Phnom Penh 5am:
Its Christmas Eve... I think.
Our room is pitch black. I close my eyes and open them again to reassure myself that there is absolutely no ambient light whatsoever. Open, close, open, close. Nope, no difference at all.
I reach out and locate my mobile phone and use it as a torch to navigate the room, grabbing my sarong on the way. Our suite is about 40ft long, with a single corridor running down its length from front door to balcony... The bedroom has no windows and the lounge area, adjacent to the balcony is heavily shuttered, keeping out the light, the heat and the noise of Phnom Penh.
The shuttered doors shudder open, and I slip out onto the balcony. The sun will rise soon, the eastern sky is already tingeing pink and soft vespers of breeze will soon give way to intense heat.
I lean over the balcony to survey the street below, careful not to catch myself on the thorns of the bougainvillea festooning the French Colonial ironwork. Below me the curbside has not yet filled with taxis and tuktuks. But across the road, the quay is already full of people walking and exercising. A man bounces a ball as he walks, I can hear the tump, tump, tump of the ball hitting the pavement.
Further up the quay I can see a disparate collection of women and men who are line-dancing. Their singsong music competing with another group of younger people, line-dancing to Asian techno pop. The cars and bikes honking their horns adds another line to the musical score that forms the soundtrack of Phnom Penh. And I think I can detect a Muslim call to prayer adding yet another layer. Odd, as I thought of Cambodia as being primarily a Buddhist country with a little Hinduism and Roman Catholicism left over from the French.
The hotel overlooks the Tonle Sap River, just as it leans in to embrace the mighty Mekong River. On the long peninsular between the rivers a massive hotel is under construction, its skeleton rising up out of the landscape like a predatory beast. Beyond that, on the far shore of the Mekong a miserable shantytown of timber houses clings to the muddy banks, where the poor of Phnom Penh eke out an existence under the shadow of progress.
In the street below our driver Mr Ram, dressed in a crisply ironed pink shirt is obsessively polishing his already very shiny brown sedan. The car door is open and his radio is adding to the growing cacophony. Ravi the tuktuk driver has pulled up, and is in a huddle of conversation with some other tuktuk drivers. When I go downstairs for breakfast they will assail me with their calls. “tuktuk Madame... where you go... you want a tuktuk Madame?”
Madame, madame, madame.
No comments:
Post a Comment