Weird animals lurk in Cambodia. Tiny sand frogs leap ahead in the darkness. A land of rising and falling tides, as the Cambodian proverb puts it, "In the rainy season the fish eat the ants; in the dry, the ants eat the fish." Specially adapted fish clamber across the mud flats from shrinking rivers for the safety of waters which flow during the dry season.
Back to dusty Phonom Penn, then a racing taxi drive on Cambodia's potholed roads. Bouncing uselessly around in the back seat on what they call "dancing roads," away from land that aspires hopelessly to past glory, retaining only the Khmer alphabet, the world's longest, all seventy-four letters, to a country which ditched its Chinese characters for Roman letters after French priests manufactured another alphabet. Stopped twice by the military, they made me get out of the car not believing I was only travelling with a day pack. With my black pocket laden cotton pants, black T-shirt, sun glasses coving a red and white flaking mask, I was a sight which inspired fear. Black was the color the Khmer Rouge forced everyone to wear.
Cambodia is a fake country, an unruly Thai province, which allows three currencies: Thai baht, American dollars and the Riel, priced unrealistically at 2,600 to the dollar. All three can be used anywhere, anytime. The shadow of Pol pot, the French-trained radio engineer, hangs heavy over the country. Lop Top would be a better name for him, he sliced the head off the country, damaging irreparably. He had the killing ability of the old Khmer kings, without the construction artistry. Cambodians can only defend their territory, humbling the mighty Vietnamese military, which after defeating the french, the Americans and the chinese, lost in the marshes of their prickly neighbor.
But the Vietnamese have basically forgotten wars, they have new dreams, new aspirations. Money. Products. Catching the Pacific wave of rising incomes and integrated economies. Vietnamese work. They study and hustle. As the French said of their colonies, "The Vietnamese plant the rice, the Cambodians watch it grow, and the Laotians listen to it grow."
Despite the criminal incompetence of their greedy, bureaucratic government, Vietnam is growing. The aspirations and energy are rising. Despite the beggars, the uselessness of labor (fifteen people visit your table during a meal, selling postcards, cigarette lighters, hats made out of beer cans, newspapers, books, cigarettes, shoe shines -- then the pstcard seller is back), the internal dissention (Hanoi people are not welcome in the south) reflecting a historic division earlier than the French and the Americans. The north was heavily influenced by China, the south by India.
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