Imperial, and buzzing
like helicopters, swarms of them around a tree on a waste lot as I was stuck in
traffic coming from the airport. And again at Wat Phnom, around stupas and
across the curved roof tops. And again over the next twelve days at odd
intervals by a pool, at a waterfall, at the beach, when I was least expecting
them. It was the season.
Under the aerial roots
of a Banyan tree I am drinking French wine, ironically enough. It’s not great.
A leaf falls into the pool, floats for a while before being swept over the edge
by the residual motion of swimmers, to infinity.
A Wat Phnom, birds in
cages. I cannot figure the reason for having fifty or more moth eaten birds per
cage at the temple. They have so little room that each time they flap their
wings against the humid air they hit each other or the bars. Poor moulty birds.
And the same with two cages of spotted doves in blue and grey collars. What is
this about? And the mynah birds, two in filthy cages and who have been taught
to say hello in English. I wish someone would explain this to me.
Everywhere plastic
bags, tossed plastic water bottles, split bin bags, nappies and glass bottles
on the beach, picnic places filled with take away and leave behind polystyrene containers
of fast food, lumps of concrete, cement dust, coffee cups. You’ve finished your
iced drink? Even my driver chucked the receptacle out of the car window,
swiftly followed by several cigarette butts. Every watercourse is filled with
rubbish, even at Angkor Wat. Every street is piled with refuse. There is a long
way to go for civic pride to mean anything. It looks like every music festival
I have ever been too, but worse; hardly anyone is clearing it up. Even the park
by the royal palace is strewn with litter at the end of each evening. Funnily
enough it is cleared at dawn. To my question as to why you treat your country
like a garbage dump. A quizzical laugh. Only tourist do recycling. It salves
our consciences, but makes no difference in a country where women do their
washing by foot as if treading grapes.
is a daily massage
either by a blind or partially sighted person at Seeing Hands, or in the spa a
short walk down the street. In the daytime I am still enough for one of the
hundreds of beautiful butterflies to land on my leg, twice, or on another day
for one to choose by breast. I am doing nothing more than looking at strangler
fig roots suffocating thousand year old stones. This counts as busyness.
Between tour groups it is quiet enough to hear the forest birds singing, and
the trees growing.
Photography and children
Watching Korean and
Chinese visitors taking their holiday snaps is an entertainment in itself.
They strike all kinds of ridiculous poses, which they find highly amusing;
looking the same way as the statue, playing with perspective, finger on the top
of a stupa, that kind of thing. Hilarious, and presumably designed to avoid
having to look at the monuments. Perhaps I need to loosen my sense of what is
cool and laugh more often.
Western tourists take
pictures of children as if they are monkeys. Why do people act so differently
when away from home? No sign of any children being abused by 70s pop stars and their
ilk. Protection and phone numbers to report abuse seem to be the order of the
day. Yet, one guest house needed to remind us not to bring sex workers to our
rooms.
Unlicensed sales of
petrol by the roadside. Fine apparently and not bottles of lemonade. Containers
of all kinds.
Dogs with long wheel
bases, and of no apparent breed.
Birds in a tree at the
beach, noisiest during a thunderstorm. Lightning forking the sand.
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