the nerve

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

2012-01-08T22:20:00.023+08:00

That was Eddie's place there, she says, pointing to small hollow set back from the beach. It is overgrown with bamboo, and at this hour of the morning is sitting in the shade of a hill rising steeply behind it. Vines run across the yellow sand and down to the beach like cargo cultists. All around, the beach is littered with round, black, basaltic rocks, a kind of volcanic bowling alley. Some have been gathered together into a circle, a rough wire grate above them, cold black ash below, and are surrounded with translucent yellow shapes of turtle shell.

He had a shack there, but it's gone now. Come on kids, you got school.
The boy gets up from where he is playing with a broken life ring, and goes into the corrugated tin shack with his older sister. Their father stands, baby in his arms, looking out to sea.

We moved back up here from Townsville a few years ago, she says. We like it here.
I look around at the large drift logs. Pine pallets embedded upright in the sand. The galvanised iron shack surrounded by fishing nets, lines, lures.

This is our home, she says. She pauses as the kids come out from the shack carrying their school satchels.
Eddie came back too, she says. They dug him up, where he was buried in Townsville, and brought him back here. His tombstone is up there, on top of the hill. This was Uncle Koiki's home. He's very famous here, you know.

It shouldn't surprise me that Eddie Mabo's place on the beach is so humble. The native title case was never about the acquisition of property. At least not from Mabo's point of view. During the High Court case in '92, other Islanders tried to argue the point on who owned what, which piece of land belonged to whom, and challenged Mabo over his land claim. Which only served to bolster his case against the crown. His point was that a system of land ownership existed long before the arrival of the markay, or white man, in Australia. During the final hearings, no-one could argue that the Meriam people did not cultivate the soil, for as Justice Brennan noted, they were devoted gardeners. And it would be hard to argue that the Murray Islanders' relationship to their lands was not proprietary. The evidence showed they owned land as individuals and as families, and had clearly demarcated property boundaries.

She points out the fish traps. Out from the shacks, cutting a swathe through the warm sea, black basalt rocks laid in a long serpentine line.

Those fish traps, they been there a long time, she says. Uncle Koiki showed the justices when they came up here. They looked here, and they looked there – but those? Very important, those stones. They took pictures of my son out there.
Who?
That film crew, they were here a few weeks ago. My son was in it, they filmed him. My daughter, too. My son played Eddie Mabo when he was younger, catching fish out there on those rocks. My daughter played his girlfriend, back when he was younger.

Dang. Missed a scoop there. All I got out of the young kid was a massive fart and some giggles, while the daughter said nothing at all. Ah well, how was I supposed to know they were film stars.

The major victory in the Mabo case was when the High Court agreed that the Common Law of Australia, properly considered, provides for the recognition and protection for the pre-existing land rights of the Indigenous peoples. For Uncle Koiki, this was more important than staking out a piece of real estate on the beach.

And while little remains of Uncle Koiki's place of residence, the principles that guided him - Malo law - remain strong. Tag mauke mauke. Teter mauke mauke. Don't touch or take what isn't yours. Don't set foot on land that isn't yours. Murray Island is no place to be wandering around, markay or not. You don't just head down to the beach for a swim or a spot of fishing and splash about with your floaties doing whatever you want. All parts of these waters belong to someone - a clan, a family - and have for a long time. The locals draw their identity from it. For Torres Strait Islanders, this is not a history lesson, or some abstract concept. This is life.

You see it in the daily ebb and flow of the Torres Strait, the Islanders and their homelands in a symbiosis as natural as drawing air. Islanders not only take their food from the land and sea around them, but their totem animals as well. The deumer, or Torres Strait Pigeon, the beizam, or hammerhead shark, the koedal, or crocodile, and other animals adorn elaborate tombstones laid out across these islands, tombstones that may often stand in a family's front yard. Fishermen and cray divers will talk about this or that patch of reef like I might talk about a vege patch in my back yard.

Commercial cray divers fishing the reefs of the Torres Strait have, in the recent past, had their catch seized and been driven off by the point of a spear or the blade of a machete. Benjamin Ali Nona's infamous incident with the spear occurred at the end of the last millenium, after which Mr Nona took the name Maluwap, meaning 'sea spear'. More recently, a cray diver was (allegedly) pulled up by his air hose and smacked about the head with a machete on Number One Reef north of Keriri, or Hammond Island. I say 'allegedly' because that case is still before the courts. Maluwap won a significant victory when he was acquitted of the charges he faced – charges that were the equivalent of armed robbery – on the grounds that he was simply taking back what he believed to be his property.

Former Indigenous federal senator Aden Ridgway noted similar incidents of commercial fishermen breaching a 'gentlemen's agreement' to refrain from taking catch within a 10-mile zone of each island had gone unchecked by the government authorities who were supposed to enforce the Torres Strait Treaty, a law legislated to protect the fishing rights and way of life of the Islanders.

"… the real victims of the law were the Islanders and the commercial fishermen, one because they held a real expectation that government would honour the treaty, and the others because of the failings of government to enforce the meaning of the treaty so that they understood what they could do," Ridgway said in his maiden speech to parliament in 1999.

In July, 2010, Maluwap Nona won a landmark native title sea rights case for Torres Strait Islanders as a whole. But our Australian government is currently appealing the decision. Send her victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us, et cetera. With his solid build and dreadlocks, Maluwap drops into the offices of the paper from time to time. When he has something to say, I tend to pay attention.

But the long and short of it, in a practical sense, is that you don't go traipsing about willy nilly across these islands. Especially on Mer. Here, you don't even go in to someone's yard to knock on their door. You stand on the edge of the property, call out, and wait.

I sit on a sunbleached log and gaze down the beach. The film crew who were out here a few weeks back were producing a movie simply called Mabo. They were chased off the island. I heard rumours they were woken in the early hours by a wild man wielding a machete, but the Thursday Island police played down that version, saying it was more likely a length of pipe. In the morning, the Mer community convinced the nervous ABC crew to stay on, but after their vehicle sustained what the senior sergeant described as 'wilful damage', they upped sticks and left.

Of course I ran the story on the front page. And of course the Mer community wanted to talk to me about that. It was blown out of proportion, they said. We are not violent people, they said. Come visit us, they said. So I did.

Only a couple of generations ago, Murray Islanders were headhunters. I was advised that I would be sleeping on a verandah next to the 'grandfather drum', or Malo drum. And to be very careful of how I treated it. Because the grandfather drum has 23 notches. Each notch represents the head of a victim who walked on the wrong side of the Malo drum, who disrespected it by walking behind it. 23 is a nice number, I said. A magic number. And I have no intention of changing it to 24. The other half of this pigeon pair, the grandmother drum, was commandeered by a visiting ship some centuries ago, around the time Fernando Torres navigated these treacherous straits.

As it transpired, my hosts, Aven and Melora Noah, could not have been more hospitable, inviting me to join a charter flight with a few others – Ed from Health, Michelle from Indigenous TV, and Nancy from the local radio station – to fly up and cover a weekend of dancing and festivities. They were just digging up the kup muri turtle when we arrived, right on sunset, and it was quite something to watch bronze whaler sharks thrashing about on the shoreline in a fight for the scraps. Didn't stop Ed and I taking a quick dip the next morning. It is shark mating season, and i figured the bronze whalers would be too preoccupied to bother with a couple of crazy white markay. We could see them, going hard at it just a couple of metres from the coconut palms lining the beach. But it didn't seem right to stare.

The kids come out of the shack with their school satchels, and head off up the steep embankment, through the undergrowth. The sun is well and truly up now and the sweat trickles down my front like the first drips of an espresso. Which reminds me. I need a coffee. Four hours sleep last night, two the night before. Usually I sleep half the day after deadline, but I wasn't going to miss Mer. Not for squids. I look down the beach. The indigenous TV presenter is getting some shots, pictures of our Islander guide talking to the turtle tracks that sweep the beach everywhere here. It's laying season, and they're on the move. We don't have to hunt them, our guide says, they just come right up on the beach for us. If you see one set of tracks going in to the bush, and no tracks coming out, you know she's still in there. You just go pick her up.

I'd heard eating turtle is like chewing on wetsuit, but the kup muri feast they served up last night before the dancing was tender, spicy and delicious. Praise be to God. And the eggs made a really nice breakfast. Needless to say, I didn't get up in the middle of the night to wander around looking for the toilet. 23 notches is fine. It's a nice number.

I catch up with Ed and the TV presenter, and we wind our way up through the jungle, on the heels of our guide.

Eddie Mabo's place back there, I say to Michelle, as she lunks her tripod and camera up the clay track.
What? Where?
Back there.

We trudge on. It's hellish hot and humid, and now there are sharp stones on the track. I've left my thongs way back on the beach. I thought we'd gotten up at 5.30 to go watch turtles laying eggs. Nobody said anything about a jungle trek. My feet aren't made for this. I'm not sure what they were made for, but it certainly wasn't walking. We reach Uncle Koiki's headstone. It is more impressive than his beach home. We sit amongst the banana grove as the stringy wisps of the kapok tree stream down around us in the hot, still air.

DO THEY BITE

2011-12-27T15:18:00.009+08:00

I'm balls-deep in water trying to get phone coverage. This would not normally be a problem, but there is a big crocodile living just over there at Red Island. And he visits the beach regularly. I ran into Danny last night at the fishing club after the raft race. Danny is the manager of the holiday park where I'm camped.

Got a call saying the croc was up on the beach, he says. Someone left a cray pot there.
So how do you shoo away a four-metre saltwater crocodile? i ask.
He stares at me in disbelief.
You don't. You shoo away the campers.

I keep my phone call short and my eyes on the water. I had a tourist ask about crocs on Thursday.
Do they bite? she asked.

I walk up the beach and drop my shirt and phone and go back in the water for a quick dip. I squat down and splash some water on my face. All the while I'm peeling eyes like a kitchenhand in a cannibal restaurant. Then it's back up the beach, grab the shirt, and back to the tent. No point using a towel. I'll be dripping in sweat again in no time anyway. I use the tap to rinse the sand off my feet and let the salt dry on my skin.

It's hot. I lie down in the tent for a brief relapse. After the madness of the raft race, it is a great relief to just stretch out in this tropical heat and do nothing.

THE PENINSULA PIRATES REGATTA

2011-12-27T14:55:00.011+08:00

It's a pretty boat, but small, almost toy-like. A large islander walks down through the coconut grove and picks up the line from the stingray anchor. He starts to haul it to shore. The rest of his group sit on the sand around the ashes of last night's fire. I walk down and join him on the shoreline.

Boat blo yupla? i ask.
Wa.

The small craft crunches up onto the sand. I see the mast is a length of three-by-two pine. The boom is the same, and a roughly-sawn piece of ply is lying in the bottom of the boat. It's a centreboard. Another length of construction pine runs cross-wise to strengthen the mast. The tiller is a length of hardwood attached with galvanised screws to the plywood rudder. Most of the fittings are handmade. The pulleys and eyelets for the ropes are all hand-carved from blocks of pine, as are the cleats on the gunwales.

You build this boat? i ask.
Wa, I mekem, he says.
Looks like its from the 50s.
Dis dinghy, i get im down south, dempla bin call im a 'clinker'.
Because of the way those boards overlap?
Wa. I mekem mast and sail, tiller, mekem sailbot.
He points to the centreboard, which still bears the markings of a felt-tip pen.
I suddenly realise this vessel has been built with a specific purpose in mind.
You're going in the raft race?
Wa.
So this is an entry in the Peninsula Pirates Regatta, an annual raft race from Umagico to the fishing club at Seisia. Well, 'annual' in the sense that it was held for the first time around this time last year, give or take a tide or two.

I've been camped at Seisia for a couple of days now, having come over to the mainland from Thursday Island to cover the race for the paper. Having not seen any of the rafts, this year or last, I was not sure what to expect. In all honesty, I was expecting to see a bunch of empty cans of XXXX Gold tied together with driftnets. Or perhaps a beer-keg outrigger with a beach umbrella for a sail. Or bamboo. Lashings of bamboo. I didn't realise you could use an actual, prefabricated boat as the basis for your 'raft'. I'll be having a word with the scrutineers. What kind of show are they running here?

WE HAVE NO EVIDENCE TO SUGGEST THAT COCONUTS KILL MORE PEOPLE THAN SHARKS

2011-08-19T20:16:00.011+08:00

A good day for journalist is a bad day for someone else. Today was a bad day for a journalist.

Today i got news that three of ABC's finest were killed in a helicopter crash at Lake Eyre in central Australia. And news that an editor-in-chief i worked with in Phnom Penh is currently hunkered down in Kabul, Afghanistan, after an attack on the British Council. "It always looks worse from the outside." And in Misratah, our former editor of photography narrowly escaped with her life by untying her constraining ropes and jumping from one balcony to another after Libyan thugs took her hostage. "It's amazing the pretty colors a rifle butt, a fist, an army boot, and having your head smashed repeatedly into a concrete floor can produce. No camera left to take a proper picture though." But the cameraphone picture was horrifying enough.

Meanwhile, here in the Torres Strait, the tide came in this morning, and went out this afternoon. The only clear and present danger on Thursday Island is spraining a wrist falling out of a hammock, or being hit by a falling coconut whilst sipping a piña colada.

MUSHROOMS IN THE LOUNGE

2011-08-01T01:05:00.065+08:00

Sure, it wasn’t a mind-blowing idea for our first magazine cover, but then again, the hallucinogens weren’t that mind-blowing, either. But the mushrooms were certainly easy to come by, especially with a supplements editor wandering the office throwing bags to all and sundry. Now that's what i call "supplements". Not that the distribution of hallucinogenic mushrooms to news staff happened every day. Not at all. This was only usual on Thursdays. As a Monday to Friday daily, our partying schedule started on Thursday nights with beers at Cantina, and continued until around Wednesday the following week.

The mushrooms smelled like the nether regions of a Ukranian prostitute, only cheaper. And slightly more uplifting, leaving us in fits of laughter all night long. But you never can tell with mushrooms. I believe it was the systematic abuse of mushrooms that led our business writer to believe that it was a good idea to fly to Tehran, be beaten senseless by Iranian government forces for violating curfew during an election, and file copy about it. But each to their own. I was more focused on aesthetics. And it was while swimming in the pool at Fly Lounge on the funny black mushrooms that i came up with the idea for the magazine cover. With its glass walls, it was a simple matter for us to photograph each other floating in this tepid water, like creatures in Damien Hirst formaldehyde, before flopping down amongst the throw cushions in the lounge to drink mojitos and giggle hysterically.

After discovering this small human aquarium tucked away in a tiny but classy shopfront cocktail bar, i realised we could use it to produce some amazing underwater images. Because of its glass wall, no underwater camera was needed. All we needed was a beautiful young Khmer model, two studio flashes set up over the pool, and a photographer. Easy peasy. Plus a range of dresses that would float delicately underwater around the model. That was the idea, anyway, and that was to be the cover image for the first edition of our new lifestyle magazine, 28Days. A dreamlike underwater image of a model, with a pointer to a lively, well-written, informative feature on swimming pools in the Cambodian capital. Swimming pools in hotels, resorts, bars, and sports centres. The model on the cover would appear elegant, with delicate fabrics floating serenely around her. The image and story feature would combine fashion, sports, luxury accommodation, sensuality, and drinking, all in one fell swoop. Now that's what i call lifestyle.

Unfortunately, what actually transpired, after the hallucinogens wore off, was a shoot with a model who was terrified of water. Completely and utterly terrified. Not only was Molyvorn unable to swim, but she was seemingly unable to grasp the concept of holding her breath while her head was underwater. The water in the pool only came up to her waist, so all she really had to do was wade in, face the camera, bend her knees and go under. I had been so concerned with finding studio lighting and a cameraman that it never occurred to me this might be a problem. But here was Molyvorn, coming up, after a brief, submerged second or two, on the verge of tears, spluttering and gasping for air. She may well have been in tears: it was impossible to tell. Despite desperate mediations via a series of interpreters, soothing words, visual demonstrations and remonstrations, all our photographer was capturing was a series of images seemingly hell-bent on accurately recreating the terror of the waterboarding torture methods of the Khmer Rouge, only in evening dress.

Eventually our ever-patient and professional photographer, Vinh, managed to snag an image that recreated, to a degree, the dreamlike look i had envisaged, and we all went home.

However our valiant efforts to procure a cover image mattered little when our permanently deranged and sweat-laden Australian publisher, Neal, arrived later that week. Storming into the eighth floor boardroom fresh from the heart of the golden triangle, he was possessed by the redundant and impoverished idea that the first edition of our magazine should not pull focus on the subtle luxuries of the expatriate lifestyle, but, rather, regurgitate, like a whiskey drunk kneeling in a gutter lit by the garish rays of the morning sun, an outrageously melodramatic tabloid rendering of sex, drugs and rock and roll in Phnom Penh.

Sweating profusely, Neal began his manic spiel by pulling from his black leather briefcase an A3 sheet of paper and waving it about like a long-lost Biblical parchment. “Sex and drugs!” he shouted. As he held forth the illustration in triumph, an audible groan came from the editorial staff. The drawing, which looked like it had been knocked out in an aeroplane toilet, featured a rough sketch of a busty brunette holding a martini glass, under the heading "Sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll in the Pearl of Asia". And there, on the bottom, right-hand corner of the page, was a pile of what could only have been methamphetamine. A destructive quantity it was, too. As a design element, it formed a visual coda to a bacchanalian list of editorial contents. The 28Days magazine had rapidly degenerated into The 120 Days of Sodom, and the swirling underwater fashion photos were sunk.

Ultimately, and despite our best efforts to give the sordid theme a sophisticated sheen, this is what our front cover was to look like: a Phnom Penh bar girl seducing the dear reader with a counterfeit come-hither look over a martini glass filled with red cordial. Fortunately, after Neal's departure for Burma, the magazine improved. He hired an actual designer to work on the desk, thereby replacing the mediocre efforts of a clusterfuck of subeditors armed with varying degrees of InEptitude. But thosee first few issues were mangy dogs. And none more so than that bitch of a first issue.

†

As our sex columnist later said: You can't polish a turd. You can only sprinkle it with glitter. I hired our sex columnist, Lulu, on a whim, after seeing her in a bikini at a beach resort in Kampot. At the time it seemed a reasonable editorial decision. Her writing style was witty and erudite, had a deft knack of avoiding the sordid, and gave the magazine the kind of local spin and spark that we weren't quite getting from The Guardian's Charlie Brooker, with his Anglocentric, politicosurrealist rants and raves.

Before long, however, Lulu was failing to make deadlines, and my editor was demanding i ditch her and hire Ingrid, who was filing for a men's magazine in the Netherlands. I'd read Ingrid's stuff and didn't much like it. Her style was all sex on the washing machine and blowjobs. It was too "in your face" and would probably get us shut down. When i arrived as production editor, Neal had explained to me the three basic tenets of fulfilling the Ministry of Information requirements for publication:

All articles must be truthful
Articles must not criticise the royal family, either implicitly or explicitly
Publications must not contain graphic depictions or descriptions of sex.

But Ingrid’s columns clearly, freely and wantonly flouted at least one of these guidelines. And what if King Sihanouk was one to day read about his fictional consummation of the Queen on a washing machine on the spin cycle? I'm sure he wouldn't take that lying down. But meanwhile, Lulu was running out of topics. What can I write about this week? she wrote in a desperate plea for inspiration. Any ideas? I mulled this over and fired back an editorial missive: I want sex in the workplace, and I want it on my desk at nine o'clock in the morning.

You could write emails like that, back then.

Then, suddenly, prior to his abrupt departure to pursue a career in heroin, my editor-at-large had what he described as a brainwave, and what I secretly diagnosed as an embolism. He decided to hire both sex columnists, and pay our paltry freelance rates to whoever filed copy first. The effect was disastrous. Ingrid and Lulu knew each other, and neither was going to stand for the other pushing in on what each regarded as their territory. Having weaved his magic, the editor-at-large then vanished to the opium dens of Bangkok, leaving me to sort out what, after a few deafening phone calls, was already shaping up as a vicious catfight in the dog-eat-dog food world of magazine publishing.

What can one do? In an attempt to pour oil on the waters, i wrote an email to both columnists: There is only one way to settle this, and that is in an inflatable pool filled with jelly.

You could write emails like that, back then.

PHOTO: VINH DAO

ЗАМЕСИТИ И МАЗАТИ МАРГАРИНОМ

2011-07-10T07:43:00.045+08:00

Saint Mark's Church in Belgrade is, fittingly, a popular and incredibly beautiful church. The dome forms a heavenly canopy far overhead. On the earthly plane, the framed pictures of saints are covered with the lipsticked imprints of kisses. A sweet smell of incense permeates the cool interior.

My travelling companion, Mili X, hands me a candle. You can light candles for the living, and you can light candles for the dead, she says. It would seem, then, wholly inappropriate to light a candle for my son, because, as a teenage Zombie, he falls into neither category. So i genuflect before the ikons, kneel on this ancient stone, and light a candle for his dear departed mother. I close my eyes and pray before its flickering light. I pray she has found peace. I pray she has gone to a better place. I pray someday i may get my record collection back. I then light a candle for my son. Can't do any harm. Pascal's wager, and all that. Then, having fulfilled our religious observances for the next six decades, Mili and i rise and make our way back out of Saint Mark's. I make the sign of the cross (spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch) and we wander back to the Hotel Splendid via the back alleyways and rooftops of Belgrade.

Daylight. I pull the heavy curtains of our Splendid Hotel room aside, and gaze out across the rooftops of the houses of the Serbian parliament. Down on the street below, men with jackhammers are busily undermining the foundations of democracy. There will be no sleeping in today. I pour a few fingers of rum, polishing the nails with strawberry juice. I must brace myself for today's search for black-and-white film.

Out in the plaza, i find it is far easier to order ПОГАЧА and sit eating it with coffee than it is to find a shop that stocks rolls of film. Nobody wants old stuff like film here. Old stuff is communist stuff. Free enterprise is digital. After eating the cheesy corn bread, i wander the plaza regardless, waylaying bystanders with my retro Nikon (no, it's not a Kiev, Zenit or Lomo) in an attempt to find someone with a smattering of English who can point me in the direction of a film vendor. Eventually, a derelict wino borrows my pen, sketches out a map, and asks me for a cigarette. The map directs me to the sixth floor of a nearby office block.

The elevator is one of those contraptions where you need to be sure to keep your appendages completely to yourself. Although i suppose this is proper etiquette whilst inside any elevator. I open its double concertina doors onto a sixth-floor corridor. Part way along, a timber veneered door hangs open, beckoning film wasters with its single, lopsided, faded orange sign: "Agfa". Inside is a man in a leather jacket, black polo neck shirt, and black beret, smoking. He is sporting a black goatee, and has a surreptitious air about him. Clearly, the man is a Satanist.

Given Mili X and i are leaving the capital tomorrow, this is my last chance to stock up on the precious silver, even if i have to deal with the devil. I spy a few black and yellow boxes marked 'Ilford Pan 100'.

Pan 100? I've only ever seen this in 50, i say. Is this some kind of cheap Russian substitute? He shrugs, takes out a few rolls of the film, and places them on the grubby glass counter. He buts out his cigarette in a filter mountain and immediately lights another. He points at my Nikon and beckons. I hand it to him. He handles the rewind spool expertly, and, determining there is no film in the camera, pops the back open and quickly checks its shutter speeds and auto function. He nods. Dobro, he says. He snaps shut the back, points to the film identifier, where i shoved a tag off my last roll of Fuji Neopan. Pointing next at the Ilford 100, he gives the thumbs up, indicating that this film manufactured in some backstreet Gulag will stack up well against the fine-grained, dependable Japanese version. As it transpires, this is complete bullshit. Nonetheless i fork out a pile of dinars for half a dozen rolls, and in appreciation, the Satanist reaches under the counter and comes up with a roll marked with the unlikely name 'Gekko'. With a wave of his cigarette, he indicates this is a freebie. Back on the street, i load a roll and start shooting street scenes. Street scenes. I love street scenes.

When i first arrived in Belgrade, that is, when the JAT aeroplane landed at airport, the passengers broke into loud and heartfelt applause. I found this unnerving. I tend to take an airline pilot's ability to land a passenger jet aircraft somewhat for granted. I don't see it as something to be celebrated with astonishment, gratitude, and a standing encore. Especially when the seat belt sign is still on. But, here we are. Belgrade, however, is only a transit point. For we are on our way to that Hawaii of Eastern Europe, Montenegro. That, at least, is how it is advertised on the billboards. I'm looking forward to the pineapples. Pineapples. I love pineapples.

Twenty minutes past midnight, Sunday morning, and i am on a train to Montenegro, having missed the bus in the scrambled mess that passes for a bus station in Belgrade: a giant clusterfuck of cars, buses and people, all tooting, shouting, and blowing smoke. A bus full of passengers about to set off to a destination somewhere elsewhere in the Balkans is stationary, blasting its horn incessantly at an unmanned car blocking its path. Someone has simply parked a red Yugo right across the middle of the road and left it there, regardless of the available parking spaces dotted around it. Finally, the vehicle is lifted and manhandled out of the way by half a dozen burly Slavs.

After the bus trundles off, the inconsiderate Yugo driver appears, and nonchalantly parks his car in a marked bay. Mili X glares at him, calling him an idiotski under her breath as he stands idly chatting with waiting passengers. He then takes a big glob of gum out of his mouth and drops it on the ground in front of him. I've always wondered, while trying to pick gum off the soles of my Blundstones, what kind of idiotskis do that. Now i know.

When the late-running bus to Montenegro finally arrives, we discover it is not our bus. Our bus left an hour previously from a similarly named street just around the corner. So we hurry and harry a taxi driver across town to the train station, and squeeze onto the last train to Montenegro, and spend three and a half hours standing in a narrow corridor as it groans and wheezes. The ramshackle train does most of the groaning while chain-smokers do the rest. Eventually we bribe a train conductor and he finds us some seats. We fold them down and chase the elusive gremlin of sleep. The two female anglo backpackers beside us manage to somnambulate throughout the entire trip, including the breath-taking scenery, leading Mili X to believe they are in possession of powerful sleeping tablets. They looked and smelled to me like they hadn't had a decent night's sleep or a decent bath since departing the white cliffs of Dover. I down a few shots of rum and fall into a fitful sleep, dreaming of pineapples and Serbian women. I fucking love Serbian women.

The morning sun is bright, accentuating the contrast between this dry, mountainous green landscape and the sudden black tunnels from which it can take several minutes to emerge. Every now and then, when we burst into the blinding sun, i notice some of these chainsmoking people are staring at me. However, i resist the impulse to smile back at them in what might be construed as a friendly manner, as Serbs have a saying in common with the Russians: "He who smiles for no reason must be fucking crazy or stupid or both" and since i had no desire to appear any more idiotic that would came naturally on any given day, i adopt the same blank-to-grim-faced expression as everyone else on the train. Perhaps it's the hair. Before i left Belgrade i dyed my hair the kind of colour you would get if you poured gasoline on a case of tangerines and threw in a match.

A river meanders alongside as, and i watch as it rushes hurriedly over shallow stones, past a couple of fisherman, before winding on past a variety of half-finished houses with steeply-pitched roofs and market gardens and into the occasional town in which the houses stand in jumbled rows, one on top of the other, and disappear beyond the view from the train window as they ramble up the side of a black mountain.

We reach the old Austro-Hungarian fort town of Budva, Montenegro, after a horrifying taxi ride from Bar with a driver from the Evel Knievel School of Taxi Instruction. For this driver, the best possible place for a taxi, if not actually in mid-air flying off the edge of a cliff, is at high speed on the wrong side of a winding, narrow, mountainous road. As we cross a narrow bridge over a ravine, i see where the metal railing has been forced back in a gaping hole. Quaint plastic posies and a delightful Orthodox cross lay next to it. This spectacle energises our taxi driver, who begins tailgating a black, late-model Mercedes Benz with dark, tinted windows, Albanian plates and three antennae - id est, quite obviously a carload of gangsters - before overtaking them with his horn blaring and speeding on through completely unlit tunnels towards oncoming traffic with his headlights off. After communing at length with Jesus, for the most part silently, we arrive in Budva in the unfortunate position of having only dinars and dollars in a province powered by euros on a Sunday morning with fifty kilograms of luggage and nowhere to stay after an allnighter on a train from hell.

We buy two bottles of water and struggle up the hill to look for a room, and very difficult it is, too, carrying bottles which, as you can see from the label, contain over a hundred litres and are larger than a small child. We find a room run by an old lady who is very nice, although it would also be nice if we had hot water and toilet paper, but one can't expect miracles.

AWAKE IN DJALI'S DREAMING

2011-05-07T15:59:00.018+08:00

Arnhem Land is a peculiar feeling. I'm all at sixes and sevens. And while i may not know what that means, i know how it feels. The rules no longer apply. Meanings are buried. People speak in ancient languages. A stranger in my own country. Because this is not my country. This is Yolngu country.

The troopy bucks like a rodeo brumby as we bounce through the pandanus scrub, all soft sand and corrugations. In the bare metal cargo hold i cling to whatever handholds i can find as the esky and spare tyre leap about like cane toads in a campfire. Up front, the two girls chatter excitedly as our Yolngu guide, Djali, tells tall tales from this remote part of the East Arnhem Land peninsula. His homeland; our destination. A beach where waves foam across an invisible line between the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

On the steel mesh cargo grille behind Djali's head, two hand-painted woomeras swing back and forth, two brightly coloured pendulums bearing strange designs from before time. Djali steers the tojo effortlessly through the scrub and sand. He is headed for his homelands at Bawaka. In places, the track is completely washed away, and is more of a creek bed than a road. Djali nurses the Tojo in low-range over the deep red ruts. Fish in tree, he says, pointing into the terrain of low scrub and eucalypts to our left. Each tree is host to its own termite nest, those thin, jagged apartments for ants. These so-called "magnetic anthills" are unlike the bulbous red anthills further south. Their grey, wall-like constructions are built on a north-south axis, to escape the sun's heat. In the afternoon, the ants simply shift their activities to the shaded eastern wing of their mud skyscraper.

You see? Djali says, stopping the landcruiser, its diesel powerplant rattling away in neutral. I look around. I don't see. 'Fish in tree' is just another surreal, incomprehensible excerpt from his millenia-old culture. Like the explanation for the strange cross-hatchings and markings on those tall, hollowed and hallowed totem poles at the Buku-Larnggay art centre. Then it snaps into focus. A fire has run through this country. On the iron-hard bark of a eucalypt is a burnt black charcoal simulacrum of a fish, tailfin down, mouth gaping at the sky. Djali stares at it a good while. Fish in tree, he says again, before shaking his head and jolting the tojo into gear.

The beach, as we crest a dune and slide slowly down upon it, is breathtaking. The water is pale emerald green. Smooth white sands dotted with coconut palms curve away to a dark green smudge of mangroves in the distance. In shallow, crystal clear waters, oysters cling to granite rocks at the high-tide mark. On the far side of the bay, low hills bask silently under a molten gold sun in a clear blue sky that stretches forever upward into the vacuum. We are in space, and lots of it. Dropped here from low orbit. Djali powers the lunar rover down the beach, and the finely packed sand is the smoothest ride since we left the blacktop way back past the turnoff to Yirrkala.

Part of the trip from Nhulunbuy to Bawaka is down a dirt "highway" in inverted commas: the Central Arnhem Highway. A gravel road that is closed half the year for the Wet. It winds through hundreds of kilometres of pure outback goodness. About 500km down the highway is the only fuel stop, the Mainoru Outback Store. Then the road finally meets the Stuart Highway after about 700km, just 40km south of Katherine.

But here and now there is no road, no roadhouse: only beach. As we near the mangroves, Djali slows and leans out his window, scrutinising the shoreline. Something catches his eye and he stops. We climb out, stretching cramped limbs and battered frames. Leave the camera in the car, he says. Women's dreaming, over there. He juts his grey-bearded chin at the dunes as he draws out a long, steel-barbed wooden spear from a bundle woven into the aluminium roof-rack. He takes a few paces back along the cruiser's tracks, and calls us over, pointing his spear at some markings in the sand. The clearly defined impressions sashay their way beneath the Tojo's tracks, through the saltbush and into the creek. I know it before he he says it. Croc. Big one, too, he says, swinging the point of the spear in a casual arc between the crocodile's footprints. Then he clambers out among the mangroves, searching.

Three mudcrabs later, we are winding along the sand crescent once more. Djali points to rocks in the distance. Only little way now to Djali's home. Land on other side my father's country. See the boat there? That my nephew, fishing. I can't see anything, not a speck, but i don't doubt for a second the boat is there. The dunes on our left have some cultural significance. Two sisters. Long time ago. Create all this here. Djali tells us only part of the story.

Myths from different mobs have similarities that strike me as vaguely and naively preposterous. People and animals turning into one another. Good magic, bad magic. Human foibles and frailties. The actions of all combining with the power of myth to create this landmark, river, waterhole, rock formation or that constellation of stars. The stories convoluted and deeply felt. But they find no resonance in me. This is not my country. This is not my dreaming. I can't pretend any deep understanding of Aboriginal culture and myth. That takes a certain kind of bored urban misfit, the one who ponces about the globe, dreadlocked, rubber sandalled, and full of shallow bonhomie, adopting Indigenous cultural beliefs in the kind of ad hoc fashion that makes bower birds look like they've taken monastic orders.

The shack at Bawaka is the epitome of beach castaway aesthetic, created as if for a getaway brochure. Decorated with fishing floats, driftwood and shells, the rough-hewn chairs and sawn log tables are right the beach, under the coconut palms. But despite its relaxing ambience, it is clear that this homeland is hard won. The native title battles have been fought, and Djali makes it clear that those who want to visit must have permission, and they must respect cultural traditions. The landscape is harsh, but bountiful enough, at least to those who know from those who knew before them. The Yolngu are familiar with the unfamiliar. Strangers have been coming to these shores for aeons, to take, to trade, to fight, to beg. The Macassans, who left the seeds for the tamarind trees all along the north coast, sailed here for the fish and the beche le mer, trading for women, and taking Yolngu crew with them back to the straits of malacca. The Japanese, here for the pearl shell. The missionaries, here for the heathen souls. Then the white man came in force, with government, police, handcuffs, rifles, poisons and prisons. Here to declare dominion, driving the Asians and their centuries-old trade back to their neighbouring shores. In place of the seafarers' wares they brought flour, tea, sugar, tobacco, alcohol and disease. In exchange for these hollow commodities, they took the land, the sea, the souls of the Yolngu.

For a while, at least.

Djali starts a fire on the beach, and i see he has gathered some leaves and seeds along the way. He lays these upon the fire, where they smoulder and smoke. Picking them up, he comes at us and pats each of us on the chest, three, four times, while speaking quickly in Yolngu Matha. A cleansing. The scent of the smoke is strong yet subtle. Bringing memories of bushfires, hot summers growing up in the northern suburbs of Perth, the burnoffs that followed the clearing of land for new parks and homes.

Now, no bad spirits, Djali says, and smiles. He lays the green leaves back on the hot coals, and throws the mud crabs on top. As they cook, he tells us about the time Olympic gold medallist Cathy Freeman visited his home in Bawaka. She named my crocodile, Djali says with pride. He came up on the beach to eat some leftover turtle. I told Cathy how fast people run when they see him. How he makes them run faster than they ever run before. So she called him 'Nike'.

Djali pulls the hot mud crabs from the fire, and throws them in front of us. The girls have brought fresh bread and salad. We crack open the shells and claws of the crab. I watch as Djali tears at the sweet white flesh of his crab with his teeth and fingers. He nods, with a chin and beard covered with juice, at a crab lying on the sawn plank before me.

LIFE PRESERVER

2011-04-22T20:52:00.051+08:00

Back in Perth. The salt water seeps into my pores and dries slowly on my skin. Crusty. I feel crusty. But i can feel the cleansing catharsis of the Indian Ocean.

The sea strips away layers of tropical detritus and fever, its salty balsam slowly healing invisible scars. Each morning i rise early and submit, monk-like, to this ascetic baptism. My early morning swims grow longer, wider, deeper. Across limestone reefs i glimpse an occasional stingray, a school of herring, on my un-Australian Crawl, before i return to terra firma. The waves wash me up onto the hot summer beaches of my youth. This is my spiritual home – stifling and suburban though it is. Terror firmer.

Every morning after the swim i'm up the stairwell of the apartments at a run, in a desperate fervour to feel well again, up all eight storeys to Safari Bob's eclectic hideaway, with its chartreuse pile carpet, its cacophony of collectible cameras, guitars, books, movies, drinking paraphernalia, and the white leather sofa that is my current abode. I lug my old Mac and prehistoric Kodak film scanner up the lift of the 'Manhattan Apartments', along with rolls of film developed in my mum's bathroom, and sit and scan the afternoons away, reliving the horror, the horror, megapixel by megapixel, of the sad reality that is Kampuchea.

The coarse white sand, the drying salt on my skin grounds me. The drug-induced haze and topsy-turvy jungle fever is lifting. It is only when Mz Mayhem returns from the real Manhattan – barely a week after my own dramatic splashdown – that I realise how close i came to never seeing my triumphant titanium muse again. Soon, my publisher will be incarcerated in Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison and my Cambodian girlfriend will be arrested and locked up in Prey Sar. Different times, different places, different reasons – all same same but different. The sand between my toes feels like salvation.

Meanwhile, Mayhem has not been idle. As a creative genius, she is not without her fans.

While I was in post-apocalyptic Phnom Penh, she was busy in Paris, directing a music clip for a song by Radiohead's Thom Yorke, on a zero-dollar budget. On its debut on the Rolling Stone website, her work was described as "a David Lynch-like odyssey". Which, from her occasional fervent, garbled, intercontinental telephone conversations, seemed to pretty much describe her Parisian adventures as well. While i was sweating it out one long night at the newspaper, Mayhem was perched nervously on the ledge of a shared apartment in Paris, worried there might be some funny business going down with her flatmate, a female clown. The clown spoke not one word of English, and Mayhem's only word of French – voila! – was not really applicable to the hair-raising situation. You can peer into Mayhem's subconsious, subterranean adventure here.

I come back from the beach to Safari Bob's version of Manhattan one morning and find he has taken up with Japanese photographer Emiko Monobe. Suddenly i'm feeling sheepish and in the way, an oafish convalescent beached on this white leather sofa like a Southern Right gone wrong. Then my sister telephones. She's on a flying visit from London; an occurrence rare as a comet. "You want to come to Laos and Angkor Wat next Wednesday? I need a tour guide." She's paying. I don't mention the fact that the only thing i know about Angkor is that it's not a very good beer. I just pack a bag and i'm gone.

The asiatic reprise is brief and sweet – the crumbling temples of Angkor, the beautiful languor of Laos – then my sister is off back to London and i'm broke and on a night bus back to Phnom Penh. I shoot the Life on the Line series with Ada, and come perilously close to being murdered, once again, this time by motorcycle thieves, before the lines blur and i barely make the flight home, clinging to the back of a fearless moto driver as he speeds, slides and scrapes his way through traffic along Russian Boulevard to get me to the airport after boarding has closed. They let me on, but only at a run.

I land on my feet when i return. I land on my feet so hard i shatter a heel bone. Stangely enough, i have no recollection of how this happened, although i do remember eating some strange sugar cubes from Sideways Dave, drinking far too much alcohol at Ezra Pound, and playing guitar on one leg at Lorenna's house while Rui You Kong recited urban poetry. It was at that point i should have taken heed of Lorenzo's advice and gone in the ambulance. I remember limping back to Mayhem's Hotel D'Pravity early that morning, and two days later, when the x-rays confirmed the fractured calcaneal, and they bound my leg in plaster, there was nothing for it but to stretch out on whatever sofa came to hand and help Nurse Mayhem script her feature film in exchange for food and board. Of course my narrative style was not of a standard high enough to warrant sponge baths.

Mornings we feast on eggs florentine, bacon, and fresh juice, before brainstorming scenes and characters in the screenplay. We fill the script with such energy and momentum it will film itself.

Occasionally we take the compulsory trip to the job centre, to convince them we are indeed on track to finding gainful employment, and they needn't worry their busy little bureaucratic heads helping us to write resumés or trawl through employment columns for factory or hospitality work. Thanks all the same.

I notice the employment section in the newspaper doesn't have a section marked 'Meaningful', and toss it aside. And what the hell is a 'Hospitality Industry', anyway? Can someone please explain how is it 'hospitality' if you have to pay for it?

We save our money, and put in applications for our British passports, on the grounds that our respective progenitors were both born in England. And despite the fact that my passport photo makes me look like my face caught fire and i tried to put it out with a hammer, both applications are approved. It is a miracle. Break out the champagne. We have our little red books – our passports to Europa, and film utopia – and things are looking up.

Mz Mayhem is heading back to New York to find investors for the film, and i'm off to East Arnhem Land to work as launch editor on a newspaper on the Arafura Sea. But first we must make a pilgrimage south to Balingup, to the Buddhist retreat, to get our respective minds in order. And after a week at the Origins Centre with the muse, i do indeed feel my batteries have been recharged, the corrosive salts have washed away, and the coast is clear. We go to the local hotel to toast our future. Mayhem says au revoir (her French is improving) and i board the bus to take the ride into the future.

STRUNG OUT IN HEAVENS HIGH

2011-02-23T17:54:00.031+08:00

I have to go to work on Sunday, Juanita says, staring at her red wine. Why don't you fly to Merapi? What's left of the village there is covered in ash. I saw some photos. It looks really cool. Everything is grey.

We are on a rooftop. It's Christmas. The sounds of the mosque drift across to where we sit. A bulbous red sun does a slow-motion impression of a lava lamp on the scraper-strewn skyline. I take up a piece of brie. What do you want for Christmas, i'd asked her. Wine. Wine and cheese. I pop the molten cheese in my mouth and take a swig of the heavy Barossa red. Good idea, i say.

We can get you some tickets tomorrow, Juanita says. But tonight we're going to party.

Flying out to an active volcano is a sure cure for a hangover. Especially when you are flying Lion Air. Because by the time the plane arrives - usually two to three hours late - you've been transmogrified by the airport lounge into a state where you are no longer hungover, but flungover. As readers of The Nerve can attest, flungover is like hungover, only further over. It is fractured kind of suspended animation fuelled by coffee, Valium, unidentified frying objects, airport music, pseudoamphetamines and Extra Joss. I crawl onto the plane, buckle up, and hold on. But the plane still spins out of control. I pop another little blue pill.

If you need to refill the vest, blow into the mouthpieces. Use the whistle and light to attract attention.

Looking out the window, i see the coastline is beneath us, bleached and washed by some sea or other. Wow, tropical seas. I thought i was flying to Central Java. I didn't expect to see surf. I find myself staring, zombie-like, at the Lion stewardess. A Lioness. I smile and give her a friendly little wink. I'd like to blow into your mouthpiece, i think. She blushes and hurries to the back of the aeroplane. You still got it, i say, nodding to myself. You don't need a light or a whistle. You are a shining beacon of man-love.

The drugs have worn off by the time we land, and the airport is filled with people. I am completely disoriented. I notice for the first time that Indonesia is filled with Indonesians. I ask one for directions. He speaks no English, so i draw a mountain in the air, make exploding noises and point out at the horizon in a few different directions. I raise my eyebrows and wait expectantly. No directions are forthcoming. Not a glimmer. He walks away. I have not the faintest idea which way the volcano is, where Yogjakarta is or even how far it is from the airport. Bah. Maps are for vassals. I shoulder my pack and head out past the taxi rank towards what appears to be a railway line. It's only when you lose yourself that you truly find yourself. It's only after we've lost everything that we are free to do anything. It's only after walking about six metres that i decide to hire a taxi.

Merapi erupted in spectacular fashion on the afternoon of October 25, 2010, the lava frying villages and vapourising people in its wake, leaving a death toll in excess of 350. Merapi - literally 'fire mountain' in Javanese - has been doing this sort of thing on a pretty regular basis since the mid-1500s. An earthquake in 2006 in the region killed around 5,000 people. As volcanoes go, Merapi takes itself pretty seriously.

Hermann speaks a bit of English, and has hugely dilated pupils set in vivid blue eyes. But by now i am used to this congress of wacked out Indonesian taxi drivers, and am not in the least disconcerted. Because Hermann claims to know where Merapi is, and more importantly, has a roomy new car with air conditioning and electrified windows. So i strike a deal. $30 for the car, and Hermann will act as my guide and interpreter for the day. He agrees readily and we quickly sideswipe the city, tracking deep into rural Java. Villagers tend cows and rice paddies. Coconut trees do a sterling job of looking picturesque. Ominous mountains loom in the distance. As Hermann points out how the family and neighbours come together to build a house, i realise he is wearing coloured contacts.

Crossing a narrow bridge, a sudden black river of frozen rock appears below us, heavily striated and ruptured, coarse and brutal. Hermann says something in Javanese. It's lava. We make our way on through innumerable detours, UN shelters, crowded roads and scorched earth. On the way up to the volcano i see the wiry, skeletal remains of torched bicycles and motos on the roadside, with scarecrow-like figurines of riders, clumsily constructed from stuffed trousers and shirts, perched atop them, as painted arrows and signs scribble our way onwards and upwards. We are stopped once more by village bandits and i shell out a few more rupiah to see our way clear. But it is only when Hermann finally squeezes the aircon on wheels into a mass of cars amongst what once was a village, and i make my way up towards the lava fields, past hastily assembled food and drink stalls, that i realise what all this is about. It's Sunday, and i am standing in the middle of one big tourist attraction.

Locals line the massive ruptures in the earth, gawping and gaping, sipping cool drinks and munching fried snacks, smiling as they have their photographs taken before this destroyed building and that decimated home. I realise i am witnessing disaster tourism. No, i'm not witnessing it; i'm part of it. I feel a red blush of shame as i take up my Nikon.

I hand some rupiah, about ten dollars, to an old woman shovelling lava slowly from her ruined home. And again to an old man standing, wearied but quietly unbroken, outside what is left of his house. The Indonesian tourists find me a curiosity, and stop to have photographs taken with me. I'm wearing my press tags in a vain attempt to appear professional rather than ghoulish as i prowl amongst the ashes. A pointless gesture amongst this macabre fun-fair. I find myself standing diffidently with two teenage girls who want a photograph taken with me. We stand, smiling amongst this grey ruin, as their mother tries to find the shutter on the mobile phone.

BREEDING LIKE RABBITS

2011-02-07T07:12:00.002+08:00

Rabbit Flat, in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory, made international headlines in the 1970s when word got out that its population had doubled overnight.

Twins had been born to its only residents, the roadhouse proprietors.

I WILL SURVIVE

2011-01-22T23:37:00.053+08:00

At some point during the day we cross the border. I'm not sure where, or when, cramped as i am into the back of this tiny Yugo for the long drive back from Dubrovnik. It seems this car has only two shock absorbers - and we are both stuck in the back, sweating like pigs. Lili raises her head from time to time to take in the scenery, while i lie slumped against a non-functional window winder. Goran, at the wheel of this Yugoslavian version of hell on wheels, is attempting to set a land speed record for the slowest ever circumnavigation of Kotor lake. I feel every bump, every nuance of his hand on the wheel.

I muse on the disappointment that was Dubrovnik. Cruiseships of tourists forensically traipsing its stony streets; a brute force of clueless investigators. The Croatian restaurant prices rising in direct proportion to the slowness and rudeness of their waiters. The residents mimicking the drabness and dullness of their visitors, blending with the tourists in shapeless t-shirts, thongs, long shorts - and the men are not dressed much better - with their backpacks, digital cameras, and Amex cards. Banal. That's the word for it: banal. Dubrovnik: a lifeless, decrepit stone monument to the banal turista.

Still, the sea was a nice colour.

Driving back, we pass two tall, tanned girls walking side-by-side along the road. I pull a muscle in my neck as i turn to watch them slowly diminish in the rear window, in their high heeled shoes, stylised make-up, long raven hair, tiger-print bikinis, and legs.
Montenegro, da? i ask Goran, our Yugo pilot.
Da.
I thought so.

We part company with Goran and Valentina at the waterfront with meaningless platitudes and promises to catch up soon. What i really need is a drink and a lie down. A good strong drink and a good lie down. And some shade. And a chair. My needs and wants are minimal. We weave our way along the boulevard towards our street. Everywhere, the tall Montenegran women sway their bikini-and-shawl-clad hips, some with their hair piled high, others wearing it long over hooped earrings and smooth, spotless olive skin. God, i need a drink. Walking up to our room overlooking the bay, we watch as two muscular guys come barrelling down the winding mountain road on Yamaha road bikes, racing each other at speed, leaning into corners with about six degrees of separation between them and the hot bitumen. No shirts, no shoes, no helmets. They pass with a sound like hornets slung from a slingshot.

Lili and i continue up the winding, near-vertical climb as one of these maniacs roars back up the hill, the other probably dead in a ditch somewhere. We pass a gym, its doors open wide onto the pavement, and as i glance in i see what looks like a heavyweight fighter belting the shit out of a big black punching bag. Probably practising for the next turista who happens to look sideways at his girlfriend. We climb higher up the side of the mountain, towards our room at the villa. Bright white houses fan out behind us around the bay, asleep in the afternoon sun, catching a slight breeze under the hot orange din of the terracotta tiles. The pool of the Hotel Avala lies still beneath us, the sweeping resort almost devoid of guests, its vaulting lobbies and promenades having witnessed more sublime times.

The old lady greets us on the terrace, and brings out a tray of ice, water and Coca Cola. We slump in the shade, absorbing the curves of the white wooden lilos. I need alcohol. I'm too tired and parched to talk, so i signal to Lili with a simultaneous raising of wrist and eyebrow. Lili translates. The old lady with the white hair nods, disappearing back into the villa, and returning with a bottle of something with a label that looks ... ah ... local. I pour a splash over ice, and add some coke.

I met Lili at university, after returning as an allegedly 'mature' age student to study philosophy and photography. And women. Lili was one of the best, forever changing my disinterested, anarchic, and vaguely nihilistic attitude to politics. I met her, ironically, in a Practical Ethics class. On semester break i stole her from her dull-witted uni-student boyfriend, packed her into a borrowed car, and drove her up the coast, camping all the way from Cervantes to Broome, where we ran out of money and lived on one of the northern creeks, cooking up freshly caught fish from the mangroves with a few vegetables. Lili had been dragged to Australia from a beautiful, tourist spa town in central Serbia by her mother, kicking and screaming, at the tender age of 17, knowing barely a phrase of English. She had been suffering post-Terra Australis depression ever since. Lili had barely been out of the city, so our regular forays into the bush introduced her to this weathered and beautifully brutal red land. It altered her perception. As did the drugs. But don't get me started on drugs.

It seems we are drinking šljivovica. I can feel it putting hair on my chest with each sip. I twirl my moustache. Judging by the label, my testicles are about to swell up like two huge blue plums. I raise my glass in honour of my beautiful sidekick, Lili. It doesn't count unless you look each other in the eye. She taught me that.

На здоровье!

After knocking back a few, i realise Lili is deep in conversation with the old lady with the white hair. Later, in our room, she tells me what they were talking about. It seems the "old lady" is younger than me. Her husband was the same age as me when he died. 42. Sitting in a café in Belgrade, sipping coffee with his wife, talking about nothing in particular when a NATO bomb struck the street.

His wife's hair went white overnight.

There is a disco here which goes all night long. It's loud. I can't sleep. Ah well, if you can't beat them (and you can't - they have security) join them. I suggest to Lili that we should venture out and join the eurotrash now dancing to the strains of a house version of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive". The clubs are like an endless screening of Fashion TV, the fabulous women in their perpetual high heels clad in little more than underwear and high heels, parading up and down anything that looks like a catwalk, the men muscular, shirtless, and ridiculously tall.

I'm too drunk, Lili says.
Well let's fuck, i suggest, remembering the time in the hotel in the middle of Belgrade last week, when she was leaning half-undressed on the windowsill, looking out the window onto the street ...
I'm too drunk, Lili says.
So how about you slip into something more comfortable, like a coma, i suggest, in what passes as foreplay when you've drunk half a bottle of šljivovica. I take a swig from the bottle secreted by the bedside, my testicles swollen like plums.

In the morning, i hire a scooter and we shake off our hangovers as we breeze down the coast to Sveti Stefan. The views are spectacular. I pull over and we soak it up, the narrow causeway stretching out to the sheer walls of the island citadel, perched dramatically on the outrageous cyan of the Adriatic. We head down to a beachside bar to swim and lie under an umbrella on a lezalika. As i take off again along the winding mountain roads, and Lili begins belting me about the head. I round a blind curve and come face-to-face with an oncoming truck, and i realise she is trying to gently remind me that we are not in Australia and i really should be on the other side of the road.

When i signed the scooter hire contract, i noticed it did at least acknowledge the fact that an accident was inevitable if you rode the scooter long enough:

"Mini Moto does not contribute to the insurancy of a person who rents the vehicle or the third person in case of the eventual accident." Hmm.

When we first rode out this morning, were immediately overtaken by the maniac on the Yamaha R1 we'd seen tearing up the mountain yesterday. Last i saw of him, he was pulling a wheelstand down a crowded main street, between pedestrians, cars, and market stalls. At least when Valentino Rossi races, they are all going in the same direction.

Of course no-one here wears a motorcycle helmet. And who are we to break this centuries-old Balkan tradition?

On the way back into Budva, we miss the turnoff and are stuck on the main road - steep, busy, with nowhere to stop and turn around - so we just keep going, up the winding mountain road, before plunging into a dark tunnel where i can't find the headlamp switch and we ride on screaming at oncoming headlights on both sides of the road until we emerge on the far side of the mountain to a brightly stunning, sheer view down a beautiful beach about a kilometre below.

We swim, we explore, we ride. We drink like loons. At the end of the day we find ourselves on a hillside at Podmaine Monastery, taking photographs and talking to a mad Serb who wants to drive us around his village in his Mercedes and treat us to a pig on a spit. Thanks, champ, but no thanks. We go inside and i light a candle for Alexei's mother. I am deep in contemplation when a rather striking-looking nun arrives, and ushers us into the kitchen, where we sit on a wooden bench at a wooden table with the monks as she serves soup, bread, and shopska salad.

Montenegro. Even the fucking nuns are sexy.

IT HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE I HAVE USED A TYPEWRITER

2011-01-19T19:27:00.000+08:00

JUANITA'S WILD ANIMAL PASSION

2011-01-10T22:43:00.021+08:00

I'm straining the coffee grinds through my teeth, the ceiling fans whirring like upside down helicopters, when the Indo man enters the cafe and greets me like an old friend. Oh dear. He must be selling something. At this juncture i might consider life insurance, but not much else. I see is carrying an ornately carved wooden tube, about thirty inches long, which he raises to his lips. Oh no. Ethnic music.

He blows suddenly and hard, and a six-inch steel dart appears with a thwack in the wooden column next to my head. He smiles, and holds out the instrument for my inspection. I shake my head. Undeterred, he demonstrates how the weapon comes apart, folding down into a short tube. '100,000 rupiah. From Kalimantan.'

It's Christmas in two days. I consider briefly whether any friends or family members could benefit from a gift-wrapped set of blowpipe and poison darts.
'No, thank you. Far too impractical,' i say as he fits the darts one by one inside the tube. 'I prefer the Smith and Wesson.'
He shows me the wrapped product in a short tube of newspaper and cardboard.
'Very good, very small,' he says. 'Only 100,000. from Kalimantan.'
I shake my head and return to my typing. 'Sorry. I'm working. Terima kasih.'
I wave him away. I'm loving this little folding keyboard. Somehow the phone knows when i open up the keyboard, and lets me type little stories. Blue teeth. I don't pretend to understand them, but, like women, you don't have to understand them to love them. And soon i will publish my first blog post created directly from this freshly blown technological bubble. I'm back in the zone. Back in the zone, man. I strain more coffee grinds and keep typing.

The taxi driver has now developed a nervous twitch, a kind of car-based St Vitus Dance. We have, by some miracle, suddenly found ourselves on a stretch of open road in the centre of Jakarta. But the driver has become catatonic, and is nervously scratching while veering across the road, lurching about in a series of sudden stops and starts. Clearly his meth-addled brain is having difficulty processing the idea of a traffic free -

'For you sir, 90,000 rupiah.' The bubble bursts as though pricked by a dart.
The smiling Indonesian again proffers his newspaper-wrapped bundle of Christmas joy.
'Please, I am writing,' i beg. 'Terima kasih.'

After driving at a lunatic pace between lanes on Jakarta's main roads - barrelling along the breakdown lane, passing cars and trucks on the inside, pushing his way though traffic with millimetres to spare - after driving at impossibly high speeds through dense traffic, twisting across lanes to avoid looming police traps, he is now on a stretch of open road, and appears not to know what to do. Now he scratches wildly at his feet, which he has lifted up (thankfully one at a time) to rest on the steering wheel. Now he is scratching wildly at his back. We have come to a complete halt on a roundabout in Jakarta Plaza. Cars make their way around us like a creek around a fallen tree before he suddenly breaks out of his torpor and is whirled away into the stream of traffic, cutting off and almost sideswiping a driver in a black 4WD.

'Please sir, you buy now?'
I sigh. 'Mate, even if i wanted a portable pygmy blowpipe, which i don't, it would never pass through customs. And if i really wanted to kill someone, which i don't, i'd use a gun, not some souvenir from the wilds of Borneo.'
'No sir, customs no problem. You can take. I promise. If you no can take, you come back and kill me.' He thrusts his chest forward as a potential target. Hmm. This is one of the more bizarre lifetime guarantees i've come across.
'How about i save us both some time and kill you now?' i suggest.

I cast a sidelong glance at the taksi driver. His red eyes are narrowed to slits. Beads of sweat form on his brow and his shirt is soaked, despite the arctic blast of the aircon. He is clearly the throes of some Malaccan drug overdose. Perhaps they have cut his meth with cyanide.
'You OK?' i ask. Not that i particularly care - but i do want to find a hotel sometime before midnight. Everything is taking far too long. Late connecting flights, and now all this traffic. Who would have thought they'd be celebrating Christmas on the roads of Indonesia? 'We arrive Jalan Jaksa soon, yes?'
He has slipped back into his toe-scratching reverie. In answer to my question, he selects another tune on his dumb smartphone. Once the volume is turned up full, he slides the shiny device into a slot on the dashboard, where it blares out a harrowing, distorted whine.
'Mariah Carey!' he shouts.
I press my eyes into my hands.

The man touting the blowgun has finally relented, and is now simply sitting at my table, smiling. I'm waiting for Juanita, former lifestyle editor of the Phnom Penh Post. She is threatening to take me to Jakarta's wildlife market. She wants to adopt a slow loris, and needs me to help her choose one. I'm not sure i am ready for this level of commitment. My son's girlfriend has just had a baby boy, and this is as close to caring for a small simian creature as i care to get.

'Isn't this illegal?' i ask her over the phone from my room on Jalan Jaksa.
'Yes and no,' she says. 'Everything is illegal; everything is permitted. But I think I can give a lazy loris a better life than it would have otherwise.' She pauses. 'But then, buying these animals just encourages the trade.'
'Oh dear. It sounds like human trafficking. Why don't you just get yourself a slave? A slave would at least be useful. What does a lazy loris do, anyway?'
'Nothing. They do nothing. And when they move, which is hardly ever, they move very, very slowly.'
I've had experiences like that. They must subsist on a steady diet of magic mushrooms. That would explain why they have eyes like saucers and can barely move.
'So what happened to Billy?' i ask, in reference to the pet crocodile she had in Bali.
'Billy and i no longer talk. He was a little shit.'
'And your pet rabbit?'
'The rabbit died. I don't know why.'
'I'm not convinced your apartment is a safe haven for wildlife, Juanita. Can't we just rescue the loris from the market and return it to the wild?'
'We'd have to fly to Sumatra. And besides, the monkey dentist removes his teeth so he can't bite, so i don't think he would survive. It's a jungle out there.'
My curiosity getting the better of me, I arrange to meet Juanita and go with her to the illegal wildlife market. Given the layers of satire and irony in which Juanita's existence is swaddled, i have my doubts that she actually wants to adopt a loris. The whole escapade is probably a ploy to pursue some investigative journalism on the illegal wildlife trade in Indonesia. You never know with Juanita.

The pet markets are, on the surface, what you would expect - full of the usual innocuous, domesticated animals. Thousands of caged birds piled one upon the other, their tiny bamboo apartments heading ever upward as though in a frustrated attempt to return to their occupants to the sky. We chance upon some glass boxes of tiny hamsters, and Juanita scratches one awake. Apparently he is 'too cute', although the more probable reason for her not pocketing him and taking him home is the frosty reception her prior rabbit got from the management of her ultra-modern serviced apartment. We press on through the menagerie. Kittens, guinea pigs, carpet snakes, geckos, and all manner of birds, from racing pigeons to an astonishingly large black cock (oops, did i say that out loud?)

Juanita has elected to come with a guide, who asks around, enquiring as to the availability of a lazy loris, and immediately finds a willing seller. We set out across the market, following our agent as he gestures us on, winding through the seemingly endless production line of cages and caged animals. We follow our man and the mystery seller through the market before coming to the gate to his apartment.

The wildlife merchant slides the steel bolt of the gate open, and we sidle up the dank concrete stairs into an airless concrete room. Our agent speaks rapidly to him in language and he nods, yes, yes, before disappearing around a concrete wall at one end of the room, into what appears to be a toilet. Juanita looks at me and raises an eyebrow. Almost immediately the wildlife merchant reappears, carrying a steel mesh cage harbouring a loris, or cus cus, which he sets of the floor in front of us. The small furry creature - ridiculously cute and sad looking with its enormous, black ringed eyes - is curled in abject fear on the floor of its cage, head down, looking up at us piteously. We stare at the lazy loris purveyor accusingly, and, believing the animal is not up to our expectations, he shrugs his shoulders, returns behind the concrete wall and comes back with another two cages containing a pair of slightly less traumatised-looking creatures. He says something in Indonesian. 'From Sumatra,' explains our guide.

Juanita takes a fancy to one of them and points, asking how much. The loris purveyor indulges in a deep and extended conversation with our guide.

'One million rupiah,' he says in translation, 'though I think you can get it for less. Maybe 300,000.'
'What do they eat?' asks Juanita. 'Worms?'
The guide patiently explains how unlikely it would be that a tree-dwelling marsupial would eat worms.

No wonder her rabbit died, I'm thinking. She was probably feeding it octopus.

We take several photographs of the caged animals, to the point where the owner becomes impatient and suspicious. We have not bothered to make an offer on any of his animals, and seem to be treating his apartment as a private zoo. I mention this to Juanita.
'Who cares,' she says, 'The guy is an arsehole. What kind of person keeps wild animals in cages in his toilet?'

LIFE ON THE LINE

2010-10-31T16:42:00.048+08:00

It's my last two days in Phnom Penh. I'm holed up at the Superstar with Ada and a thousand dollars in cash.

Things have gotten messy. Lea tried to kill me again yesterday. First with a knife, then with a brick. I'd told her she couldn't stay at my apartment any longer. I had reasons. Good reasons. But not good enough for Lea. For her, it was dead simple.

"Mark you leave me, I kill you."

Clearly, it's time to get out of Phnom Penh. I'm certain to run into Lea again. On the streets somewhere, at the market, in a bar. The problem is i might not see her coming. She came perilously close to finishing me off at Bodhi Villa, when she took a swing at my head with a star picket. The time before that, she split the back of my head open with one of her wooden platform shoes, before bursting into tears and driving me to hospital.

Never break up with a woman wearing platform shoes. After Lea went out to buy some water, I told the doctor i'd had a moto crash. I didn't want to embarrass her. Besides, a moto crash is a common enough occurrence here. It is so ubiquitous that when I told one of my Khmer journalists that Michael Jackson had died she replied, without a scrap of irony, 'Moto crash?'

As the doctor stitched me up, Lea came back and spoke to him in Khmer. I paid him the fifteen dollars and as I made to leave, he gave me a knowing smile and said "Next time, don't cheat on your wife." It was a wtf moment.

It's time to get out of Phnom Penh. Miss Mayhem has been messaging me for a few weeks now from New York, fearing the worst, begging me to get out. And things are beginning to get a little edgy, even for me. I've been hanging out with a couple of American gangsters, Sonny and Jay, Khmer refugees who grew up in the US before being deported for breaking the law. Here, with no family, no job, and barely able to speak the language, they are in a no-man's land where their choices are limited: do crime, or run a hip-hop school. Sonny and Jay chose the lesser of the two evils and immediately started work in drugs and prostitution.

Sonny and Jay happily showed me their varied - if relatively unimaginative - rackets. The drug trade, the strings of girls they'd run, and the illegal gambling dens. The police would finish work at 6pm then start as private security at these gambling rooms, hidden from Western eyes for the most part; instead targeting the desperately poor and superstitious Khmer. An average gambling room will take around $300 a night. An average Cambodian lives on less than $1 a day.

One of Jay's other rackets was getting people out of jail. For a thousand US, he could have the most savage convicted criminal sprung and walking Phnom Penh's streets within a day, a free man - while still to all intents and purposes an incarcerated felon on the books as being in prison. Perhaps the police simply rounded up homeless people to make up the numbers; i don't know. But Jay would put up the money, and Sonny would collect it. Sonny stayed with me for a few weeks, in my apartment opposite the Russian Embassy. He lived life on the edge, always with a pretty girl or three around, and always carrying a weapon. Last i heard, Jay had been busted with a kilo of methamphetamine and had been imprisoned for life. However i doubt he will be there for long.

I never did get to do the photo essay on the gambling dens, although i did do an extensive tour of them with Sonny over a couple of nights. I was trying to figure out how to get the photos: act the dumb tourist, or use a concealed camera. Each approach - like most things on the criminal fringe - had its pros and its cons.

Ada lights a pipe as we watch the music videos on TV. I've given her most of my stuff; she and her family are desperately poor. Clothes, a pocket knife, a leather belt, some after shave. I'll leave her what's left of the smoke when it's time to go to the airport: there is no way we can get through all of it, try as we might over the course of this 48-hour drug-fuelled bender. I dial room service and order more Asahi beer.

Ada took care of me one time, months back, when i was evicted from my apartment and had no money. She took me to her shack on the railway line, wrapping me in a krama and showing me how to wash using the earthenware pot outside. We ate fish and rice with our hands, drank ginseng wine mixed with yoghurt, and slept on wooden planks covered with a thin blanket and a mosquito net. Ada shared her small room with six friends and family. My French friend Mikhaila worked for an NGO down the tracks, running a school there. These French kids were providing what Hun Sen's government could not: education for the children along the railway line.

"Mark you stay with me here?" Ada had asked, waving at the timber walls. She'd literally kicked her mother out of the bed the night before. I shook my head. No. But thank you.

She asks me the same thing at Superstar.

"Mark you stay with me here?"
Ada, you know i have to go. I have a plane to catch tomorrow. I need to find a job.
"Mark you come back for Ada?"
If you want.
"I want."

Ada and i meet Mikhaila at Dodo Rhum on Street 178 the next afternoon. We're high as kites and can barely walk. Mikhaila has offered to give me a ride to the airport on her 250. Remy pours me a Martinique rum with fresh coconut. I'm going to miss Remy, but i will miss his spectacular rums a whole lot more. He pours me another. I bid farewell to Ada, and climb on the back of the dirt bike. Mikhaila belts down the street in her inimitable, fearless fashion, tearing up Norodom and out along Russian Boulevard towards the airport.

"Mark, why are you so stupeeed?" Mikhaila shouts in her usual straightforward fashion. It's a fair question, and one I am not at all unfamiliar with. "Zat girl, ow old eez she?"

She's 22, i say.
"And why you zink Ada wants to be wiz you? She eez 22, she eez beautiful, why you zink she is wiz you?"I know what she is getting at. But i don't point out the obvious. Mikhaila is also 22, and even more beautiful. But i'm not paying her for the ride, either.
I don't know, i shout back.
"You are so stupeeed!"

Mikhaila refuses my offer of fuel money at the airport. She kisses me on both cheeks, kicks the bike into gear, and is gone. On to India, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia. I'll see her again. Somewhere. I pay my departure tax and and make my way across the tarmac to the Bangkok Airways jet.

At Suvarnhabhumi Airport i swallow forty milligrams of Valium, four little blue pills, before boarding the plane for Perth. The idea of Perth is just too desultory. Later i am shaken awake and stumble through customs, where they search my bag and ask why i am carrying so many little blue pills. I have around a hundred.

Because they were so cheap, i slur. They let me through.

True to my word to Ada, i'm back in Phnom Penh two months later, back in the shack on the railway line. I turn up with as little as possible, as I know i can't live out here, even for two weeks, without most of my gear getting stolen. I'd been hanging around Laos and Angkor Wat for a couple of weeks, waiting for my dole cheque to come through, which of course it never did. So i stole two old paperback books from the hotel, sold them for food, then borrowed $20 from the bureau chief in Siem Reap for a bus ticket. I disembark from the overnight bus in Phnom Penh at 5am, carrying a Nikon, some film, a few clothes, and 500 riel - around twelve cents. Not nearly enough for a moto. I shoulder my pack and head north west, towards the the railway line.

PROPINQUITY

2010-06-29T18:06:00.003+08:00

During all the time I lived in Leederville, my parents only ever came to visit me once. Later in life - much later, after a lengthy period in which I did my very best to simulate a normal lifestyle – later in life, they came to visit me more often. Twice, I think. But back then in the bad old days I was living underground in the city. Quite literally, holed up in my basement sound recording studio in the central business district, and, more figuratively, in a series of cheap rented houses around the city. Large, rambling old places which were, once I relinquished tenancy, invariably demolished. Or, as some would argue, further demolished.

But my parents did come visit me in Leederville once. They came to visit for some quite banal, innocuous reason, and were no doubt surprised to see the paddy wagon parked in my driveway. They were forced to park on the verge. They were even more surprised to see their son bustled out onto his wooden verandah between the shoulders of two burly blue-suited detectives from Belmont. The detectives had just placed me under arrest for possession of an unlicensed firearm. The timing of my parents' visit was, to say the least, unfortunate.

“Oh, hi mum,” I said to my ashen-faced mother in passing. “It’s not as bad as it looks - ” before they pushed me inside the van and slammed the door shut. I waved to my mother through the square, steel-mesh window “I’ll call you later, ok?” Smiling, holding an opposable finger and thumb to my ear.

My father did not look so surprised. He just looked the same way he always looks: like someone standing in the rain on a desolate stretch of freeway next to a broken-down second-hand car at night holding a warranty that expired the day before.

Bad timing. Jung would call it synchronicity.

I would just call it a bitch.

ON A BANANA AND A PRAYER

2010-06-26T15:59:00.025+08:00

“My sister, she sick,” Lea says. “We take her some money and some food, ok?”

She is standing in the doorway of the large, tiled bathroom, hands on hips. She’s been on her mobile for the past ten minutes, talking in Khmer. I scrape a blunt razor across my face. I’m late for work. We’ve been up most the night - and now deadline day is looming for the magazine. I wash away the shaving cream and look in the mirror. But not for long. Hollowed cheeks. Black rings under the eyes. Hair all over the place like a mad woman’s shit.

“We go later, after work.” I spray some aftershave. Walk into the bedroom. Pull on a shirt. ID tags. “Where my glasses?” She finds them on the top of the TV.
“Sophea, she sick. She die soon.” Lea says this off-handedly, as if saying we had better hurry up or we’ll miss the bus. I pull the balcony doors closed, with their blue-lacquered, wrought iron security, and lace one of the heavy Solex padlocks through the steel hoops. “Keep these shut if you want the aircon open, OK? What, you want to keep the coconut sellers cool down there on the street?”
Lea laughs. “Fuck you Mark. You so la la.”

We visited Sophea a couple of months ago, the morning Lea and i set off to ride the motorcycle up to Siem Reap. Then, too, i had given Sophea food, and money. Then, too, she was supposedly sick, although she looked ok. She certainly had a big smile when we gave her the fresh fruit, vegetables, dried fish, and cash.
“Lea, i’m late for work. I go work now, lu luoen, lu louen. We see Sophea later.”
“You give me money, I go see her.”
Lea’s younger sister lives in a small room down past the Russian Embassy, where Sisowath Quay turns in to Mao Tse Tung. Not so far from work, but further down the boulevard, behind the furniture shops with their endless rattan arrays of tables, chairs, shelves. I figure we can pick up some food at Kandal market, drop it to Sophea, and i can still make the paper by 11. The hard news team – national, world news, the photographers, editor-in-chief – are all there by nine, but no one from the lifestyle desk deigns to show up before 11. The news team only gave me a hard time about this once.
“You guys stick to news, i'll stick to lifestyle. A lifestyle editor needs two things: a life, and some style.”
“No,” i say to Lea. “You come with me, we go to old market, we go see Sophea, then you take me to work. OK?”
“Yes sir,” she says.
“And stop calling me sir.”
“Yes sir Mister Makroy.” She laughs, pulling on her yellow slippers, the fluffy ones with the smiley faces. She looks completely ridiculous in pyjamas and slippers.

Downstairs they’ve opened the shop. My scooter is locked up out on the road. Harmon, the gray-haired old American bleeding heart, abandons his breakfast, eager to show me his latest project. It’s a full-scale papier-mâché table, complete with papier-mâché chairs. He wants the kids in the village to manufacture them.
“You know, i’m pretty sure I can find a market for these,” he drawls. What a senseless idea. It's good old American entrepreneurial drive, gone troppo. The heat has gotten to him. I wave him away: he’s a basket case.

Lea drives. I cling to her skinny hips as she blithely navigates the chaotic carnage of Phnom Penh’s streets. She loves driving the scooter. It’s new, it’s black and red, it has anime graphics, and it’s automatic. She gets a kick out of telling her friends that i bought it for her, but of course it’s hired - at a special rate from Kieran at Kung Fu bar. Lea uses it by day, and we scoot around the city by night. When i need a real bike, i borrow Kieran's 400 Hornet. Much more fun.

I must admit, i do get a laugh whenever Lea drives me to work in her pyjamas. It’s quite common for Cambodian women to wear pyjamas around town during the daytime. But that doesn’t make it any less funny. Lea pads around Kandal Market in her smiling yellow slippers, laughing with the ladies as they fill my bag with fruit, dried fish, rice, and takeaway beef lok lak.

Once inside the steel shuttered door, which opens from an alley off Mao Tse Tung, i see Sophea lying on the concrete floor of her bathroom, at one end of her small but neat abode. Her hair is plastered over her face, her body and clothes drenched in sweat. Her head is over a pool of vomit, and she is dry retching, her body wracked with spasms. A handful of blue pills lie among the brown mess, and she is clutching her mobile phone.

Lea crosses the room and crouches beside her sister, talking quietly in Khmer. She fills a cup of water and fetches a towel. Taking a ladle out of the ceramic pot, the one that holds the water to flush the toilet, she washes the vomit down the drain. Sophea replies to Lea in her quiet, lilting, bird-like voice, almost inaudibly, as she pulls her hair back from her delicate cheekbones. Her voice is soft and weak. She is telling Lea something about her head, the back of her head. It hurts there. I help Lea lift Sophea up from the floor and we walk her to her mattress. She is shaking badly, her pain almost visible. I feel her forehead. She is terribly hot, burning hot. We lie her down on her bed. She shakes her head, no, and crawls onto the cold concrete floor by the mattress, lying on her side. Her breathing is shallow. She is shivering and shaking. Suddenly she smiles at me.“Hello Mark, how are you?”
How am I?

“We’ve got to get her fever down,” i whisper to Lea. “We need aspirin, and we need to get her to a hospital. Is there a doctor around here? Can we take her to Naga Clinic? Why isn’t she in hospital?”
“She need ten dollars. She no have ten dollars.” Lea shrugs, and takes the towel to the kitchen sink. She runs it under the tap, then crouches beside her sister, wiping her forehead, neck, arms.
“She sick same same before?”
Lea nods. “Yes, same same before.”
“Where she sick? How?”
Lea puts her hand on her stomach. “Too hot here - now too hot here.” She puts her hand on the back of her head.
I touch my forehead. “Here? Same?”
“Same, same before. When she sick here.” Lea puts her hand on her stomach again. “You know, when you like…Mark, you member when I burn my hand here?” she points to a tiny scar by the base of her thumb. “You member, I burn my hand here, with…how you say, happy birthday?”
“Happy birthday?” This is getting surreal. Lea looks exasperated. “You know Makroy, happy birthday, happy birthday.” She makes as if she is flicking a lighter.
“Oh. A candle?”
“Yes, you know a candle, you member i burn my hand with a candle here. Sophea sick like that, only inside, here - and here.” This is making very little sense. “The doctor, he make picture.”
“Uh huh. Can I see it?”
Lea talks to Sophea, who raises a thin arm and points to a rattan shelf.
“Yes sir.” Lea comes back with a sheaf of papers, and what looks like an ultrasound image. The medical documents are all in French. The image shows a dark patch where Sophea’s liver might be. Two smaller ones either side of the base of her spine. Cancer, I think to myself.
“Tumour?” I whisper to Lea, pointing at the dark area. She looks at Sophea.
“I dunno,” Lea says.

I try to make sense of the French doctor’s clinical notes. A waste of time, I decide. She’ll die from the fever alone if we don’t do something soon. I hand Lea a crumpled pile of notes, a few thousand riel.
“Go to the pharmacy, get some aspirin.” While she is gone i get Speedy on the phone. He says he can’t do the taxi at the moment, and gives me another number. His friend can’t do the taxi either. Sophea waves her hand, weakly. “Mark,” she says. “It’s ok. I so sorry.”
“No, no, it’s fine, don’t worry. We'll get you to the hospital.” I feel her forehead. You could fry an egg on it. Sophea stops shivering and starts sweating again. I put more cold water on the towel, wiping her neck and her brow. She takes a sip of water and lies back down, talking, something about a movie, something she has seen on TV. I don’t understand what she is saying.

Lea comes back in with a handful of pills. Ibuprofen.
“This is not aspirin, Lea.”
“Same, same,” she says.
“But different?”
She laughs. “Fuck you Mark.”
Is ibuprofen any good for a fever? I can’t remember. I don’t know. I get on my mobile and call Dr John in Australia.
“Yeah mate, ibuprofen will help take down a fever. How many milligrams? OK - give her two now, two in an hour. No, the codeine won’t matter. Just keep her cool, a high fever will kill her. Get her in a cold bath. With ice."
I explain there is no bathtub, let alone a refrigerator. Let alone ice.
“Cold towels. Water. Just keep her cool; get those pills into her. What's she got? She coughing? Sore joints? Swollen glands?”
“Don’t know mate. Hard to get a straight answer. Not sure she’ll keep these pills down. I’ll call you back.” Lea holds Sophea’s head and hand as she swallows two pills, then she turns to me.
“Before, she take her medicine, last of her medicine, she take, but no good, no can keep inside,” Lea says. “She sick.”
“Tell her she’s got to keep these down,” I say. I look dumbly at my phone. “I can’t find a taxi.”
“I get tuk-tuk,” says Lea. “Taxi driver no good.” She puts her head out the door. “Tuk-tuk!” she shouts. “Lu luoen, lu luoen!”

The hospital costs two hundred dollars, bit by bit, over two days. Everything is pay as you go. The medicine, the IV drip, the blood tests, the X-rays. The food. The room. The water. When she arrived, Sophea had a temperature of 41.9. So. What was I supposed to do? Say, sorry, Sophea, not my problem. I have to go now. I have a lifestyle magazine to do.

Give the doctors the money, they’ll take the money and she won’t get treated. Give her the money – well. She’s not likely to stay in hospital.

Sophea seems to be putting up with the doctors’ prodding and probing good-naturedly, as if to humour me – to thank me, in her way. She doesn’t much believe in any of it. Lea comes back from the market with a small bunch of bananas, some lychees, and some incense. She gives her sister a yoghurt drink then takes me outside. We place the pathetic offerings on the Buddhist shrine outside the emergency ward. Lea lights the incense and bows her head, holding her hands silent contemplation. This, it seems, is the only thing that can help her sister. This is the only thing to do to keep her smiling. And when we return to the ward, where the mosquitoes circle lazily, Sophea is indeed sitting up, smiling.

“Is ok, Mark,” she explains. “No worry. I see you next lifetime.”
She lies back down and closes her eyes, still smiling. She’s deranged, I think. They must have filled that saline drip full of fucking morphine.

The next day Lea and I arrive at the hospital with another hundred US dollars. I go out for food, and when I return, Lea meets me at the gate. She takes me to the other side of the hospital grounds, past buildings that still stand shattered from the Khmer Rouge. We go upstairs to the second floor, where I meet some Western doctors. An American woman in a white coat explains her cell count is low enough for her to qualify for free medicine at what she explains is a non-government clinic. I sign a form for Sophea, and Lea and i are taken in a small white van back to the emergency ward, back to Sophea’s bedside. Her fever is down now, and she is no longer in pain. She is weak and wants to go home. She smiles, and says something in sing-song Khmer to Lea.

“She want to talk to you,” Lea says, and leaves, going out onto the verandah to talk with the relatives of the old woman in the bed next to us. Sophea beckons me over. I sit on the bed.
“Mark, thank you for help me,” she says. She puts out her hand and I take it in both of mine. “Now I tell you…I…I…” but her lower lip starts to quiver as she squeezes my hand hard and looks down. "I have the HIV.”
She starts to cry. “Mark, I tell you because you my brother.”
I hold her as she cries some more.
She’s only 26, I keep thinking. She’s only 26.

“I so sorry,” she says.
“Shh. It’s ok. It’s ok.”

Me, I don’t cry. Not til I get back to work, when I try to explain where I’ve been these past two days.

Sophea
1984 ~ 2010

IT'S A HOLIDAY IN THE K-HOLE

2010-05-16T22:16:00.030+08:00

I've never seen such a mirror ball. From the darkened mezzanine, i watch as it rotates in a gigantic, slow saturnalia, its rings of light flashing from the shiny surfaces of the distant bar and the jewellery of the dancers below. It's big.

We are the only Westerners in the club, a club tricked out with the gaudiest of Phnom Penh's elite, in their brutal hate couture. Women with hair piled high over hooped earrings are gambolling in the flickering light with men dressed as characters from a Korean soap opera, their carefully mussed hair and flashy rings underlining the fact that their countrymen are living on a dollar a day. With their ostentatious wealth and their power to chronically abuse power, they are relaxing this Friday night, taking a break from selling the land out from underneath its people.

Neal is dressed, as always, in a suit and tie. With his mate Travis, and Travis's wife, Sokleang, we have ramshackled our way through the chaotic streets in a tuk tuk in search of Holiday, otherwise known as Manhattan Club. It's duplicitous namesake makes it difficult to find. But we're here. It's an old army trick, assigning code names to crucial rendezvous points. Try finding Snowy's, for instance, where one can sit and sip cocktails and watch the sun set over the river from a precariously perched verandah - a verandah which will, in all likelihood, and in the very near future, topple headlong into the slow-moving, lily-strewn Mekong, taking the bar and all its inebriated customers with it - Snowy's, where one can sit and watch the sun set over the river - if only one can find the damn place. No easy task, given the bar is actually called Maxine's.

After locating Holiday, Neal leads us through a glistening wet car park towards a garishly lit entrance, beneath a neon sign which reads 'Manhattan Club'. "You can usually score ketamine around here," Neal says, waving a stylishly suited arm around at flash Hummers, fancy cars, and a dalliance of young men and women in the shadows. He pauses for a moment, and we stop and stand with him, in the torpid, humid aroma of Phnom Penh's streets after rain, half expecting someone to step forward and proffer a plastic bag. If we were lakeside, or even riverside, there would be no end of shamelessly unimaginative entrepreneurs on hand to offer us drugs. But this is the high end, the pointy end, of the Cambodian netherworld. These kids are connected to generals and ministers - their money comes from on high, not from the street.

But why would anyone with half a brain left would want to score ketamine, i wonder as the doorman pats us down for weapons. It's beyond me. I remember trying special K with Mickey T a couple of years ago, back when Miss Mayhem was staying with us in Carnarvon. As you do, in an outback town where one form of after-hours entertainment is to snort Bundaberg rum until it comes out your eyeballs. We began experimenting after the local veterinary surgeon gave Mickey T a couple of vials to administer to his injured dog. But i had other ideas - as did Mickey T, who, after curing his dog's bad shoulder with reiki, handed the drugs over to me. We medicated ourselves and dropped quickly and drastically into the k-hole. Barely able to move, we could not speak at all - only growl, or occasionally bark, while rolling about on the floor. Which frightened poor Miss Mayhem, when she came home from work, nearly out of her wits.

But Neal seems intent on the ketamine experience, so, after the waitress arrives with our drinks, i peel my ears and mingle with the crowd on the mezzanine, sipping on my Heineken and looking about. I hear Neal ask the waitress to go find him a girl. I shake my head, counting in it the number of times he's asked me to do the exact same thing. He can't seem to pick out a girl for his own self - probably because he can't actually see. The girls need to be brought within a few inches of his designer frames. I bump into a well-dressed, thick set Khmer man, who turns around and surprises me by asking in English where i am from.

"Australia. But i like it here better. It's more fun."
"Ah. And you are looking for fun tonight?" He lights a cigarette.
I look around and nod. "Always looking for fun."
"Too easy," he says. "There's plenty of girls." He raises his head and blows a plume of smoke over the handrail in the direction of the dance floor. The waitress reappears at the top of the stair with a dumpy-looking girl wearing too much eye-shadow. She takes a quick look at Neal from underneath her false eyelashes before turning abruptly and walking back down the stairs.

"I'm not looking for a girl," i say.
He nods. "So. You want ketamine?"
My eyebrows shoot up. This really is too easy.
"Yes. I mean, no. My friend wants some." I nod at Neal, standing a few metres away. "Any around?" Neal glares at me, and beckons me over hastily.
The Khmer puts his hand on my shoulder. "Wait here, my friend." He slips away into the crowd. The mirror ball rotates ever slowly as the music gets ever louder. I slalom through the crowd to Neal, who grabs me by the arm and leans in, whispering in my ear.
"What do you think are you doing? You've got to watch yourself here. That guy is a gangster."
"Just asking about some K."
"Are you crazy? You don't just ask those guys for K. This isn't lakeside." I nod, and sip on my beer. "Why don't you go and find us some girls?" I shrug, and walk over to the bright chromium rail. I look down at the crowd. A pretty Khmer woman in a white fur coat looks up from the dance floor. I smile. She smiles back. So they do wear fur coats here. And i thought all that Japanese clothing sent as aid - with little regard for Cambodia's location in the tropics - was only bought by barang on their way back to the chill north of the hemisphere. But i doubt this woman bought that coat from Tokyo Thrift.

She returns to dancing with her female friend, who is equally expensively dressed, minus the fashion model looks. She glances up at me again, and i raise my drink. She smiles. I turn around and the Khmer gangster is standing there in front of me with his fist clenched. He raises his fist, slowly, until it is just below the level of my eyes. Right in my face. I dart a glance at Neal, who is standing, frozen, watching for the inevitable attack. The gangster smiles, and i see there is a line of white powder on the uppermost side of his fist, between thumb and clenched fingers.

Photo: Safari Bob

Neal buys fifty dollars worth, which gets us a lounge outside a private room on the mezzanine, and an unending supply of horse tranquilizer. The gangster sits with us and sets about disengaging our minds from our bodies. After a couple more lines i'm happily giddy, and tell Neal i'm going downstairs to find him a girl. He grins, and does another line from a plate which has appeared from who knows where. The kitchen.

I float downstairs to the girl in the polar bear coat. She speaks no English. And i can barely speak at all. The music is way loud. I point upstairs, then lean in to her ear and say: "Party? You? Your friend?" which comes out sounding like "woof woof woof." She shakes her head no. I shrug, and float back upstairs. The party has moved on from the lounge to a stainless steel table, where we have a new round of beers. My gangster friend is giggling like a lunatic at something Sokleang is saying. He beckons me over for another beer and a line. A security guard appears, dressed in black, his uniform bearing markings in the style of a New York cop.

Torch in hand, the security guard walks over and shines the light onto our plate. I thank him and do another line. This is no Carnarvon K-hole. This really is 'too easy'. I start to giggle. This seems the understatement of the decade. The security guards are helping us do lines. I waft over to the rail and the polar bear girl and her friend look up and see me. I can't help laughing. They laugh back, and, after a brief exchange of words, head up the stairs.

After a couple of lines. the polar bear girl sidles up to me and Neal begins dancing, quite up close and personal, with her friend. They're drinking and having a good time. I'm feeling kind of warm and fuzzy. Or is that the coat? After a few more drinks, i notice Neal has turned a distinct shade of green. He has backed away from the dancing girl, and begun an urgent, whispered discussion with Travis and Sokleang. They both look at the girl, still blithely dancing away, and shake their heads. Something is wrong. Neal looks even more sweaty than usual. Positively uncomfortable. I beckon Travis over.

"What's wrong?"
Travis shakes his head. "Neal is convinced the girl is a ladyboy."
I snort into my drink, and beer froths everywhere. "You've got to be joking."
"I know. She clearly isn't, but we can't convince him otherwise." Travis shrugs.
My head starts to spin. Ladyboys? Oh dear. What have i done? Now even i am not so sure. The coat. The makeup. I feel giddy, and sit down on a couch far too quickly, dragging the polar bear with me. She laughs and her nails dig into my skin. Suddenly i remember the story of the friend of my late wife, the one who climbed into the concrete polar bear pen at the Perth zoo while on acid and was torn apart in front of his horrified, tripping friends. Oh god. Ladybears. What have i done. I look desperately around, but there is no escape. I am surrounded by polar bears. My legs refuse to move, as legs will inevitably do in a nightclub, or is it a nightmare? as the impending disaster draws ever near. And i begin to realise, too late, just how easily a fine mind is lost to the lure of the K-hole.

HAPPY AS A PIG IN ANGKOR

2010-03-28T00:04:00.053+08:00

The Prince D'Angkor Hotel. King Sihanouk himself and his royal entourage are rumoured to have stayed in this four-star resort in the French Quarter of Angkor Wat's tourist mecca town. So why shouldn't i? Don't let poor accommodation get in the way of a good story, i say.

Held at XBar in Siem Reap, the second annual Porkula 1 is an event on Cambodia's social events calendar not to be missed. Or so i tell my senior editor when i reques two return air tickets plus expenses to cover the event for the social page. Thankfully he is so deeply involved in his own personal crises, as he lurches from one disaster to the next, that he scarcely notices any requisitions i file for supplies or claims i make for expenses. I mean, i didn't even make it to the Tonle Sap lake to file the story on the seasonal snake harvest after my interpreter failed to turn up at midnight at the agreed bar. But i had the expenses in my hand. And after quite a while, the barman had most of the expenses in his hand while i fell out of a tuk tuk on my arrival at the Pontoon nightclub in the early hours. But such is the nature of journalism.

So when i booked Elvira and i into a deluxe suite at no charge at the Prince D'Angkor, it is on the eventually surprising premise that i would write a feature on their hotel. Surprising in the fact that i did eventually write a feature on their hotel for which they were very grateful - so grateful in fact that they allowed me back six months later, with a murderous, meth-addicted bar girl in tow, to write another one. And they even gave us a better suite. But when i was there with Elvira, i very nearly didn't file anything at all. I was lucky remain in a sanguine state long enough to collect sufficient notes to file any kind of story whatsoever.

You see, Elvira, fresh off the plane from a London-based motorcycling magazine, is very keen on her marijuana. But then, she is very keen on a whole number of things. There is no shortage of enthusiasm or energy with Elvira. It radiates from her in the newsroom like shrapnel from a landmine as she hurls instructions about like ninja stars. Oh, but i'm a big fan of shouting in newsrooms. It's up there with pig racing in bars, believe me.

It is because of Elvira's predilection for the herb that we wind up at a happy pizza shop near Pub Street a few hours before the chequered flag is due to fall. There is a whole street of these herbal pizzerias. In typically Asian fashion, all the shops of one type tend to be concentrated in one area - be it plumbing supplies, carved wooden sword shops, or eateries. If you walk down this particular street you will see a sign with a happy face proclaiming Happy Pizza, followed by another with a happier but more stoned-looking face, tongue lolling, which is the shopfront for Extra Happy Pizza. Then there is Ecstatic Pizza, with a caricature on the shop display of a face like a necrophiliac making love to Janis Joplin. I think we eventually ate at We Are Totally Off Our Fucking Tits On Ridiculously Barmy Pizza Which Is Pretty Much All Marijuana With No Actual Nutritional Value Which Is Why We Are So Fucking Happy Pizza. Or something along those lines.

The pizza is my first mistake.

It is on checking back into the hotel suite, in preparation for the races, that panic strikes. "Oh, god, what if there's nobody there tonight?" i wail at Elvira. I'd been up to XBar the night before for a quiet drink, and believe me, it was a very quiet drink. There was, apart from me, only two people in the bar. And they were the bar staff. At the time i figured i was just early. A quiet night. XBar is open late, and warms up as the other bars close down. But tonight, after the four slices of Extra Happy kicked in, i am worried.

"What if nobody comes?" i repeat.
Elvira is playing around with the buttons on the console by the bed, switching the lights on and looking around the room to see where they come on, then switching them off again.
"Oh this is good. And look, you can turn on the television from here." She switches on the TV. A frantic Khmer melody fills the room, and we watch as a heavily made-up woman in a bright green dress begins to methodically destroy our remaining peace-of-mind. "Do you want room service?" Elvira asks. "I'm hungry. Where's the menu? Oh, here it is. How about a drink?"
She goes back to the buttons, and starts pushing one button relentlessly. "Where's the make-up room?" She looks to the bathroom as she presses the button, but to no avail.
"Who am i going to photograph if no-one turns up?" I shake my head. I can't come back with absolutely nothing for Monday's page 17. Anything i write on the hotel won't be published until the magazine comes out. I need social pictures, with a story on an event. "I suppose i could just photograph the pigs," i say.

Elvira doesn't appear to be listening. She is talking to herself and the TV is very loud. I go to the bedside table to study the console. There are buttons for the bathroom, the sofa and balcony, the bed left and right, the main room, and the make-up room.
"Where is the make-up room?" i ask, and pressing the button.
Elvira is now looking at the menu. "What do you want from room service? I'm having the filet mignon and a bloody mary."
"Do you think i could just shoot the pigs?" I ask. After all, she is the national news editor. She must have some news sense. "I mean, they've all got names. And sponsors. If no-one actually turns up for the racing, i suppose we could just publish a social page full of pigs' faces with their names underneath. What do you think? Would anyone notice? I'll have the pasta marinara. And an Asahi. Maybe there's one in the fridge." I press the make-up room switch again, and it glows green. I look around. "I would have thought it would have been above the dresser, where your jewellery is."

The make-up room switch is my second mistake. Because there is no light above the dresser. Meanwhile, Elvira has changed channels, and another woman is wailing loudly on the television, which is now tuned to a long-running Cambodian soap opera. Someone is beating her, slapping her back and forth relentlessly with an open hand. This seems to go on for quite some time. I take the remote from Elvira and press MUTE. The slapping continues, only silently. Elvira picks up the phone and orders the food, then begins to ramble something about the motorcycle magazine, hashish, and narrow roads. In my mind's eye, i'm picturing the Out and About page full of pigs' faces, with their names captioned neatly underneath. It would work. But i'm starting to feel paranoid. I haven't had pot in ages and the happy pizza has hit me like a sledgehammer. There is no way i can go out to a bar. There is no way i can even leave this room. What if there are people out there? I try the make-up room switch again - on, off, on, off - but nothing in the room is changing. Except Elvira's ranting has now increased to a full-blown holler to fill the void left by the mute tv. "Test riding a Ducati, now there's a job. I remember one time out on one of the back lanes, i'd just crested a hill, when -" I point the TV remote at her and press MUTE, only half-joking. "You're ranting," i say. "The windows are open, all the lights are on, the TV was on full - we must be making one hell of a racket."
"Oh, did i tell you? I'm ADHD," she says. "Whenever i take marijuana, i just go ballistic."
I sit down suddenly on the bed. There is a knock at the door. "That was quick," she says. "I'm starving."

I open the door on two short, identical-looking Khmer maids who stand staring silently at me with an accusing glare. White towels in hand. No trays of food and drink. Here's trouble, i think. They just stand there, staring at me.
"Please - sir - turn down - room?" one of them says, eventually, in halting English.
"Of course. Yes. I'm sorry." I shut the door on them and walk back into the suite.
"Where's the food?" asks Elvira.
"Maids," i explain. "I told you. We're making too much noise. They want us to shut up. Oh, god, there's no way i can go out tonight. The room is spinning." I sit down on the bed again, wishing i could make it to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. I'm suddenly extremely thirsty, and my mouth and throat are parched. "I need a beer. I'm totally paranoid. No-one is going to be at the pig racing. Where's the camera, anyway? Oh god, a page full of pigs' faces."
"What utter nonsense," says Elvira. "It's the deluxe suite. We can make as much noise as we damn well like. What did they actually say, Mister Paranoid, if you don't mind me asking?"
I mimic the maid's voice. "'Please, sir, turn down room.' Maybe we can get away with it, just this once. Maybe it's actually a brilliant idea. It's just what this town needs. Like when i ran a one-off shooting page in Carnarvon, with a picture a dead and bloodied goat someone had shot, after Bazza forgot to file his fishing column." Elvira pauses for the first time since we returned from happy pizza. A strange look comes over her face
"Oh god," she says.
"What?"
"Turn down room. They want to turn down the fucking bed!" She walks briskly over to the console beside the bed. "The fucking hyphen!" she moans. "Why are there no decent sub-editors in this godforsaken country?"
"What are you babbling about now?" I walk over and stare at where her finger is pointing, accusingly, at the lit "Make-up room" button.
"There is no make-up room. We've been asking them to make up the room."
I pause as this sinks in. There is another knock at the door.
"No," i say. "We've been asking them to make up the room, then not make up the room. Then make up the room. Then not make up the room."
Elvira begins to laugh. "Make up the room. No, actually, don't. On second thoughts, do. Yes, make up the room."
"No, don't make up the room." I collapse into a fit of laughter. "Make up the room." Elvira staggers to the door to open it for the room service waiter, who enters with two silver trays. We are falling about the place, unable to stop laughing. There are tears rolling down my cheeks.
"Those poor maids," i sputter. "I said, 'Yes, of course' and shut the door in their faces." We clutch our sides, unable to control our laughter. Not so much, i suppose, because doing things to annoy hotel staff is so very funny. But more because there is a good reason why they call it 'happy pizza'.

BUFFALO AU GO GO

2010-02-09T22:04:00.013+08:00

(Written for The Phnom Penh Post 2009)

Bareback buffalo racing is a spectacle not to be missed – so why do so few tourists witness this annual event in this small Cambodian village? It’s hard to understand why this is not one of Cambodia’s premier tourist events.

Whereas Spain has its running of the bulls, the small village of Vihear Suor, just 50 kilometres northeast of Phnom Penh, has its buffalo racing. That’s right. Buffalo races, the likes of which are held nowhere else in Cambodia.

Horns and heads bedecked and bejewelled, these krobei are quite a sight – and when a loose herd of them get moving amongst the crowd at speed, it is scarcely less chaotic and spectacular than Pamplona. And, at times, just as terrifying. When these guys race, there is no holding them back. With nothing but a thin rope through their mounts’ nostrils, a pair of bareback racers whip their wilful beasts along at an astounding pace.

Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, a trio of buffaloes pound their way underneath a temple archway and along a narrow, muddied track to the finishing line. That’s around a tonne of unpredictable animal hurtling past a seething throng of wildly cheering spectators. Then they turn around, line up, and race back. And did I mention the wrestling? And the bareback horse racing? And the sideshows?

Oh. And did I mention the mud?

Though it is utterly amazing to stand back and watch these Khmer buffalo-wranglers pelt through the crowds lining the clay quagmire that serves as a racetrack, it is another thing altogether negotiating a similarly torturous “road” for 20 kilometres or so from the ferry on Highway 6. The wet clay is so slippery you can barely stand upright on it, let alone ride a bike. Particularly when you chose a fast and flashy Honda street bike with slick tyres, as opposed to a far more practical dirt bike, for the trip.

Clay is soft, at least – a quality I found most appealing when the bike slipped out from underneath me. And I wasn’t the only one who came unstuck along this treacherous road. Perhaps it is this perilous journey that explains why the Vihear Suor buffalo races are not so high on the average tourist’s “must-see” list.

To add insult to injury, the races are held at the height of the rainy season. And the 7am start time – meaning a 5:30am departure from the capital – also deters most Westerners. I counted just six barang amongst the thousands of visiting Khmer villagers. But why some budding local entrepreneur doesn’t organise a bus tour to this event I have no idea. Because believe it or not, it was worth all the mud and bruises.

There is no betting or prize money for these races. It is just part of the tradition of the Pchum Ben festival in this village, part of the spirituality of the gathering. The horns of the beasts are wrapped in the same cloth as the monks’ robes. And the decorative pieces on the pointy end aren’t just there for decoration – they also provide protection for the riders.

Apart from the unique spectacle of buffalo racing, I was equally entranced by the wildly entertaining bareback horse racing. Children climbed trees and the temple archway for a better view, while orange-robed monks and beautifully adorned women lined the track to be spattered with mud along with the rest of us. The buffalo disappeared from the races early, however, and by around nine o’clock the racing was all but over.

People continued to observe Pchum Ben at the pagoda; vendors continued selling their food; people threw darts at a wall of balloons at the sideshow. Hundreds more headed to the ring to watch the Khmer wrestling. Meanwhile, I tracked down a buffalo for a quick ride. Having negotiated the roads to Vihear Suor on a motorbike, and taken a ferry across the Mekong, the opportunity to add buffalo to the day’s modes of transport was too great to resist.

Not that I rode very far. Or fast. But was it worth the trek? I’d venture an unequivocal “yes”. And if two-wheeled clay skating is not your thing, there is always the shared taxi, albeit costly over the holiday period.

If you do manage to get there, intact, the colourful chaos that is Vihear Suor buffalo racing is a day at the races you are never likely to forget.

TROPICAL ISLAND GETAWAY: NO BIG BUCKS, JUST A BIG BAD BUS

2009-09-21T22:58:00.007+08:00

Surrounded by the the deep blue-green of the Gulf of Thailand, i pause and lower the dripping paddle along the length of the kayak. Waves lap gently against its lurid yellow hull. Ahead, a small island curves upward from the horizon like a convex lens, a small window on a dense mound of green foliage.

Looking back to the Sihanoukville coast i appear to be equidistant between the two landfalls. My shoulders and arms ache, but in the warm sun and the cool breeze, it is an agreeable enough sensation. Even with my myopic vision i can make out a fuzzy strip of sand on the leeward side of the island. My glasses, along with my camera and towel, are stowed in a waterproof bag, in the entirely probable event that i should capsize.

Having never driven (ridden? wrestled with?) this type of kayak before, i wasn’t quite sure how i would go. The last time i attempted to paddle one of these long floating things was in an estuary off the North West Cape in Australia. A long and extremely thin craft, it was lent to me by a local oyster farmer, and i soon found there was an art to maintaining one’s balance on it, as it had all the lateral stability of a cylindrical floating log. At one point, a fellow kayaker paddled past as i was floundering about in the warm estuarine waters, trying to get the vessel righted and retrieve my paddle.

“You’re swimming here?” he asked, astounded, as he glided effortlessly by. “Aren’t you afraid of the sharks?”
“Pardon?” i spluttered.
“This a breeding ground for tiger sharks,” he explained. “And it’s breeding season.”
In as casual a voice as i could muster, i replied: “Oh, no. Sharks don’t scare me.”

He shrugged, and paddled on toward the mouth of the inlet. Of course, as soon as his back was turned, i clambered aboard and set a new water speed record as i flailed my way to the nearest shoreline.

“Sorry mate,” said Richard the Oyster Farmer, in his broad Australian drawl, when i returned his three-metre fibreglass death trap. “Shoulda mentioned the Noahs.”

The kayaks for hire on the shores of Otres Beach, Sihanoukville are much more sensible beasts. They come in two versions. One is wider and shorter than the other, for added stability. But having previously and rapidly mastered the art of keeping a narrow kayak upright, while escaping the circling tiger sharks, i felt confident enough to hire the faster, thinner version.

Otres Nautica, one of the many beach shacks that line the farthest and most laid-back of the beaches along Sihanoukville coast, rent them from $3 per hour to $8 for a half a day. For a two-person kayak, you are looking at $4 and $10. And unless you’re on steroids, half a day is plenty. You’re here to relax, remember. So if pumping seawater is not your thing – if you are more a fan of smooth sailing – you can rent a Hobie cat for $10 per hour or $30 per half day. However, as many of the islands of the coast are surrounded by submerged rocks, the Otres Nautica guys ask that you don’t try to beach one of their catamarans on the shores of an unfamiliar island.

But with its shallow draft, a kayak will get you just about anywhere.

And there are plenty of islands a short distance off Otres Beach to choose from – Koh Khteah, Koh Chrahloh, Koh Russei (Bamboo Island) and Koh TaKiev lie dotted about within a small distance of one another, down the coast and around the corner to the waters off Ream National Park. Given the only upper-arm exercise i get these days is lifting the occasional pina colada to my lips, i set my course for the nearest island, about two kilometres offshore. The coral-rich waters here are ideal for snorkelling.

The solitude, slow roll of the waves, the sun and the sand: it is a soothing antidote to the mad, turbulent flow of Cambodia’s boulevard traffic and highways. And with two- to five-dollar rooms in Otres’ many beach shacks, it is a cheap and cheerful way to escape.

But speaking of highway hell, you do need to factor Valium into your holiday budget. Because until the airport is reopened at Sihanoukville, the only realistic option of getting to the coast is by road. A share taxi is one option. A little blue pill and a four dollar bus ticket is another.

Valium. It’s not that I am an advocate immoderate self-medication. It’s more a question of avoiding the total nervous breakdown inevitably results from the travails of being fully conscious during the horrendous, horn-blasting, music-blaring, blind-corner-overtaking, zig-zagging trajectory through Highway 4 armageddon.

But it’s worth it to get to Otres Beach.

Buses leave from the station near Psar Thmei from around 7am, with fewer departures as the sun nears its zenith. Sorya, Mekong Express and Paramount are among the better services, but when traveling with Aunty Val, comfort becomes less of an issue. It takes around four hours to arrive amongst the indescribable squalor of downtown Sihanoukville. The first thing to do is get the hell out of there. As you alight from the bus, motodops descend upon you like flies on the proverbial. One of them can get you out to Otres Beach for around two dollars.

If you also wish to shuttle back and forth to town, or visit Victory Hill, Ream National Park or surrounds, a better bet is to leg it around the corner to DD Canada on Ekareach Street. Here you can hire a scooter for three dollars a day with your passport as a deposit. And while the proprietor will not win any awards for courtesy, the motos are in as-new condition and are well-maintained.

As I near the island, i am confident enough of not capsizing the vessel to unclip the waterproof bag and fetch my camera and glasses. Wow. When you see the greenery – huge, old trees and dense undergrowth – you realise how much of the Cambodian coastline has been denuded of its tall timber.

I run the kayak onto the sandy beach with a satisfying crunch.
A genuine tropical island getaway.

So. Return bus tickets, $8. Valium, $9. Two days moto hire, $6. Fuel, $2. Kayak, $8. Two nights’ accommodation on the beach, $10.

Getting three sheets to the wind on rice wine with the local fishermen: priceless.

Unedited version of an article published in
7Days "Weekend Escapes", Issue 5, August 28-September 3, 2009.

NICE GIRLS

2009-09-20T01:52:00.019+08:00

A Khmer girl sits down in the seat in front of mine on the bus to Kampot. I’d seen her as i waited to board the bus. I was bleary-eyed and she was holding a giant yellow styrofoam esky. She smiled at me. I smiled back. Well, you’re forced to, really. Although sometimes i don’t. I just won’t. Sometimes i’m in a bad mood. I’ll just glare.

Or sometimes, when a pushy motodop grabs me by the arm, saying “Sir motorbike” - as they all do, as if they were some ragged army of kings intent on beknighting me as a two-wheeled lord - sometimes, when this happens, i’ll turn on them and explain to them slowly and clearly that if they touch me again they will wish they had never been born. But these moody occasions are rare, and usually a result of me suffering an undiagnosed tropical illness, or just having just been robbed, or having been stung on the knee by a Cambodian Wasp, or sometimes a combination of all three. Usually i’ll just smile and say, no thank you, or point to my own motorcycle standing nearby with a shrug, as if to say, well, there’s nothing i’d like better than to get on the back of your woebegone scooter and pay for the privilege of you getting us both lost, but unfortunately, look there, i have my own motorcycle. I can get my own self lost, but thank you sir for your kind offer.

But there’s something about taking a journey, by bus, train, plane or spacecraft that opens you up to romantic possibilities. Something in the way we move. So instead of glaring, or sticking my tongue out this esky-belaboured girl, i smile. Sticking your tongue out seldom works, anyhow. Least not with the girls at the Heart of Darkness, least not after a certain hour in the morning. They’ll just stick theirs out straight back at you, and wiggle it up and down provocatively, before coming over to whisper some sordid proposition in your ear. Or so i am told.

I’m carrying a small satchel of hand luggage, all that i need for a four-and-a-half hour bus trip and a four day alleged ‘holiday’, which, of course, involves shooting for The Paper. A selection of medications for various eventualities, a book by Haruki Murakami, socks, jocks and two shirts, a pair of khaki shorts in case i’m called upon to do an emergency impression of Steve Irwin, a notebook and pen, and a camera to shoot the Kep Jungle Dance. I’ve missed the early Thursday bus, having been up all night with a certain businessman attending the opening of a new nightclub at Phnom Penh’s biggest casino, NagaWorld, an occasion formally ritualised by the smoking of a foil of heroin in the club’s toilets, followed by crazy dancing at the new Darlin’ Darlin’ club, then crazy dancing at Riverhouse, then more crazy dancing with certain unnamed yet wholly infamous journalists at the Heart of Darkness bar and then, needless to say, following the downhill slide from there to Howie bar to shoot pool and thence to Walkabout. Walkabout is the dregs. Old prostitutes interspersed with older white barang, and worse: nobody who can even beat me on the pool table. On average, one Westerner dies each month at Walkabout. It’s like a retirement home for the misbegotten, misplaced and depraved. And each time someone dies, the cops turn up and money has to be paid. I heard a tale of the owners being busted by the cops early one morning as they laid one carefully wrapped Western corpse out by the rubbish skip on Street 19 - but i stress this is an uncomfirmed report, coming as it did from a totally unreliable source, i.e. a former AFP foreign correspondent. Anyway, i missed the bus because my bag and medications were still at this certain businessman’s apartment, not because of any complications at Walkabout. But it was a late night.

After being unable to get hold of the certain businessman by phone, owing to him being in a meeting, i eventually made the long trip up the several flights of stairs to his apartment and lo, one of the girls lets me in. I retrieve my satchel, and make the one o’clock bus. As we’re sitting in our seats, waiting for the alleged one o’clock bus to leave, hopefully some time before two, the girl in the seat in front turns around and smiles at me, offering what looks like an open packet of fetuccini. Its plastic wrapper is decorated with a picture of a smiling crab. She says something in Khmer and I nod, and say thank you in Khmer, and remove one of the strands of smiling crab pasta. She shakes her head no, and using sign language, insists that i take the whole packet. I shrug, thank her again, and take the whole packet. I read the label. It is artificial crab flavoured strips. Of course. What else would it be.

I try one. Dang, these are good. Like potato crisps, only longer, thinner, hotter and with more flavour. And tasting exactly as you’d expect an artificial crab to taste.

The junk food here is just the bomb. Take the iced coffee. It comes in a can. And it’s just that. It’s actually got coffee in it, and plenty of it. You can get it black, or with milk. Compare this with the cartons of "iced coffee" you get back home, wherein the only coffee flavour you get is what has leached through the packaging from the drawing of the coffee bean on the label. By a kind of process of graphic osmosis. A bland milky baby food for a society of bland milky babies. And did i mention the cuttlefish crackers?

I munch through a few artificial crab sticks. The bus begins its interminable blaring of horn as it inches forward through the crowd. The girl and i stumble through some Khminglish phrases, in which we establish that we are both going to Kep, and that we are both on holiday. She shows me a tiny picture of herself on a massive laminated A4-sized card, which proclaims that her name is Kali and she is a security guard. Here’s a match made in hell, i think. I introduce myself as Mark, which is my name, and show her my accreditation from The Paper, which is hanging around my neck - a document which, for some reason, she finds hysterically funny. Perhaps it’s the glasses. She offers me a carton of apple juice. I say no, i have some water, thank you, but she insists. I feel i should offer her something in return. I rummage through my satchel, and come up with a packet of Valium, which i proffer tentatively. She declines with a polite shake of her head.

Me, i take two. I know what these bus trips are like.

When she wakes me, just before Kep, a strand of artificial crab dangling from my lips, she points out the window and says something which obviously means she is getting out. I ask her to wait, and rip the map out of my Kep guidebook. I draw a circle around Kep Lodge, with a big arrow pointing at it, and write “Kep Jungle Party, Friday. Your official invitation. Mark.” And hand it to her.

I wave as she stands with her giant styrofoam esky on the side of the road. As she waves back, she nearly drops the esky. She laughs. The bus lurches forward. The horn blares.

Of course, when she turns up at the party on Friday, looking nice, with hoop earrings and makeup and a red and black top and a couple of friends, i’m so wankered drunk and so intent on winning every single game of pool that i all but ignore her. I can be such an idiot sometimes.

“I go now,” she says, late in the night, with a forlorn look. “See ya,” i say, and play a left-handed shot on the number three nestled on the cushion, rolling it into the top right corner pocket. Oh, i can be a thoughtless, insensitive tool sometimes, harbouring all the grace of a wooden mallet saying goodnight to an egg. And she is such a Nice Girl too.

I know she is a Nice Girl, because of when we got saturated the night before.

I’d just gotten off the bus and made my way to the Lodge. Nothing like free accommodation in a quality establishment. I'd barely made myself at home in my bungalow, by eating all the chocolates in the bar fridge and smoking a huge pipe of meth, when who should knock on my door, but a complete stranger.

“Mr Mark, a girl at bar to see you, Miss Kali,” he says, and disappears.

She has a moto, and is taking me to dinner. At least i think she is offering to take me to dinner, but it is arranged through translations by the barman, who seems to think we are going out for dessert. Which makes no sense at all, because i haven’t eaten all day, apart from some artificial crab strips and four packets of chocolate. Dessert should be preceded by a dinner, surely. Obviously something has been lost in translation. Are we going to the crab market, famous for its non-artificial crab and Kampot pepper? No, she is taking you to another market, far away, in Kep City Proper, the barman explains.

As it eventuates, Kep City Proper is indeed a long way from the Lodge, and is marked by two enormous gold-coloured chickens, or at least what look like chickens, which stand in front of the municipal offices. Other than that, it is identical to the rest of Kep. Beach, jungle, overgrown, abandoned and burnt out shells of 60s modernist beachside villas, cattle roaming the potholed streets, and ramshackle roadside stalls. And it is at one of these aforementioned stalls that we dine.

We barely negotiate the clay track from the Lodge and make it onto the bitumen beach road before we run out of fuel. Typically, Kali lets me know this through a combination of giggling and pointing, but i’ve run out of fuel often enough on my own self to know what is going down. Luckily, we’ve just crested a hill, so we roll about a kilometre through the light rain to what looks like a family squatting in a tin shed on the side of the road. That’s because it is a family squatting in a tin shed on the side of the road. She negotiates the purchase of a cool drink bottle of fuel, for which she refuses to let me pay, and we head on.

Dinner is an hilarious affair. The rain starts coming down harder, and the family who run the roadside food stall, who share at least half a dozen teeth between them, attempt to put up an umbrella, installing it on a three-legged steel tripod. Or at least it was a three-legged tripod until Kali put a rock on top of one of its legs it to stop it blowing away, suddenly reducing it to a two-legged tripod. More giggling. The umbrella then collapses, with Kali inside it. I order mi sup mowan and assist one of the family members with his conversational English.

“You lived here long?” i ask.
“Yes, long time,” he says. “Thirty years.”
“Wow,” i say. “Thirty years. That is a long time.”
His friend points to an enormous mansion across the road, all lit up and surrounded by a high, lighted wall. “He lives over there,” he says.
“Wow,” i say. “That looks nice.”
They both explode into laughter.
“No, i don't, i live in a hammock on the beach,” he explains.

After stumbling about like a christmas tree character in a pantomime play, Kali emerges from the green folded canvas umbrella, throws it aside, and sits downs next to me. I talk with the pair of jokers about hammocks, rocks, benches and soup. Kali gets up and goes to talk with one of the women. The soup arrives. I’m famished from my allnighter, having eaten only thin strips of artificial crab and four packets of chocolate since the night before.

“Your girlfriend, she go now, but she come back,” the sup chef suddenly says, and i notice Kali is on her moto.
“I do hope you are coming back,” i say, raising an eyebrow. She giggles and rides off into the night. I set about eating my bowl of chicken noodle soup with some gravity. And chopsticks.

Chicken, Khmer style, is prepared, i imagine, by killing the chicken and chopping and pounding it into small pieces with a heavy cleaver. The aim is to get as many small, pointed shards of bone into each piece of meat as possible.

“Mmm, chnganj,” i nod, expressing just how delicious the meal is. I pull a shard of bone out of my gums. The sup chef’s gold tooth gleams as he smiles in fluorescent glow of the roadside stall.
It’s still raining, and it’s getting cold. The mi sup mowan is hot, and, apart from the skeletal remains, extremely tasty.

When Kali comes back, she has on a warm jacket, and offers me a t-shirt that proclaims that it is quite a good idea to try to eradicate TB and is two sizes too small. I put it on over my existing t-shirt. I feel slightly warmer, at least on an emotional level.

The 75 cent soup is followed by a delicious 25 cent dessert. I don’t know what the ingredients are, only that these roadside jokers have done something amazing with fruit, covered it with shaved ice and condensed milk and it is chnganj. It starts really hammering down, and we retreat to the cover of the stall to finish our desserts.

Kali procures some plastic raincoats, which are worse than useless, and we ride back to the Lodge. She stops at the family squatting in the tin shed on the side of the road, where we’d bought the bottle of petrol earlier, and hands them a package. Something she’s bought for them at the markets. They nod in appreciation. I have no idea what it is. All i know is that by the time we arrive back at the Lodge we are completely saturated. I get off the moto and Kali waves goodbye.

“Don’t you want to come in and get dry?” i ask, making the motions of towelling dry my chest.
She stares at me as if i have just asked her if she would like me to strip her naked and ejaculate on her tits. Which, in Khmer, i suppose i very well might have. But i would have meant it in a nice way.
She shakes her head no, and smiles. “Tomorrow, party, i see you,” she says. And rides off into the rainy night.

And that is how i know she is a Nice Girl. And that is why i felt like a wanker for totally ignoring her at the Jungle Dance. Well, almost totally. I did dance with her, and i believe i did buy her a drink. However my bar tally for that night, as i found to my chagrin two days later, stood at 16 black russians. Plus a bottle of Ginseng wine and half a bottle of Cuban rum back at the bungalow, where i smoked reefers with the French girl.

Because of course, the French girl, Mikhaila, was always due to arrive at the Lodge on the Friday. And stay until Sunday. And i've never really understood the expression about birds in the hand and birds in the bushes. Because the French girl, whom I met at Chinese House while waiting for Miss Lulu Wayward, was, is, and always will be, one of the most sublimely beautiful women i have ever met. And also a Nice Girl. A Nice Girl at the bar, a Nice Girl on the dance floor, and a pool cue in the hand is worth two Nice Girls in the jungle.

Sure, Mikhaila wants to save the world. Sure, she’s vegetarian, rarely eats, rarely speaks, and has a weird black bead on a thin wire pierced through an angular high cheekbone. And carefully mussed long black hair. Sure, she’s exotic. And sure, i’ve never seen her drunk or anything other than casually elegant. And sure, she’s French and speaks English like she is laying crazy paving. In that French accent of hers. But so what?

Because after i'd filed my lazy jungle story on Saturday morning, we had ourselves a time in the afternoon, tearing up the trails of Kep Mountain on a 100cc Honda Dream, a ridiculous unit for such a trek, through rivers and over rocks, taking in waterfalls and views that simply went on forever. We visited a beautiful building called Le Bout du Monde, which translates as something like the house at the end of the world, which it is, looking out over jungle, through vines and plains of coconut trees to the islands. Everywhere on this looped jungle trail, it seems, we look out to a vista of jungle, sea and islands. We hole up high on the mountain path in a ramshackle hut as the tropical rain hammers down, peeling and eating rambutan and loganberries, smoking, and tentatively revealing our plans and individual dreams of the future.

We come down to visit the sailing club, and climb around the sea wall to sneak into the closed, private resort of Knai Bang Chatt.

The last time i went out with the French girl was after an allnighter on mushrooms, on Anandi’s river cruise. I hadn’t heard from Mikhaila for three weeks, since we’d met at Chinese House. There, she’d stood next to me to order a drink. I was waiting for Lulu. I’d asked her if she thought there was such a thing as the perfect cocktail, and, if there were, whether it would be a dacquiri, and she thought i’d said something entirely different, and our discussion eventually converged on the idea of going out on her dirt bike one day into the countryside for a ride.

“Can you ride a dirt bike?” she asked.

Can i ride a dirt bike.

Three weeks later, and not a peep. And there i am at Touk bar, about to go down to board the boat, with my friends who are all high on mushrooms, and my mobile rings, and a bizarrely accented voice says, “Thees eez Mikhaila from ze Chinese House. We can leaves tomorrow” and i’m thinking who the hell is this? And why are they trying to sell me canned leaves?

“We drank ze dacquiris together?” she says. Oh! Mikhaila. But what does she think? That i’ll just drop all my Saturday plans to go out riding in the countryside with her?

Of course she does. Of course i do.

“Tell you what. There’s a boat leaving in ten minutes, across the road from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Sisowath. Get down here and we’ll go for a cruise.”

Does she make the boat?

Of course she does. That’s what i like about her. She’s a bit of an adventurer. And she owns a dirt bike and rides like a demon.

BUDDHIST HELL

2009-07-29T23:16:00.017+08:00

Photo from Buddhist Hell by Miss Stephanie Mee, who is now, alas, in Bali with Juanita The Former Lifestyle Editor

Miss Wanderlust and i are going to Buddhist Hell. This is the place where our souls will be kept in constant torment for misdeeds in our former lifetimes.

All i can say, in our defence, is that we were awfully hot and dusty after that dirt bike ride, and the impromptu shower with the large washing bowl was entirely in order. What was perhaps entirely out of order were our antics with that golden reclining Buddha statue. But he looked so peaceful and happy, almost as if he were begging to be clambered upon.

And although i still believe the photograph has immense artistic merit, it will not be posted here.

I wrapped myself in a Buddhist robe to dry. It was hanging outside one of the monk's cave apartments - although there were no monks to be seen on this part of the mountain. Thank god for small mercies. However I now have it on good authority that we will come back as slugs to be trodden on accidentally by Buddhist monks.

On arrival at the foot of the mountain, before the climb and our well-earned shower, we lay about in a pagoda and chatted with the monks, the nuns, and some random villagers. Well, Miss W did. I just lay almost comatose on a straw mat on the cool tiled floor, resting my poor monkey arse after hours on a combination of dirt bike and Valium, while she chatted away like a native. The nuns then sang her a lovely, lilting Khmer song, and asked her to do the same. Which she did. And did it very well. My oh my, this Miss Wanderlust is a girl of many hidden talents. Although while we were showering, some were perhaps not so well hidden as others. But i digress.

Miss W then translated the villagers' request for me to sing them a number. I sat up and looked about, confused. Are these people insane? Do I look like a Cambodian jukebox? I'm recuperating here, for Buddha's sake. Can't you see i'm having a relapse? But they would not take no for an answer. Not having any Khmer love tunes at the forefront of my repertoire, i figured Mexican was about as close to Cambodian as i was likely to get. At least they are both north of the Equator. So i launched into Warren Zevon's Carmelita:

I hear the Mariachi static on my radio
and the tubes they glow in the dark
and i'm there with her in Ensenada
and i'm here in Echo Park

Oh Carmelita, hold me tighter,
i think i'm sinking down
and i'm all strung out on heroin
on the outskirts of town.

Which seemed as appropriate a song as any. Well, it was either that or the Ramones' I Wanna Be Sedated - but i didn't have my ukelele. The nuns seemed to like it, especially the part where i pawn my Smith Corona and go to meet my man, who hangs out down on Alvarado Street, at the Pioneer Chicken stand.

We climbed the mountain, and met some more nuns on the other side. Miss W somehow convinced them to make us soup.

And we ate it like the ravenous, lost, wandering souls that we are.

Miss u, Miss W.

A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY

2009-07-26T23:25:00.006+08:00

Thank you, Miss Helen Randy, for your succinct observation.

LUST, DUST AND THE SEARCH FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

2009-07-21T21:22:00.022+08:00

For some reason, i was thinking we were just going for a quick burn around the village. On the borrowed 250. Maybe say hello to some of Miss Wanderust's Kampuchean friends, then back to the hut to crash out for the rest of the day. But perhaps that was just the Valium talking. And the fact that we'd been up all night. But once we hit the Battambang railway line - after coffee on low stools at a wooden roadhouse shack, hours of meandering dirt roads, rice paddies, coconut palms, and one road that simply ran straight into a lake - i realised i was not going to get any sleep. No. Not today.

Today we are riding out in search of enlightenment, seeking to find our way to a mythical, remote Buddhist mountain to visit monks who live in caves. To meditate, to sit atop boulders and soak up the time-space continuum, like a strawberry daquiri through a giant cosmic straw. If all goes according to plan, that is. Which it doubtless won't. But still, it's good to have a plan.

Miss W stops to ask directions from a couple of locals busily engaged in loading a nori train with sticks. A nori is one of those bamboo rail carts that motor up and down this almost disused railway line. Don't ask me why they are loading it with sticks. I've long since abandoned all hope of understanding how people eke out a living in this country; the whys and wherefores of their quotidian grind generally elude me. These two i suspect of being into speculation. Investors; they've picked up these sticks cheaply while the market is in freefall, only to sit on them and bide their time, waiting for the inevitable recovery of the global stick market.

The couple are friendly, but of course i don't understand a word they are saying. I've been living in the Penh too long, where you can get away with "turn left, turn right" and "watch out!" (an indispensable phrase when riding on the back of a moto) "how much is that?" and "too expensive!" And, of course, mi cha mowan, which is Khmer for chicken and fried noodles. Mmm. Chicken.

But i digress.

When you live in a village, however, it's another story. Wanderlust, over the past year working as a district schoolteacher, has pretty much mastered the tongue. The girl comes back with more vague secondhand directions, points in the direction of some distant mountains, climbs on the back of the bike, and we continue on our confused way. I drop the clutch, throttle on hard, and power away, clicking up through the gears. We're flying again, heading on through the sunshine and light on this benzodiazepam-fuelled dirt path to enlightenment.

It's insanely sunny, this wide open road. Are we literally heading for enlightenment, i wonder? Or just sunburn? Is this the one true path? We are, according to the girl, headed for a Buddhist pagoda, a huge phnom capped by an immense boulder, in the dead centre of nowhere, where monks live in caves, nuns make soup, and all is peace and light. Me? I'm not insensitive - i just don't care. I do love a motorcycle trip, even more so with a girl on the back. I'll just try to avoid running us off this wooden bridge and into that rice paddy, that's the way. Watch those potholes. Ooh, that's a big truck. I'm having fun. Enlightenment? It can wait.

The bike coughs and splutters, and i switch to reserve. There will be a village ahead somewhere with fuel in those one-litre glass cool drink bottles. 3800 riel, or about 90 cents. And maybe we can get some water. I'm parched. We come to a large stone archway over the road, and a T-junction. Turn right! Wanderlust shouts, flailing a vague, checkered-sleeve arm. A few kilometres down the track we come to a small village - in fact nothing much other than a wooden, tin-roofed shack - and pull up in a cloud of dust. Chickens scamper as curious kids appear from nowhere, munching cobs of corn. An old lady smiles us a toothless smile and says something in Khmer. She is clearly happy to see us.

We drink a couple of gallons of water, and stash a litre in Wanderlust's backpack. I down a tin of Red Bull, surprised i haven't yet dozed off at the handlebars. However, i'm not too happy about the sunburn. I've had my bare arms stretched ahead of me in a horizontal position, like some kind of speeding somnambulist, for the past two or three hours under this harsh tropical sun. They have turned a worrying shade of red. And without a helmet, i can feel my face taking on the unappealing incarnadine tinge of a boozed up Brit backpacker on Bondi Beach.

Wanderlust, at least, has a long-sleeved shirt, a pink krama and Jackie O sunglasses to protect her skin; her skin, delicate, young, smooth, soft, supple, elastic...

But i digress.

We fuel up the beast, and she does a bit of bartering with the villagers, managing to procure a long-sleeved shirt, hat, and a scarf for her scorched driver. Laughing, they throw in a rather delightful pink hat to match her krama and shoes. Thus outfitted with fresh supplies and bedecked in the style of your typical Cambodian weekend explorer, we mount the trusty steel steed and sally forth.

The road winds upwards, and slowly increases its rate of climb. There are no more villages, but we see the occasional oxcart and moto. The foliage is beginning to thicken. We pass under another large archway across the road. Beside it, caught in perpetual mid-stride, stands an impressively gigantic concrete elephant, an escapee from some long-forgotten concrete jungle. Two children sit underneath in its mammoth shade. The road continues upward.

Can this really be the path to the Buddhist mountain and enlightenment? Or is the truth far more harsh and tangible?

…/ to be continued

MISS WANDERLUST

2009-07-15T22:06:00.024+08:00

I’m exhausted, I say to Juanita the Lifestyle Editor. Too much sex. Too many drugs. I think I need a hobby.

Juanita glances at me over the partition between our computers.

Well, she says. How about rock and roll?

Two rounds of tequila shooters at a quarter to five in the morning in a rowdy strip club is a sure sign that I might just be up all night. The taxi to Kampong Chhnang is booked for 5am, and Miss Wanderlust and I are supposed to be in it. I’ve promised her she will be back at her village in time to take her English class at 7. But after a couple of tequilas, my American friend is back on the bar, pole dancing with the girls. She’s leaving next week. She’s going home. She doesn’t want to go.

I sit at a booth with Finch and Syd, who are drinking, and laughing at my attempts to procure a glass of water from the bar girls. No, I’m not buying you a drink, i say. No, I’m not interested in your services. No, i don't want a beer. I’m here to look after my friend. I’d like a glass of water please.

I’m parched. It’s been a long night, and what we haven’t smoked simply isn’t worth smoking.

The taxi will be outside my apartment in five minutes, I shout to Wanderlust on the bar. She nods, continuing to dance, doing the bump with one of the bar girls. Let’s go, I yell.

No, she shouts back over the appalling dance music. I’m staying here. She keeps dancing.

Wilful.

If there’s one word that describes Wanderlust, it is wilful. I met her at Equinox, where she was drinking water, and she appeared completely sane. But it has been one long wilful escapade since she turned up poolside at Blue Lime thirteen hours ago, without a swimsuit, but with some nice off the hook sake. After languid swim, a few swigs from the ceramic Japanese bottle, many many a cocktail, a bite of street food, some 50% rum from the Martinique Islands with coconut and chocolate at Dodo Rhum, followed by a party at Katarina’s apartment, a beer or two at Meta House, where we met the creator of Eastenders, then more cocktails at Fly, then more partying at Katarina's, then more cocktails and machetes at Café Ya,

followed by more partying at Katarina's, we found ourselves at Candy Bar. But from what I understand, it is crucial that my young friend makes it back to her village to see her students before she gets her flight home in a couple of days. She gyrates her hips with one of the girls. I don’t think she is prioritizing at the moment.

I again attempt to coax Wanderlust down off the bar. Finch and Syd, again, laugh. You’ve got no chance mate, says Syd. My phone rings. It’s Veary. Mr Mark, your taxi is here. He waiting. Where you?

We’ll be there in five, I shout into the cell phone. I return to the pole and take Wanderlust by the arm, and she leans down as i shout into her ear. I’m leaving. See you later.

I head for the door. Mark, wait, she says, climbing down from the bar top. Let’s go. Come see my village.

We ask the taxi driver to stop awhile riverside, as we lie on the low granite wall and wait for the sun to rise over the Tonle Sap. Long wooden boats motor by slowly in the still orange light. The American standard hangs limply overhead, just one of a string of flags that line Sisowath Quay. The sun is taking too long, we decide. Wanderlust flicks her cigarette. We leave in the taxi, eating rambutan, drinking beer. I pop a Valium. I figure I can get a quick nap in the car, and another while Wanderlust takes her class.

You’re my cousin, she tells me on our way up Highway 5. From America. I’ll have to explain you to my adopted Khmer family, she says. An American cousin? Oh god, this is just wholly inappropriate on a whole range of levels. I take another swig of beer. We talk, we eat. We don't sleep.

The taxi arrives gets us in just before seven. I am introduced briefly to the Cambodian family, as Mark, her American cousin, then led up the wooden stairs to Miss Wanderlust’s room. Wide wooden floorboards. Clothes, backpacks, posters, running shoes, food, bottles. A guitar. Make yourself at home, she says. I’ll be back. She changes and leaves in a brief whirlwind. I take another little yellow pill. I imagine it will be a fairly sedate day, pottering about the village. I fall asleep on the bed.

She shakes me awake. Let’s go, she says.

It seems like I’ve only been asleep ten minutes. How long have I been asleep? I ask. Ten minutes, she says.

I sit up and look around. My mind has a fuzzbox connected somewhere between my eyelids and my brain stem. A phaser is inline with my ears.

My class didn’t turn up, she says. But that’s Cambodia. No means yes, and yes means no. She bounces on the bed. Let’s go.

Uh - where are we going?

Well, she says. Can you ride a dirt bike?

…/ to be continued

BACON AND PEANUT PASTE SANDWICHES

2009-07-10T00:08:00.003+08:00

JULY RECIPE OF THE MONTH
With thanks to Barb Coddington

Fried bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. I have never made this, and the propane can on my single burner stove is empty and i don't have the necessary 30 cents to have it refilled. But if i did, i would, if i could.

PREPARATION TIME
Not take long.

INGREDIENTS
Serves 1
2 slices of bread
1 piece of bacon, rindless if you prefer
Peanut butter, or peanut paste, depending on your hemisphere

RECOMMENDED WINE
A Puligny-Montrachet white should do.

METHOD
Fry bacon. Butter both sides of the bread with peanut paste. Put bacon in the middle.

GUACAMOLE AND PICTURE TOAST

2009-06-30T18:39:00.008+08:00

JUNE RECIPE OF THE MONTH
With thanks to Lulu Wayward

Guacamole and picture toast. Sure, you can just cut open an avocado and spread it on a bit of toast - there’s nothing wrong with that. And while I do believe I should be able to draw a salary simply for getting out of bed in the morning, that doesn’t mean I’m lazy. No no no. But by laying claim to being a creative genius, I’ve put myself in the situation where I must, every now and then, do something creative. So in this month’s recipe, I am going to combine finger-painted toast with avocados and cilantro to create something exquisitely and vaguely Mexican.

PREPARATION TIME
It’s not the Sistine Chapel. It’s toast and dip. 10 minutes.

INGREDIENTS
Serves 2
A few slices of raw toast
2 large Haas avocados
2-3 tomatoes, depending on size
Half a large red onion
Cilantro, cumin, chili and lime juice to taste
Extra wedges of lime and salt
Oh, and a smidgen of garlic

RECOMMENDED WINE
Tequila. It's Mexican for 'wine'.

METHOD
Put Beck's 'Guero' on the stereo, take the middles out of the tomatoes and dice finely. Then close the Facebook window of your browser. Let’s face it - you’ll not get anywhere with this recipe with Facebook running. Part of the reason why I have become so utterly bone idle lately when it comes to blogging is…well, you know the reason. And why should fiddling about with tomatoes be any different? Or avocados? I’ll just get the pips out of those avocados when something either interesting or uninteresting will happen on Facebook. It’s the same with trying to write while at work…for example, Miss Wayward’s chat window will open up, with the words “I’m bored.”

And then the guacamole will go out the window. Or the front page of the paper will be put on the backburner.

Either way, it spells devastation in the kitchen.

“I might do some work...or I might make a necklace out of paperclips and pretend to read something relevant,” Lulu muses. “Choices, choices.”

While she may seem angelic, I have the devil’s own time concentrating once she starts talking about paperclip jewellery. Or goats. Concentrate. Think about the stuff they put in cartons of apple juice. Concentrate. Once you manage to get the pips out of the avocados, don’t toss them in the bin. Put them aside for later, after the washing up, and then rub them lovingly in your hands. My friend Sarah Toa swears by it. The oil in the avocados will work wonders on your skin.

“I accidentally went out with those Canadian chefs last night,” the Lulu window informs. “We were talking about goats and stuff.”

Fuck the goats, concentrate. The task at hand. Spoon out the luscious avocado, and combine it with the finely chopped onion and garlic in a large bowl. Mash it up with a fork. Do not, under any circumstances, use a blender. If you use a blender, the ghosts of one million Mexican mamas from times past will come and haunt the shit out of you. I have this on good authority.

Now, add the cilantro, cumin, chilli and lime juice to taste. If, like me, you have no idea what cilantro is, use coriander. Now for the exquisitely creative part.

Before you put the toast in the toaster, wet your finger under the tap and draw a little pattern on the bread. You could try a Mexican sombrero. Or i guess the eyebrows of Frida Kahlo would be easy, though you might have to employ your middle finger to get the required thickness. Use your imagination. Draw something Mexican. Try a nice pastoral scene of a drug lord shooting up a border town.

Now although I’ve claimed that I was going to do something creative, by now you will have realised that this was an outright lie. In my defense, I must point out that I don’t own a toaster in Cambodia, nor is there one in the office. So these samples of picture toast were simply culled, à la most blogs of note, directly from the Internet. But that's no excuse for you not to make your own. And while i realise retro video games have very little to do with guacamole, fuck it. Life is full of surreal juxtapositions.

“Turned up at an important meeting with some Korean businessmen today, unknowingly still wearing my paperclip jewellery,” Lulu says. “Realised halfway through. Still, one must persevere in maintaining the illusion of sophistication, innit.”

Spread the dip on the toast and away you go. Use the extra wedges of lime and salt to down the tequila. And close that fucking Facebook window.

TWO FRONTAL LOBOTOMIES, PLEASE

2009-05-04T09:13:00.048+08:00

It was around that time i had my eyebrows blown off in a bizarre mining accident.

There were too many of us. We were in the bush, and little by little, we went insane. We worked hard, pulling twelve hour shifts, drilling, sampling, putting in grid lines - but once we finished work there was really nothing much to do except drink, smoke, or blow things up. Or sometimes, all three. The Broad Arrow Tavern, the set of the 1971 Googie Withers film Nickel Queen, was 30 kilometres down the track, and we'd go there for Sunday sessions. The nurses would come up from Kalgoorlie. We'd drink, play pool. Then back to work.

We were out looking for gold. Camped at a place called Ora Banda in the Western Australian goldfields. BHP Minerals Group, Gold Exploration. Prospectors, like my grandfather, had been looking for gold around there since Paddy Hannan struck it rich in 1893. And there was plenty of it. But it was not all gold and glamour. Part of the job was running the camp, and keeping a tidy camp meant disposing of rubbish. So we would throw it down the old mine shafts, and every now and then, pour a gallon of petrol down there and burn it off. For entertainment value, we'd sometimes throw in a half-full, sealed drum of fuel as well, and sit back with our tinnies, and wait for it to explode dramatically into the night sky. One time, during a routine burning off operation, the burning rag i threw at the fuel-filled mine shaft didn't quite make it into the hole. So i wandered over to complete the job. Needless to say, the fuel vapour in the shaft exploded and knocked me onto my back.

I walked back into camp, and ran into one of the geologists, a fellow by the name of Swan. "What was that noise?" he asked. "Sounded like an explosion."
Oh, nothing, i said. Just burning off some trash.
Swan stared at me for a moment. "Sacre blurter," he said. "You've got no eyebrows."
I had no idea what 'sacre blurter' meant, but Swan was always saying it. He was always putting small rocks into his mouth too, sucking them, and then looking at them under a lupe.

I never really understood geology.

Every now and then, there would be something much more interesting to do, something that didn't involve rocks or garbage. Like the famous 1985 Nurses' Cocktail Party. The poor things. Posted out there in the sticks to serve a year in Kalgoorlie - they were almost as sexually frustrated as we were. Almost. They invited all the miners for miles around.

It was always going to be a messy affair. But it was elaborate. They hired a piano player, and filled the entire hall - which, interestingly, was downstairs from the nurses' dormitories - with tables, each table holding a different array of spirits and liqueurs, along with glassware and carefully hand-written recipes for an enormous range of cocktails. Little plastic graduated cylinders used for dispensing medicines were standing by for good measure. I turned up with Bernie, who set about showing the nurses how to really mix a cocktail, à la Tom Cruise, dispensing with the dispensers, twirling bottles through the air, pouring liquor from a great height, and creating knockout drinks.

The piano player's name was Swifty. He was 66 years old, bald, wrinkled, with huge bags under his eyes. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled perpetually from Swifty's lower lip, somehow defying gravity. Swifty could play anything. You could request any song, from the past, present or even future, and Swifty would nod sagely, ash dropping from his smoke, and continue playing his particular version of ragtime blues. I don't remember him stopping for more than half a beat the entire night.

Needless to say, i moved from one table to another, intent on working my way through each cocktail recipe, and i became somewhat inebriated. Well, this is what we were here for. It's not exactly sex and drugs and rock and roll, but this is the bush. Allowances have to be made.

One of the nurses zigzagged over to the table where i was trying to mix a Flaming Lamborghini.
"What happened to your eyebrows," she said. She was drunk. I was drunk.
"Lost them in a poker game," i said.
She seemed pretty. Tall, dark hair, dark eyes. I noticed she had legs.
"Let's get a drink," she said.
"Good idea." I knocked back the Lamborghini without setting fire to it. I'd decided to avoid playing with matches. We staggered across the hall to find Bernie, who made us his specialty: the Frontal Lobotomy. We had a few of these. Things were spiralling out of control. There were people dancing by the piano - no, there were people dancing on the piano - as Swifty continued in his inimitable style. A couple were making out on one of the tables, the liquor pushed off onto the floor. I suddenly realised i was having trouble standing up. I reached out to the nurse for stability. She mistook this for an act of intimacy, and kissed me wetly on the mouth. "Let's go upshtairs," she slurred.
"I very much doubt i can make it up even a single flight of stairs," i said. At least, that's what i imagined i was saying. It came out more like, "Mrrgh skkk dlb." Clinging to each other for mutual support, we perambulated like a dizzy quadruped towards the foyer, where a wide staircase curved upwards to the nurses' quarters, and, no doubt, carnal bliss.

We paused in the fluorescent-lit foyer to study the swaying staircase. This was going to be difficult. We kissed again, and she began to undo my belt. I tried to take off her dress, and got it part way over her head before we both fell over onto the floor.

When the police arrived, one of them prodded me gently with his boot. By this time, the nurse and i were entangled head to toe on the linoleum, where i was attempting, with no great success, to perform cunnilingus. I'm not sure how long we had been there, or whether we had fallen asleep at any point in the interim.

"Come on, mate," the police constable said. "Looks like you've had enough."
"Enough?" i mumbled. "We are just getting started."

FASTING

2009-05-01T18:26:00.000+08:00

MAY RECIPE OF THE MONTH

Drink some water. Don't eat anything. Do this for a few days.

iCHICKEN

2009-04-30T23:59:00.039+08:00

APRIL RECIPE OF THE MONTH

Warm chicken salad, with watermelon, feta and pepitas. For when you’ve had enough curried chicken amok to last a lifetime, you’ve got the lonesome lovesick blues, and you feel like falling asleep with your face in some really classy food without burning your nose.

Doctor Abigail's chicken-free version.

PREPARATION TIME
Cooking time is around thirty minutes to half an hour, longer if you are on Valium. You'll need scissors, a corkscrew, and maybe some razor blades. Anything sharp will do.

INGREDIENTS
Serves one person and a refrigerator
Half a chicken (as Kierkegaard once said, half a chicken is better than no chicken at all)
100g pepitas
Half a watermelon-sized watermelon
250g feta cheese
Sesame oil
Juice of two limes
Sea salt and cracked pepper

CHOOSING A WINE
The phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejects the rationalist view of an autonomous subject who can make fully objective decisions. On the other hand, he rejects determinist views of the world as constituted of solid objects, including our bodies, which follow hard causal laws. For Merleau-Ponty, people are ambiguously free. People are neither completely determined by the things in which they are embedded, nor are they completely independent of them. Thing-person interactions are ambiguous. One cannot determine how much an action or response is self-motivated, motivated by the thing itself, or by previous interactions with things that influence the current interaction. I hope this helps.

METHOD
Make sure you have a corkscrew handy. Like W.C. Fields, i was once stranded without a corkscrew and had to survive on nothing but food and water for days.

Open the wine. If your hands shake as you do this, it could be a sign of malaria, or worse, that other tropical malaise, the dreaded delirium tremens. Either way, it might be best if you were to open the wine and let it sit and breathe while you mix some pre-drink drinks. I recommend Valium with a gin and tonic chaser. This should cover all the bases.

Knock back the G&T&V and mix another. Now, plug in the iPod and dial up some music. Because there is no way you should be fooling around trying to turn over an LP twenty-two minutes from now. You know you’ll either scratch your record really badly or fall asleep and wake up with grooves on the side of your face. Use the iPod. Try Floating Into The Night (1989) by dream pop artist Julee Cruise.

While you are still capable, grab a pair of scissors and cut the chicken into bite-sized pieces. Mind your fingers. Heat up some sesame oil in the pan and throw in the chicken. It should make a sound like a high voltage transmission line on a humid day. Meanwhile, slice the watermelon into wedge-sized wedges.

When the chicken is nearly done - and make sure it is done, don't get me started on pink bits at this point - throw in a handful of pepita seeds, those green things that come out of pumpkins. Did say 100g? I’m not really good at estimating the weight of anything that is not a white powder. Let’s just call it a handful, shall we? Once you’ve browned the chicken and pepitas, throw it into a large bowl and let it cool for a while. You’re making a warm chicken salad here. Now is the right time to get started on the wine. Pour out a generous splash.

Women. Don't get me started on women...

Once the chickeny pepita stuff has cooled a bit, toss in the watermelon and crumble the feta, then squeeze on the lime juice. Be generous with the lime juice, the sea salt, and the cracked pepper. Hmm. Is the word 'generous' really applicable if it is only for your own self? Surely not. So instead, be greedy with the lime juice, the sea salt, and the cracked pepper. Serve up however much you think you can eat before you float off into the night. Grab some cling wrap and, à la Bad Boy Bubby, cling wrap the rest and put it in the refrigerator. Because tomorrow will be another long, lonely, and generally soul-sapping day in which you will once again require sustenance. But then, maybe tomorrow you could ditch the self-pity and try something with mushrooms. The mushrooms here in the Penh are, by all reports, magic.

Drugs. Now don't get me started on drugs...

SURROUNDED BY ALLEGATORS

2009-04-19T20:53:00.053+08:00

Khmer New Year in Kampot. It was just fantastic. And i'm not talking about the barbecued ribs.

The holiday in the 'Pot with my fellow journalists was, allegedly, wild. Unfortunately i remember nothing. But since returning to work the stories have been flowing thick and fast: many, varied, and unrelenting. Because journalists are known for primarily two things: the ability to tell stories, and alcoholism. So naturally, we took to a holiday in a well-stocked bar like crayfish to raw sewage.

Apart from purportedly holding the Bodhi Villa bar in thrall with a stolen guitar and stolen tunes from Warren Zevon and the Ramones, the Art Director also, according to eye-witness reports, danced semi-naked with a topless midget who had walked into the Villa in the early hours, straight to the bar to order a joint, and, after it was allegedly consumed, challenged A.D. to a near-naked dance-off á la Zoolander, but without the underpants. Here i must stress the word allegedly. These journalists are slippery customers. Especially when they are oiled up with body lotion. One of them even claims that i confessed an undying love to our Lifestyle Editor, Juanita, but by part way through the second morning i had regained my senses...

I awake, naked, in a room above the bar, alongside our Supplements Editor, and begin a search, traipsing the length and breadth of the Villa, for my missing clothes, only to find them on my return in a sodden heap next to my bed. Sensibly, i elect to pull on swimming trunks, return to the bar, and breakfast on a fruit shake with two shots of Creme de Bananes.

It is at this point that i begin to pull focus. Finch. The spectacles. Last night's skinny dipping and its subsequent consequences. Clearly, it is time for me to go freediving at the bottom of the Kampot River. Finch, our illustrious deputy chief editor, lost his spectacles the previous night while trying to swim upriver from the floating pontoon to his bungalow while carrying a bottle of Pimms and two glasses of ice. And now i must, i simply must, find his spectacles: my bar tab is dependent upon it. For although things are spiralling rapidly out of control, Finch has offered a cash reward.

Photo: Tracey Shelton

"I'll give you twenty dollars if you can come up with my glasses," Finch yells, somewhat recklessly, from the bar. This is Cambodia, where twenty US dollars is the equivalent of five bottles of Russian vodka. And while i am already haplessly diving and groping about in the mud in two fathoms of water at the bottom of the river, the prospect of ready cash pushes me to lift my game. I clamber up the pontoon and accost Zoë - easily the skinniest of the last night's skinny dippers - who has just returned from another of her legendary cross-river swims. I put on her swimming goggles. We are, after all, professionals. After the next dive i come up, having held my breath right to its limit, only to crack my head on the bottom of the pontoon. Air - wherefore art thou, air? I have little time to ponder why all Cambodian rivers are about as transparent as a Eugene Ionesco play as i search in desperation for the surface. Eventually, fighting panic, i think laterally, swim sideways, and come up, thankfully gasping a lungful of the languid Kampot air, by the speedboat.

I hoist myself up onto the steps, and notice a beautiful young woman lying on the pontoon, half in and half out of her bikini. She seems vaguely familiar, this sunlit blossom of ladyflower. But i must not be distracted. My further inebriation may depend upon my success. I dive again, and again, and again, and i find some glasses all right - a sorry-looking pint mug, and two wine glasses.

"Those look like the glasses i was carrying last night," yells Finch, and drags on a cigarette. This is a valuable clue. I do some quick calculations. Figuring on the lighter weight of his spectacles, the direction of last night's current (today it flows in the opposite direction, with the incoming tide) and the direction in which the beautiful young woman from the pontoon is now swimming, i set a trajectory like a catenary and dive again. Against all odds, there they are, sitting upright on the bottom of the river, as if Finch had casually got up to switch off a reading lamp. I come up next to the bikini girl. "I found them," i whisper into her startled, wet, and yet somehow sublimely beautiful face.

When i casually stroll up the gangplank wearing Finch's spectacles, an air of stunned disbelief descends upon the bar. Zoë steps forward. "I just want to shake your hand," she says. "This is unbelievable." I'm sure her disbelief stems mainly from the idea that she may not get her goggles back, because she takes these from me quite deftly during her brief congratulations. Finch, too, looks momentarily gleeful, then morose.
"I guess i owe you twenty dollars," he says.
"You got that right," i say.

The promised $20 reward goes toward paying my bar tab, which is extensive, even though, apart from the Chuck Norris cocktails, and a few Black Russians, and the morning heart-starters, i imagine i have spent the past twenty four hours drinking only from my smuggled $4 bottle of Bacardi rum, which i allegedly last night drained and threw into the river, before spending the next half hour asking people if they had seen my bottle of Bacardi. Again, i stress: allegedly.

The bikini girl comes up and dresses for breakfast, and it is then that i suddenly realise that i have indeed met her before and the only reason, in a somewhat ironic and bizarre twist, that i didn't recognise her on the pontoon was because she didn't have her clothes on. She is, as it turns out, the inimitable Lulu Wayward from last week's performance of the Vagina Monologues. A play which of course i didn't go to see, owing to my Freudian castration anxieties, but we really needn't go into that at this juncture. However we did publish Lou's picture in The Paper, a fact which Lou was not remiss in drawing to the attention of her Spacebook acolytes: "Lulu Wayward is congratulating the PP Post for choosing to print the ugliest picture of her in the entire world - what did I do to you?!?!"

And indeed the picture did not do her justice, because Lulu is absolutely fabulous - only a whole lot funnier, and with a greater capacity for alcohol and cigarettes than Joanna Lumley. All she needs to do now is work on her accent. It's just way too London. We get to talking, and the allegations continue. I am surrounded by allegators, so it seems. As Lou recounts over breakfast, i met her last night, for the second night running, introduced myself, for the second night running, then asked where she was from, to which she replied "South of England... near London" and to which i, apropos of nothing at all, responded, "Well, you can go fuck yourself." And the previous night, Lulu continues, i invited her, again shortly after introducing myself, to an impromptu modelling shoot the following morning. Now this, like the skull of the Hunchback of Notre Dame when he doesn't have his mind on the job and is struck by two hundredweight of solid brass, rings a bell.

"Yes, i do remember that," i say, putting my hands up to my head. "But you never turned up."
She shakes her blonde head and lets out an exasperated sigh. "Yes i did," she says.
"You so did not - i was here at the bar waiting for you at 7am," i say.
"I was here at six," she says. "You said six."
Now this is the sole mental image i am unable to erase from my memory. And i wasn't even there.

Lulu then begins to recount a very interesting theory. "And you know what else?" she says. "Whales. Whales beach themselves because they are driven by evolutionary forces beyond their control, which make them attempt to walk on land. And if Darwinism is correct, which it indubitably is, eventually one of these hapless creatures will harness the requisite genetic mutation to manage to do just that, and stumble up the beach into oncoming traffic..."

I interrupted her in amazement, pleased to hear that my postmodern evolutionary theories on apsirational whales have finally reached a wider and more appreciative audience.

"That's amazing!" i say. "Where did you hear that?"
I am, naturally, incredibly curious about the six degrees of separation through which she has stumbled en route to my theory. Lulu stares at me blankly for a moment and says, "You were talking about it to me last night. And I must say it's the biggest load of fucking bollocks i've ever heard in my entire life."
"Well, you're only young," i proffer.

And it was only when she started talking, over a cheeseburger with cheese at the Rusty Keyhole later that night - about the preposterous Klang Beer challenge, the man-eating piranhas, the rules that apply to fucking goats, gastronomically adventurous spiders, dead dogs and the fact that the human body is an amazing thing - it was only then that i knew i was in love.

Photo: Tracey Shelton

Which of course i had forgotten all about by morning. Because i'm pretty sure i introduced myself to Lulu all over again later that evening, and it is statistically probable that again i told her to go fuck herself. "South of England... near London? Well, you can go fuck yourself." And this morning, i remember nothing. But such is the nature of the 'Pot, the Villa, and those god damned Black Russians.

THE JEFF BUCKLEY SCHOOL OF SWIMMING

2009-04-05T22:00:00.050+08:00

Taking a few capsules of pure codeine and lounging around the pool for a day before the race was probably not the best training regimen for a eight-hundred-and-seventy metre river swim.

Halfway across the river, as i choke on another lungful of the muddy Mekong, and its currents do their best to drag me down and across the border into Vietnam, i begin having second thoughts. In fact, what i am having is more along the lines of an existential crisis, but this is no time to split hairs. I am thinking this enterprise would best be filed under the heading "It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time." Deciding to enter the 14th annual Mekong River Swim. Having a number drawn on my arm with a thick felt pen and wading out into these warm waters, my feet squelching alongside 150 other, slightly more seasoned, quite obviously more fit, and almost certainly better-prepared swimmers.

In a bar with Kate Liana in the early hours of this morning i decided how i could not only do this swim, but do it easily. I had an epiphany over a Kahlua on ice, as i came to the sudden realisation that even though i can hardly swim at all, suffer chronic asthma, am prone to panic attacks and on the wrong side of a mid-life crisis, all i needed do was to put my mind to it. This, so it seemed, was simplicity itself. Time after time, when an athlete wins an Olympic gold medal or sets a new record for the clean and jerk, she will explain the secret of her success: "This is proof that you can do anything at all if only you put your mind to it."

I switch to backstroke. This has the added advantage of giving me a more line-of-sight approach to my frantic prayer-making. My second thoughts are returning, bringing with them, like unwelcome mental gatecrashers, some menacing third, and even fourth thoughts. Because, in the harsh light of day (and this sun is indeed very harsh: it is the kind of sun that Richard Brautigan must have been suffering under when he wrote: "The sun was like a huge 50 cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match, and said, 'Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,' and put the coin in my hand, but never came back") the problem with this "proof", elucidated so regularly and with varying degrees of articulation by our sporting greats, is that it simply doesn't hold water. Unlike my fucking lungs. If one person wins, how is this proof that anyone can do it? Statistically speaking, a sample size of one is hardly what you would call representative. What about the other ninety-nine hundred and ninety-nine people who also put their mind to it? I look up from my backstroke to find i have been swimming in a slow circle.

After helping Kate Liana finish her final pot of beer, and agreeing with her that yes, we should indeed totally do brunch, and agreeing to meet her at the boat first thing in the morning for the swim, i went home, lay on the bed, and put my mind to it. It was simple. All i needed to do, when i turned up for the swim in a scant few hours, was to focus my thoughts on the opposite bank of the river. Then, if these Olympians were right, my mind would somehow carry me across to the other side like a kind of mental ferry, without the tedious physical reality of kicking or paddling coming into it at all.

In the 13th annual Mekong River Swim, last year, the circling boats had plucked one sorry "competitor" from the opaque waters of the Mekong in the final stages of drowning. He had been drinking heavily the whole of previous day and night, and had, so the story goes, only left the Heart Of Darkness bar that morning with barely enough time to fetch a towel on his way to the river. Of course, nobody had thought to prevent someone so obviously and totally inebriated from entering the event. Such an idea, id est, limiting someone's freedom, could scarcely have been entertained. This is, after all, Cambodia.

"If i don't make it, i want my 2009 Mekong River Swim t-shirt to go to my son," i say to Zoë, as we stand waist-deep in the river awaiting the gun. Zoë is speaking to me again, and has seemingly forgiven my trespasses of several days ago when i tried to abduct her, strip her naked and strap her to Russian military hardware for the purposes of Art. She has adopted the defensive approach deployed by many of my female friends: let us just assume he is joking. Of course, Zoë doesn't realise that the peril which i face is utterly real: she swims a kilometre or two every morning at the pool at the Himawari Hotel, so for her, a 870m swim is nothing. A swim that is, for me, like a jet aircraft dropping, all aflame, to dramatically disintegrate on impact with the water, is for her just a drop in the ocean. She has no idea of the circumspect solemnity with which i impart this information: "If i don't make it..."

Zoë is covering the swim for The Paper, in the time-honoured Gonzo style of immersing herself in her subject. The metaphorical gun is fired by someone shouting "Go!" (are these organisers really so hopeless that they can't find a loaded pistol in Phnom Penh?) and we splash forth, a human flotilla of flailing limbs, goggles, and funny rubber hats.

Needless to say, the Lord answered my prayers, otherwise this post would have been cranked out by the Electric Nerve phrase generating machine (which can easily replace me as a writer because, as Scottish journalist Gilbert Adair notes - a writer whose own translation of the French book La Disparition by Georges Perec into English is faithful to the original in that it does not contain even once the letter 'e' - "writers these days don't write, they process words") and my Mekong t-shirt would be in a Fed Ex box on its way to my by now completely orphaned son. But it was not to be. After giving up putting my mind to swimming, after giving up the idea of fixing a picture of the opposite bank firmly in my mind, and beginning to actually swim, after another fifteen minutes or so in the water, I finally manage to haul my sorry ass up the clay bank - only to find not only can these alleged "organisers" not find a gun in Cambodia, but they can't even even find enough drinking water for 150 competitors - after i stumble up the clay bank, looking, bleary-eyed, through a thin film of water pollution, disillusioned, and not quite stone motherless last but, instead, sincerely grateful to the morbidly obese, blind, retarded girl who may take that honour but a few strokes behind me, after thanking the Lord (and my finishing the swim is clearly proof of Her existence), a whole 32 minutes and 16 seconds after the invisible gun, after i stumble up the bank into the middle of nowhere only to find an old Khmer lady trying to sell me a silk krama (like where do you think i keep my money, lady? Up my ass?) i begin to wonder why i didn't take more advantage of the organisers' completely lax approach to testing for performance-enhancing drugs.

Zoë did it in 14. But for me, 32:16 was a personal best. For a Mekong River Swim. Which, of course, is proof that you can do anything at all if only you put your mind to it.

These days i'm putting my mind to returning to the saltwater pool at Blue Lime, to continue my training regime. Only this time i need to be far more disciplined. The codeine will have to go.

Clearly, what we need at Blue Lime is opium.

MANGOES, MODERNISM AND MADNESS

2009-04-03T12:49:00.045+08:00

I always knew sooner or later i would end up in the ghetto.

Having stopped to photograph some kids framed by a long, dark corridor, i turn to find the rest of my group has vanished somewhere inside this labyrinthine, bleak, and decades-old experiment in social housing. Like most 1960s modernist low-cost apartment blocks, the White Building will end its days as a slum. But it lasted longer than most. It even outlasted the death of modernism, the sudden and final throes of which came on July 15, 1972, according to postmodern architect Charles Jencks. That was the day the prize-winning Pruitt-Igoe housing development was demolished in St Louis. Thirty-three eleven story buildings. 2870 apartments. And, on the original plan, not one playground.

Ah, but the premise; the promise. "Better living through architecture." Le Corbusier. Mies van der Rohe. The power of the minimial, the rational, the positive - what a grand progressive project. A project which ultimately failed to account for the fact that life is, well - messy.

But in Cambodia, no building is so bad as to be unlivable. I walk to the end of the dank corridor, which smells faintly of urine, past a couple of open doors looking in on squalid interiors, to an open breezeway between the blocks. While not exactly lost, i have no idea where i am heading. They must be in here somewhere. I'm on a tour of Khmer New Architecture, and am beginning to feel that a walking tour of Phnom Penh, at this time of year, is one of the more arcane forms of madness.

I wipe away the sweat and take another sip of water. Bedspreads hang over the rails of the stairwell. A small shop is set up on the floor outside one of the apartments, vending the basic stuff of life. We've just visited a tiny school downstairs, the only education option for these kids, all of whom work - some picking over the rubbish dump, some doing heavy manual labour. Some young Khmer men, shirtless, are leaning against the stair, joking amongst themselves. Probably wondering what this barang is doing on their block. The answer, as usual, lies in my curious and Quixotic tendencies. As one reader of The Nerve says: I will just think of you as the Knight of Lost Causes. But, lost cause or no, it has been difficult not to notice this huge, decaying apartment block, given its rude proximity to my workplace.

The offices of The Paper are housed in the Grey Building - the other half of this pigeon pair of Vann Molyvann buildings on the Front du Bassac - and one side of my office looks out over its buzzing, blackened hive, out over a no-man's land of desolate rubble from the recently demolished Dey Krahorm. A little over two months ago, 600 thugs and riot police working with developer 7NG descended on this poor community to ruthlessly evict them, destroying everything in their path. Because we simply must have another shopping mall.

Phnom Penh (Cambodia). 24/01/2009:
Police aiming a straight-shot tear gas gun during the final eviction at Dey Krohorm.
©John Vink/ Magnum

The White Building is next in line. "We are not aiming to save this building, its future has already been written," says Maria, who runs a photography project in the Building, giving cameras and lessons to its inhabitants, who faithfully document their frankly astonishing lives. "It's difficult to tell people they have to stay here, in a building that's falling apart. No-one wants to be here. The building was designed as a social housing project - the biggest in South East Asia - but what it has come to represent is the complete opposite." I swelter up another flight of stairs, searching fruitlessly for the others in my party. An old man points along a corridor.

The beautiful, minimalist, staggered-block designs of Vann Molyvann's Grey and White buildings have long since been effaced. The high-end version, the Grey Building, constructed from granite, had its open terraces and uneven skyline filled in, to create an ugly monolothic box that is now the Phnom Penh Centre. Which has been painted white. The White Building, in an ironic twist, has meanwhile turned grey in its tropical environment. I find the rest of the group deep in the concrete intestines of the White Building by following the sounds of music: they are crammed into a tiny apartment watching some bizarre performance art.

Vann Molyvann, Cambodian protegé of Le Corbusier, studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning here in 1956. With the patronage of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, he then set about building most of the city's landmarks. The National Stadium, Independence Monument, the State Palace, the Institute of Foreign Languages, the 100 Houses Project...and a nice house, Knai Bang Chatt, on the beach at Kep, which you can see here when you click on "Concept". Or go on the virtual tour, drag the cursor around and get dizzy. Go on. Vann Molyvann and the other New Khmer Architects turned what had become a dirt-road backwater into an elegant capital city of wide boulevards and vaulting public buildings. In Building Cambodia: New Khmer Architecture 1953-1970 Helen Grant Ross describes the results: "Roofs fly, weights lift off the ground, and concrete, crazy paving, louvred walls, light and shade play in the tropical climate." Yes, indeed they do. Or did.

Shoes, sandals and the ubiquitous flip-flops lie scattered outside the door. It seems there is some Apsara dancing going on. Until this point, i haven't been privy to any Apsara. I wander in and sit cross-legged on one of Vann Molyvann's concrete floors, and watch as the girls elegantly twist and turn before these grimy yellow walls.

"Apsara dancing!" Kate Liana splutters when i tell her of the day's events, as we swim languidly in the saltwater pool paradise that is the Blue Lime. "Was it torture?"
It was hard sitting cross-legged on that concrete floor, i must admit. I should get along to some of Liana's yoga classes. But torture?
"I thought it was ok," i mumble defensively.
"How long have you been here? You'll get sick of it soon enough, don't worry," she says, smoothing aside her long hair. She takes a sip of her cocktail. "How can they call it dancing, anyway?"
"What do you mean?"
"Apsara dancing - it just runs those poor women through a series of poses designed to reinforce their status as demure and submissive," she explains.
I suppose they did look rather - i don't know - subservient?
"I thought the music was nice," i say, meaning, in fact, "But Kate, if it weren't for these submissive and subservient women, i wouldn't be able to have any slaves! Who would clean the tiled floor in my kitchen? Who would do my laundry? Jesus!"
Remind me to ask my maid if she does Apsara dancing. Sometimes there's just nothing on TV.

In 2001, Vann Molyvann's Olympic Stadium was sold to a Taiwanese developer, who reneged on a deal to renovate the modernist gem as part of the deal. Instead, he filled in the hydraulic ponds that were designed, like the famous moats of Angkor Wat, to drain away the monsoonal rains. Filled them in with a series of shoddy, low-rise retail buildings. And if it's not Taiwanese Trash going up, it's Korean Nouveau Bland or Chinese Baroque. In 2007, Vann Molyvann's elegant National Theatre building was torn town after it was sold to a private developer. And the beautiful, fan-shaped structure of the Chaktomuk Theatre is now also in the hands of a private developer.

Van Molyvann. He's still living in Phnom Penh now, but must be well into his eighties. But when the Golden Age of Khmer architecture came to a brutal end in 1970, with the coup d’état led by the American-backed General Lon Nol, Vann fled to Switzerland. It must have been painful for him to watch the events that then unfolded. Year zero, 1975, the Khmer Rouge - no fans of cities - marched into Phnom Penh and evacuated the entire population, driving them out of the city, out into work camps in the country, into a prison without walls. They abolished cities, they abolished money. And that was just the start.

"They took Cambodia from a country in the process of development to a communal society without the slightest vestige of the modern or the urban," Vann Molyvann said. The Khmer Rouge even attempted to blow up some of his buildings. But the present threat of development is far more dangerous. It is a powderkeg on a short fuse set to cause far more damage to these stunning heritage buildings.

"The buildings survived being abandoned better than they've survived being misused," says Helen Grant Ross.

I peel a mango. Everything in this country is up for sale: its land, its heritage, its people. Cambodia: where everything is permitted but nothing is legal. Prostitution is illegal but is endemic. Marijuana is illegal, of course - but it is a commonplace for a barman to roll up a scoob of Cambodian red and pass it around the bar. Just as happened at Dodo Rhum House last night, where i had ducked in to escape the rain.

"It's just mango rain," says Remy, pointing out the open shopfront at the heavy downpour. "It is not rainy season until June." Three Frenchman are sitting around smoking and parlezing Français. Remy, behind the bar, serves me a rum cordial, this one flavoured with coffee. A joint goes around. I realise one of these two Stefans is a work colleague. The other Stefan, who runs Factory on Street 140, describes the night three thugs armed with machine guns tried to force their way into his house over some disagreement.
"My girlfiend and I, we were hiding under the table," he says. "There were three locks on the front door, they broke the top one, pow, then the middle one, pow, and started on the bottom one. I knew if the bottom one went we were dead," he says, matter-of-factly. "I could see the machine guns through the gap in the door. Luckily the last lock held. Lucky for me."

Or Cantina bar, where that affable Californian, Hurley, introduces Liana and i to famous war photographer Tim Page. Who immediately passes me a joint. Framed war photographs and kitsch posters from Mexican movies grace the walls. Hurley's Cantina sign, above our heads, is made from bent and welded barrels of guns, including the always dependable AK47. "Always aim for the center of the seen mass," advises my ex-Army friend and travelling companion, Raoul. "And when shooting women or children, don't lead them by as much...they run slower." And you might think he is joking.

Page is searching for the remains of his friend, the opium-smoking journalist Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who disappeared in April 1970, while travelling by motorcycle in the Cambodian countryside. Flynn and Dana Stone (on assignment for Time magazine and CBS News respectively) were captured by communist guerrillas. They were never heard from again.

"It's disappointing, when months of painstaking research takes you out onto a limb, where you reach a point where someone knows someone who was there when they were shot, but then it transpires that that person was also later shot, and the branch just breaks, you are back to the starting point, back on ground level," says Page. He talks at length, and it's interesting stuff.

Tim Page's portrait of Sean Flynn
from www.andybrouwer.co.uk/blog

But this is Phnom Penh, and there's always something more interesting to do. Like going out and partying at a lesbian wedding dance on board a boat on the Mekong River.

But that, as they say in the classics, is another story.

WHOLLY INAPPROPRIATE ON A WHOLE RANGE OF LEVELS

2009-03-28T15:32:00.019+09:00

"There's enough material in Phnom Penh to keep you going for a lifetime...which can, of course, be quite short over there if you fuck up with the wrong people."
- Raoul.

It is typical of the way things work in Phnom Penh that i only met one of my fellow journalists at The Paper after working here for two months. And that was only because i ran into him in a bar. He is obviously from the classic school of journalism - one of those hacks who does all his writing in bars and only comes into the office to claim expenses. Still, i figure if you're going to learn, learn from the experts.

And there is no shortage of bars in Phnom Penh in which to hone my journalistic skills. So far i have worked my way through the first half of them, along with the first half of that axiomatic expression, "We live and we learn". I may be in a foreign country, but a lot of the terrain i am covering is, sadly, familiar ground. Like doing Wholly Inappropriate things whilst inebriated.

I should have learned long ago that tranquillizers and alcohol are not one of life's more scintillating options. I'm not sure why our lifestyle editor was handing them out in a bar in the early hours of the morning, but from what i understand, it was because somebody had, Wholly Inappropriately, handed them to her. My job was to hand them on to somebody else - anybody else - like a hot potato. Rather than wash them down with my eleventh Black Russian. I'm not sure what happened after that, but the Cambodian girls who work in the shop downstairs from my apartment reported that my girlfriend brought me home at 4am, which is strange, because i don't have a girlfriend. Other than that, i know for a fact that i sent some ludicrous text messages, including one to a very nice American girl saying i wanted to bite her, and another to a work colleague asking him to accompany me in search of the happy pills. I don't remember anything at all from 2am, after the Stilnox kicked in, until 5am, when i managed to bring myself around. But i am pretty sure i came home and frightened my (probably now former) flatmate Zoë as i crashed about the apartment, taking powerful stimulants, while attempting to persuade her to accompany me to the Kambol shooting range to pose naked with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

"That is Wholly Inappropriate, on a whole range of levels," is what she said.

Looks like it is barge-pole range for me with Zoë from now on.

THROWN BY THE WHITE HORSE

2009-03-17T20:02:00.038+09:00

With the mercury pushing a hundred in the old money it's not a good day to be stuck at the track sporting a hangover, no money, and severe bruising. Another motocross bike roars angrily past over the humps, its rider holding on grimly, clearly barely under control. I take a step back, firing off a few frames as the sound of the two-stroke drills into my skull. I’m spattered with mud and wet with sweat. And still labouring under the illusion that being a photojournalist is a somehow glamorous occupation. I can’t wait for them to spray my lens with champagne so I can get the hell out of here, back to lakeside, and book up a jug of beer. But the final race is five hours away. As another rider roars by i'm covered in yet another layer of fine brown dust. God, i need a drink. But water costs money.

Living in the cheap and somewhat notorious district of lakeside has its advantages, for sure. My four-dollar room has a view over the mosque and the lake, and of course the swimming pool at the four star hotel around the corner is an added, if illicit, bonus. No-one there will question a barang in his underpants. The lakeside food is cheap, and i can run a tab. But there are problems. One is the water pressure, or lack of it. Three days now without water in my room. The other problem is the drugs. They are simply too cheap.

While the sale of drugs and women is endemic in Phnom Penh, it is completely out of control at lakeside. Around the city, a moto or tuk tuk driver will ask, with descending likelihood of success, if you want a tuk tuk, if you want a massage, if you want to go to the Killing Fields, if you want gunja, if you want a woman, or if you want to go to the shooting range and fire at a pig with a rocket-propelled grenade. I wonder how an average tourist’s tour of the city would go if they simply accepted at random every outing a tuk tuk driver proposed. It would be an interesting day, to say the least.

But out at lakeside, the tuk tuk and moto drivers dispense with these frivolities. Coming back home from a pubcrawling boozefest, I stumble past these touts as they lie in wait, lining the narrow lane, with its combination of makeshift bars, third-world Khmer squats, and the open corridors of guest houses facing out onto a polluted lake.

“You want ganga? I have. Skunk. You want cocaine? Ecstasy? China white?” The moto driver shadows me with his urgent whisper, as I head past The Wanderer towards Moskito Bar. Out on the guesthouse boardwalks, backpackers lie on their couches and hammocks, whiling away their nights in a never-ending carousel of marijuana, cheap beer, and cheaper women. The idea that someone might want a lift out of lakeside is not high on this moto driver’s radar. “You want Ecstasy? I have. Yama? I have.” And, judging by his endless palaver, the immensity of his pharmacopeia stands in stark contrast to the paucity of his vocabulary. Moskito Bar is quiet, a couple of black guys drinking to hip hop. So i decide to investigate the depth of this tuk tuk driver's stocks.
“You have ketamine?” I inquire.
“Yes, yes, I have, you want?”
“No. I’m never touching that shit again in my life. What do you think i am, crazy? How about amphetamines?”
“Yes, yes, I have.”
“What about dimethyltriptamine?”
“Yes, yes, I have.”
“MDMA?”
“Yes, yes, I have.”
“Magic mushrooms?”
“Yes, yes, I have.”
“How about a bag of dust from the surface of the moon?”
“Yes, yes, I have.” I am beginning to doubt his sincerity. I know, for instance, that what the locals sell here as cocaine is either heroin or ketamine laced with speed. As reported in the newspaper only recently, a couple of Western tourists found this out the hard way. The two men were found dead in their hotel room, bleeding from the nose, with a packet of pills “to cure erectile dysfunction” and a pile of white powder beside them. There is a slight difference between the diluted cocaine of New York and London and 100 per cent pure horse. A difference which can put a real downer on a fun night out. Or a gay night in, as the case may be.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Come, come, I show you. I have room. You see.”
Ever curious, I follow him into the darkness, down the winding back lanes of Boeung Kak, past the high concrete wall of the mosque.

We come to a rickety walkway over the water, between wooden-walled huts, where the drug dealer holds his mobile phone down low behind him, barely illuminating the broken planks and gaps in our path. In dim living quarters people are lying about on mats or cooking on the floor. A skinny dog brushes past my legs. Through a window, lit by a low watt bulb, an old man is drawing a bow across a strange, tall, stringed instrument in meditative melancholy.

The dealer stops for a moment to shake free a short, loose plank next to a flimsy door. He reaches into the cavity and removes a plastic shopping bag. He pushes open the door and motions me inside. An old lady nods at us and steps outside the room, which is about the size of an ensuite bathroom, but with fewer amenities. He picks up his young child and points to a dirty mattress on the floor. I sit. He puts the child on his knee and opens the plastic bag, handing me a formidable bag of marijuana. “Skunk,” he says. I open it and take a whiff. It is better than most. Most of the ganga here is hay, but some is so strong as to be positively hallucinogenic. This is export quality shit. The usual hay is for the domestic market. Next, he produces a pile of small plastic bags, densely packed with various substances. He introduces them to me one by one. It is an extensive supply. Some fat crystals of meth. Brown, flat circles of opium. A thick bag of amphetamines. Red yama pills. Some other pills, which he claims are ecstasy, but could be anything. Some blocks of hashish. Another bag, full of soft white flakes, which he says is cocaine. It does look like cocaine. But being relatively naïve when it comes to illicit drugs, i am unable to put my finger on what exactly this is. I try putting my finger on it anyway. It tastes bitter. Who knows? I am but an innocent abroad.

“How much for the crank?” i ask.
“Twenty dollar.”
“Ten?”
“Twenty.”
“Ten.”
“Twenty.”
“Ten.”
“Twenty.”
“Fifteen.”
“OK.”

Outside the door, he hands the money to the toothless old lady and hides his stash back behind the broken plank.
“Where you go now?” he asks.
It’s about 1am. Some friends will still be out drinking cocktails, pursuing various depravities at Pontoon, the floating nightclub on the river, tethered to the ex-casino boat Mekong Queen.
“Pontoon.”
“I drive you.” He goes inside and picks up his child. We walk back through the squalid labyrinth, back to the main lane, back amongst these missionaries, mercenaries and misfits. His moto is outside The Wanderer. He sits the boy up front, where he leans happily on the handlebars. I slide on the back and we set off to riverside, and the thrilling frivolities of Pontoon.

Heading past the big roundabout at Wat Phnom, the daytime haunt of elephants, monkeys, tourists, and four statues of the Buddha, he suddenly comes to a halt. On a dark stretch of road.
“What’s up.”
“No gasoline sir.”
“You’ve run out of petrol.” I sigh, and look around. We’ve just passed a couple of massage parlours and a supermarket, but up ahead all is quiet. From here to Pontoon is maybe a five minute walk, and I’m pretty sure I know the way. I hand him a couple of thousand riel. “Get yourself some fuel, champ. I’ll walk.” I head east, towards the river.
After walking about twenty metres, I run into a group of four Cambodian men. They launch into a familiar spiel. “You want ganga? You want girl?”
“No, thank you.” I try to keep walking, but one of them moves in front of me while another grabs my arm. This is unusual. Touts here hassle you relentlessly, but they rarely touch you. Unless you pay for it.
“Good ganga. Skunk.”
I shake my head no. “Awtay, awtay, awkun.” I point down the street. “Sohm toh. Pontoon. Leah heouy.” Having made my goodbyes, they release me and I walk on. But something is wrong. My wallet is missing from my back pocket. I turn around to see one of the men, about ten metres further down the street from the others, hiding something under his top. I walk towards him. He breaks into a run. I run after him. He circles back towards his friends. I start chasing the pickpocket around and around in circles, while yelling “Police!” but of course there is nobody to hear. His mates do their best to get in my way. There’s only about forty dollars in the wallet, but, having consumed quite a few pints of beer, I’m more worried about the happy powder. What will the girls at Pontoon say? They will be unimpressed.

The thief is screaming and shouting as I chase him in an ever-diminishing spiral. Suddenly one of the men appears in my peripheral vision, off to the right, running at me, swinging something. It hits me hard on my left shoulder. Really hard. As I stumble, the thief throws my wallet onto the bitumen. The gang runs off up the street, into the dark. I drop to my hands and knees, winded, and pick up the wallet, emptied of its cash. I put a hand to the wound on my shoulder, feeling the damp stickiness of blood. Bastard, I mutter. That moto driver set me up. I stagger ruefully to my feet and start the long walk back to lakeside.

So this morning i am sore, sorry, and stuck at the motocross. My left shoulder bears a huge bruise and a nasty cut from the chain or buckle or whatever the hell it was that stopped me. The nice woman from the internet café, who treated my wounds at lakeside last night, suggested I go to the doctor - but of course, my medical insurance expired three days ago. And the thieves just took the last of my money. You go to police? she asked, as she applied the antiseptic.

Hmm. I can just picture it. The police will ask me what was stolen.
“Apart from the cash? Well, they took my drugs, didn't they, the bastards.”
“Can you give me a description?”
“Sure. It was about a gram, white powder, allegedly amphetamines.”
“No. Of your attackers.”
“Oh. Well, there were four of them. Four men. Cambodians.”
“What were they wearing?”
Here I would pause to search my memory.
“Well, as I said, it was dark – but they were clearly wearing way too much makeup. And miniskirts. Cheap jewellery. And the one who took my wallet had on a halter-neck blouse, in a rather fetching turquoise. He was carrying a chain-mail handbag.”

I wince as the internet girl rubs some tiger balm on my bruise.

“No, I don’t think I’ll be going to the police,” i say.

Damn those ladyboys.

CAMBODIAN RED

2009-03-15T18:52:00.014+09:00

for Doctor Abigail

MARCH RECIPE OF THE MONTH
Lime marinated beef salad. Served on a banana leaf to save on the washing up. For those with an eating disorder (i.e. vegetarians) this recipe is simply ideal. It's so easy to spot the meat - that'll be the red stuff - and push it to one side to create a luscious peanut salad. And it's as close to a vegetarian meal as anything you're likely to find in Cambodia.

PREPARATION TIME
Allow 30-40 minutes for marinating and then a minute or two to simply toss together, like two homos in a tryst.

INGREDIENTS
Serves 2
200g beef (or kangaroo if you are in the lucky country) sliced thinly
1 stalk lemongrass, sliced thinly
1 chilli, sliced thinly
100g bean sprouts
50g roasted ground peanuts
1 clove garlic
juice of 3 limes
palm sugar, salt and fish sauce to taste
mint and basil, roughly shredded
4 leaves saw mint, sawed into 1cm pieces

SUGGESTED WINES
Forget the wine. This is the tropics. Try some French Baïta rhum and ginger cordial with a slice of lime over ice. Get a couple of these going while you put some vinyl on the stereo. I recommend Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band's 1969 classic Trout Mask Replica.

METHOD
Slaughter a bullock. Procure the rest of the ingredients from the market, and take a ride home through the narrow streets in a cyclo, soaking up the smells of the street stalls and the fresh tropical rains.

Combine the lime juice, lemongrass, garlic, saw mint and chilli to create a marinade. Season with salt, sugar and fish sauce to taste. Having created the marinade, congratulate yourself by mixing another ginger rhum. Or two. Put the beef in the marinade and leave it for 30 to 40 minutes. This, along with the washing up, is the easy part. Turn up the stereo and wander out onto the balcony, rhum cocktail in hand. See what's going on down there on the street, beneath the bougainvillea. Those Cambodians, what are they up to? And why don't they have a word for "vegetarian"? Hmm. Life's complexities are many. Too fucking many. Flop in the hammock and roll up some Cambodian red. Then let the lime juice marinade go to work work on the beef as the rhum and gunja goes to work on your brain.

After half an hour or so of cooking remotely from your hammock, wander, dazedly, back into the kitchen and flip the record. As the ceiling fan circles overhead, drain and squeeze the meat to remove all the juice. Toss with basil, mint, coarsely ground peanuts and bean sprouts. Serve it on the aforementioned banana leaves, on a rattan table on the terrace, topping up with ground peanut, basil and mint. Garnish with searing circles of chilli.

You realise the gunja has done its work properly as you tear into the fresca meat. The red Cambodian sun sinks at the edge of the street, down by Heart of Darkness bar, as the sounds of the tuk tuks and vendors float up from the street. Another long warm tropical night is in store. It might be a good night to get out on the streets, once the moon comes up. Maybe wander over to Fly for a blue margarita and a swim in the lap pool, or maybe even Sharky bar.

Or maybe roll up some more red.

MONKEY MAGIC

2009-02-26T23:08:00.030+09:00

The bumper sticker reads: "Honk if you want to see an AK47 fired out a car window." The black Hummer hums along just ahead of my moto driver down Preah Monivong Boulevard. And i do mean just ahead: my driver's handlebars almost scrape the rear quarter panel as he weaves along looking for a few empty centimetres of passing space. I have a sudden flashback to the time i was driving my '62 Spitfire down the Mitchell Freeway, just behind a biker with "Coffin Cheaters" emblazoned across the back of his jacket, when my horn suddenly came on for no apparent reason and stayed on. I mean, i can laugh about it now.

I've told my driver i'm in a hurry, and he is obligingly honking and passing everything in sight as he speeds along the wrong side of this four-lane road. We pass the Hummer without incident, then almost have a head on collision as we turn left into oncoming traffic, but of course i'm used to that by now. All the drivers cut the corner as they turn, just so they can ride directly into the oncoming traffic on the steet they are turning into. It's a kind of national sport. I rummage around in my pocket to find my mobile, and punch a Recently Dialled Number.

"Is that Mean Harean?" i ask, as the driver squeezes at high speed through an impossible space between a rubbish truck and a street vendor. The female voice on the end of the line says something i can't make out. There is a disconcerting echo on the phone. I assume that i am speaking to the head of HR, so i persevere. "It's Mark Roy here. I'm running a little late. But i'll be there soon." My words echo back to me, jumbled up with a heavily accented voice which for all i know could be quoting me the price for an ounce of gold in Borneo. "Yes, ten minutes, i'll see you then," i say, and hang up.

You might think it a little loose, taking off to a foreign country with almost no money on the off chance of securing a job with an international daily newspaper. And then turning up to your interview late, and without a CV. But fuck it. This town doesn't make it any easier. I mean, you'd think that any premises advertising 'quality colour laser printing' might in fact be able to produce just that, rather than a faded, striated black-and-white mess that looks like it was spat out of a well-used 1970s photocopier using dirty dishwater as toner. Which, in all likelihood, it was. And when you leave your one-and-only business shirt with the laundry to be washed and ironed two days earlier, you would hardly expect to be still standing there, twenty minutes before your job interview, while they decide to switch on the iron. I stand and watch. There is little else i can do.

"Where you go?" asks a moto driver standing nearby.
"Well, i am supposed to be at the Phnom Penh Post by 11a.m," i say resignedly. I glance at my watch. It's 10.45, and the office is on the other side of town. "Preferably wearing a shirt."
"Ah, yes, i know where that is. We get there no worries."
This sounds promising. "It's on the corner of Sihanouk and Sothearos boulevards," i advise.
"Yes, yes, i be there many times." He waves his hands dismissively. Obviously it won't be a problem.

So it comes as something of a surprise when five minutes later he stops just a few hundred metres from the laundry in front of a large, yellow art deco building, just east of the shrine at Wat Phnom.

"What the fuck is this?" i ask politely.
"The Phnom Penh Post Office," he says.

They have recently introduced helmet laws in Cambodia, for which the moto driver is grateful as i smite him on the side of the head.

The new helmet laws here only apply to drivers, not passengers. Moto taxi drivers carry one helmet and one helmet only, and that's for them. It's a curious arrangement, but one to which you soon become accustomed. Just as foreigners can be pulled up and given a ticket for riding a motorbike during the day with their headlights on, so Khmers blithely ride about at night with their lights switched off with no fear of being pulled over by the police. There is an ineffable and arcane logic to it. Ah, you've got to love the place.

Against all odds, the job interview goes swimmingly, and the CEO shakes my hand and gives me a ticket to their work function at the Foreign Correspondents Club. The function is being held this Friday, and will include free food and drink. This is a good thing, especially when you are down to your last forty dollars. Remind me to wear clothing with capacious pockets. I'm living on about $12 a day coming in through eBay. My room is $4, a meal is around $1.50, and a litre of water is $1. It's a pity the pinball machine deal fell through, because that would have brought some welcome pocket money. But people here will go around stealing integral components, like transformers. It can't be helped. $12 a day means i can live. Not comfortably, by any means, but i can live.

Then this morning i realise i have $12 Australian coming in per day - while all my costs are in US dollars. Ouch.

It's time to cut costs, i decide. Who says i am not a rational human being? First, i decide to sleep all day so i won't spend any money. At nightfall, i set out on foot and find a cheap Khmer eatery across the road from the casino at Boeung Kak. Stainless steel tables, plastic chairs: above us only sky. The menu has an English translation of sorts, offering such delicacies as sautéed frog with red curry pasted, and that perennial favourite, sweat and sour pork. I'm tempted to try the fried swamp cabbage with chilli, hold the eel - but instead i opt for a very tasty chicken noodle soup for a dollar. On the table is a big jar of sliced garlic and chilli and some fish sauce. Mmm. I lash out on a glass of sugar cane juice.

On the way home i am inexorably drawn to the Boeung Kak Drinking Shop. The name "Drinking Shop" piques my curiosity. I walk in and browse the shelves. Only $6.50 for a whole litre of rum? How long has this been going on? A shot of rum here is a dollar fifty, and there are around thirty-three shots in a litre. Yes. This should cut my costs considerably.

And with cigarettes at only fifty cents a packet, it's almost worth taking up smoking again. I could save a fortune.

The next day i'm gazing, as usual, out the window of my tiny fourth floor room, across the mosque to the lake, when i see a troupe of six monkeys scampering across the rusted corrugated iron roofs. They look in windows and frighten the backpackers, jumping up and down excitedly, before clambering along some electrical wiring to the roof directly below. The monkeys just wander about wherever they like, doing whatever they like, with no-one to disturb them. They drop onto a balcony and begin messing with a washing line. One of them pulls down a bra, pulls it over his head, and then wraps it around his chest. He gets bored of this, drops it, and they jump onto an adjoining roof before dropping out of sight between the buildings. Monkeys. Ha. Funny. I pour a couple of fingers of the Baïta Rhum, add some orange juice, and knock it back. Breakfast of champions. Now, time for a swim. Not in the lake, of course - it is polluted beyond redemption. But the freeflowing antics of the monkeys have given me an idea. I pack a towel and walk around the corner to the 4-star Phnom Penh Hotel.

I stride into the lobby like i own the place. Always stride into the lobby like you own the place, i decide. From now on this will be my mantra. Stride into the lobby like you own the place. The air conditioning is simply luscious. I bet they even have hot running water here. And cakes! I walk by a glass display cabinet filled with fancy cakes. I haven't seen a cake since Brunei Airport. I walk down a long corridor, past the entrance to the casino, then circle back past some very expensive-looking shops on an almost impossibly shiny polished wooden floor. I see a sign pointing to a spa and health club, so i meander in that direction. I've brought a small plastic bottle of iced tea with me, filled, of course, with French rum. Because the more of it i drink, the more money i save. Brilliant. Next to the entrance to the spa is a sign in elegant brass lettering, pointing up a flight of stairs, which says simply: "To swimming pool".

After a few laps in the cool turquoise water, i hop out and lie back on the sun lounge. I figure i must be saving a couple of hundred dollars a day lying here. I sit up for a sip of iced tea. Yes, one could get used to these cost-cutting measures.

THE LOST PINBALL MACHINES OF KAMPUCHEA

2009-02-15T16:22:00.035+09:00

I find the dust-covered, rusted Williams Whirlwind beneath a crumbling vinyl tarpaulin under a house in the back streets of a Cambodian port. From all accounts, it is the last remaining pinball machine in the country. I'm trying to figure how cheaply i can buy it and transport it across country to Carlo's rooftop bar and grill, 550km away in Siem Reap. The Whirlwind's owner is in jail. Perhaps a carton of cigarettes would be useful.

I returned to Sihanouk Ville from Kampot after learning of the possible existence of the pinball machine from a seasoned Dutch traveller i met in a bar. To the uninitiated, this may seem to be an almost random pursuit - to travel the South East Asian highways in search of pinball machines - but i can assure you this strange compunction has a completely rational explanation. Well, almost.

No, it's not that i am a pinball wizard, nor am i even much of an aficionado of the silver ball. It's just that, well, i have this friend, Carlo. Carlo has Special Needs.

I travelled with Carlo and Raoul in Bangkok during the 2006 military coup. Before he took off to Cambodia to find work as an industrial designer. Like many Westerners who take off to Cambodia with the intention of finding recognised employment and building a stable career, Carlo instead opened a bar. As the owner of the rooftop bar and grill XBar Asia in Siem Reap, Carlo now indulges in the depravities of pig racing, ice lugeing and vertical skateboard riding while screening open-air movies and hosting bands such as the Foo Fighters. But the simple pleasures of pig racing and hosting American rock stars is no longer enough for Carlo. His insatiable thirst for decadence drives him to want more and more. His jaded pleasure centres can now only be assuaged by the procurement of not one, but two pinball machines.

"You coming to Cambodia?" Carlo asks. "Pick us up a couple of pinball machines on your way from the Thai border, will you?" Which, on the face of it, seems a reasonable request, and one that any self-respecting mezzano such as myself would normally have no problem accomplishing. But there are certain complications.

Firstly, the Khmer Rouge relentlessly destroyed every trace of Western domination that they came across during their four-year reign of terror. And a pinball machine is a classic symbol of the Western hegemony, with all the bells and whistles.

Secondly, the few machines that managed to survive the Khmer pinball purge, and most of those brought in subsequently, were snapped up three years ago, when a travelling American entrepreneur scoured the country's dens of iniquity and bought them all up, selling them to collectors on eBay at great profit.

Thirdly - just how popular can coin-operated machines be in a country that has no coins?

While getting steadily more drunk in the downstairs bar of Blissful (with its notice that promotes 'No Drugs No Weapons No Prostitutes' - clearly a sign that one man's Bliss is another man's Boring) i stumble, quite literally, upon a lead. I'm drinking the strangely sweet and potent Mekong whiskey, which at a dollar a shot represents an attractive brew for the travelling cheapskate. Dieter, my inebriated companion, regales me with tales from the old days, back in the nineties, after the UN-sponsored election brought some semblance of normality to the country in 1993. From politics the conversation follows a natural course, flowing like the Mekong, to pinball machines.

I know where there might be a machine, says Dieter. There was this bar in Sihanouk Ville - it's owner was thrown in jail a couple of years ago ...

I grab a bus the next morning, and wind up with a room upstairs in a wooden hut on Otres Beach, south of the port town. Here i sit and write, lounging on a beach chair sipping vodka and coconut juice and talking to passing French women in bikinis. But this cannot sway me from my mission. I finish my drink and get on my hired moto.

The Corner Bar is on Victory Hill, a sleazy part of town near the port, a balls-out-rock'n'roll kind of street packed with girlie bars and the kind of sad, misbegotten perverts that give expats a bad name, i.e., 'sexpats'. The bar upstairs, where the alleged pinball machine was last sighted, is being refurbished. The new owners know nothing about any pinball machines.

The previous owner left a couple of years ago, says one of them.
I heard he was thrown in jail, says the other. Ask Johnno downstairs, he might know.

Johnno Downstairs is out, gone to the Embassy to pick up a delivery of imported food. He will be back in an hour, the bar girl tells me. I wander the street in search of some food. I find instead a Caucasian man, sprawled on a piece of cardboard in front of an empty shop. Hideous open sores fester on his legs, his hair is grown long and wild, and he is covered in dirt. He stares at me with vacant eyes. It is a troubling sight. This will be me in two weeks, when the money runs out. I walk past the promise of dancing girls at La Tropicana and the Taxi Club, past the French bar at Le Barometre, before settling on a curry amok and a couple of pints at Retox. The evening is coming on and the bar girls are coming out.

After the hot tofu curry, i head back to the Corner Bar. Half a dozen young Khmer men are having a party in a tuk tuk across from the bar, drinking from a plastic bottle full of spirits. One of them jumps out and approaches me, flashing a palm-sized bag of gunja. You like? You buy? he asks. Awtay akwun, i say. No, don't like, don't buy. Smoking gunja at this point could only confuse things. I'm on a mission. I can't be stumbling about the streets of Victory Hill like some stoned fucking hippy.

Yama? he proposes. Now, this is an interesting development. My trusty travel guide describes yama, from the Sanskrit यम, meaning death, as a drug that "provokes powerful hallucinations, sleep deprivation and psychosis" and warns all travellers to steer well clear of it. I order two, and go into the bar to find Johnnno Downstairs. My man dashes off, promising to return with the goods in twenty minutes.

Yes, i remember the pinball machine, but i don't know where it is now, says Johnno. The owner is in jail. You need to talk to his friend, Heinz. But i don't know where he is. You might try Rudi, he runs the German bar above the guesthouse down the road. He points.
The bar has a great view of the bay, terrible Eurotrash music, and no customers. No staff, either. Apart from the disco music, it is deserted. I go back downstairs and see a blond man in a black sleeveless Rammstein t-shirt taking directions from one of the restaurant staff. He sets out across the road. I follow him. This must be Rudi.

Rudi, i shout. He jumps.
Ja? Wie gehts?
Entschuldigung sie, bitte, i say, before realising that my high school German will not stretch far enough to ask for directions to a long-lost and possibly imaginary pinball machine. Perhaps i could deploy the only other German phrase i remember from those wasted high school years: Du bist so röt wie ein Krebs. Which means, of course, You are as red as a lobster.

It is doubtful the phrase would serve any useful purpose under the present circumstances. I switch to English.

I'm looking for Heinz, who may know the whereabouts of a pinball machine which used to be above the Corner Bar, i explain.
Of course, no problem, says Rudi, as if i'd asked for directions to the bus station. I know the bar. The owner is in jail.
He thumbs through his mobile phone.
I will give you the number for Heinz, he says.

The number is engaged. I walk back to the Corner Bar, and my man pushes a plastic bag with two red pills into my hand. I slip him some money, and walk with him over to the tuk tuk party. One of the men offers me a cut-off water bottle, the bottom filled with what looks like fish sauce. One of the others hands me a skewer with some unidentified fried meat impaled on the end of it.
Awkun, i say, and dip the meat into the fish sauce. This provokes an outburst of hilarity.
What? i ask, glowering.
Is whiskey, one of them says, pointing at the strange brown liquid. Ah. Still, never apologise, never explain. I chew the meat, and down the rest of the weird-tasting drink. They offer me more. I carefully extract one of the yama tablets from my pocket and wash it down with some of this home-brewed liquor. It's time to see just how accurate the Lonely Planet travel guide really is.

By the time i am following Heinz on my rented Honda Dream through the ever diminishing backstreets of Victory Hill, i am beginning to feel a little strange. Perhaps it was that fried meat. The scooter, as promised on its shiny decal, does indeed handle like a Dream. That is, surreal images are looming before me and i have no idea where it is going to take me next. We are barrelling at high speed along a winding, narrow dirt footpath, where women sit chopping unidentifiable victuals and men are engaged in that most popular of pasttimes in South East Asia: squatting on their heels. We pass through some huge wrought-iron gates and ride up to a small house on a large block. A blue, dust covered VW convertible sits under the house.

I have no idea where i am, but i am suddenly feeling omnipotent and strangely light-headed. Heinz has started babbling about his friend. He is in jail, you know.
You don't say.
It is all political. He was framed by his enemies. Ten years. Ten years in a Cambodian jail - can you imagine? But it is going to the Supreme Court. I can't say any more.
I wasn't asking.
Heinz looks about furtively.
Other than this.
He walks up close to me, and holds my gaze.
This is a dangerous country, my friend. You can get your throat cut here for fifty dollars.
Wow. That's a bargain, i blurt out. I am beginning to feel a little dizzy. My mouth has gone dry and i feel like the red ants from the jungle have returned to crawl about the insides of my eyes. Heinz goes inside the house and returns carrying a large meat cleaver.
Now i show you, he says.
Right. I'm wishing i hadn't had those last two pints.
He walks over to where a bundled tarpaulin is held aloft by four rusted legs, its blue bulk taped roughly together with clear packing tape. He cuts quickly through the tape with the cleaver and pulls the decaying vinyl away.

It's a pinball machine.

All i can report, at this stage, is that it was a Whirlwind. All the rest is a blur.

IT'S A JUNGLE OUT THERE

2009-02-11T14:26:00.039+09:00

Our English-speaking guide explains we will have to take the long way through the jungle, because the trail passes through a Buddhist hermitage set high on the hill.

"The monk there, he magic man. He meditate now, we cannot go through."

He points to the rough bamboo archway, decorated with colourful flags, which marks one trail leading up the hill to the left. One of the flags must be monk for Do Not Disturb. Reluctantly, we take the trail to the right. We see no more villagers dragging bundles of freshly cut bamboo, and the banana and papaya are replaced by dense, tall timber, vines and palms. We are above slash-and-burn country now, heading into the deep jungle. With a six-hour trek ahead of us, my shirt is already drenched with sweat after only an hour.

Up ahead, setting a cracking pace, is our Khmer guide, who speaks no English and smokes constantly. He wears long trousers and a long-sleeved shirt over a t-shirt. Obviously it's a bit nippy for him this time of year. He's purloined my Wilderness Equipment backpack to store our vegetables, rice and extra water, and given me his smaller bag. Which, with its confusing pockets and worse than useless zips that continually burst open, is so annoying that i feel like flinging it into the trees. As i grope around fruitlessly for a water bottle in one of the hidden compartments, i trip over a vine.

As you may have guessed, i don't go trekking for the alleged fun of it. I'm chasing a story on the privatisation of Bokor National Park. Sokimex Petroleum, who are building a resort here, closed the only road in two months ago. The only way to get to the previously deserted French town of Bokor Hill Station, where the new development is taking place, is on foot through the jungle. The French colonialists built the outpost from 1917 to 1921 high on a mountain plateau, at an altitude of (my knees tremble at the thought) 1080 metres, as a way to escape the heat, the mosquitoes, and the lumpen proletariat. Many Khmer labourers died building the road up to the grand hotel, casino, post office, palace and night club.

Apart from the two guides, there are six others on this jaunt, who are apparently mad enough or bored enough to be taking this trek for pleasure. Apart from the two Ukrainians, who clearly just made a wrong turn somewhere on the way to their hotel.

Above the whoop-whoop of the gibbons, the birdcalls and the thrum of insects, we hear another sound. It is music, played on what sounds like a bamboo angklung. It's coming from the other side of the valley. We stop to listen. It's a magical sound.

"I thought you said he was meditating," i say to the guide. We press on. The two Ukranians are a decidedly odd couple. One of these Cossacks is wearing Thai fishing pants, high on his waist, with his t-shirt tucked into the waistband. His feet and ankles protrude from the bottom of his wide-bottomed trousers like stilts. The other one seems to have taken his style pointers from the Aki Kaurismäki film Leningrad Cowboys. The Ukrainians have made no attempt to communicate with the rest of the group and always stand slightly apart, whispering together like as though they were some kind of Communist fucking spies. The stilt-walker carries what appears to be a laptop satchel. The fat one in the cowboy outfit is constantly complaining to the skinny one. All the swear words are in Ukrainian, so i have no idea what he is saying, but i imagine it goes something like:

"This one more fine mess you gotten us into, Igor," Yuri says as he climbs another sandstone incline, struggling to remove a thorny vine from his cowboy hat. "How much further this gypsy fleabag hotel is? Where the godforsaken tour bus?"

Still, it can't be easy booking a tour when you speak no English and the tour operator speaks no Ukrainian. Even i understood the part where he said we must wear sturdy shoes. These two are struggling along in thongs. Yuri mutters to himself as he negotiates another fallen log.

We lunch at a waterfall. A myriad of butterflies flit and sit on the flat, grey sandstone rocks, their wings upright like a flotilla of yellow sailboats in the shallow pools of water. After a simple meal of rice and vegetables, Daniel from Oxford lights an enormous spliff, which he shares with me and a young Californian who goes by the unlikely name of Troyce. We swim, wash off the sweat in the waterfall, and laugh as the Ukrainians stand and mutter about the decadence of the West.

The climb gets dramatically steeper, and under the influence of the profoundly strong ganga, things get a little weird. Visions from countless Vietnam war movies i'm sure i never watched begin screening in my head. Fallen trees are marked here and there by machetes, and there seem to be tripwires and ambushes at every turn. I put my hand around what looks like a sturdy tree, only to have it crumble away, and suddenly my hand covered with a swarm of small, red, savagely biting ants. Large, mud-like bees nests appear in the trees. Our guide points as a short, black snake slithers from view. Paul, a Yorkshireman and amateur botanist, points out what looks like your garden-variety palm, the kind of thing you would have by the pool – except for those clumps of two-inch long needles sticking out of its stem. Occasionally we hear the jet-like whoosh of air from the large hornbills wheeling invisibly overhead.

Suddenly our Khmer guide stops. We are standing in a piece of jungle which looks a lot like all the other pieces of jungle we have pushed our way through. How can he tell where he is going, i wonder. It is when he begins backtracking that i decide he probably can't. It was disconcerting enough earlier in the day, when two members of our party, along with our translator, caught up with the rest of us at a rest stop, looking even more sweaty and shaken than usual. "Are we glad to see you," said the Englishwoman. "I thought we were lost." The English speaking 'guide' nodded his head. "I was sure we were lost," he said. "I was calling out, but i couldn't hear you." How very reassuring.

The Khmer guide stands motionless, looking up another trail. Then he nods his head and barks something to our translator, beckoning us over. "Is OK," says the translator. "He know a shortcut."

Oh, sure.

"Is two hours from here instead of four. But is steeper." Steeper? How the fuck can it get any steeper? We soon find out. Yuri mutters to himself as he scales a vertical pile of rocks ahead of me. I pray he doesn't slip in those damn flip-flops because he will take me out with him on the way down. Higher up i see our erstwhile guide, walking casually up the scree, using his hands not – like the rest of us – to find purchase in a handhold, but to light another cigarette, which he puffs on gaily as he disappears from view on his sweat-free ascent. Hours later, as we emerge drenched and exhausted to sprawl our weary bodies about on a mountaintop trail, he stands waiting like a polite elevator attendant. I take off my shirt and wring out the sweat

We trek across an open plateau to reach Popokvil Falls, "the waterfall of the swirling clouds", where a truck from the ranger's station is supposed to pick us up and drive us the remaining eight kilometres to Bokor. Of course, it doesn't turn up, because Sokimex Petroleum have long since banished the rangers from their base in the old hospital at Bokor Hill Station. Or, as it is now officially referred to on the Cambodian Ministry for Tourism website, "Bokor Resort". Which sounds much like Sokha Resort, where the owner of Sokimex Petroleum, Kem Sokha, privatised the best beach in Cambodia. Another curious fact i noticed on the Ministry's website was that there is no listing for Bokor National Park under the 'National Parks' link. If you click on it you get a page which reads "under construction". Later, when i photograph the cement factory built within the national park to supply concrete for the new development i realise just how accurate this is.

Not surprisingly, no truck arrives from the non-existent ranger's station. But we do get one man on a battered scooter. He begins to ferry us, one by one, up the horrendously pot-holed and boulder-strewn "road" to our accommodation. I do some calculations and figure that even going as fast as he can, on that road, it will take about six hours to get us all to the station. We can walk it in about two.

We start walking. The man on the scooter returns, this time accompanied by another man in camouflage gear on a red scooter. He wears an RCAF badge. Royal Cambodian Armed Forces. He is army. So i am not surprised when i later learn Sokimex Petroleum have the Cambodian military working as private security on this project. And that, under their company policy, we are not supposed to be here at all. The army officer looks us over carefully before continuing on his way.

The accommodation is basic. Three double bunks in a room. Given there are seven of us, plus the guides, it is fortuitous that two of our party are a couple, or two of us very soon would have been a couple.

After exploring the hill station we lie, exhausted, in our bunks. Apart from Paul, who sets off on a quick jog around the lake. That way madness lies. Yuri, having successfully negotiated a six-hour jungle trek through some difficult terrain wearing thongs, falls and hurts himself climbing out of his top bunk. It was painful to watch, unfolding as it did so inevitably. For some reason, he used the door to take some of his considerable weight as he climbed down. Igor put his foot against the door to stop it swinging open any further, even though it was obvious the door was going to swing shut the other way as soon as Yuri put his weight on it. We watched, mortified, as the door swung shut - crushing Yuri's hand and sending him sprawling to the floor. I learned some more Ukrainian.

At dinner, Yuri is unimpressed by the simple fare. Rice, steamed vegetables, and a bit of beef. The rice and vegetables are delicious. I don't know about the meat, because Yuri serves himself first, carefully spearing all the beef from the large bowl with his fork, and piling it up on his plate. He spends his dinnertime complaining to Igor through mouthfuls of beef.

"This hotel very bad, Igor," i imagine him muttering. "My backside very sore from scooter. Why we come here, Igor? Falling down buildings here everywhere. Everywhere, these falling down buildings. Why we come here? We have same falling down buildings at home, in Ukraine."

We don't know when we are due to leave in the morning. It depends when the bribed driver of the steel-tray truck can make himself available to torture and pummel us on a bone-shattering judder down the pile of rocks that passes as a road to the mountain trail. We sit on the steps of the ex-ranger's station, looking out across the excavated lake to the abandoned hotel, casino, church, and the rest. Crumbling into the thick foliage of palms, vines and wild, thorny raspberries. The water tower, like a spacecraft that dropped this strange, vanished civilisation onto this remote mountain plateau. The original casino, perched high on a sheer cliff which drops off into a mist-shrouded jungle, was moved to a building closer to the lake. Too many people were losing all their money at the tables, buying one last drink, and taking a lonely walk outside into oblivion.

We sit and look at this abandoned playground of the rich and suicidal. We discuss the proposed resort, which would redevelop these buildings and build a huge, 5-star Vegas-style hotel and casino in a large tract of cleared land between the church and the monastery perched on the cliff in the distance. Our translator goes inside and returns with a glossy Sokimex Petroleum calendar, filled with artists' impressions of the impending resort. The colourful, airbrushed view across the lake shows bright, renewed, Lego-like buildings, a promenade peopled by happy and rich strolling couples, a Vegas-style casino, a fake Disneyesque waterfall and - believe it or not - an artificial volcano, complete with exploding red lava.

Yuri looks, incredulous, from the lurid calendar to the desolate scene before him. He looks from one to the other and back again, again and again, before shouting something at his comrade in Ukranian. I'm not sure, but i think it went something like:

"You see, Igor? They take us for fools! This place nothing like in brochure."

JUNGLE CURRY

2009-02-10T20:40:00.010+09:00

FEBRUARY RECIPE OF THE MONTH
Cambodian pangolin jungle curry.

PREPARATION TIME
Cooking time is nearly an hour. Clearly, we are not fooling around here. And catching a Cambodian pangolin can take ages, because they have been hunted almost to extinction to assauge the arcane and insatiable urges of the Chinese billions. So make it easier on yourself. Use chicken.

INGREDIENTS
Serves 2
1 tablespoons peanut oil
500g kg chicken legs, skin on
3 red chillies
1 cup coconut milk
½ cup chicken stock
1 kaffir lime leaf
fish sauce, to taste
thai basil, julienne green onions, bean shoots and fried shallots
garnish with steamed rice and lime wedges
coconut halves for serving, go on

Jungle curry paste:
1 teaspoon shrimp paste
1 teaspoon green Kampot pepper, fresh from the fields (or tinned, why not - we've already skimped on the pangolin)
1 tablespoon shaved palm sugar (shaved, mind you - the last thing we need is hairy palm sugar - hairy palms being the first sign of madness)
½ teaspoon ground turmeric
¼ cup green curry paste
(the second sign of madness, apparently, is looking for them)

RECOMMENDED WINE
The inherent spiciness of this dish can be offset by a little residual sugar in the wine. So shall we have a dalliance with a 2008 Alkoomi Frankland River Riesling? Or perhaps try a flirtatious little gewurztraminer? What the hell, let's down a flagon of muscat.

METHOD
Fill a couple of tumblers with muscat. To make your jungle curry paste, wrap shrimp paste in a sheet of foil, place in a hot wok or frying pan and cook on both sides for 2 minutes or until fragrant and dry. Remove and set aside to cool completely. Then get out the old mortar and pestle. Remember to swish out the residues of whatever drug concoctions you've been grinding up lately. Sudden and inexplicable hallucinations ruin too much fine cuisine. Pound the shrimp paste and peppercorns in a mortar with a pestle until well combined, then stir in remaining ingredients. There you have it, jungle curry paste. Now if only we had a pangolin.

Heat the oil in a wok over a medium heat. Cook your chicken and chillies in batches until browned all over. Don't worry if it's not cooked through, we'll deal with that red herring later. Just take another swig of muscat and remove the chicken. Add the curry paste and cook over a low heat, stirring until fragrant. Stir in coconut milk, stock and lime leaves, then return the chicken to the pan.

Put some vinyl on the stereo. I recommend Brian Eno's 1974 classic Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy). Play side one, which begins with Burning Airlines Give You So Much More, followed by Back In Judy's Jungle.

Simmer uncovered until side one has finished and the sauce has thickened slightly. The chicken will have cooked through by this time. Pink chicken is the last thing we need. Worse than hairy palms. Serve the curry in half a coconut. It's quaint. Garnish with combined basil, onions, bean shoots and fried shallots. Turn over the record and serve with rice and lime wedges. Not the record, the curry in those coconut shells.

Get stuck into the muscat again, so by the time Phil Manzanera's one-note guitar solo kicks in during The True Wheel, you'll be trolloped enough to believe this is a rare display of true genius. Which, of course, it is.

This recipe was culled from the pages of that perennial magazine of doctors waiting rooms from Shark Bay to Ulla Dulla, the Australian Women's Weekly.

ARCHITECTURE TO DIE FOR

2009-02-07T22:19:00.018+09:00

Kampot, southern Cambodia. You've got to love a town where one of the major activities listed in the guide book is "going for a stroll". Because not only am i proud of my bipeduality, but i am also an unabashed fan of decaying French colonialist architecture. So evenings here spent strolling the bars peppered around the river and the old bridge are, for me, evenings well spent.

The vaulting art nouveau, art deco and modernist architecture here took a hiding in the civil war of the 1970s, but even when burnt, blackened by tropical fungus, in a state of semi-collapse and riddled with bullet holes, these buildings still retain their charm. I would argue that, like the patina of strife on a piece of antique furniture, this aesthetic of decay has improved most of these works. Part of the magnetic appeal of these two- and three-storey buildings - at least, of those left standing - is in their movement, like a shell on the back of a hermit crab, into a postcolonial, subversive space within our eclectic twenty-first century.

A riverfront apartment is home to a Sri Lankan restaurant or cocktail bar, a former sprawling market houses an improvised indoor volleyball court. Regular 1960s row houses, in the street where i am staying, are brightly redecorated with Khmer shrines and Chinese feng shui. Ministries of Economics are turned to massage schools, and former palaces have become squats.

I hire a three dollar scooter - welcome to the cheap seats - and ride down to nearby Kep, the seaside town which became known as "The City of Ghosts" after the Khmer Rouge systematically destroyed most of its beautiful, sprawling homes and murdered the occupants. They were fierce Maoists, intent on destroying the bougeoisie and their elitist, rich lifestyles. Ironically, their egalitarian motives are being usurped by those connected with the current government and other rich Khmer elites who are returning in droves to Kep. In Cambodia, prime real estate is everywhere being snapped up by those with ties to Hun Sen's ruling party or those willing to pay them their ubiquitous kickbacks. No longer so ruthlessly equitable, it seems the people's party has traded its Maoist caps for baseball caps and is embracing a corrupt version of the free market. And is there any other version?

The shells of many of these former palatial residences still exhibit architecture to die for - quite literally. After exploring a ruin on a beach lined with coconut trees, i ride the rest of the way into Kep, stopping outside a grand set of wrought-iron gates, broken and held together by barbed wire. The remains of a manicured garden stretches from these rusting gates to a bombed-out palace. A squatter is sitting in one of the glassless windows on the ground floor, smoking. He motions me in.

It takes a hefty shove to creak the gates open. Chickens peck at scraps and smoke from a cooking fire wafts across the grounds. There is laundry hung across the foyer and a ragged blue tarpaulin is stretched across the high-ceilinged verandah. Inside, most of the beautifully painted ceramic floor tiles have been chipped away, and charcoal and wood is stacked by a handrail-less, wide stone spiral staircase that leads to the floor above.

Like many of the Khmer, the man appears to know only two words of English. "One dollar," he says. Everything here is one dollar. A short ride on the back of a moto: one dollar. A bottle of water: one dollar. The opportunity to photograph a squatter in front of a palace in the City of Ghosts: one dollar. I peel off some US currency and ask him to pose for the Rolleiflex in front of his beautifully decaying home. His arms crossed.

I climb the spiral stair and wander the eerie, empty rooms, faded walls covered with graffiti, messages carefully painted in Khmer script, and, on the façade that looks out over the ocean, bullet holes.

When i return downstairs, the squatters are nowhere to be seen. The front gates are closed again, and a tour bus is driving by. Tourists openly gawpe at me, standing at the front of the palatial residence. I'm glad it's only tourists, and not the Cambodian police or military. I might have had some explaining to do - some of the properties have 'no trespassing' signs on them, and probably not always in English.

Back in Kampot, i sit writing in my notebook at the Honey Bar, a couple of blocks from the mish-mash reconstruction of the old bridge. The town is described in tourist guides as 'soporific' - and it does have the languid feel of the riverside town. Less of the pummel and froth of the seaside town of Sihanouk Ville. It is laid back and cosmopolitan. And, speaking of cosmopolitan, the cocktails here are two dollars. The honey trap of the travelling alcoholic ...

Faded yellows and blues against the blackened stone, orange lichen, tropical foliage and broken pavements and streets. Everywhere the tuktuk, scooter and bullock. Why am i so drawn to this aesthetic of ruin?

I take another draught of the white rum. The answer is self evident.

LIFE IS CHEAP, TOILET PAPER IS EXPENSIVE

2009-02-03T22:21:00.021+09:00

Finding the motorcycle gang was never going to be easy. The Lone Brothers clubhouse, located in a backstreet bar run by the first biker club in the country, was a long walk up a karaoke street in the north-east quarter of the southern Cambodian coastal town of Sihanouk Ville. The national port of Cambodia, Sihanouk Ville is renowned for its brazen daylight bag snatches, the brutal skullduggery of its moto and tuktuk drivers, the overwhelming depravity and debauchery of its visitors, the smouldering piles of garbage on its roadsides, and its beautiful islands and beaches.

Now when i say this street is filled with karaoke bars, i don't mean to imply it is in any way civilised. For karaoke is simply a revenge attack launched upon the West by the Japanese in reprisal for their loss of the Second World War. But the Japanese have at least made some concessions in this warfare. Although they systematically bombard most major Western cities with this aural shrapnel, at least it comes out with English subtitles. But this Sihanouk Ville street, with its shanty bars and blaring Khmer karaoke music, is such a brutal assault on the senses that it must surely contravene the rules of warfare under the Geneva convention on atmospheric detonation. Worse, the street has next to no signs in English. And, walking back, after the power suddenly goes out and i am plunged into a heavy and humid darkness - the entire hellish scene lit by a mere half moon - things did get a little weird.

Walking up the hill, as the sun sets over Gulf of Thailand like a slice of orange sinking into a blue jelly and absinthe cocktail, i watch a woman driving a bullock and some calves in circles around a field. I have no idea why. But then, i don't know why there are large flat boards on the side of the road holding what appears to be slowly drying mounds of human excrement, either. Some of the foibles of the human soul must forever remain a mystery to me. All i know is i am glad to escape the bar down the hill, where i stopped to ask directions and quench my thirst with a simple Angkor lager on tap. At 50 cents, these ice cold beers were so hard to pass up that i had several.

I was greeted in the bar by an old, shirtless Dutchman wearing shorts, weird-looking tattooed symbols, and a hat.
"Have some of this," he says, offering a joint.
"Don't mind if i do," i say.
I cup my hands carefully to create a handformed chillum, placing the joint between my first and second fingers. What do you give the man who has everything? Penicillin. Can't be too careful nowadays. I hand the thick smoking reefer back to the barfly as the barman pulls my pot of beer.

"Geek," the Dutchman says, proffering a wizened hand.
"Mark," i say.
"You know the principle of Om?" Geek asks. "Mark, I once saw my foot covered entirely with bees! They communicated with me using the patterns of Om. As the Queen of my country once said: 'Nature is under control but not disturbed' - but she is a liar. A liar! And how do i know? I tell you the truth now - because i have seen this with my own eyes! Mark," he says, grabbing my leg, "You know, if you look under the paw of a dog, what do you find?"

I shrug my shoulders, perplexed. I don't know. A fucken paw print, maybe? I can't seem to find any coherent thread in Geek's story. I might be forgiven for thinking these rambling propositions are merely a string of non-sequiteurs issuing like steam from the boiling brain of a demented crack head. But you never know. Perhaps i am missing some mystical truth.

"You see the soul of a baby, only sideways," Geek explains. Nope - demented crack head was right on the money. "You know the universe is vibration. But Mark," he says, jumping to his feet, "They took the stem of these babies only to cure the Queen of the Netherlands, like this," he lunges at me and grabs my skull, "From here to here!" he makes slashing motions at my forehead and neck. "If a baby is cut it will bleed to death! And I was in the prison for fourteen months! This tattoo here, these three lines, these represent the three kingdoms of heaven!"

I take a sip of my beer, and glance around, surreptitiously, for an escape route. Geek stares at me through yellow prescription glasses, with clear, round bifocal lenses set into the bottom. He has his head tipped back, peering at me through the bifocals with his pinpricked pupils, checking to see that i am still paying attention, or, at least, still seated on the bar stool next to him. He continues with some rant about the eye of God. I nod from time to time. The beer is not bad. But poor Geek is clearly a nut bar. Definitely he has had too much of something. I zone out as he continues his frenetic and garbled concoction of animism and drug-fuelled symbolism. A girl is singing songs of love on the microphone next door, in competition with some bizarre coconut rap coming from across the street. Bamboo and vines form a screen on one side of the bar, and down the steps in the tiled pavilion some Khmer boys knock ivory balls around on a billiard table. Bicycles and motos criss-cross the dusty dirt street out front. Late afternoon sun illuminates the motes as they drift lazily under a circling roof fan.

Eventually i manage to peel myself away from this mad Dutchman, who continues his rant regardless of the fact that the bar stool next to him is now vacant. Instead, i strike up a conversation with the Khmer barman. It is a short conversation, as i expect he has limited English, and involves me using hand signals to order another pint and to ask if he knows anything about a motorcycle club somewhere in the street. I spread my arms wide and imitate the sound of a Harley Davidson. He nods. "Oh yes, they up the street, way up, four hundred metre. You see big bike. Where you from?" he asks, staring at the red Maoist star on my black cotton bag. "Canada?"

The questions here are always the same. Where you from? Where you go? Ah, if only i knew. It is too deep a philosophical point to even begin to fathom. I shrug my shoulders, resigning myself to the postmodern philosophical position of Whateverism.

The barman tells me the biker bar doesn't open until after dark. I finish my beer and order another.

For some reason, i had supposed the Cambodian biker club would be frequented and run by Cambodians. But the only Cambodians in the bar are the bar girls. Klaus is German, about fifty or so, with a leather vest laced up at the sides, a skull cap, and a big handlebar mustache. He is drinking black coffee. A Honda Shadow leans idly outside the front of the Lone Brothers' compound, underneath their 'colors' - a skull and crossbones with red and blue flames exploding out each side. The girls stand, equally idly, around the bar.

The bar menu advertises hard rock, hot girls and cold beer. I opt for the cold beer. So how hard is it to start a motorcycle club in Cambodia, i ask Klaus. The land where everybody, except the cops, gets around on a scooter.

"Is not easy. We are Cambodian chapter of the Thailand Lone Brothers MC," Klaus explains. "We have now six members."
Six?
Klaus looks down into his coffee. "But one rides a 250cc trail bike." Two of the other members, it seems, ride 600cc Honda Shadows, like the one parked outside. But there are club members with a couple of larger bikes, he assures me.
And when is your next ride?
"We maybe go for a ride together in June."
June? I blow some froth across the bar. I was hoping to put together an article before June.
"Is not easy getting all our members together," explains Klaus.
Can't be that hard - there's only six of you.
"Our President runs another bar. He is busy there. But we were going to this weekend go for a ride to Thailand, to see the motorcycle show, five thousand bikes will be going there from all around. We were going to go there."
And? What happened?
"Is not easy." Klaus stares sheepishly into his coffee. "But we ride to Kep before."
Kep? The seaside tourist town of Kep is a leisurely two or three hour drive down the coast, through the Elephant Mountains. You can get a nice feed of crab there. I'm starting to think these guys don't exactly bring a town to its knees when they rumble into town. Or, in the case of the 250, sputter into town.

OK. So they are not exactly the Hells Angles. And maybe riding big fuck off bikes in Cambodia is not for everybody.

"Riding to Phnom Penh, it is the cows that are a big problem," admits Klaus. "And the slower scooters, they do not use their lights. And the roads not so good as Thailand."

Maybe the bar and biker club is just part of their retirement plan. A beefy, if somewhat aged biker on a big black machine pulls in a bit later, and a few younger-looking heavies in tatts drop in to quaff the beer and squeeze the women.

The Lone Brothers bar. Hot girls, cold beer - and apparently they do a hearty goulash soup. I order another beer.

As the town's power fails and the lights go out on my long walk back, i hear some girls calling at me from somewhere in the darkness. "Mister! Mister!" Several sets of hands grab me and lead me, blind in more ways than one, into one of the now darkened bars. "You sit!" They thrust me into a chair and begin to massage my head, shoulders, arms, legs - and, as one of them pulls off my Blundstones - feet.

"Where you from? Where you go?"

PICKLING THE LIVER

2009-02-01T19:29:00.016+09:00

It was probably the vodka shooters that sent me over the edge. I certainly wouldn't have bought a cotton shirt covered in green elephants if i was sober. But then, when you're drunk, green elephants hold an irresistible attraction.

Speaking of ridiculous shirts, i got a message from Safari Bob today. "I can relate to the hangover, I experienced a nasty bout on New Year's Eve-eve. I had to stay in Java for New Year's exploding from both ends when I should've been on a bus back to Bali. You'd think drinking a bottle of Chivas Regal at karaoke the night before would've killed any bug I had, but it went too far and the purging began. Another learning experience chalked up."

I too missed my bus. It was probably the vodka shooters. We live and learn. Well, we live.

After putting away numerous beers with my streetside som tum, then more still with vodka salt and lime at a streetside bar - where they always provide you with a girl, even when you just want a quiet drink - i stagger back towards the flophouse, stopping only for a couple of beers at Cheap Charlies, the open-air corner bar favoured by expats and tourists. But just before i reach the Suk 11 flophouse, i spy a fake old English pub, The Pickled Liver. Right next door to my suite. Featuring a picture of George Best on its coat of arms. Again, if you are drunk, a picture of Georgie Best is irresistable. Because normally, of course, i wouldn't be seen dead in a fake old English pub, but then normally i wouldn't be wearing a shirt covered with green elephants. I stumble inside and order a pint.

There is a game of pool happening at the far end of the bar, a very serious affair between a couple of pink Englishmen and two swarthy fat men, who look like they could very well be in the oil business. They have enough of it in their hair. The barman presents me with my beer in a glass with a stem. I stare at it, mollified. "You've got to be joking, mate," i expostulate, with most of the expostula ending up on the beer mat. "That's a sheila's drink! Did you hear me ask for a shandy? Can you put it in a proper glass?" It's amazing how these Ocker mannerisms come to the fore when you are away from home. And pissed as a newt. I turn my attention back to the the pool game. I'm feeling a little woozy, like i have been dropped into a scene from The Adventures of Barry McKenzie. I stifle an almost irrepressible urge to chunder on the Englishmen.

The barman simply tips the amber ale from the sheila's glass into a schooner glass and hands it back to me. The two men in the moustaches appear to be winning, playing a very reserved game; each shot taken with a soft, even touch to run the ball up toward a pocket. How civilised and sedate. It's like Pot Black, minus the hired suits and bow ties. I watch the match with scorn. I am inebriated enough to believe i can take the winners on playing left handed with the schooner balanced on my scone. So when one of the pink punters inadvertently downs the eight ball, i pounce. I ask an innocuous looking lad standing next to me if he plays, and if he can partner with me against the oil sheiks. "No, no," one of the sheiks says, jabbing a finger into his hairy chest. "You must play me. I am Mustafa. This is Abdul." He gestures at his partner. I nod at them both and shake hands. "Mark," i say.
"What?" says Abdul. "Muck?"
"Yes, Mark," i slur. "It means son of the god of the edible seaweed."
"Twenty baht," says Mustafa, indicating the green baize. "You must pay."
I grab some change from a bar girl. From nowhere, a small boy appears and takes my coins, quickly and professionally racking up the balls. Just as quickly, he disappears. Kids. I shake my head in dismay. I must admit W.C. Fields was onto something when he said "Anyone who hates children and animals can't be all bad." I take up a cue and give the triangle of fifteen a mighty thump. A ball goes down in the corner pocket but it is all a blur. Even standing still looking at the rest of the balls, lying stationary on the table, it is all a blur. What don't you say to a policeman when you are pulled up drunk driving? "Are youse two twins?"

I check the chute to see if it was a big or a small. One of the sheiks comes over. "I am supposed to break because I win," he says.
"Bit late for that, Abdul, i already sunk one."
"I am Mustafa - he is Abdul," he says. He bends down to look in the chute. "OK," he says magnanimously. "You play on. You are on these," he indicates the bigs. What? I check the chute again. It is a solid yellow ball with the number '1' on the side.
"I don't think so champ, i'm on these." I point to the smalls. His mate comes over to check. He crouches down, and nods.
"Thank you, Mustafa," i say.
"I am Abdul - he is Mustafa," he says. Either way, i am allowed to continue. I take a swig of the brew and follow my usual set of rules for playing pool drunk. Rule number one: adopt an air of extreme and totally unjustified self-confidence. Rule number two: hit the balls as if you want to place them about forty-five feet beyond the pocket.

After a few minutes, these tactics begin to pay dividends. When Mustafa sinks the white, it seems the game is mine. I've sunk about five balls to his one, and now i have two shots. I hold up two fingers, not in a rude way, but just to check. "Two?" i ask. The sheiks nod. I sink a ball off the first shot and line one up over a pocket on the next. I move around the table to knock it in. A hand grabs my cue.
"Two shots only."

I look at him, incredulous. "I just sunk one," i protest. "If you sink a ball you get an extra shot. Them's the rules, Abdul."
"I'm Mustafa - he's Abdul," he says. "You have two shots only."
I look to his friend in mute appeal.
"The American is right," he says. American? "He has another shot."
"Thank you, Mustafa."
Abdul says nothing. I think they know now that i'm mixing up their names deliberately. Basic psychology. I go to the bar and take a hefty chug of beer, in the belief that this too will somehow psyche out my opponents. (In the morning, i think differently). I chalk the cue, and swagger over to the table to knock the number six into the pocket as if i were trying to hit it into some time next week. I miss my next shot completely - a touch too much swagger in the elbow. But Mustafa misses his easy pot and sets me up. I belt the last one down and take aim on the black. With five of Mustafa's still on the table, there is no clear shot. The pair stand and watch intently. I belt the black and watch as it pinballs around the cushions before finding a centre pocket. Ha! Too easy. I thank Abdul and Mustafa and head for the bar to start psyching out my next opponent. A French Canadian girl is hovering with her 20 baht. I've seen her hanging around the flophouse. Cute. "Rack 'em up," i say, waving at the table. The young boy appears again.

Abdul shakes his head. "You lose," he says.
"What?" i wipe the foam from my mustache.
"You lose. You did not choose a pocket."

The kid racks up the balls as Mustafa chalks up his cue. Tsk. I figure that kid is way too young to be hanging around bars racking up pool balls. It's a disgrace. Why isn't he out peddling his arse on the street like the rest of them?

I bid farewell to the French Canadian girl, and to any chance of becoming a mountie.

SLUMMING IN SIAM

2009-01-30T23:39:00.009+09:00

That it should come to this. Posting a blog from a coin-operated computer.

Bangkok. One huge mis-en-scene from Blade Runner. Skytrains, buses, scooters, the ever-present tuk tuks. So many people in this mad rush toward obscurity. The roads noodle skywards, layer upon layer. The sky is scraped of its sun, its stars. Forget remembering a tall building to use as a landmark. The city sprawl is too wide. I can't see the sky, just this strange grey haze. Smog. Horns blare. A bus lurches forward, only to stop again in the traffic. A girl in the window wears a face mask.

I walk through the side roads; the Soi. Through tunnels between them, past the roadside stalls, with their deaf vendors signing to each other. Past the go-go girls i saw when i was here for the coup in '06. Same same - but different. Another tuk-tuk tout approaches me.

"You want taxi?" he says, grabbing my arm and gesturing towards one of the line of waiting drivers.
"No, thank you."
"You like massage?"
"Sorry. You're not my type."

I find a roadside vendor to make me som tum. With a Tiger beer. Sit back on a plastic chair, the steel table, and watch the tourist parade, of which i am, by default, a part. An elephant ambles by. I'd forgotten about the elephants.

HEARTS OF DARKNESS

2009-01-18T03:45:00.054+09:00

"Come meet me at the Heart of Darkness bar in Cambodia ..."

"...and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him - all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is detestable. And it has a fascination, too, which goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination - you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate."

- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

"Sounds like the sorta place a girl could really kick up her heels," Mayhem says.

Miss Mayhem - she is cursed with humanitarian instincts and an innate need to protect and stand up for vulnerable beings. From the women and children of Gaza to the animals of the wild frontier, she does what she can. I once drove with her from Carnarvon to Exmouth, and along the way she insisted on stopping at every dead roadside kangaroo to check their pouches for joeys. For a while there, the offices of the Northern Guardian resembled an animal shelter, with a sling containing Jasper the Orphaned Joey hanging off Melinda's car seat or journalist's chair. We also had a rather large blue heeler prowling the office, whom Mayhem had saved from a bullet at the pound.

Melinda Mayhem - she just won't take cruelty and suffering lying down. Apart from in the S&M dungeons, of course.

Things did get a bit out of hand up at that North West paper. Not only with the introduction of the animals. On the morning that i returned to work after a five-week stint in the psychiatric ward, suffering from "exhaustion", Mayhem and i went to the servo before work and bought matching black cowboy hats. I was wearing some spurs that i had bought on a whim on eBay. When we marched into the newspaper office that morning, looking like fugitives from the set of Gunsmoke, my manager looked apprehensive.
"So ... Mark," she said, her voice quavering. We both turned and glowered at her from under our stetsons. "Are you going to be ... okay?"
"I've never felt better," i said, spurs jangling as i stomped off to make my first coffee of the day.

"Fuck America, as they say in the classics," i say to Mayhem. "Come meet me at the Heart of Darkness bar in Cambodia. We can start afresh."
"Yes, i suppose if you're going to have a rant at people in a bar there are certain advantages to doing it in a place where no-one can understand you," she says.
"And i suggest you bring your disguise," i say. "It is against the law to take Cambodia's ancient treasures out of the country, and that's how we'll be making our money until we can land jobs - we'll be selling Khmer stone statuary on eBay. If things get too hot, we'll slip into our disguises and make a run for it on the motorcycle up to Siem Reap, where we can hide out at Carlo's rooftop bar and grill til things cool down. I know a place in Bangkok where i can pick up a cheap 1960s Suzuki on the way to the border."

"Excellent," says Mayhem. "That sounds like a plan. I'll dress like a man - that should confuse the communist government and the CIA. What about you?"
"I'll wear your blonde wig. But if i have to dress as a woman then you should ride on the front of the bike - that way we'll attract less attention."
"Good thinking, Art Director."
"So i'll meet you in Phnom Penh?"
"A kettleful of venomous snakes wouldn't keep me away," she declares.

It's good to have sensible travel plans. I fly out next week.

FACING THE MUSIC

2009-01-08T19:08:00.026+09:00

It's a Friday. Fuck. I don't know how much longer i can kid myself that the idea of life as a connected journey towards something worthwhile is not an utterly meaningless proposition. I shift down and accelerate hard up Graphite Road. It's like getting kicked repeatedly in the guts. I should never have sold those Koni shocks. Another unseen bump on this winding road kicks the frame hard up into my spine and knocks the wind out of me. The air is hot and dry inside the helmet. The sun slants harsh through the regrowth karri as the sweet sour smell of the forest mingles with engine oil and leather.

I'm aiming for Manjimup to Nannup in under 45 minutes. Not because i'm in any kind of hurry, but because i'm told it's good to set goals. What a smashing day to be speeding relentlessly towards some kind of armageddon. Unlicensed, unrepentant, and unwavering. The road is hilly, winding, and surprisingly free of the usual holidaymaker hell that plagues the south west this time of year. A perfect venue for the solitary pleasure of motorcycling. Since leaving Albany i've only seen one four-wheel-drive, slowly crawling up a curve, caravan in tow. A box on wheels containing all the things they have come here to get away from. I cross the double white and blow past before they even register. Yellow road signs appear, those black snakes with pointy heads. For each and every one the decision is simple: draw your line and stick to it.

There are two kinds of motorcyclists: those who have come off, and those who will. Fortunately, i'm one of the former. Another road sign looms as i crest a hill and sweep down into the next curve. The new short mufflers crackle as i change down. Winding road, next 7km. What a glorious day. Apart from the fact that it's a Friday. Fuck.

I'm northbound to Southbound, a wrangled VIP two-day pass stashed in my backpack. To see Gomez, The Grates, The Hives, Bluejuice, Franz Ferdinand, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Dylan Garrett, Miss Polly, and Nurse Nikki. I have a media pass, plus one. And it's the "plus one" that introduces the armageddon factor.

"Miss Polly, i can't take Friday off. I asked already. If i do, they'll fire me. Besides, the best bands are on on the Saturday."
"Architecture in Helsinki are on on Friday. And you know i could have bought a scalped ticket my own self."
She's right, of course. But she's always right: she's a woman. When we first went to buy tickets and found they were sold out, i said to Miss Polly: Don't worry, i'll find us some. And i did. That was back when there was an 'us', and 'we' were going to spend our holidays in Margaret River. Dang. So i got us a media pass, plus one. But to get Miss Polly in on Friday, i need to be there, in corporeal form, with ID.

"Don't worry, i'll be there on the Friday, i promise," i said. This was a bit rash. But nonetheless, i promised. And if you don't look after your friends, then you instantly forfeit all your rights as a human being. You might as well pack it in. Or become chief-of-staff at a narrow-minded country newspaper. Of course, when i got back, i was fired on the spot. But this is a mere technicality. Am i a writer, or an arse-licking employee?

Some would contend that, at the moment, i am neither.

"Get your stuff and get out," said my chief-of-staff. Obviously she is not a fan of music, freedom, or sheer lunacy in any of its many and variegated forms.

I check the map pages when i pull into Nannup. I gave my country roads directory to Dylan last week, for his northbound road trip with his younger brother Jake. So i have only printouts from Google Maps to find my way through the back roads to Dunsborough. Just north of Nannup i turn off the highway and head west along Mowen Road, which soon becomes a gravel track. Oh well. I stick to 120 to even out the corrugations.

Eventually i get lost, ditch the road maps, and navigate by the sun. North by north west. When i get to Dunsborough it's hot, and insanely crowded. One of the advantages of riding a splendid vintage motorcycle is that you can park it anywhere, even somewhere utterly ridiculous, like right smack in the centre of a crowded footpath. People will just stand around admiring it, saying things like, "Wow. Nice motorcycle" or sticking notes to the seat that say "Love the 650. If you ever want to unload it, ring me. Dave 0412 546 912." If it was a Hyundai Excel, of a Ford Festiva, or a Kia, the virulent mobs would instantly snap off the antennae, key the duco, and twist the windscreen wipers ferociously about until they point in the direction of the next transit of Venus. Or simply kick the mortal piss out of the panels and headlamps with their steel-capped boots.

I dodge the moribund hordes and pull the dusty bike up to within spitting distance of a coffee shop. I hit the kill switch, twist up the petcocks - what a curious word - and kick out the stand. I dismount, pull off my helmet and, with my back arched and my feet shoulder width apart, i shake free my hair and stare around at mercilessly at the masses and laugh, just like Billy in Easy Rider. Ha ha ha. You can do this kind of shit when you ride a motorcycle. It's fucking great.

The front of the bike, my visor, my jacket and jeans are covered in bugs. Damn those guys. Captain America, and Billy. Wherever they went, their bikes were shiny and spotless, but you never saw them take so much as a rag to them. And they never changed their clothes throughout the entire film. They even slept in them. What kind of road trippers are these? With their spotlessly shiny bikes and freshly laundered shirts. Apart from in the last scene, of course, when they are lying in pieces and on fire on the side of the highway. But i'm hoping it won't come to that.

I order a coffee, fight off a pregnant woman with a pram for an outside table, peel off my jacket and change into a Thai batik shirt. Everything looks better in a Thai batik shirt, especially those ones with the two pockets low down at the front. While waiting for my double shot i text Nurse Nikki.
"I'm in town, at the coffee grinders. Come get me."
I haven't seen her in ages. She's still the same. Friendly, attractive, talkative - and unmarried. What's wrong with young blokes these days, i wonder. I follow her back to her beach house. It's a two-storey job on the beach side of Geographe Bay Road, with a huge roofed deck that looks out across the peppermint groves to a white sandy bay.

Noice. "You want a drink?" asks Nurse Nikki as i stretch out on the deck. Why haven't i visited here before, i wonder. I get a text. Miss Polly and her two sisters will pick me up around 1, then we'll head out to the festival. Miss Polly. Mmm.

Of course i'm here for all the wrong reasons. Well, no - not all the wrong reasons. I'm here for the music, to catch up with friends, and to engage in some serious photography. But the irrational, romantic and - let's face it - stupid part of me still longs for a return to that certain frisson that comes with the package that is Miss Polly. This, of course, is never going to happen. I know that. Because that was then. And this, unfortunately, is now. The harsh light of summer. But then, i never was much amenable to reason. I always was partial to the je ne sais qua.

"Uh, why did you just kiss me on the neck?" Miss Polly demands after i return from the bar and kiss her on the neck. I like her neck, especially where it joins her shoulder. I've been waiting a good fifteen minutes in the festival sun for a beer and a vodka. I thought she might be pleased to see me, seeing as how i have a cold beverage in my hand. We slide them into our classy servo stubby holders, the ones that feature those airbrushed pictures of scantily clad women lying on tropical beaches. Miss Polly looks very attractive in her orange island girl dress and orange nail polish. A bit like a tangerine. Thank god i didn't bite her on the fucking neck - my lawyer is away in Halmahera.
"Uh, because you were standing there." i say, realising this is probably not a sound defence.
Dylan and Miss Polly's friend are also standing there, watching this exchange.
"Friends don't do that," Miss Polly says. Friends. The f-word again. Hooly dooly.
"Of course they do. My friends do it all the time." I lean over and kiss Dylan on the neck. He's completely pissed, and barely notices.
"Yeah, i'll buy one for a dollar. Let's start a cult. Where's my dog?" he shouts, and takes another drink.
"What do you think?" Miss Polly turns to her girlfriend, who is luminous with the kind of sexual afterglow that follows a night of wanton lust with a new boyfriend. She smiles the smug, self-satisfied smile of a cat cleaning the cream off its whiskers. She might as well have a sign on her that says: i just got fucking laid. "Would you let your friends kiss you on the neck?"
"No. I certainly wouldn't," she says. "No no no. Never. You need to set some boundaries. I would only let my lover do that to me." Then she kind of wriggles.

Well. Thanks a lot. I hope after your boyfriend dumps you no friend ever kisses you on any part of your body again. Ever.

I shrug, take a swig of Heineken, and leave with Dylan. We go for a walk amongst the revellers, find Dylan's new friend L, and head over to the VIP media section. Here we put away a serious amount of free drinks.

I mean, if you can't fuck your friends, who can you fuck.

It's hopeless. Things were good there for a while; but now it's just hopeless. I cast about for a lifesaving ring, but there is nothing. Just the rolling sea that is the Southbound festival. I knew it was hopeless a few weeks back when she said "There is no 'us' anymore, Mark. There is no 'we'. Can i be any more clear?" The problem is that i can never understand why women are not perpetually in love with me. Hell, if i was a woman, i'd be in love with me. I take another swig of Heineken. Maybe i should have paid more attention in class. Maybe i should have taken notes when they explained what to do when the ship goes down. I thought you were meant to just keep on playing. Or stand and salute or something? I can't remember. I go to see the nice girl at the bar. A vodka? Ppffsshh. There you go. Ahh, thank God for small mercies. Small mercies in aluminium cans.

She's right of course. But then, she's always right. She is a woman, after all. I knock back the vodka and go for another. Hmmm. Freelance. Freelance sounds good.

THE FIRST AGAINST THE WALL COME THE RESOLUTION

2009-01-01T00:00:00.012+09:00

It's New Year. A special night of the year, chronologically speaking. I'm figuring i'll grill me some catfish and make new muffler brackets for the 650. Then Nurse Nikki phones from Dunsborough. Nurse Nikki. We have an interesting, ongoing, long distance confabulation. It involves her phoning me, at odd hours and usually naked, and recounting her sexual adventures.

"Hi Mark."
"Hi. I was just about to call you." It's true. Straight after the catfish. I need somewhere to stay this weekend. I just wasn't sure how to ask without it sounding like an indecent proposal. "What's happening in Nurse Nikkiland."
"Not much, going to the pub, chilling out. Watching my new house getting built. What about you."
"Not much. Going to the beach. I was hoping to get away to Southbound on Friday. What you up to tonight."
"Going to the pub later to see some reggae. But right now I'm just lying here naked on the floor."
"Oh, ok."
"It's one of the advantages of having the whole house to yourself."
"For sure."
"I just got out of the shower, so i thought i'd call you."
"Good idea."
"Who are you - uhhh - taking to Southbound."
"Oh. I'm giving the other ticket to Miss Polly. I kind of promised. And we've been getting on a lot better since she stopped speaking to me and left town."
"I thought you were going to ask me."
"Well."
"I thought you told her to get lost."
"Uh."
"So where are you going to stay."
"Oh. I was just going to sleep on the ground."
(As if.)
"You can stay with me if you like."
"Oh really? That's a good idea. It sounds like the place to be at the moment."
"Yeah, well my parents are away... it's their beach house, but they're hardly ever here really - oh, you mean because i'm lying here naked."
"Uh huh."
"Well as i said i just got out of the shower. I'm just - ahhh - relaxing, you know. Unh."
"Mmm."
"Uhhh." Pause. "Have you spoken to Mickey T lately."
We share an ex. My ex-flatmate, her ex-boyfriend.
"No, not really, just on Vicebook, but he's not been online much. I think he's out sailing. There's a picture of him toying with a shark on Dr Case's page. They're out in Shark Bay."
"I haven't heard from him for ages. So what's your New Year's resolution."
"Uh - "
"Mine is not to have any more casual sex. Not until i'm back in a serious relationship."
"Woah."
"Yeah. No more casual sex until i'm in a serious relationship, and if that means i don't have any more sex for as long as i live, well, so be it."
"Heavy duty. For as long as you live. That's a long time."
"Yes, i told my friend, and she goes, Nikki, that's the same New Year's resolution you made last year."
"Oh. How long did that last."
"About an hour. But i'm a lot older now, and a lot wiser. This time i mean it."
"So how old are you - all of about twenty-five?"
"No, I'm thirty! So what's your New Year's resolution."
"Me. I've got two. Number one is no more serious relationships, and number two is plenty of casual sex. Really casual. Like, not even paying attention."
"You can ring me up and tell me about it."
"Sure. Before, during, or after?"
"During would be better. That way I can live a sex life vicariously through you. Not much of one, though, by the sounds of it."
"I'll see what i can do. And i'll give you a call when i get into town."
"OK."
"So it's OK to come stay this weekend."
"Sure."
"We can lie around and talk about how our New Year's resolutions are coming along."
"Sure. Happy New Year."
"Happy New Year."

I hang up. That's the New Year thing sorted. Now the catfish.

STONER NOODLES

2008-12-31T16:31:00.029+09:00

DECEMBER RECIPE OF THE MONTH
This is a recipe for instant gratification. You can cook this while totally off your tits. I know, because i was there.

INGREDIENTS
Serves 2
Mi Goreng instant noodles
two eggs
coconut milk
coriander
sprouts or other vegetation
meat, fish, or fish substitute

METHOD
Dylan is back in town. I don't quite know what he is doing here, but that's OK, because neither does he. After lurching about town for a 'quick drink', we finally stagger back to the apartment and start in on a stash of New Zealand's finest, thoughtfully left behind during a recent visit by a local bohemian guitarist. It's been a big afternoon slash evening. Sarah Toa was right. There is no such thing as a 'quick drink' with Dylan, unless bouncers are involved. As it was, i had to drag him out of the Tangehead pub before we were thrown out. Once again. After weeks of practice, i have found there is an intangible yet clearly definable line, which, if we stick to it, allows us to be happy, smiling, partying drunks. Once the line is reached - and this is easily recognisable, because suddenly everybody is our best friend - the trick is to drink one glass of water for every alcoholic beverage. And drink slowly, preferably while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. To quote Safari Bob, everything looks better in a Hawaiian shirt.

But if i succumb to that almost irresistible urge to increase my alcoholic intake fourfold and /or start in on the spirits, i will cross this fine line, and become an instant nuisance. Or, along with Dylan, two instant nuisances.

After Dylan sits down at someone else's table and starts talking in what sounds like a Lithuanian dialect to Ann-Marie, the pretty, short-cropped blonde-haired ex-model, i decide we must have inadvertently crossed that line at some point on our crawl between the Hurl, the Premier Hotel and Tanglehead. Ann-Marie works at the hairdressers downstairs from my apartment and, a couple of days ago, they were all working dressed in elf outfits. Ann-Marie's red pixie party dress, trimmed with white faux fur, came down to her upper thigh, followed by a short space of white flesh, then sheer white lace-topped stockings. She was wearing high heels, and her legs went all the way up until they met our expectations. We had just returned from the beach, and stood in front of the window - sandy, stunned and somewhat stricken - as Ann-Marie bent over to pick a dustpan and brush up off the floor.

"You looked very festive in that elfin outfit," Dylan says to her during a brief moment of comprehensibility. "My friend and i were watching you through the window. I've got an ostrich egg at home. I can show it to you if you like."
I collar Dylan and drag him toward the exit. "Let's go."
"We could listen to Barry White! Do you play Yahtzee?" he shouts over his shoulder.
Our exit is complicated by the sudden appearance before us of two blonde girls, dressed all in khaki. They introduce themselves as Steve and Bindi Irwin. This proves too much of a distraction for Dylan, who immediately launches into another improbable dialogue.
"A dingo ate my baby," he begins.

Eventually we reach the relative solace of the apartment, light up a pipe, and get bombed. Dylan raids my vinyl collection, and begins to irreparably damage my mint condition Beatles box set. I go to the kitchen to see what's to eat. Not much. Some leftover beef vindaloo. And a couple of packets of two-minute Mi Goreng instant noodles.

I boil some water on the stove, and crack in a couple of freshly plucked eggs. After these have cooked for about a minute, i chuck in the noodles and their concomitant condiments, squeezing them out of their little plastic sachets. Dylan has found some Stevie Wonder. The street scene from Living For The City plays out on the stereo. I lurch about the kitchen. Two minute noodles. It doesn't quite cut it, does it. I find a tin of coconut milk. Mmm. There's an idea. Coconut milk. I open it and set it aside while i go looking for some coriander. Coconut and coriander. Like Steve and Bindi. I find some coriander and some leftover salad, and tear it all up. The noodles are cooked, so i tip in some coconut milk and throw the vegetation on top. Looking good. But it needs some body, some meat, or better still, some seafood. Fish. Or perhaps some nice fish substitute? I ransack the fridge and cupboards. Nothing. Only the leftover beef vindaloo. Where is Sarah Toa, rogue fisherwoman when i need her? What the hell, i think. I quickly heat the vindaloo in the microwave and throw in some beef strips and, as an afterthought, tip in some of the curry oil.
"Mmm," says Dylan, and he takes a mouthful from his bowl of noodles. The Saints are on the stereo, stranded far from home. "This is great curry laksa."
I look at the bowl, with its coconut soup intermingled with curry oil. Bean shoots. Noodles. It does look like curry laksa. Well i never.
"Oh it's not bad," i say, nonchalantly. "I got the recipe from a Thai monk during my stay at the Suvarnabhumi Temple at Three Pagodas Pass, up near the Burmese border. Back in '72."
"They love their Yahtzee, those monks," says Dylan. "You got any beer?"

AS I LAY DRYING

2008-12-28T18:18:00.011+09:00

My lids are red, almost translucent in this lucid December sun. I hear the soft shush, shush of the swell between the rocks, and feel the warmth of the sun, and its bite. I realise i will be prickly with sunburn tomorrow. But the heat is so relaxing my muscles have lapsed into a dream state. And i don't wish to wake them.

Yesterday i applied for a job as a journalist in Airlie Beach, Queensland, with The Whitsunday Times. No, not the Sunday Times - The Whitsunday Times. This is a subtle, yet vital distinction. Because the Whitsunday Islands are exotic, are far away, and have remote beaches. Mmm. The Whitsundays. I'd need a yacht. And perhaps there i can finally get away from it all. Perhaps there i can finally escape my past and stop running for a while.

So how do you think it feels
sleeping by yourself
when the one you love, the one you love
is with someone else

then it's a wide open road
its a wide open road
and now you can go any place
that you wish to go

- David McComb

But deep down i know the memories will follow in my wake, and when i stop she will once again wash over me. Getting away from it all on some remote beach. It's a romantic notion; and like most romantic notions, it will never work. Because on whichever beach i lay on - and today i'm laying on a warm rock off Mistaken Island - it is never remote enough. Wherever i am, the beach is right there under me. There is no escape.

Mistaken Island - a metaphor for my journey these past two and a half years, trying to forget, trying to push myself and my work out beyond the edge. And now today i have discovered i am not a photographer at all. I am merely a camera demolition expert. I have destroyed yet another Nikon, this time by dropping it onto Sarah's head as we climbed down from above the wheelhouse on the Cheynes II. She did a sterling job of breaking its fall, but as it hit the deck the back came open, ruining my last roll of film. The camera no longer works. Deja voodoo. I remember picking up another F3, also minus its back, its spoiled film spilling out like goat entrails out onto the highway near Ravensthorpe. Only a couple of weeks back. And the D70 ... well, best not to even think about that one. Suffice to say it's gone too. That makes four cameras lost, broken or completely destroyed since October. Ouch. I heard a theory, through a friend of a friend, that i am subconsciously destroying all my cameras because i don't value my skills as a photographer. Perhaps that's what happened in my relationship with Mili X. Perhaps i didn't value my skills. Or perhaps i'm just really stupid and clumsy.

Either way, i'm working on a deal with The Newspaper to acquire their stash of old Nikon film cameras, which are languishing and collecting dust, in a steel cabinet in the subs' room. A whole bunch of them. Which is good, because at this rate, i'm going to need them.

Just as we were about to push off from the Cheynes II, we suddenly realised it was a giant mussel farm. Never averse to a feed of those tasty morsels, we filled a third of a bucket in no time flat; Morgan, Catherine, Sarah and i pulled them from the hull where they were clustered between the high and low tide marks. Then Sarah piloted the boat around the coastline, past Fisheries, to the lee side of the peninsula and Mistaken Island, where we anchored and swam. I had only boxers. "Don't laugh," i instructed my fellow drifters as i prepared to dive into those crystal clear waters. "Oh, no," said Catherine, "We'll only laugh when you get out." Hmm. The shrinkage factor. I dive in.

Lying, drying, salt taut on my skin. Sarah and Catherine are stretched out on another rock somewhere on the island, while Morgan is fossicking about, swimming, and calling to his mum. The quietude and sunshine is bliss. I roll onto my stomach and start toasting my back. Perhaps i should stay put in Albany for a while, with its warm weather and stunning beaches. I'm earning good money now, as production editor. And Melinda Mayhem will be back from New York by the end of the week, unless they agree to extend her US visa - and even the US Government is not that crazy. Last time she flew from Manhattan straight to the mangroves and spent three months working in Carnarvon, where i broke her in as a journalist. If i remember rightly i was wearing spurs at the time.

"I'm thinking of coming down to Albany from New York," Mayhem says. "Can you find me a job? I mean, why break with tradition? We'll save some money, Art Director, and head for Europe. Go on."

Perhaps that's what i need to break this spell. My muse. I'm hot, and i'm dry. I wade out into the crystal clear waters for another swim. Fuck the X. Bring on the here and now.

MESSING ABOUT IN BOATS

2008-12-26T14:27:00.010+09:00

It is a splendid day. The sea is glassy and white clouds scud, as only clouds can, across an azure Albany sky. The thirty horsepower Mercury is getting us across at a good clip. We can see the silhouette of the Cheynes II framed against the white beaches of Possession Point. The whole venture brings to mind Kenneth Graham: "There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

The Cheynes II. And i thought my '62 Spitfire was a rustbucket. It had nothing on this old Norwegian whalechaser. It is one of those spectacularly failed projects. You know the ones. Your uncle probably had one in his shed, a chassis of a vintage car or truck, dozens of cardboard boxes full of parts, and a head full of dreams.

"It had a series of owners, all fixated on owning the ship as a kind of boys' own adventure," explains Sarah Toa, as she pilots Old Salt's tinnie across the harbour. "One of its owners was going to make his fortune out of it during the America's Cup, hiring it out to rich Americans, so they could watch the yacht race in luxury. Decked it out with a chef's kitchen, plush velvet booths, jarrah panelling. They went broke, of course."

As we approach the half-sunken ship, pigeons explode into the clear sky, circle, and resettle. We draw up alongside and tie off where the rusting deck lists right down to the high water mark. Surprisingly, there are no 'keep off' signs here to deter visitors, nothing imploring them not to trespass, no warning signs at all - other than the obviously dangerous deck. I step onto it, and see it has completely rusted through in parts. A bit like the floor in my '62 Spitfire. I welded the floor pans up, and then the sills rusted through. I replaced the gearbox, and then the cylinder head went. I went through two differentials and still it howled like a banshee. The fuel pump imploded along with various axles, bearings, radiators and starter motors. "No-one ever owns a Triumph," a knowledgeable friend told me. "You only ever own Triumph parts."

We weave our way past the rusted holes and scattered debris toward the bow of the ship. The bulkheads have long been stripped of their brass portholes. Pieces of chain and steel plate are lying about. What looks like a mast rises high above the deck, secured by cables. A rusted 44-gallon drum is affixed to the top, guarded by a lone cormorant. Of course this can't be a mast: the Cheynes would have been powered by a massive diesel engine. Or was it steam? It must be a lookout, a crow's nest, from which the whalers would have sighted their quarry. The cables still hold a few rungs, which run up to the rusted drum. One could still possibly climb it, but it would be a suicidal mission. And today i'm just not in the mood. I did try to commit suicide once, back in 95. I took up smoking and stopped wearing seatbelts. This, however, proved unsuccessful.

These days kids paddle out here from Camp Quaranup to do bombies off the deck. Miss Polly told me she came here once on a school camp, and did just that, only to find that the impact with the water a few metres below was sufficient to pull her bikini top off.

Ah, to be sixteen again, and swimming with topless, raven-haired girls. I gaze out into the green waters and trip over a length of steel cable.

The Cheynes II is, i realise, one of the last bastions of freedom. Here, we are completely free to fall down, hurt ourselves quite badly, and sue somebody's ass. It is a treasure trove of litigation. Sunken ships and treasure. A boys' own adventure indeed.

THE FINE ART OF GETTING FIRED

2008-12-16T08:35:00.026+09:00

It's never much fun getting fired. But when you are a human cannonball, it comes with the territory. And Dylan's ballistic style was always going to land him in trouble.

He was a talented writer, our former arts writer, one of the best - and i've worked with some damn fine talent during my nine-month sojourn at The Newspaper. Dylan's words glowed with a white fire. He had the imagination and verve to carry the bright and blazing torch of prose well beyond the pale. He was a natural with words, and was never more so than when being ejected from the various bars around town. He would invoke heaven and hell in his brilliant drunken diatribes, bringing down all manner of blessings and disgrace upon our bleary heads. You could call him a troubled writer. And as his sometimes unwilling accomplice, i too was troubled, mainly by where we were going to drink the following night as we were systematically banned from each of the town's few watering holes. Even our friends started banning our late night, inebriated visits. Dylan was indeed a troubled soul. I got along with him famously.

Miss Polly and i went to see his bizarre film, Enter The Hobo, which had been included in an international comedy film festival in the nearby hippy commune of Denmark. We drove down there, bought some wine, ordered a pizza and sat through what Miss Polly later dubbed "officially the worst film of the entire festival." I didn't think it was that bad, although it was clearly a stoner movie. The pizza was a good call.

Anyway, after a particularly spectacular drunk one night he finally lost his artistic licence when he was fired on the spot. That night Lorenzo and i were nearly killed. But as we tore down the winding road around Mount Clarence, the silver sea shining like a sharp flat blade in the abyss below, i was totally fatalistic. Faster, faster! I cried. You need to accelerate through those corners! Keep the car balanced! Hit that bend at its apex! And so on.

And of course it all ended badly. We skidded to a halt outside Martine's place, where Derek, Dolores and Tiffany had just returned after the pub, but they wouldn't let us in. Tiffany, who is quite a responsible girl in a glamorous kind of way, tried to take Dylan's keys. But we took off again, back up the mountain, in an ill-fated search for a higher plane. Ours was a spiritual quest. There was a bottle of spirits out there somewhere with our name on it.

So Derek rings on the mobile. "What do you think you are doing, you fools? Make him stop. He is in no condition to be driving. Get out of that car," he admonishes.
"Sure Derek. What would you know about it?" i demand, as i am flung hard against the window winder as Dylan negotiates another hair-brained bend.
"I work in the emergency department, i see what happens," Derek says.
"Try telling that to James Dean," I shout, and terminate the call.

I had absolutely no idea what i was trying to say, but i was saying it with great conviction. An ashen-faced Lorenzo jumped out at the next intersection.

It was a sad day, helping him empty out his room. It wasn't much of a house, out past Highway Meat Supply in one of the undesirable suburbs. The back door was broken and couldn't be locked. His flatmate was away on the mines. The recent downpour had covered the kitchen floor with water. Some aboriginals whom Dylan had given a lift home the night before had stolen all the cassettes out of his car. There was nothing much in his room to put into a storage unit anyway, but he insisted on doing just that. "I'll be back at Christmas," he said.

A clock radio, a small collection of the worst records i have ever seen, a cheap portable television and a box of oddments. Even in the smallest storage unit in the complex, his collection of belongings looked pathetically small. I tried to explain that he wouldn't miss any of this stuff, and that he would never come back for it, but after he accidentally snapped the key off in the roller-door, it was settled. We tossed the remaining LP records. Max Bygraves went onto the roof. An accordion band hit the forlorn-looking basketball hoop by the cyclone fence.

"I'll be back," he said.

NINETEEN SEVENTY NINE

2008-12-06T23:06:00.049+09:00

He found me through an article in the newspaper.

"When i first saw that story about someone with your name riding a motorcycle around Albany without a licence, and giving false details and a false address to police, i thought, that would have to be you," he says.

It's an unnerving experience. Someone you haven't seen for nearly 30 years on your doorstep. School friends - those school friends with whom you once spent a lot of time - have this innate knack of turning up and shining a harsh light on your formative years. Quite unintentionally, in the course of general conversation, they illuminate how you so carelessly chartered this course of self-destruction, how you so blithely cast off into strange waters, setting sail with nothing but a rudimentary grasp of trigonometry and the wan light of distant stars.

But this didn't occur to me when i first opened my door and saw Lachlan. These thoughts came later, after several red wines, and more several red wines. The first thought that came to mind was how long his eyebrow hairs had grown.

I invite him upstairs, and put some coffee on the stove top.
"Yes, that was me," i say. "I couldn't do anything about the article going in the paper, but i did get to write my own headline. 'Motorcyclist takes police for a ride'."
He nods. "Yeah, funny," he says flatly. "Then i read a story about your photographic exhibition. You were always photographing things. That's what i wanted to talk to you about. You see, i'm getting married next week..."

And so we get to talking. Remembering the days of the old school yard. Music, cars, the (still unsolved) mystery of girls, our first forays into pubs and clubs, and, of course, skateboarding.

"Remember the luge runs?" Lachlan asks.
"Remember? 65 miles per hour on a four-foot long skateboard. Three inches off the road. At night. Yes, i remember."
"There was one time at Kangaroo Hill, me and Tim were standing, waiting for the run. Then this couple came out into their front garden, just randomly; we didn't know what to do. Suddenly the luge goes past, whoosh, and they watch it barreling downhill, stunned. Hub dressed all in black, lying down on the board, lit by your headlamps as you both roared past their front gate at over 100km/h.
"This couple just stand there, stare at each other. Then the bloke goes, 'I have heard about these things.' We just took off."
I laugh. "I remember doing Ewan Street in Scarborough, from the water tower to Scarborough Beach Road. Ha. Crazy days."
"Ah, Scarborough High School...they banned all school socials after ours. Man, i don't know how you did it. You got third in the academic awards, and you were never at school."
"I was so."
"No you weren't. You were always out stealing cars, or down the beach, or making explosives, or doing some crazy shit."
"I was not."
"Then you would bring in sick notes, and forge you mother's signature." He laughs.

He must have me confused with someone else. I'm imagining he's suddenly going to look at me askance and go, hang on, who are you again? Oh, no, that was another guy. But he doesn't.

"Remember when we went to that gig at UWA? What were they called - Icehouse? Flowers?"
"Flowers. And no, i don't remember. I'm pretty sure i wasn't there." But there is a niggling memory.
"Yeah you were, we were looking for you after the show, and you'd taken off with the band somewhere."
"No." Did I?

It slowly dawns on me that i've blocked out a whole series of memories from those days. They were troubled times. I didn't know who i was, what i was doing, or where i was going. High school days. It was like being locked in the trunk of a car, on a slow crawl up a darkened road, suddenly emerging before a giant drive-in screen as some bright and strange movie unfolds before your eyes. Now that part i remember. That was 1979, the movie at the drive-in was A Clockwork Orange, and i'd been in the boot of Robbie Chapman's Renault. I got in for free.

After high school i worked in a bank for two years, to qualify for the independent rate of tertiary assistance. The stint as a bank clerk permanently scarred my soul. To compensate, i bought a '62 Triumph Spitfire, chopped and lightened, with a worked motor. My first car.

Always start as you mean to continue.

We'd drive out to wherever and just skate. All the old crew from school, the pioneers, were still skating right through 1980. We were listening to new wave, punk, whatever. Sex Pistols. Devo. The Ramones, The Cure, The Jam. We could see bands every night at the Cat and Fiddle for a dollar, but we'd still climb the barbed wire at the back to get in for free. We were punks. The pub is the Flying Scotsman now, and the old punks settle for pizza and a pint on Sundays. But the Cat had bands like Doris Day, the Neutrons, the Silent Type, the Manikins. And the Triffids, whose limp and laconic stage presence belied their panoramic music and Dave McComb's stunning lyrics.

I started to take photography seriously. Went off to university and spent two years studying physics. Then i met Sienna, and began fooling around with drugs. As you do. I'd jump in the Triumph with a ridiculous amount of hash and we'd just drive, to Kalbarri or Margaret River or wherever, sit on the beach and smoke until we couldn't move. Or i'd turn up at a ramp and try to skate on acid. Things spiralled out of control pretty quickly. The skate crew fell apart over the next year as people drifted off. I don't remember much of that period at all, right up until the beginning of 1987 when i discovered i was a father and had certain responsibilities...

But by 1983 i had dropped out of uni started played music. In those days, this seemed a viable career option - you could live on the dole and play punk rock in bars. The Old Melbourne, the Casablanca, Hernandos, the Seaview, Rockwells, the Stoned Crow, the Shents, the Wizbah, Ozone Bar, the Red Parrot. I was renting a run-down house near the Leederville Hotel, a two bedroom wooden cottage for twenty dollars a week. But most days i'd go visit Sienna. We'd get stoned, fuck, and lie on her bed, off our heads, listening to King Crimson, Return to Forever, Eno, or some wacked out shit like Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Sienna was going through a mad, bad time. Her boyfriend Bob had died of a heroin overdose in the bathroom of a roadhouse, while on tour as the drummer in the musical Hair. A phenomenal drummer, by all accounts. Sienna threw herself into his grave at his funeral. She was a nut bar, but i loved her. Then one night she just ran off. Turned up a few days later in the hills, at a friend's house in Darlington, where she'd spent the past two days blind on datura. Literally blind. She was never the same after that. We drifted apart. I joined a new band.

Lachlan, meanwhile, was Down South, surfing, smoking, and camping in the forest. Working his way through university, to emerge a decade later with a qualification and a house in Denmark.

"Last i remember, you were getting about in that Kombi," i say. "It had 'Copious Amounts of Marijuana' written all over it."
"That's not the half of it," Lachlan says. "I could tell you the story of my flatmate, Juan, and the two motorcycles he brought in from Peru. With two fuel tanks full of cocaine."
"Now there's a story."
He phones his fiancee. We pick her up from Pyrmont House, and start on the drive to Denmark. I'm going to shoot their wedding next weekend, on a hundred acres of land Lachlan owns in the forest. He met Nicola while doing aid work out of London.

So how did he end up there?
"I just got jacked of it all in '99, doing accounts and helping make rich fat people richer and fatter," Lachlan explains. "I wanted to quit Australia and go overseas, and do something useful. So i put my hand up for Australian Volunteers Abroad. After about a year, I got to the interview stage. They asked me where i wanted to go. I said i didn't care. They said you have to give us a preference, so we know where to place you. I thought about it, and said, well, I want to go where there's surf, women, and beer. In that order." He pauses to overtake a cyclist.

"So they sent me to Afghanistan."

"I had no idea where it even was, so i looked it up on the map. And i'm like, where's the fucking beach?
"I spent a few years there, mainly in Kabul, working amongst the Talibs for a Danish aid organisation. We were right next door to the Ministry of Vice and Virtue, the ones who did all the enforcing. Staff members would literally hide under their desks when those bearded bastards came in. They were scary. I remember one time we heard they had taken some kites off some kids, and told them they should be spending more time reading the Koran.

"Then we look outside and there they are next door, kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders, flying kites."

BOHEMIUM IS SO AN ELEMENT

2008-11-26T08:46:00.029+09:00

Meanwhile, Miss Mayhem is in New York, having recently completed her diploma in film directing. Mayhem is hanging out in Manhatten with music producers, filmmakers, actors, billionaires, and presidents.

"Come and meet me in Spain, Art Director," she says.
"I got no money," i say. "I spent it all."
"Don't worry a.d, i'll find us some money," Mayhem says. "I've got connections."
She is an ideas girl. And it is my job as the Art Director to bring these ideas to fruition. Thus we begin a series of increasingly bizarre schemes and exploits to make money for our plane tickets.

"I need a buyer for a whole bunch of muscle cars," Mayhem says the next day. "You find us a buyer in Australia and we'll take a cut. It won't cost us a cent up front, a.d, i promise. I have a friend. There's four of each of these cars, 60s and 70s, SS, Camaros, Coronets, Corvettes."
Hmm. That's sixteen cars. I get on the blower to a guy in Albany, Joe, a millionaire who collects classic cars.
"If you had a convertible E-type, i'd take it," Joe says. "Look, it'll cost you three grand per car to ship them out. I know a buyer in the Eastern States, i'll track down his number. You'll need makes, models, years, photos."
I call Mayhem. "I know the Dodge Coronet, the Chevrolet Corvette and Camaro - but what's the SS?" i ask. "Is that like a Gestapo staff car?"
"I don't think so," Mayhem says, in all seriousness. "I think it's a Chevy. I'll get the details from the grease monkey tomorrow."

The next day she emails me a link to a seemingly random webpage.
"What do you think, Art Director?" she asks.
Reluctantly, i click on the link. They are looking for women to donate eggs to the infertile.
"Compensation for successful egg donors is $8,000 and you receive a free, comprehensive medical evaluation," the site says.
I call her back. "Are you for serious?"
"Am i for serious? I don't even know myself."
"It sounds like you are just one step away from drug testing."

Mind you, i got good money when i was drug testing, back in the nineties. One time i got $220 for sleeping, and another time $20 for every shit i did. Money for shit. It was great. It lasted a few weeks, before some guy developed an erratic heartbeat and ruined it for everybody. The damn fool.

Another time i got a wearable heart rate monitor, which i sold to a jogger for sixty dollars.

"So how's it going with the new muse?" asks Mayhem.
"Miss Polly?" i say. "Well. The girl has talent."
"Yes," says Mayhem. "I like Miss Polly. She has a sense of the ridiculous." She pauses. "Well, she must have."
"Hmm." I let the implication slide.
"You know, you always remind me of the Doctor, having all these adventures with all these beautiful women by your side," she says.
"Yeah, right. You know it's not like that."
"I hope i'm your Rose," she blurts.
"What?"
"You know how she was always your favourite."
What is this girl on?

When Mayhem came to Albany, back in June, it was raining. We spent the weekend in the apartment, watching an entire series of Dr Who. We were so engrossed we only went out for one photo shoot. A pvc jacket and binoculars, up at the radio tower.
"Look at my Facebook page," Mayhem says. "There's a link to the episode where Rose re-enters. Maybe that will be us! Minus the Daleks killing you."
"The drink is already killing me, i don't need the Daleks."
Mayhem: *in Dalek voice* "Inebriate! Inebriate!"

"How about a photographic exhibition in New York?" she asks the next day. "Your work and mine, a collaboration. Well, yours mainly."
"Can you get a gallery?"
"I'll find us a fabulous space! I have contacts. You know people here pay $20,000 a week to hire a gallery? Their work is about as engaging as shaking hands with a leper, yet they're still packing out openings and selling really mediocre work."
"I can do mediocre," i say.
"Or we could do billboards," Mayhem says. "I have a billionaire friend who does billboards."
"How would that make us money?"
"It would make us famous," she pleads.
"That's not the same thing, Mayhem. But i like the way you think."
"What about those Aboriginal photos of yours from the outback? The Australia movie is in release here next week. People are going nuts for the Aborigines. "
"Umm, all those photos were taken by Aboriginal kids and i can't sell them because i don't own the copyright," i explain. "I can only exhibit them."
"I'll think of an angle, a.d, don't worry. I'll make us some money, then we can meet in Spain. Spain, Art Director! Spain!"
"Spain. Yeah, right." The conversation is beginning to sound a bit like an episode of Charlie the Unicorn.

The next day she messages me on the Facebook.
"Hey a.d!"
"Hey ho!"
"Ha ha. Fucking hilarious aren't you. How's tricks?"
"Up and down, up and down. Yo-yo tricks."
"Oh, i know, a.d, i've been depressed too. A muse without the maestro - what sort of life is that? I'm not being very successful leaving the apartment tonight, i'm meant to be getting shot by a French film director on 35mm."
"What time is it over there?"
"It's one in the morning. I'm obnoxiously late. But what's another hour? These people are experimental filmmakers, they don't punch the clock. I wonder what they want me to do? I should have asked."
"You think it might be risque?"
"I think the French director wants to sleep with me," she says. "But hopefully not on camera."
"Then he really would be a French director."
"Oh, noes! I'll have to change my Facebook status to Born for Porn."
"What will your mother say?"
"We are professionals, Art Director. She'll understand. And Qantas is offering two tickets for the price of one. I'll make some money and we can meet up in Spain."
"We are indeed professionals, Mayhem. I have the utmost respect for your work. Even when you do and say crazy things without any regard for the consequences..."
"Like when i wanted you to tie me to the railway tracks?"
"Hmm... or that time in the desert when i'd been shooting you in your underwear, and we were having a break you looked at me and said 'So, Art Director, what would you like to do now?'"
"Did i really say that? Hahaha!"
"A couple of ideas crossed my mind..."
" I did say that! Hahaha. Jesus!"
"We have a strange relationship, Miss Mayhem."
"Indeed we do. Leaves many a person scratching their heads i'm sure. Did you know there is an Albany in New York state?"
"Yes, i did. Do you know if it is wrong to sleep with someone from your sister city?"
"Hahaha. You should come over, we'll get tongues wagging for sure. But i'll see you in Spain in February?"
"OK Mayhem."
"OK a.d."

Mmm. Spain. That means Spanish women.