The whole boatload was kept waiting while it was sorted out, with documents passed from hand to hand to hand, examined, altered, stamped, discussed, brought back to us, for further alteration, signature, explanation, comment. And then more hand to hand to hand.  More stamping.  Then we are brought forward.  You can only stay five days, Sherry is warned.  And then just as us last two semi-Ugly Americans are about to board the slow fast boat, one final concerned look-see by another customs officer at the gangplank.

Remember the next time you enter Cambodia: you need three months before your passport expires--not two.  This rigmarole seemed to require a small bribe to set right--a quiet and in some ways justly corrupt contribution, that is, to two devastated economies, in the shadow of a premonitory glimpse of Khmer architectural wonders.   There aren't nearly enough jobs anywhere  and certainly not in the touristic chunk of the economy--so there's doubling and re-doubling of functions and services, which jostling lends a sometimes comic but certainly good-humored hubbub to everyday encounters.

 

We'd been on the Mekong Delta for several days, staying mostly at a very cheap riverfront hotel in Can Tho we'd been led to by a friendly elderly Finnish woman, who'd been doing volunteer work at the local university for a number of years--that ethic certainly persists here.  In the park across the street stood a massive statue of Uncle Ho, made of some mysterious shiny alloy, that sometimes seemed silvery but was definitely gold at night when young parents brought their toddlers to play under the avuncular god. 

 

We hired a longtail boat and young woman guide for a long day on the river, beginning at dawn.  The initial aim is to get 10K downriver to the picturesque but vibrant floating market (which we did) and then after lunch in a riverside pho (noodle shop) to float through some of the myriad canals inaccessible to the bigger tour-boats.  At one point we took a walk on a narrow dirt path through the rice fields, passing kids who wanted  to practice their quickly exhausted TV-English on us. 

 

All of this in an earlier era might have been described as settling into a groove.  One is always conscious how everything in a poor country is used and then used again--but there have been very few undertones of desperation and none visible here-as they were so palpable, for example, in Honduras when we were there not so long ago.

 

In the morning before we left Can Tho I rose early again aiming to get a shot of some live shrimp in the street market (don't ask--it's an idea for the film about the counter-intuitive relation between  the U.S. war-time devastation of the Delta and the VC's consequent harvesting of the resurgent shrimp population) and realize again how babies and toddlers react to me with wide-eyed wonder  as some strange white-haired white apparition in their midst, which I attempt to defuse by bits of mugging, foolishness which their parents at least appreciate.  Thus is the language barrier side-stepped rather than broken.

 

Phnom Penh is as crazily energetic and everything-happening-on-the-streets, watch out, as Saigon but appears to be much more stretched to extremes of past and present, errant splashes of wealth slathered over the intense poverty--in clashing registers of visual display.  After all these years the very first trial of one of the top Khmer Rouge torturers has just been completed--the  chief of the notorious S21 prison is now awaiting sentencing. 

Early yesterday morning we hopped into a tuk-tuk (a moto-taxi, of sorts--which are everywhere) and headed for the Genocide Museum, on the site of S21.  We hired a guide, a woman who at age 14 was force-marched out of Phnom Penh with her entire family (guilty of intellectualism: her father was a teacher) for two months.  So this woman, who lost her entire family to Khmer Rouge torture, who saw her uncle shot pointblank along the march, now earns her living giving these incredibly unspeakably harrowing tours, day in, day out.  On another level entirely, I was reminded of the 67-year-old guide at the CuChi Tunnels--both of these guides had been fitted out for their current line of work by their formation during the wars, with the prospect of escape foreclosed by sheer necessity. 

 

The saffron-robed monks do carry saffron-colored umbrellas everywhere  as they walk the streets.  At the model of Angkor Wat that sits behind the Silver Pagoda one monk in a group of four pointed to the turtle flopping around in the mini-moat and asked me its name in English.  

 

Today we tuk-tuked to the Bureau of Fisheries, which is just where Mao Tse Tung Boulevard begins--because in its previous incarnation (you see how karmic we are in danger of becoming) it was the U.S. Embassy.  Just before the Khmer Rouge hit town in 1975, the ever-generous US diplomats on site offered the not-so-shadowy puppets experiencing their final moments in power--a helicopter ride out--only 1 of the higher-ups thought that a good enough idea.  The next day the KRs lined up the other suckers in the tennis courts behind the building--and mowed them down.

A few hundred meters from there is a gorgeous pagoda, all golden cobras, assorted happy demons, and smiling Buddhas, in front of which five or six barbers ply their trade in the open-air.  I think tomorrow I might go back for a dollar haircut.

But I didn't get back there--we took off for Angkor Wat instead . . .