I hate prologues and introductions.
This is more of an aside than those things.
I was thinking of my friend Sacha again. I may have mentioned him in previous blogs. He killed himself. Sometime between going missing in Melbourne from his share-house in Richmond, Melbourne and when they found his body when I was out in the Dandenong forest on the outskirts of Melbourne when I was out with a bunch of people filming a short film that I never finished called Agent Juanito that I had based on script I wrote which was based on an Alfred Hitchcock film called 39 Steps. There may have been less, or more, steps, I think it was 30 something. A spy sort of thing. That was probably at the end of 2001 or the start of 2002, the year my daughter was born. After that I never made another short film, or film of any length.
Disappeared, I think, sometime in the late 90s. I had gone with my Bulgarian mate Kosio Newman – who is also missing from my life, perhaps in Sofia, I asked my daughter to keep an eye out for him when she was there a few weeks ago but she didn’t see him – on a roadtrip from Melbourne to Queensland that I chronicled in the Adventures of Koiso & Juanito. That was the year the lead singer from INXS, Michael Hutchen’s (actually Hutchence, I just looked it up but wanted to keep the original spelling in as an approximate guess, can’t always go rewriting history) died as I heard about his death somewhere on the road while we were still in Victoria. The year was 1997. Which I just looked up.
It took longer than I thought between Sacha going missing and his body being found, I think in a tent from what I remember from the news report. I think he was a skeleton by then. I can’t find any further record of him. Like he didn’t exist. And they tell us anything we do on the internet will come back to haunt us. I can’t even find a record of my dead friend, so I don’t think the internet is that good!
Anyway he was good guy, a good friend, and he was partly of Maoria heritage, and was from Invercargill in New Zealand’s. He changed his name from Bendan (or Brendon) to Sacha after toying with the idea of calling himself Alexis. He liked those Russian sounding names that could be used for males or females.
And that’s how I start my blog post today, I’ll put some ****s, and a picture of some Great Hornbill birds in Phnom Penh, below to demarcate that from the ‘main’ blog post, which is more travel focussed and much less dead, skeleton, friend in forest focussed.
But I will say, the day they reported finding his body, maybe somewhere out in the Dandenongs forest, we were filming Agent Juanito.
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It was still daylight when we crossed the border from Vietnam to Cambodia on the way from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh. The bus driver stopped at the border and in very broken English asked all of us to handover our passports.
A woman who had been living in Cambodia was worried.
‘It sort of breaks all the rules of travel to hand over your passport’, she said with trepidation.
“Yeah, it’s South-East Asia though’, I said, wondering now why I said that as I’d been ripped off many years earlier in 1995 on my first trip to Bangkok, but that day I felt it was all going to be cool. Or maybe not, I just took my chances.
We all handed over our passports, including woman who was living in Cambodia who was trepidated (that’s technically correct English according to the internet which can’t find mention of Sacha anywhere). I can’t recall, we may have also handed over a small amount of cash as an ‘administration fee’ as well. If we did, it wasn’t much. I didn’t miss it anyway.
There was a kind of lawless looking zone around the border between the two countries. With a few casinos and things. We weren’t sure if we were still in Vietnam or maybe we were in Cambodia already.
We waited a bit, maybe 20 minutes, perhaps longer. I could just say I put a timer on and it was precisely 28 minutes and 40 seconds and who would knows. Then, after 28 mins, 40 secs our passports came back and we all now had Cambodian entry visa stamps in our passport having earlier collected our Vietnam exit stamps. On the Vietnam side the Vietnamese had actually checked who we said we were on our passports. On the Cambodian side the Cambodians didn’t check anything. Perhaps they were fine with seeing a Vietnamese exit stamp on our passports. It probably would be pretty unusual for the people who the Vietnamese verified to suddenly swap with other people in the no-man land. Perhaps a story point for a spy thriller like Agent Juanito.
I don’t have a strong recollection of the whole process, but it worked. Our little minibus, with maybe 12 of us foreigners inside, had made its way across the border from Vietnam to Cambodia and we continued on our way to Phnom Penh along a narrow two-lane road with plenty of potholes and trucks that would pass us at every chance they had and as dangerously as they could. That’s a pretty boring description of the dangerous driving we witnessed. My writing friends from RMIT University’s Professional Writing and Editing course, which I had been studying in Melbourne when Sacha went missing, though I was kind of on a break when Kosio and I did our roadtrip from Melbourne to Queensland. Oh, and I didn’t finish that bit above, I mentioned hearing of Michael Hutchence’s death. I forgot to mention I heard about Sacha’s disappearance in 1997 (I didn’t hear about his death until around 2001-2002 or maybe, possibly, 2000), when I had arrived in Queensland and was living with my sister in a flat in Bilinga on the Gold Coast.
The flat was hot and had many cockroaches. I went back to Melbourne to recommence my Professional Writing and Editing course when I realised I wasn’t going to get a job on the Gold Coast during the 1997 economic downturn.
There seemed to be an abundance of dentists in Cambodia. Every kilometre or so there was a dentist’s office, or place, or surgery, that’s the probably the term. Cambodian dental surgery.
They – the dental surgeries – looked as though it was a government run place. They must either have good or bad teeth in Cambodia, I guess depending on whether the amount of dental services represented a prophylactic or reactive measure.
We had left our friend Fyyaz from Canberra back in Ho Chi Minh. Not because we didn’t want him coming along with us on the minibus trip which had been the original plan, but because he had decided that despite all the really amazing and delicious Vietnamese food available in Ho Chi Minh he had elected to eat what appeared to be a 2-5 day old hot dog from a 7-11.
Just for the record when Fyyaz was contemplating the hot dog I had said, ‘why are you going to eat that hot dog when there is all this nice Vietnamese food around the place?’ And I continued, ‘We were literally just there at the food place where they had all that nice food and you could have had something there.’ And I might have added, at leats in my imagination, ‘if you eat that hot dog you may get very sick, or perhaps even die, and I’m not going to explain to your wife how you died, I’m just going to keep going with our trip and leave your dead body at the hotel in the red-light district with many question marks, as we’ve already prebooked a bunch of hotels and don’t want to get involved with you and your curious choices of “food”’.
And Fyyaz had said, ‘I can’t use my credit card to buy all the street food’.
And I said, ‘I would have given you the cash to buy something nice, and we can still go get something nice’.
And still he insisted on eating the yukky old hot dog from the 7-11.
And, in summary, he got food poisoning. Just like I thought he would. Most likely from the hot dog as he hadn’t eaten anything else Jan and I hadn’t eaten.
All I can say is, ‘te lo dige’, in Spanish or ‘I told you so’ in English.
I’m reading a book called The Horse, the Wheel and Language, about the origin of English, well the roots of the Proto-Indo-European language which then developed into German, English, Spanish, Bulgarian, Sanskrit, and a bunch of other languages. There’s a lot about counting bones of sheep and horses to work out how language spread. Really, that seems to have something to do with language.
So Fyyaz couldn’t come on the minibus with us as he needed to go poop too much. Or just enough to get the pesky bacteria out.
I know the feeling, I ended up with vomiting and diarrhoea on an American Airlines flight from Australia to Los Angeles after eating some sort of scrambled egg thing for breakfast. I know it was that American Airlines as Jan hadn’t eaten that for breakfast and I had made the mistake of eating it. And I know it was something from the plane as as we were waiting at LA airport for a connecting flight to Oaxaca, Mexico, I had begun to get sick, which had then gotten much worse by the time we got to Oaxaca and ultimately had me in hospital on a saline drip and drugs at 2 or 3am on I think the 2nd night we were there.
I’m still having trauma with eggs imagining they are off.
On our first night in Oaxaca, before ending up in hospital, we had gone out to a restaurant to try some tlayudas, the Oaxacan corn tortilla dish, for Jan, and sopa de tortilla for me and my delicate stomach. Had I known how bad my tummy was getting I would have just had a coke and a few spoons of the sopa de tortilla broth.
The next day I only got out of bed to go to the toilet. Frequently.
Lucky I packed 10 pairs of underwear as the slightest movement seemed to result in anal discharge.
So, Fyyaz, on his way from Vietnam to Cambodia, had elected to fly from Ho Chi Minh to Phnom Penh and we were going to meet up with him there.
We travelled for maybe 4 hours from the Mộc Bài, border crossing to Phnom Penh. I only know it was Mộc Bài as I have a stamp in my passport which I never remember even looking at until now.
It was a bit of an adventure, I think more interesting than the air route. You get to see a bit of the countryside, the many dental clinics, and some other interesting things.
I remember seeing a truck that was, from an Australia perspective, fully totally overloaded and beyond what I’d consider a reasonable height above the truck’s tray with bales of hay to the point where it looked like it was going to topple over if you lent on it too much, or if there was a strong breeze. It was going along ok though and I imagine it reached its destination okay.
There were also quite a few of these tractor looking things, but not tractors, like these long converted tractor type things that looked sort of pointy like a drag racing car, but distinctly tractor/ farm looking with what looked to be a kind of large lawnmower engine, or generator motor. Something like that. They look almost like a long horse-drawn cart with the open motor out front with a belt I guess connected to the axle to drive the wheels around. You might guess I’m no mechanic, nor perhaps a poet. Maybe I have a picture of one as my description on both the mechanical and poetic level is not that grand. I’ll check.
I checked, and I don’t have a photo. You can use your imagination. Or better still, go to Cambodia.
So, after a bit, we arrived in Phnom Penh.
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Jan and I were staying at a fancy hotel in Phnom Penh in a reasonably quiet neighbourhood which was walking distance from the Royal Palace of Cambodia. Fyyaz was at some place in a neighbourhood where women kept asking him if he wanted ‘boom boom’. Which he insisted he didn’t and I’m sure he didn’t. I mean that in a genuine way, I’m his friend, and he’s not into that type of thing anyway. I mean I’m sure he’s into sex a bit. He has 2 kids. As for the sex workers though, I wouldn’t think so.
As for getting involved with organising the return of his body if he’d died from the 7-11 hotdog, that luckily wasn’t tested.
Not that I could judge, in terms of employing sex workers, I did pay for sex once. It was pretty crappy. I only did it because I was stressed. I was on a work trip to Melbourne. My ex-wife had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia. I should say she had recently shown symptoms of schizophrenia after having been diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was younger, which she, and her family, had never told me, but then, after having two kids, I was just becoming aware of her illness, which was quite stressful. Anyway that’s why I rang up and had a sex worker come to my room. Because I was stressed and thought sex might relax me a bit. She was nice, but I couldn’t really get it up.
I had a bathtub in the hotel room. Having a bath was more relaxing than trying to have sex with a sex worker.
The sex my wife and I had at our fancy hotel in Phnom Penh was a million times better. I recommend every now and again splurging on a place with a four-poster bed on occasions as it does wonders for libidos.
I think we met up with Fyyaz after we’d had a night at our fancy hotel. We hadn’t wanted to get a sim card at the no-man land border crossing area so we’re heading to some mall to find a place to get a SIM.
Fyyaz loved the malls as they had air conditioning. When we met up with him in Ho Chi Minh we told him he should toughen up and get out and enjoy the street food in the SE Asia heat otherwise he’d never experience the local culture.
So, on our first morning in Phnom Penh, we met up with Fyyaz somewhere, maybe at our hotel, can’t remember, and we all went out to explore some temple on a roundabout which had some cool birds getting food from rubbish bins. It was hot, of course, but the temple, and the Great Hornbills (thank you Apple photos look up types of birds in photos) were very cool.
Later we went off to visit the Carlsberg beer sign which Fyyaz saw across the Mekong. But that is worthy of another post. I will leave this post here.
For now, getting from Vietnam to Cambodia, and seeing some Great Hornbills and a temple on a roundabout should be sufficient.
