I can go to hear music and dance and not feel out of place even though I’m 40 or 50 years older than the vast majority of people around me.

Lots of people wind up going back to their home countries, but the majority are doing it temporarily to make enough cash to be able to come back and stay awhile. Some are fortunate to be able to teach or earn good wages in tech fields and the really lucky ones do tech work for western wages remotely from Cambodia. The really, really lucky ones have pensions or money in the bank, though there are pitfalls for some in not having enough to do.

It’s just so easy and cheap to drink or do weed, some people forget there are other things in life and sometimes they do the harder drugs so nonchalantly, without considering the consequences, they sail on through the mortal barrier and bring tragedy to their friends and families. As I’ve said before, everybody has a right to their own poison, but really, it’s stupid, negligent and disrespectful to those around you to kill yourself over no damn good reason. A broken heart when you’re only 30 years old?

It is possible to stay here on local hospitality wages, but it’s a very frugal lifestyle. Sure you get to hang around a cool easy place to live – Rough Guides recently did a survey of the friendliest places to travel and Cambodia was by far the first choice. Well, that’s why we’re here, facilitated greatly by ease of obtaining long term visas, of course. The simple beauty and warmth of the place easily compensates for low wages for some. And sets back the need to return to and make the dough. According to our local immigration cop there are 700 foreigners, including Chinese, living in Kampot. It does take them a little while to catch up with newcomers – though they’re very likely to find you in the end – so you can probably add another 100 or so.

One fascinating evolution here is the number of women expats. Even 5 or 6 years ago men outnumbered women about 10 to 1. Men travel easier, they’re less vulnerable and have fewer worries about being taken advantage of, but the times are changing. Today I wouldn’t call it even, but I’d guess at least 30% are women. That gives the town a whole new vibe, it feels very different from a few years ago. The women seem to be developing a special camaraderie and solidarity. I haven’t been around the country much lately so I can’t say what’s happening elsewhere. The comfort they feel here in Kampot may be partly an effect of not having any girlie bars. Whatever, it feels good having a more balanced population.

I finally got to check out the new night market near my house. First thing you encounter when you go in is a shallow wading pool for kids and there were 30 or 40 little buggers screaming and yelling and having a great time. (Digression: There are no free or low cost swimming pools in Kampot or anywhere that I’m aware of in Cambodia. Development needs to be more than bricks and mortar, it also needs to include facilities that enhance lifestyle. Sure, if you have the money to pay for pool time, you can always find a place, but the role of government is to improve the life of all citizens, not leave access up to the private sector to provide for only those with the wherewithal.)

The booths are very nicely designed but only half were occupied and really, it’s just the same old clothes and stuff you find all over: nothing new and not much that’s interesting. There’s a big stage for music events, but as I walked past in front of it while recorded music was happening I had to block my ears from the excessive decibels. Not a problem for most locals and I’m sure they enjoy the local bands. There’s a large seating area to serve the food booths, which also were only half occupied, which fronts on a wide beach. The market stretches more than 100 meters from River Road to the river in a long narrow design. They have about 40 meters of riverfront where kids were also having a good time playing in the sand. Overall the market is nicely done, but it’s in an out-of-the-way location and seeing sparse attendance and lots of empty stalls at this time of year doesn’t auger well for its success. Time will tell.

It’s middle of March and high season is winding down. There’s still quite a few people around but not like January or February. Nowhere near enough to keep all the bars and especially the new ones occupied. After Khmer New Year in the middle of April, tourism takes a dive. A friend who owns a restaurant on Phnom Penh’s riverside that caters almost exclusively to visitors said after ten years being there, his slowest month was always June. When that’s combined with expats who make regular runs back home to enjoy northern summers, it gets really quiet around here between April 15 and July when there’s a small uptick from people who live in northern countries who get there vacations during the summer break.

After that two month July-August mini-high season we descend into wet season in September and October when lots of establishments don’t even bother to open. With 90% of people here on motorbikes there’s a big incentive to stay home on rainy nights.

Meanwhile there’s lots of music happening now. Almost every night there’s a regular event, some nights more than one. I know, living in the capital or S-ville that’s not a big deal, but for our little burg, a real pleasure. And admittedly, one of the good things about being a tourist town. We expats could never support so much music on our own. Some of my friends think Kampot is too boutiquey, they prefer Koh Kong, but you miss out on variety of food and entertainment living in a backwater like KK. Sure, we’re all worried about what it may become with an influx of people, but for now all is good.

The musicians who’ve been here a while are getting much better, like Andy, for instance who plays around a lot who’ve I not yet mentioned, but some of the new ones are very impressive. First there’s Kat, who has been around, but who I didn’t see much in till recently. Don’t know if I wasn’t hearing her properly or she’s just improved a lot. She alternates between ukulele and guitar. She writes almost all her music and is quite a storyteller. With a slight nasal twang and a heartfelt delivery she’s the essence of cleverly cute or cutesily clever; however way you look at it, she reaches my soft spot.

There’s Howard (he actually has a nearly unpronounceable Scandinavian name) who plays a strong 12 string guitar with a powerful voice to back it up. One piece he does is a medley of Neil Young songs, starting with Heart of Gold and seamlessly segueing into Rockin the Free World and back. He sounds a bit like Young, but much stronger. A real asset to the music scene here.

There’s Luna, who’s just recently arrived, who provides a big change of pace. She plays a jazzy keyboard to back up a very strong voice with all original songs that she calls melancholy, though I would add moody, introspective, torchy to describe them. She’s only 18, which duly impressed me, so I expect her to become very well known as she improves her sound.

However in a panoply of musical precious gems, Cristina takes the crown. She brings tears to my eyes, a musical friend said she gives him goosebumps. She strongly reminds me of Billie Holiday with a lilting voice that’s effortlessly suspended somewhere in the stratosphere. Her depth, inflections, purity of tone are devastating. And when she needs to at crucial moments in the song, packs the power of an Aretha and the raw, gutsy, raspy energy of a Janis. Absolutely a singer to watch because she has the potential to make it big.

Speaking of music, a few words about acoustics. For some bar owners music is like an afterthought. It’s there in the background and they don’t give it much attention. For me it’s an important part of pubbing it. I’ve got lots of music on my hard drive, but I never want to listen at home, there it’s only quiet that I crave. But by the evening it’s just the opposite, I’m starved for good tunes and the energy and vibes memories that they often conjure up. Therefore I’m going to gravitate at night to where the sound quality is good.

I can enjoy all kinds of music so with few exceptions that’s not a problem and can tolerate more that I don’t especially like, but I can’t abide by motherfucker music. You know, Ho, ho, ho, ho, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, m-fucker, etc, etc, etc. Drives me crazy. Lots of times locals will play that stuff not realizing how gross and disgusting the words are. If you play more than one Ho tune, I’ll ask politely for you to change it, otherwise I’m outta there.

If your seek to draw customers in with enjoyable music and quality sound, then acoustics is all important. No matter how good the sound system, if the acoustics in the room are bad, it’ll sound tinny, echoey, scratchy, cloudy, the sound imprecise and garbled. That happens when the room is all hard or reflective surfaces like concrete, ceramic and glass. Good acoustics requires soft absorbent surfaces like cloth, tapestry, carpet, straw and to a certain extent wood. Good acoustics is pure sound. You can hang materials from the walls and ceiling, or hang specially made acoustic panels from the ceiling, anything to soften the sound and give it depth. There was a new very expensive concert hall built a while back, maybe in the 60s or 70s, with terrible acoustics. After that debacle, the architectural and engineering communities put a lot of effort into understanding acoustics.

Cruise boats are back with new rules about maximum numbers and sufficient lifejackets. They’re lots of fun. The beauty of a river run in Kampot is that the current minimal level of development on the river makes it a beautiful natural cruise and with Bokor mountain in the background a stunning view. It won’t stay that way for long since new venues are opening up on the river all the time, but for now really pleasant.

Pop-ups are popping up all over the place. Pop-up is not a word we use in America, so I was a bit confused at first, to us it’s just a mobile restaurant or food stand. The most prominent of our pop-ups is Butz’s reincarnation of Wunderbar, a successful restaurant on the Kampot scene for 5 or 6 years. Working out of a mobile restaurant, the menu is very basic, though the food is equal quality. He’s set up on the sidewalk of the park strip opposite the old market, (which really should be called the new old market or something to that effect, because it’s anything but old). He’s got a few folding tables with accompanying plastic chairs on the sidewalk and always has customers.

Next to him, though he sometimes sets up on the riverside park, we have Yuki with his sushi rolls and home brew ales and wheat beer, it’s really good stuff. We was set up at his house before, but it was in an odd location, so there’s lots more people to sell to now. The beer is excellent and the sushi authentic. Zeke’s got a pop-up serving nachos and tacos. Peter, the Belgian baker brings his pop-up to the river 5 mornings a week where you can get his fresh breads including tasty multigrains and an array of pastries.

It’s a good life.

 

 

 

Climate Change – Kampot – Cambodia

 

The debate over climate change rages among the commoners but within the near-consensus of the scientific community the question has long been settled. 97% of climate scientists are in agreement on the matter, most of the remaining 3% are in the employ of the extractive fossil industry. In the eyes of the deniersphere, that hotbed of alternative facts, the 97% have created a hoax to further their own careers. These people, who’ve spent eight years in rigorous study to earn their doctorates, who’ve immersed their lives in science and the scientific method somehow all decided independently (or maybe they have a secret network) to essentially go back on all the principles they studied so hard to learn and just lie, make things up to create cushy jobs for themselves. Baloney, absurd, ridiculous, doesn’t pass the smell test, a non-sequiter. Meanwhile, they have no problem trusting the tiny part of the scientific community that’s being paid to spread industry propaganda.

In the above regard the ultimate crime is owned by Exxon, as they knew back in the late 1970s that, according to their own researchers, build up of CO2 in the atmosphere was going to be a problem. The bosses didn’t take kindly to that information as acting on it would eliminate their profit base so they spent some $30 million in the next couple of decades funding climate denial. The company is now being sued by some 14 attorneys general because of the damage that misinformation has done.

What does a warming climate mean for Cambodia? The Super El Nino of last year is an indicator of some of the changes we can expect. The El Nino phenomenon is caused by a warming of tropical Pacific waters and that brings us drought; super refers to ocean temps that were much warmer than typical El Nino warm. Last year brought water shortages in many places, a delay in planting crops and the highest temp ever recorded in Cambodia, 41.7C or 107F. Subsequent to El Nino we had a neutral or very mild La Nina that brought us ample rain, but it’s very weak and we may be headed right back into another difficult El Nino. The oceans are warming, which might have cancelled out the preferred, otherwise more likely La Nina conditions.

Being near the sea Kampot will never get as warm as the interior, though still plenty hot enough, but we also have other climate change problems to deal with. Rising seas being the number 1. There’s been a lot of glacial melt feeding the oceans and water expands as it warms and we sit very close to sea level. Sea level rise is already happening: In the Mekong delta salt water has intruded up to 100 kms inland, rendering rice cultivation impossible in those areas. It’ll probably be a long time before the sea rises to permanently flood our town, but regular flooding events might not be uncommon and require sea walls and other defenses to save our little burg.

Climate Change doesn’t preclude extremes of cold. Every time it’s cold somewhere, deniers will say, Global warming my ass, it was really cold here yesterday. Almost every day of the year there’ll be some places that are exceptionally cold as well as hot, but what we are seeing now is about 10 record highs for every record low.

In the process of debating the issue, I’ve done quite a bit of research.

The first graph shows rise in global temps from 1880 to the present.

This chart is from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s for November, not the whole year. I didn’t realize that at first, but now that the Trump administration has scrubbed the site of any mention of climate change, the annual one is no longer available. The annual one would be very similar, except it would be more evened out. The last 40 years would be the same, showing a relentless climb, but notice the highest high is much further from the average than the lowest low. If you separated out the first 100 years you’d see a normal up and down pattern.

This next graph shows global temperatures and CO2 on the top two lines.

As you can see they track very closely. When one is up, the other is up and vice versa. It doesn’t matter in this context which came first, they go together. It also is of no import what triggered those changes, though I’d certainly be interested to know. When the earth is in a deep ice age the CO2 ranges around 180 to 200. There’s a lot less vegetation, so less CO2. I was quite surprised to see that most of the last 400,000 years have been much colder than we’re used to. If we hadn’t pumped so much CO2 in the atmosphere, based on looking at the past, we might well have been slated for much colder times. I expect we’ll skip the next ice age until the earth regains its balance. Just speculation, I’m not a scientist.

It’s not changes in the sun’s intensity that have caused global warming. Solar intensity has been declining of late even as temperatures have been rising.

In the last 10,000 years or so, the time we know of as civilization, CO2 has ranged between 260 and 280 ppm and temperatures have been in that Cinderella range of not too hot or too cold. Sure, during that period there were very cold times, mini ice ages, if you will, and droughts and very hot times, but temps did not stray very far from average.

Since the industrial revolution CO2 has risen to 400ppm, way above the top line in the graph. There’s no possible, plausible natural way for that to have happened in such a short time frame absent the burning of fossil fuel producing greenhouse gases.

The last time CO2 was that high was at least 800,000 years ago, some sources say up to 20m years, and at that time the temperature was 3C higher. Most of the recent extra greenhouse-caused heat has gone into the oceans. They act as a giant heat sink absorbing vast amounts of CO2 so it should take quite a long time to reach that 3C threshold. So far temps have risen only less than 1 degree and already climate extremes are playing havoc with the earth’s natural systems. Even the relatively small amount of rising water temps has had devastating effects. A very large portion of the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia has bleached and died from rising temperatures and that’s being replicated in many reefs around the world. We are still pumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and there seems no end to how high CO2 levels will go. Countries are giving themselves decades to clean up their acts when we’ve already hit the danger zone.

Rising sea temperatures intensify tropical storms. Last year a tropical storm in very warm waters off the coast of Mexico intensified from a category 1 storm with 125kph winds to a superstorm of 360kph winds in just 24 hours, breaking all records for wind speed and speed of intensification. It was a small storm and luckily hit off a remote, sparsely inhabited coast so damage was minimal.

If temps in every part of the planet rose proportionally, GW would be relatively easy to handle, but what it really does is accentuate the extremes of droughts and floods. As temps rise air holds increasing amounts of water so when it does rain we can expect more intense rain events. Higher temps also means increasing evaporation so the land dries out faster.

What I don’t get is why anyone would think burning lots of coal is a good idea even if CO2 were not problem. What is it about pollution and land degradation that makes them so giddy? A friend said, We’ve got 500 years of coal and cheap electricity, why bother with renewables?

Do they get a rush when they see pics of smog in Beijing? That smog is one reason why coal is cheap, since a large part of the cost of burning coal is externalized; for instance, the cost of treating people with respiratory problems caused by pollution from coal burning is not included in the cost of the coal; everybody else – governments, individuals – pays it, so in the end result, it’s not actually cheap.

Even if burning coal did not create a greenhouse gas, there are lots of other reasons why it’s a terrible idea. For one, the oceans absorb a lot of CO2, turning the water more acidic, which then plays havoc with shellfish who are having difficulty making their shells in that acidic water. Are we willing to give up shellfish for the sake of cheap energy from fossil fuels?

Every stage of the use of coal to generate electricity is an environmental challenge.

And now with the widespread use of fracking to extract gas and oil, they’re not much better than the coal alternative since large amounts of methane is released in the process. Methane is 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 on a twenty year timetable. It’s not as prevalent as CO2, and it doesn’t last as long, but the warming of the arctic where temps have risen much faster than in temperate and tropical regions has the potential to create a methane bomb since very large amounts are locked up in permafrost and ice. Also very often fracking pollutes ground water: it’s being permanently destroyed (at least for thousands of years) for the sake of profits today, is that a worthy, intelligent trade-off?

Nonetheless, coal is still the worst. Formerly coal was produced in deep mines – still is in places like China. They were terrible for the worker’s health, but a least they didn’t impact the surface. Today all new mines in the western world are either open pit or mountain top removal. If you’re in the Australian outback where the land is desert scrub and nobody cares much about it and it’s far from any place where people live, then as ugly as the mine may be and as destructive as it is to the landscape, not much fuss is made about it and nobody has to witness the scars upon it.

That’s how it’s done in the American west, but in Appalachia in the east coal is extracted via mountain top removal. What they do is take a mountain covered with trees, strip it bare then use dynamite to blow off its top. They then push the remaining debris into the nearby streambed polluting the stream with heavy metals and destroying it for at least hundreds of generations. What’s left after the coal has been removed is a moonscape. Sure, if the miners took the time to save the topsoil so it could be replaced after they finished their extraction and kept the rocky debris out of the streambed it could regenerate in a few generations, but of course they don’t since that would cost a lot of money and the coal would no longer be cheap.

Then there’s transporting the fossil fuel. Oil and gas go in pipelines, notorious for leaking. In addition, oil pipelines in cold areas need to be heated to keep the oil flowing. Coal is usually moved in huge coal trains or shipped around the world. All movement of fossil fuels requires lots of energy.

Then the burning of fossil fuels, but especially coal, produces other pollutants besides CO2. And finally, after you burn coal you still have mountains of toxic coal ash to deal with.

Fortunately, in an amazingly short time wind and solar have become competitive in cost and in the US they make up the majority of new energy sources. Unfortunately, the forces of regression in the US are trying to make solar more expensive: in Nevada, for instance, the Republican state legislature wants to penalize people who install solar (Wanna guess who’s financing their campaigns?). Still, the movement’s unstoppable. Economically, in many parts of the world, it no longer makes sense to build new fossil fuel facilities.

Deniers complain about the cost: Converting is too expensive, it’s not worth it, they say. We can’t afford it. Not worth spending the money to have a clean environment? It definitely wouldn’t be cheap. One trillion dollars a year for a decade would still leave much of the US dependent on fossil fuels, but the country would be a long ways towards a clean environment and provide millions of jobs that can’t be outsourced. One trillion dollars is only about 7% of GDP.

Cambodia is trying to get most of its electricity from hydropower, which is good in theory except when the dams reduce fish populations. Cambodians get 80% of their protein from fish. A government spokesman once said, The people will be happy to have cheap electricity, but I’d bet they’d rather have fish to catch and eat. The other major problem with depending on hydro is drought. In the hottest months, when electricity is needed most, there’s insufficient water to generate much power.

It’s the Chinese who are financing and building coal power plants here. It’s really not the thing to do in today’s world, but they come ‘free’. In quotes because the Chinese drive hard bargains. Most such contracts to build and operate power plants (and not just the Chinese) include clauses that guarantee the builder a certain minimum profit, whether the plant is used or not. We’ll have to pay for that power even if we don’t want it.

The people in government love coal, but Cambodia has great potential for solar and hopefully someone will step up to produce large-scale solar power here. We do have a company in Cambodia – Star8 – that produces solar buses and tuk-tuks. For not much more cost than a motorbike and trailer, you can get a tuk-tuk that’ll go thirty kms on a day’s sunshine, 80 kms when the batteries are fully charged. They are very quiet compared to combustion engines and very simply designed. The only complexity being the electronic controls.

The new Coca-Cola plant in Phnom Penh gets 1/3 of its energy from the sun.

The future is in renewables.

 

It was quite a circus on Kampot’s riverside last new year’s with every centimeter of the park strip that wasn’t occupied by parked cars and motorbikes taken up by Khmer picnickers and revelers. They laid out their straw mats on the hard ground and partied up. Some brought their boom boxes, others brought tents for overnight. It’s too bad the park strip is so narrow right at old town, because Khmers love to congregate, they hate being alone and only feel really comfortable when lots of other people are around. So while there were locals picnicking all along the 3 kilometer waterfront it was most crowded where it could least accommodate them.

In the aftermath there was trash all over the place, though actually, the majority was piled around the small inadequate trash bins. Maybe they just don’t have any additional ones they could’ve placed there, but it sure would’ve made a difference in the clean up phase.

The road itself was also jammed with vehicles and people. The absence of usable sidewalks doesn’t impact life and livability in a small city like Kampot with about 50 to 60,000 people the way it does in the capital, because traffic is generally relatively light, but on a holiday like new years, it can get pretty treacherous out there trying to get around.

Kampot has become a prime destination for locals on holiday. They flock to the little burg at every opportunity. Especially from Phnom Penh, since the capital has done and is doing its best to cover every public park and vacant space with buildings. If you don’t live near the river or Olympic stadium, there’s no place to go for respite from the noise and concrete. I just don’t get it: The people who run the country have certainly been to other cities in the region and the world that have wonderful natural parks. Just in our neighborhood, Ho Chi Minh, Bangkok, Rangoon all have beautiful parks. In Cambodia’s cities, there isn’t a single natural park outside of Siem Reap. The country is great at securing riverside space for the people, but after that, zilch, nada, nil.

High season is in full swing with everybody, or nearly everybody enjoying the rush of customers. Still, it doesn’t seem as busy as in the past, though maybe only because new establishments are proliferating. There’s been lots of live music around, not like rainy season when the place was dead. In addition to the old regulars like the Playboys which I mention often, there’s a threesome called the Potshots. Ant and John are on guitars and Hugh on drums make a really tight sound, they’ve literally been playing together for years. Ant and John also play around town as a duo. After a long hiatus, I’ve started to bring my instruments at open mics so the action is welcome.

Potshots is also the name of a paintball park partly owned by Ant. Sounds like great fun, though I personally probably shouldn’t be running around on rough terrain at my age. I can take off on a sprint without a problem, if I’m thinking and careful, but the old bones get brittle and I could easily get sprained if I got too excited and rambunctious while out on the kill.

Speaking of traffic let me unload some pet peeves and proffer a little advice. Here in Kampot car drivers will stop their vehicles wherever they happen to be in the street, even right in the center of a traffic lane. Sure, most times there’s little traffic and plenty of room to get around, but it still seems weird to me. The rule is to always get your vehicle as far as possible off the traffic lanes, cause you never know if the necking down you are causing will in turn result in an accident. That’s especially true on highways where people are driving really fast: get out of the way or you may be in for a rude awakening. Even just a motorbike can cause problems when it’s on the edge of the roadway instead of completely off it. Stopping anywhere you feel like also happens in Phnom Penh, where I saw drivers everywhere double parking, causing minor jams. Cambodia’s cities were not built for the automobile, so as the number of cars in the country ramps up there’ll be gridlock and chaos. The problem will also be exacerbated by the large multistory buildings filling up the center city since they will be drawing large numbers of cars. Even if they provide parking spaces to residents, there’ll still be a lot more traffic.

The government is working on traffic legislation. One proposal is establish a minimum driving age of 18 for cars and 15 for motorbikes. Sounds reasonable enough, but if the moto age restriction is ever enforced here in Kampot there’ll be lots of very disappointed little kiddies who you can see bopping around on their little bikes. I see them as young as 6 or 7 years old. While they may be fully capable in a technical sense of handling their Chalys or what have you, they have almost no sense of safe driving practices and will cut corners, snake around traffic and pull in front of vehicles without thinking, not to mention often drive very fast. And of course it’s very rare to see one wearing a helmet. Personally, I’d be scared to death to have a little kid of mine out in traffic with all the crazies out there doing cowboy tricks on the road.

Also the PM has ordered that drivers of motorbikes with 125cc or less engines be exempt from having a driver’s license. I’m sure everybody who drives one of those little bikes – what we call scooters in the west – was happy to hear that, but what about the need to know the traffic rules? For that there’s no substitute than passing a test.

One of my driving pet peeves is how motorists will stop their cars at night but leave the headlights on, including when they’re facing the wrong direction. It’s very disconcerting when you’re facing bright lights on your side of the road. Didn’t anybody teach them what parking lights, sometimes called running lights are for? You want people to know you’re there, you don’t want to blind them.

And let me reiterate, when you’re out walking at night, especially if you’re going to be on a road that’s not well lit, you need to wear something white or light colored even if you think all black is more stylish, because otherwise you are invisible to drivers until they get very close. I usually drive slowly, but I do get distracted at times and old eyes generally lose some of their night vision so you really want me to see you far in advance, not have to swerve out of the way at the last minute.

A large scale drug crackdown is in force here in Cambodia, maybe sparked or inspired by the Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous assault on small time users and dealers. Summary execution for selling a few nickel bags of meth to fund your addiction? Or just using? No evidence, no trial, no lawyer, no opportunity to claim your innocence? He even bragged about participating in a few extrajudicial murders himself while mayor of Davao in the southern island of Mindanao. The result of 18 years of his tenure as an anti-drugs anti-crime mayor?: Davao has one of the highest murder rates in the country, in a country where violent crime is rife. And all those bloody murders where official numbers show the country has 4 million ‘addicts’, which mysteriously grew from only 1.3 million just a couple years ago. That would be a lot in Cambodia which has 15 million people, but the Philippines has more than 100 million, so at most a minor irritant. Also, rumor has it that Duterte is addicted to prescription pain killers, so if true, a hypocrite besides.

Other countries in the region maintain a mandatory death sentence for relatively small amounts of drugs: In Malaysia and Singapore 15 grams of heroin or 200 grams of pot qualify for the death penalty. Talking to a Malaysian a few years back, he said that traffickers figure if they’re going to die for a small amount, they might as well do large amounts.

With the advanced world moving towards looser, more humanitarian attitudes towards drugs, this type of crack down is an insanely regressive move.

Instead of education and harm reduction, people are getting draconian sentences. A friend knows a woman who was duped by a boyfriend into carrying a kilo of meth and got 27 years. A truck driver who got $100 for moving a ton of marijuana got life in prison. Another woman duped by a boyfriend into importing 2 kilos of cocaine also got life. He kept pressuring her until she gave in. She had no idea what she was transporting. She aroused suspicion by not having any check-in baggage. These are not the big fish, but merely couriers. In a country where murder sometimes only gets 15 to 20 years, a travesty of justice.

The place to start easing up is of course ganja. With nine American states making recreational pot totally legal and another 20 or so making medical weed legal; Uruguay legalizing pot and others loosing up, there’s no reason whatever for going after pot here in Cambodia, especially with the anomaly of ganja being quasi-legal for happy pizzas. Colorado, the first state to make it legal, is getting twice as much in taxes from pot as from alcohol. With surrounding countries on drug killing sprees, it’d be hard for Cambodia to buck the trend, but it would nonetheless be wise to try, since an open attitude would be good for the country and for tourism. It costs a lot of money to nab, prosecute and imprison drug offenders. And it costs society a lot in peace and security when a large scale underground business in contraband flourishes, bringing crime and corruption.

Cambodia is already the easiest place to smoke weed in the region and there are no discernable negative impacts on the country from the drug itself; that is, aside from its illegality. In the same way that Cambo makes it easy and is tolerant of all types of people living here, having a gentle touch with marijuana would only be good for tourism and drawing expats.

The key to minimizing use of drugs, alcohol, tobacco, whatever is education. Tobacco is the perfect example. When I was a kid in the forties and fifties around 70% of adults smoked and lots of kids too, considering I started at 12. Tobacco advertising was everywhere, including on TV and so many adults smoked that it was difficult for them to tell you not to. Camel advertising claimed ‘9 out of 10 doctors prefer Camels’. I once had an old advertising sign from Old Gold cigs that said ‘Not a cough in a carload.’ Filters didn’t come into use until the late 50s. The tobacco companies tried to convince people that their product was harmless decades after everyone knew inherently that it was dangerous. We kids were aware of its dangers back in the fifties: we referred to cigarettes as coffin nails.

Now after many years of research debunking the industry’s obfuscating and clouding the issue of health problems associated with smoking, restricting of advertising and widespread education, the percentage of smokers is down below 20%. Tobacco is so cheap here in Cambo that a lot of expats will smoke here but not when they return to their home countries where it can be very expensive.

I believe everybody has a right to their own poison; it’s your choice. The only important point on that score is to know your poison. Some people justify their addiction saying they like it and don’t care if they don’t live as long. Unfortunately for them it’s not that simple. If you could enjoy your habit for three or four decades and then die nice and quickly, that’d be one thing, but generally when your cells turn cancerous you die a slow and terribly painful death, wasting away to nothing. That could happen when you are in your fifties or sixties when you still might have had decades of good living to go. When I was in my teens and people warned me about smoking, I would haughtily declare that I was going to enjoy life now and wasn’t worried about the future and as long as I lived to the year 2000 (when I’d be 59) I’d be happy. Well the year 2000 is long gone and I’m still having a great time and getting a kick out of life.

It took an extreme effort to quit 35 years ago, and it’s certainly made all the difference. I quit by overdoing it, sometimes called immersion therapy. Most of the time I smoked it was cheap, harsh, unfiltered, roll-your-own cigs. When that was combined with smoking pot for the last 14 years I smoked tobacco, it got so I was coughing all the time. Smoking both at the same time is much worse than either one individually. I couldn’t attend meetings or such without disrupting them.

I’d known from past experience that there were times I was so sick I positively could not take a single hit, so I purposely made myself sick. I smoked one after another non-stop of that cheap tobacco. When I finished the package, I started rolling the butts and then the butts of the butts until I felt so bad the thought of a single puff was so repulsive, I stopped. That was 35 years ago and I haven’t had a hit since, except for mistakenly smoking mixed joints.

The point being, whatever the addiction, tobacco, drugs, alcohol, gambling, it’s the individual’s responsibility, with whatever education, guidance or rehab efforts the state can provide. In that scenario, the damage and cost to the society and individual is far less than the kind of repression that happens now.

Besides, the whole anti-drug thing is stinkingly hypocritical. In Singapore, you can kill yourself with tobacco or alcohol, you can eat yourself to death, you can gamble away your family’s future in the local casinos, but if you smoke a joint you get locked away. A couple years back a Singaporean couple returning from a vacation in Australia were drug tested and since they’d smoked pot in Oz and pot lasts 30 days in your system they spent two years in prison for their terrible transgressions.

 

Five Rooms a Day

 

 

According to a friend, five new hotel rooms are opening every day in Kampot. He himself was responsible for two days. Other people I know are doing the same, so the little burg is on a roll. It’s December and lots of people are around, a far cry from September and October when the town was deserted. Still the question is whether the boom is on track or ahead of itself, expanding more rapidly than the trade warrants. It’s still all cool, all groovy and mostly on the side of improvement, rather than downhill sliding.

There’s a new $2 billion plus development announced for south of town with villas, condos, a marina… you know top-of-the-line, except a little research shows the outfit proposing it is a telephone number and not much else. Still, a ghastly prospect, but the comfortable class need homes too, don’t they? Wouldn’t want them to sleep on the street.

Right near by, about 10 km from town is the new $18 million passenger port under construction. According to the Asian Development Bank which is funding it, it’ll serve about 1000 passengers a day between Kampot and Vietnam’s Phu Quoc island, other ports in Cambodia – Koh Rong, Sihanoukville, Koh Kong – and Thai islands. In 2014 Phu Quoc had 128,000 international tourists and while I couldn’t find the numbers, I’m sure the vast majority arrived by plane. Maybe 100 per day currently arrive by ferry, so not much to justify that big port. However, Vietnam is predicting a tripling of tourist arrivals by 2020, which seems quite fanciful to me, but anyway lets triple that number to 300. Maybe also just having the port there will be an attraction and that by itself will add a few hundred more travelers. Any kind of sea travel will be more expensive than other modes, but it ought to be a fun trip taking the boat to Snooky. Still looks like a boondoggle to me, but I’ve been wrong before, so we shall see.

As part of the trend towards ‘big ideas’ a large and interestingly done night market is soon to open north of town past the new bridge. It’ll have more than 100 merchandise booths and 60 food booths on a long piece of land that reaches all the way to the river. It’s done well, looks good, so might be successful, though it seems out of place there all by itself. It’s very close to my place which is on a road perpendicular to river road so once they repair my road there may be some bit of traffic going by. When I first moved in 9 years ago – 9 years in the same rental house! – the road was a backwater with wetlands, including two large lotus ponds, dominating. Now almost all the water features have gone and it’s nowhere near as pleasant, however being a one block road, it’s never likely to have really busy. Thankfully so because I’ve created a wonderful garden there over the years and can’t move even if I wanted… though the world being as crazy as it is, it’s folly to plan too far ahead.

In addition the Kampot nurses school which backs up to my place has just constructed a large three story structure which replaced grand old eucalyptus trees. In place of those tall trees swaying in the breeze I now see lots of classrooms overlooking my place.

The cruise boats are still not running since the temporary halt was ordered after 4 people died on a severely overcrowded vessel about a month ago. They’re still trying to work out some new safety rules, I guess. That’s sort of how things happen in Cambo. Everything is loose, freewheeling and unregulated until a problem surfaces that requires government intervention.

In a similar case, a longtime and well-liked Phnom Penh expat met an untimely death as part of a Mekong boat cruise because of lax safety rules. The way they work it there when there are several boats needing to dock they stack them up side by side and you jump from one to the other to get off. Unfortunately the gap, evidently, was too wide and he fell in. Contrary to my first impression he wasn’t a drinker, so that wasn’t a factor in his death, though I’m sure most people do have a few beers as part of a cruise. That event probably won’t bring changes to the rules, but a few more might shake the government dragon into action.

Another serious nighttime accident has happened on the riverside in the vicinity of Bokor Mt. Lodge stemming from speeding, drunkenness, both or just plain negligence. It was the fourth one in two years. As I understand it, a large car pulling out into traffic was hit by a motorbike, giving the bike rider a cracked skull with some of his brains hanging out of it. The guy in the car probably pulled out without looking first or if he had looked the biker must’ve been coming along too fast to stop in time. And of course no helmet. While I noticed almost everyone wearing a helmet in Phnom Penh last time I was there, here it’s only about 20 or 30% that do.

Part of the problem is the ease of speeding at night, especially from the south where there is no congestion and clear sailing for more than a kilometer, at which time you hit a lot of congestion in a small area. Once you are going fast it’s hard to slow down, even if you are aware of the danger, but also there’re a lot of people who run through town like a bullet with cars sometimes going more than 100 kph and motorbikes as fast as they will go. River road is planned to be a major road from Kep past the new port and through to Teuk Chhou upstream near the dam. In it’s new parts it’s wide, but right in town it bottlenecks. Western city planners would tackle the problem with ‘traffic calming’ concepts. In this case one solution would be rumble strips on the road like the one’s used to denote schools. That’s one way to get people to slow down. Speed bumps could be a problem, since if you’re not aware of them and you are going very fast, there could be a serious result. As the number of businesses increases on the strip, along with increased congestion, more casualties are certain.

Traffic calming is also needed to tamp down on early evening cruising by young people. Eighty percent of the traffic on riverside at that time is just youth going back and forth with a lot of speeding and dicey moves for showing off. At one point they actually blocked off part of the road to prevent cruising, but it caused more hassles than it solved.

Madi Bar on the river was closed for renovations last August but the new owner of the building didn’t want it there so it was closed permanently. It was the place to go on Thursday nights for live music and dancing for more than 5 years and is sorely missed by this old boogie-woogie man. Chiet, the owner and lead singer for the Kampot Playboys will probably do something similar at his new place, Orchid G.H. on what we call guest house street since there’re about 8 on a short stretch of road.

Karma Traders, a new guest house north of town past the railroad tracks, attracts 50 to 100 people on music nights… just opened and crowded already. Moi Tiet near the river gets a lot of people on its music nights. Now that it’s high season, there are lots of people around so a lot more exciting than back in the rainy months when the place was often dead. Billabong GH has a Sunday afternoon session with music at 5 pm. They’ve got a pool so good fun on a lazy Sunday. A small Sunday afternoon market with music from several people was held at the Pond GH. Lots of people showed up, tots to geezers, and a good time was had by all.

We had quite a bit of rain here in mid-December, so much on one day that it felt just like September. What a contrast to last year, when it hardly rained in November and then almost nothing till May. Last year was an El Nino year, a warming of the Pacific meaning we tend to get dry weather. Now we are in a mild La Nina, a cooling of the Pacific so plenty of moisture is about right. We get some rain every month including December, but 100 mm in three days was a bit much. Nice thing about the rain now is that it keeps the temperatures way down.

There are rumblings out of the government that they’re working on a new law related to alcohol consumption. Supposedly it’ll take in the questions of drinking age, taxes and advertising.

Can you imagine a drinking age of 21 in Cambodia? Sometimes laws should be aspirational, but really, it makes no sense to have laws that are unrealistic and unenforceable, not to mention stupid. Like in America where at 18 you can join the army and be sent off to war to kill people and blow things up, dance buck naked in a strip bar and stick your pussy right in a guy’s face, be a star athlete making millions of dollars, but you can’t have a beer until you’re 21. You can be inundated with a barrage of ads on TV extolling the virtues of drinking – Wow look at all those happy people drinking beer! – but you can only watch from the sidelines and long for the day you’re old enough to drink. By preventing, or trying to prevent, young people from drinking, you only encourage them to binge whenever they have the chance.

Increasing taxes on alcoholic beverages seems like a good idea, but it too has many pitfalls. First it falls most heavily on the poorest people. There are a lot of dangers and problems associated with drinking, but it’s as old as civilization because it’s also an elixir that eases the tensions in life, helps you forget your troubles and loosens you up to enjoy yourself and have a good time. Sure, it has to be done in moderation lest it damages you physically. You also have to be wary of addiction, but increasing the price only makes poor people who need it to keep their psychological balance poorer and sometimes causes them to turn to very cheap unregulated homemade alcohol like the tainted rice wine that recently killed 15 people and hospitalized another 100 in a provincial village.

The other factor mitigating against raising taxes on alcohol is tourism and the expat community. People come to Cambodia for many reasons but it sure helps that beer is so cheap, especially since restaurant food here is a bit more expensive than our neighbors. How many places will you find a mug of beer for a dollar and even less during happy hours?

It makes a difference to this expat – and I’m sure many others – that I can go out nearly every night and have a few beers without breaking the bank. A lot of our social life – mine for sure – revolves around the bars. I spend most of my days by myself so I greatly look forward to hanging out at night and shooting the shit with friends and travelers. The contrast to how my life would be back in the states couldn’t be more stark since there I’d be spending five or six nights at home drinking by myself being bored silly, like I am now when I stay home even though it’s only once or twice a week.

The third part of the proposed new legislation is advertising. While I consider beery delights close to essential to a good life, it’s never something that should be encouraged. People don’t need to be convinced by slick advertising to drink. If anything the opposite should be true, public service ads should be warning of drinking to excess. Alcohol advertising is especially pernicious here since it’s practically ubiquitous. Everywhere you go there are large, ultra-tacky, ugly as sin, lighted beer signs. In places where bars are concentrated that’s all you see. In bar strips in Thailand, every one has unique and sometimes artistic signage, in Cambo, crap, because all you see is beer advertising, there’s no art whatever. Bar owners do it because the signs are free, but they don’t do much to advertise the bar because the bar’s name is actually very small. After you provide the art, a sign of equal size only costs fifty dollars. It’s good to know what beer the place has on tap, but that can easily be done without a big ugly sign.

The other thing that needs to go are pull tab cans. Once again drinking should not in any way be encouraged, but also those tabs are a nuisance and are sharp enough to cut easily. They’re also not often recycled. They don’t weigh much but hundreds of millions start to add up. They were banned in Oregon in 1973 because people were getting their feet cut up walking on the beach. Just before Cambodia beer was introduced five years ago the government announced a ban on them, but Cambo beer had started with them and it was new, and I’m sure the Khmer owner is an influential man, so the government folded and now there’re lots of beers doing the same thing. Education is key to minimizing damage from alcohol, but it’d be somewhat futile if people are bombarded with seductive advertising at the same time.

On a political front, Kem Sokha, second in command but de facto leader of the opposition since Sam Rainsy is in exile, was pardoned by the PM in a surprise move. Five members of  Ad hoc, an advocacy group now in prison are also supposed to be pardoned. Their imprisonment is widely perceived to be politically motivated.

The PM generally has strategic motives behind these moves, but it’s hard to figure why he’d do this now, though he can always find a reason to throw Sokha back in the slammer, if he wants. His jailing and the others is based on the accusation of bribing his former mistress with $500 to deny the affair. The reasoning was that she needed the money since she was unable to work while so much bad energy was afoot.

For the investigation they brought in the Anti-corruption Unit as well as the police. Meanwhile the ACU had no interest in investigating a $500,000 bribe given to the Health minister by a bed net supplier. The ACU has succeeded in going after corruption in many instances, but impunity for certain of the well connected is clearly its failing. With elections coming up there could be turmoil, but regardless of the bad omens I’m hoping for calm and acceptance of the results whatever the outcome. I know, wishful thinking.

 

Kampot Writers and Readers Festival

 

The second annual writers festival was a great success with lots of people coming from all over Cambodia and sometimes beyond to take part. Similar to the first one at least 500 people showed up and filled the town’s hotels and guest houses.

There were a couple dozen venues and nearly 90 separate events which included music, dance and art as well as writing. Highlights included the opening ceremony at the Kampot Traditional Arts School where the local governor, diplomats and important figures spoke, Nerd Night at the Fish Market upscale restaurant where the house was packed with nerdy talkers and listeners and closing night music at the streetside stage in front of KAMA, Kampot Arts and Music Association, where Julien Poulson, main organizer of the event holds sway.

The evening program at the stage began with the Bokor Mountain Magic Band which after a shaky start showed some solid chops, a really tight sound. Their lead singer, good as her voice was, had some fine dance moves, I was very impressed.

That was followed by Carlos Andres Gomez, a master storyteller, who ad libbed a beautiful message taken from disparate keywords from the audience.  He prompted the audience for the first word; creative came up. Last word was moist. An audience member came up with one theme: living in Cambodia, a second theme was Donald Trump. Difficult as that may sound, it took him less than 30 seconds to start to weave a tale about all of us being together here in Cambo and how we’re creating a new life in our adopted homeland, etc. I forgot how he got Trump in there, but it really worked. His message was so inspirational that at one point he called for people to come forward near the stage and quite a few did. He wasn’t even intending for them to do that, he was just riffing on his story.  Gomez could clean up as a cult leader, live high off the hog, I hope he’s never tempted.

The Kampot Playboys finished the night and as usual filled the dance floor, which as it happened wasn’t in the best condition. While many of our streets have been upgraded recently, it was a sordid mess in front of the stage with the road partly broken up into gravel and due to an unfortunately timed and smallish but significant rain, there was a nice big puddle right in the center of the dancing area. Didn’t stop people from showing their stuff and having a good time.

A highlight for me was the presence of Kingdom beer. It hadn’t been around Kampot for quite a long time, but they brought some down for the festival to try to get the ball rolling again. The good part was they didn’t want to haul any back so they sold off everything they had left for a dollar. What a treat, excellent beer.

Unfortunately the festival didn’t seem to be as organized as last time. It is a big and very complicated event, so some slack is in order. But still, no big beautiful schedule, only a simple one printed on white paper and Thursday’s wasn’t even ready on time. Also in many cases there was no or not much description of what was taking place. And timing was way off at times

I had a very disappointing Saturday night. I saw Nerd Night on the schedule with no accompanying details, but figured it had to be right for me. I got there half hour after it was supposed to start, but absolutely nothing was happening so I headed down to the Mad Monkey where a band I wanted to hear was playing. I hadn’t been there before so I thought it was a good opportunity to check the place out. It’s a backpacker haunt so not a place I would normally go. I got there, but no band. I wandered back to the heart of town and did a few ordinary things. There were quite a few people drinking beer at KAMA later that night so it wasn’t a total loss. It was only the next day that I found out that Nerd Night at the Fish Market didn’t get started until the time it was supposed to end and it was packed and a really good time was had by all… so not pleased about that.

The highlight for me personally was a session entitled ‘Writers on Acid’ involving myself and two other writers. I was surprised by the title they had bestowed upon the session, though having partaken plenty in the distant past, it wasn’t totally out of place. All three of us had asked to be on the agenda for quite some time, but our requests had gotten lost in the confusion and disorganization so staff compensated by lumping us all together. Which turned out fine, all together we got 18 to 20 people to attend; it might have been mighty sparse doing it separately.

In addition to myself, there was Todd Fahey who’s written a novel titled ‘Wisdom’s Maw’. It describes the part the CIA had in the early days of the spread of LSD. He’s done his homework and describes in novel form the participation of Aldous Huxley and lots of other memorable icons in the CIA program called MK Ultra which was intended to find drugs they could use to control people’s minds. He transitions from Huxley to the beats to the hippies to tell the long story. It was good.

Also there was James Newman who’s written a series of books that take place in a moderately dystopian near future in ‘Fun City’, a tawdry place on the order of Pattaya or Angeles City. It goes noir in lots of directions, makes you smile and is worthy of a read.

Together we talked about psychedelics in general, the effects on us and our books. While I’m still incredulous, Todd says he actually wrote while tripping. I had some good ideas while tripping, but getting them onto paper – last time for me was 44 years ago, so being before computers, paper was it – would’ve been an unimaginable task.

While I’m on the subject it must be time for me to plug my own books. Mine weren’t written on acid, but it certainly laid the background for both my novel Y3K and my memoir A Hitchhiker’s Tao. Y3K takes place in the waning months of 2999. It’s primarily a look back from then to the environmental breakdown – which I refer to as Entropy Gaia – that’s about to befall our planet and the Ecotopia that the people who are left create out of the ashes. It includes a faithful description of my five years living in a commune in the mountains of southwest Oregon, updated to the future of course, and an exploration of mysticism, the belief that all things are connected and all are represented in the cosmic mind, the repository of all knowledge, past and future. The experience of acid is the closest most of us will come to feeling that connection.

My memoir, A Hitchchiker’s Tao; subtitled Thumbing Your Way to Enlightenment, covers the same topics as Y3K except themed on my extensive hitching experience. Between 1968 and 1980 I did 60,000 to 70,000 miles on the road and about half that was without money. I was out on my thumb for weeks at a time, including in very cold weather where I might not have made it if not for the generosity of strangers. I wouldn’t hitch without money today if I had a choice, but I know I can stick out my thumb and go anywhere I need to strictly on cosmic largesse… well okay, in America at least. Either way, with or without money, that’s what it’s all about; when you’re hitching you are at the mercy of the cosmos. It might take one minute for the next ride or a whole day. You have to learn to deal with uncertainty and have faith that it all works out. Y3K and A Hitchhiker’s Tao are available as ebooks.

There’s rumblings in the community about how the festival was conducted with many people feeling that it needs to be a community effort with a lot more transparency. While it was a remarkable achievement under any circumstances a lot of people were left unhappy about the procedure and determined to change it for next year.

Meanwhile Kampot has become the go-to place for expats and Cambodians when they want to escape the big Penh. Last September on Pchum Bun holiday Kampot saw its worst traffic jam since the new bridge was built in 2010. Traffic was backed up for about 300 meters in town heading for the bridge and all the way to the traffic circle on the Sihanoukville side. Kampot traffic police, never having had the challenge before, stood dumbfounded while vehicles locked up at the traffic circle. It took maybe an hour to get through the jam. Along the road from the big city vehicles were moving but there was hardly a break for many kilometers.

This all created a very crowded riverside and the problem was duplicated at the water festival though the jam wasn’t nearly as bad. A very unfortunate trend has taken over the riverside which likely started with the Fish Market restaurant.  It’s the only private property on the river in the middle of 3 kilometers of riverside promenade. The owner of the restaurant set up the front of his place with car and moto parking in such a way that pedestrians now have to go out into the street to get through. There should’ve been a requirement to maintain a place for people to walk.

There are now half dozen cruise and/or restaurant boats parked on the river, most of them garishly lit. They bring visual pollution and block the view for people who want to sit on the river and take in the peaceful aspects of the water. These boats draw a lot of people and maybe with the example of the Fish Market, many people are parking their cars in the promenade transforming a park in to a parking lot. In addition to seriously detracting from the walking experience, having big vehicles in the park damages the pavement and tree roots.

The area just south of the old bridge was the first section of the park to be improved and was done with very low curbs. In most of the later sections the curbs are very high preventing anyone from driving into the park.

There’s talk of forcing the boats down river where it’s much less crowded, but that probably won’t happen soon. Meanwhile people are furiously building new boats to take advantage of the boom in visitors, so it may be impossible to see the river soon with the coming of high season and lots more boats.

The above was written before a tragic accident happened on a tour boat that became grounded. Because of the holiday and influx of visitors the boats have regularly been overcrowded like the one that went down was: it had 80 people on it when it was only built for 50. They were on a nighttime ‘firefly’ cruise and on their return with a very low tide the boat hit a sandbank which tipped it over a bit causing some people to fall into the water. After that lots of people panicked and jumped in the river. Four people wound up dying. The government is banning all cruises for a few days until they draw up some safety rules.

Went to my first air guitar competition. I hadn’t thought much of the idea, but friends were going and it was held at The Pond where my bday party was held, so I stopped by. It was great fun, I had no idea, laughed my ass off. I was too shy to participate this time, but next time I’ll be practicing my air chops and be ready to sweep the competition.

A band called G. C. Riders came to town from their base in S-ville. They said they’d only been together a month, but it sounded like they’d been making music together forever. And what a disparate crew. Vocalist and rhythm guitar is from Australia, drummer from Estonia, bass from Indonesia and lead from Denmark. They started out with Hendrix’s Watchtower: I marveled at the lead guitar’s abilities, I dare say, practically as good as Hendrix himself. The others were all pretty good, but I thought him the exceptional one until the bass player did a 10 minute solo doing tricks on the axe like I’ve never seen before: he used all ten fingers playing it like a harp. Highly recommended.

The Bugger II saga is hopefully over; that is, the hassle of driving a car you think might blow up at any moment. It was more than 5 months from the time it was totaled till just recently when I finally got the second one working properly. I was a big hassle at times riding the bicycle home in the late hours. Now that the car is in working order I won’t be doing that very often. In some ways I’ll miss it: it’s not that big a deal, only about a mile. I don’t even mind getting wet and I can always use the exercise. But there are two exceptions, the first is the Kampot dogs of midnight. No matter how many times you do it and how well prepared you are with rocks to throw at them, there’s always a tension and nervousness involved in running the dog gauntlet, especially since a friend was bitten recently.

The other problem is the last 60 meters to my house. Almost all the way home the road is fine, you can go fast to try to outrun the dogs and when you’re moving, the bicycle light is bright. However when you have a roadway that’s mud intermixed with mud puddles and you’ve been drinking and there’s no moon and your light is barely working because you are moving very slowly, well disaster for sure. Last time I did it I fell down in the mud and dislodged my chain in the process and had to walk through a small pond to get to my house. Once that road is upgraded I’ll ride the bike again sometimes, I promise.  You do get lazy when you have a car, but I promise I’m going back to the bike on occasion. Besides, rainy season is almost over, it won’t be as bad as the road dries up.