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So, Emma had a flat tyre at lunchtime yesterday. She asked me to fix it and took my bike back to work (they're identical except hers is burgundy and mine is British Racing Green for extra speed). From experience I knew that this is exactly the kind of simple errand that can turn into a mission in a strange country where you can't speak the language. By the way, our Khmer lessons are going really well but we haven't covered words such as puncture, fix, wait why are you sawing the valve out of the inner tube with a hacksaw blade yet...but I get ahead of myself.
You might be thinking why don't you just fix the puncture yourself ? Very good question, my dad taught me to fix punctures along with a whole heap of other useful handyman skills when I was a kid, but it's just not the way it's done around here. Khmer's don't carry tools because you can find a mobile repair shop on every street corner where a few locals eke out a living fixing up bikes, scooters, motorbikes and tuk-tuks with a portable compressed air tank, puncture repair kit, bucket of water and the essential hammer. The bikes here are very basic, so it works well with this kind of system. I'm sure if you rocked up with some fancy western racing bike or suspended mountain bike with Shimano group-set it would cause quite a stir but pretty quickly they would work out what needed to be done (although they might use a hammer to do it).
So I point to my flat rear tyre and frown. Seems to do the trick on the communication front. My man sticks some air in, puts a blob of saliva on the valve and watches. Fiddles a bit, repeats the exercise. Seems to come to the conclusion that the valve is duff (i'm not so sure but hey, what do I know). So, surely i'll be getting a new inner tube right ? Oh no, my inner tube looks pristine compared to most of the tubes in service on bikes here which consist more of patches than rubber, and they're not going to throw it away for the sake of a valve. So, out comes the hack-saw blade. Starting to get a little bit sceptical but hey i'll go with it. He saws off the valve (at the rubber). I now have an inner tube with a gaping hole in it. All my western mechanical instincts are screaming at me to say something, but I wait with baited breath to see what happens next. Out comes a modified valve with a hand-made stopper of thick rubber...goes in the hole, glue on the tube around the new valve. OK, still not sure about this... Next, a hole is punched in a regular repair patch with a hammer (yay, the hammer). Patch goes on around valve. Hmmm, i'm trying to work out how they are going to stop the air leaking. Ah I see, a nut goes over the whole lot and gets cranked tight. Then it's back into the tyre, retaining nut over the top, air goes in and jobs a good'un.
These kind of methods apply to cars & motorbikes too. The back street mechanics workshops look like something from the Industrial Revolution in Britain. There isn't a car or bike in Cambodia which has ever had a manufacturers service (which makes buying a vehicle here a bit hazardous). The concept of manufacturers parts or even the right part for the job doesn't 
really exist. The Russian Market which is popular with tourists, has around a quarter of it's stalls devoted to second hand scooter parts. If you were savvy enough you could go shopping for parts and build a scooter from the ground up. I was thinking the other day, if you took a random sample of say 100 people from the streets of London or Melbourne and let them loose in the Russian Market, how many could make a functioning vehicle ? I reckon you'd be lucky to get 2. Our knowledge and service economy, niche job specialisms and lives spent sitting in front of computers in glass towers have made us forget how to get by. It reminds me of the Golgafrincham storyline in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In Cambodia, my guess is 20 or maybe more could put together a scooter in the space of a day. These guys have mad skills, born of necessity and experience I guess. Not in a "Western, well trained, follow the manual, do everything right kind of way" but in a "get it back on the road using anything to hand, ingenious, it doesn't count if you don't use a hammer kind of way".
Oh, and the puncture repair is holding up well so far...
I've been thinking about registering for a road race around Angkor in December, so I decided to up the kilometres on my run this evening from 5km to 10km. I haven't run 10km in many years and all I can say is owww. It was a particularly hot night tonight and I was soaked with sweat by the end with a tomato head which everyone was laughing at on the way home. Also, a dog I walked past was scared of me at first but it got all fighty when it realised I was friendly and started chasing me down the road...should have used the old fake rock in the hand throw trick. Anyway, I managed 10km no worries so I think that means i'll have to register for the half marathon around the temples. Gulp...i'll be hitting you all up for sponsorship later as it's for charity.
Flying into Phnom Penh yesterday, we had an excellent view of the work going on to fill in Boeng Kak Lake as the plane circled to land. Those who have visited Phnom Penh will probably recognise this as one of the most popular backpacker haunts, the water front bars and guest houses offering sunset views over the water as thirsty backpackers enjoy a beer. I didn't have my camera with me unfortunately, but from what I saw the lake looks to be already roughly half filled with a huge tongue of sand protruding into it from the Southern shoreline. Boeng Kak Lake is being completely filled in and developed for commercial and residential purposes by Shukaku Inc and Yunnan - a Chinese company. The google map below makes it pretty clear how profitable this will be, the lake is just outside the CBD and once filled will be prime real estate.
The director of Shukaku is a CPP Senator (Cambodia's ruling party), and the development is expected to lead to the forced eviction of around 4000 families. The papers here run stories weekly which throw up questions about the development - compensation for the evicted residents, the impact on drainage in the area, the transparency (or lack of it) in the business dealings between Shukaku and the government, and the obstruction of public meetings held by the residents to name just a few. Regardless of the veracity of any of these reports, and putting aside the clear economic incentive for the work, the displacement of so many people seems to be inherently wrong in my opinion.
Em & I were in Bangkok at the weekend, visiting our good friends Pia & Sebi. It's the first time we've left Cambodia since we arrived 3 months ago, and we had a fantastic time hanging out. We spent a lot of time at the mall - shopping, going to the cinema, and eating great Japanese food. It was also Sebi's birthday and we went out to a pool-side roof-top party overlooking Bangkok's high rise skyline which was top fun. The whole experience really highlighted how first world everything is in Bangkok, and how small and undeveloped Phnom Penh is in contrast. Personally, i'm not a big fan of malls which I find incredibly soulless places and to me represent the pinnacle of our consumer culture (if you want to see them in a new light check out "Dawn of the Dead" - George Romero's 1978 zombie classic). Coincidentally, I had to go to one of Phnom Penh's few malls yesterday - Sorya mall was opened in 2002 and caused quite a stir because it was the first building in Cambodia with escalators (apparently the sight of adult Khmer's scared to get onto the escalator was quite funny), suffice to say it's not a patch on Bangkok's monster malls. Although it was a nice change to get a dose of modernity, and lovely to see our friends, I have to say it's nice to be back in small, dusty, friendly Phnom Penh.
Last night, we went to Meta-House to watch Kampuchea : Death and Rebirth - a documentary made in early 1979, just after Phnom Penh fell to the invading Vietnamese forces. The East German filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann were some of the first foreign journalists to get access to the country after the Khmer Rouge fell from power. The film has an overtly political agenda but was both powerful and informative. The extensive interviews with Khmer Rouge mouthpiece Ieng Thirith are quite hard to swallow, despite the filmmakers intentions to discredit her (Ieng Thirith is one of the five senior Khmer Rouge officials currently in detention and awaiting trial at the ECCC tribunal in Phnom Penh). However, the interviews with the few inhabitants of a decimated city and their incredibly raw emotional accounts of the events of the last four years are compelling. One group of university students had just returned to their college. Intellectuals were one of the groups particularly targeted by the Khmer Rouge and this group of around 100 students had collectively lost more than 800 family members - for most of them their entire family. It's clear that as some of the few educated people left in the country, they would be particularly responsible for reconstruction. Also striking from the footage was how developed Phnom Penh was prior to the 1970's - it has been described as the pearl of South-East Asia - the level of sophistication in education, healthcare and infrastructure was all suprising to me, all of which was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.
Most of all though, and the reason I would thoroughly recommend this documentary if you ever get a chance to watch it, are the incredible images of an empty city. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge literally emptied Phom Penh and marched all the residents out to rural communes (read labour camps) in an attempt to create their agrarian utopia. Imagine a city evacuated in a single day and left deserted for four years. The filmmakers got access to the city just after it was taken by the Vietnamese, and the footage is unbelievable. Everything deserted, the signs of a hurried departure but also undisturbed houses full of possessions, and nature taking the streets back. The Vietnamese had to work quickly to restore essential services such as water and electricity before the city could be repopulated. Engineers are shown at the city power station and water plant trying to get systems back online. I think the eeriest scene in the film was the footage of ceiling fans and air conditioners in houses across the city coming back to life when the power was restored after their owners left them on four years earlier.
One of the things we've normalised living in Cambodia, but seems strange to a first time visitor is the monetary system. Daily life here never calls for a card of any sort - our credit cards & debit cards are at the back of a drawer somewhere. In fact, apart from posh hotels and high end stores, you couldn't use a card in Phnom Penh if you tried. Only one thing cuts it here - cold, hard cash. In fact, my wallet is so empty that i'm thinking of taking to carrying around a roll of notes like an East-End Gangster. The only complication in an otherwise very simple system is that there are 2 currencies in circulation here - US dollars and Cambodian Riels - and both are notes only (no coins). Cambodia opted to dollarize it's economy back in the early 1990's, presumably for the perceived stability of the currency. $1 USD is currently worth around 4200 riels. You can pay for things with either Dollars or Riels but in practise we usually pay in dollars, get large change in Dollars and small change in Riels. This works pretty well as it's always good to have a supply of Riels for sub $1 items such as food, drinks and moto's. Having said that, the 100 Riel notes can get pretty annoying, worth about 2 cents and not good for much at all !
I'm finding it increasingly hard to read the newspaper in Cambodia. It's not that I need a shaggy dog story, but it would be nice to read something other than cover to cover tales of government corruption and the downtrodden masses. A couple of stories really got to me recently, particularly as I encounter tuk tuk drivers on a daily basis.
Tuk tuk drivers are everywhere in Phnom Penh. We're in low season for tourists at the moment which means these guys are struggling for business and you frequently get propositioned by multiple drivers within the space of 100 metres walking down the street. I left our apartment yesterday to find 6 tuk tuks parked up in the street outside - it makes you feel guilty for walking or cycling. Anyway, your average tuk tuk chariot costs around $500 to buy outright, and we've recently discovered that a lot of drivers can't afford it so drive for a company. Back in the golden days of early 2008 a tuk tuk driver was earning $10 a day on average for 5 hires (a pretty good wage by Cambodian standards). However, the global economic crisis has been taking it's toll on the informal sector of the economy here, largely due to job losses in the formal sector, reduced investment, and lower tourist numbers. The net result is that the average daily earnings for a tuk tuk driver in early 2009 were just $4 for 2 hires. That's a 60% reduction and i'm sure makes it hard for a lot of these guys to pay the rent and support their families. I saw a couple of moto drivers coming to blows over a fare outside the supermarket yesterday and it's kind of understandable when your entire income for the day might consist of 2 rides.
But the economic crisis is affecting everyone, right ? For sure, but what really got me riled up was the Daun Penh local government's preparations for the ASEAN-EU meeting last week. We live in Khan Daun Penh, and it's also the home to most of the foreign embassies and some of the government buildings. In preparation for the meeting, the local government decided to do a street sweep to clean up homeless people, street vendors and tuk tuk drivers who were deemed to be 'unsightly' for the visiting dignitaries. I think the idea is misplaced as tuk tuk drivers add a lot of colour and life to the streets, as well as providing an essential service used by locals and tourists alike. In total, 34 tuk tuks were confiscated by the municipal government ahead of the summit. Drivers were allowed to reclaim them after the summit concluded, but as usual many were required to pay a "fee" to recover them. One driver reported he had to pay $55 to get his tuk tuk back, add in the loss of a few days wages and this is a big deal.
Worse still, in order to retrieve their tuk tuks the drivers were forced to sign an agreement which banned them from operating on 3 of Phnom Penh's main streets - Sisowath Quay, Norodom & Sothearos Boulevards. For those in Melbourne this would be like forbidding taxi drivers to use Collins St, Elizabeth St & Lonsdale St and effectively makes it impossible to ply your trade. When asked why the drivers were banned from these streets, Him Yan (Phnom Penh Deputy Municipal Police Chief) said "We do not allow tuk-tuk drivers to drive on some prohibited roads in the Daun Penh district" and offered no explanation for the ban.
Stories of corruption and high handed dealings like this are so frequent here, that it often seems that neither institutions or government have any interest at all in serving the people but rather their own self interest.
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009052926167/Business/Informal-sector-suffering.html
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009060926357/National-news/Tuk-tuk-ban-angers-drivers.html
really exist. The Russian Market which is popular with tourists, has around a quarter of it's stalls devoted to second hand scooter parts. If you were savvy enough you could go shopping for parts and build a scooter from the ground up. I was thinking the other day, if you took a random sample of say 100 people from the streets of London or Melbourne and let them loose in the Russian Market, how many could make a functioning vehicle ? I reckon you'd be lucky to get 2. Our knowledge and service economy, niche job specialisms and lives spent sitting in front of computers in glass towers have made us forget how to get by. It reminds me of the Golgafrincham storyline in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In Cambodia, my guess is 20 or maybe more could put together a scooter in the space of a day. These guys have mad skills, born of necessity and experience I guess. Not in a "Western, well trained, follow the manual, do everything right kind of way" but in a "get it back on the road using anything to hand, ingenious, it doesn't count if you don't use a hammer kind of way".
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