Martin Love: Exploding cows and cheap facials

April 10, 2012
By MARTIN LOVE
Providence Journal
PHNOM PENH

Arriving in Cambodia for the first time, I was trying to figure out what kind of country would let a tourist, for about $400, blow up a cow with a rocket-propelled grenade or a bazooka. Or maybe I was trying to figure out what kind of person might take pleasure in blowing up any cow that afterwards would not be at the least edible.

At any rate, I have no inclination to explode a cow and will not visit the "shooting range" outside Phnom Penh or, for that matter, any of the "killing fields" where the Khmer Rouge back in the mid-and late-1970s unleashed such a paroxysm of blood lust that some 2 million Cambodians lost their lives to both random and Communist-orchestrated carnage.

Indeed, I had some vague trepidation about Cambodia. Heart of Darkness? A place where the most lurid of human impulses get full play? Well, no more than any other place on the planet, I have discovered, and there are many expanding pluses in what remains a very poor country.

I have just published a fact-filled novel, "The Girl from Ha Giang," about neighboring Vietnam. The main character is an American editor struggling with pure propaganda at the national Communist Party-controlled English language paper in Hanoi.

I spoke with Kevin Doyle in Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital, which has about 2 million people. Doyle, an Irishman and a recent Nieman Fellow at Harvard, edits the city's nonprofit English-language daily, The Cambodia Daily, which claims on every Page One to report the news "without fear or favor." Apparently Doyle has had some run-ins with the "authorities" but he seems unfazed and says that the print media in Cambodia are among the freest of any country in Southeast Asia.

Freer than the print media in glittering, rich Singapore and in Malaysia and Thailand, not to mention in Vietnam or Laos or Myanmar, he says. I would have to say perhaps even freer, in some respects, than the mainstream print media in the U.S., where it's been obvious that "favor" for the rich has been rampant.

One might think that Cambodia, where some of the old Khmer Rouge leaders are still alive and still under international investigation but as yet not in jail or prosecuted, would be among the most unstable of countries. But it's not.

Consider Hun Sen, Cambodia's prime minister and the head of the country's major political party -- the Cambodia's People's Party. He's the longest-serving strongman of any country anywhere close to Cambodia, with him and his party having been mostly in power since the Vietnamese intervened in 1979 and began to break the grip of the bloody cabal that was the Khmer Rouge.

There have been allegations of mild corruption and even instances of torture under this man of 60, who has six adult children -- (one of whom attended West Point), three daughters and three sons named rather fancifully and amusingly Ma-net, Mana, Manit, Mani, Mali and Malis. Hun Sen has a thing for alliteration at least. His staying power is obvious.

Meanwhile, Cambodia, though still one of the world's poorest countries, is said to have considerable and as yet untapped offshore oil and natural-gas resources, and onshore minerals, too. The economy is growing nicely, garment manufacturing is blossoming, and the foreign tourists, especially to Angkor Wat and to the beaches of Kep, are coming in droves.

When I arrived in late March from the luxurious glories of Changi, Singapore's airport, to Phnom Penh's dilapidated gateway, I had expected to see wet, shimmering, emerald rice fields stretching everywhere beyond the tarmac.

No such luck. The rice fields still take up much of this largely agrarian nation but they are utterly brown and dusty this time of year. The oxen and cows that will pull the plows when the rains come in June and rice planting resumes forage randomly in their rural domains. The peasant farmers go about their family business, their provisioning and their weddings and births and deaths as they have for centuries amid what seem calm and deliberate Buddhist ways. I had to wonder if any of the farmers I met would have ever sold their cows to the "shooting range." I did not ask.

Phnom Penh is hardly sparkling like Singapore or Hong Kong or Shanghai, but in fact it's better and wonderful. One sweaty afternoon, in temperatures over 100 degrees, I wandered in a labyrinth under tarps of a vast, open-air market near the confluence of the three rivers that merge beyond the quay of the city. There I stopped, and for an hour had a gaggle of ladies massage my face with various unknown emollients for a mere $2. I bought a hat at the market for 50 cents, too, and, having bought a temporarily better face, moved along to a restaurant serving better prepared Lebanese food than I have found in the U.S. so far.

Even better, Cambodians don't seem pushy but rather a nice mix of proud and warm and pleasant. They are not inclined to cheat or hassle anyone. It's nice to be somewhere where the pace is relatively slow, as are the 'tuk-tuks'' -- small carriages pulled by motorcycles that ply the boulevards and will take anyone across the entire city slowly for almost nothing. Then there is the perfect hotel room I got for $15 a night.

Cambodia seems just the right location to escape for a while the insanities of U.S. and Wall Street financial malfeasance, governmental corruption, shrill election-year politics and warmongering pundits in the mainstream media.

Martin Love, a former Journal writer, is a Chapel Hill,

N.C.-based writer.