A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [90]
The cheap bastards from the TV production company had booked me into yet another depressing sinkhole in Siemreap. I took one look at the lobby, and, fully aware that I would be staying in even rougher environs over the coming days, decided to splurge. I checked myself into the Raffles-operated Angkor Grand a mile down the road. I figured one night living like a colonialist oppressor would be good for me. I had never enjoyed a high-pressure shower with unlimited hot water the way I did that night – glorious after all the lime-encrusted dribblers I’d been standing under in recent weeks. There was an enormous pool, three restaurants, and a bar and sitting room, where uniformed help in pointy hats and green kromahs made girlie drinks decorated with umbrellas. When I returned to my room after a massage, a swim, and a croque monsieur, there was a garland of fresh jasmine flowers on my pillow.
I took full advantage of my luxurious surroundings, because tomorrow the ordeal would begin. The crew was nervous. I was nervous. The plan was to take a hired boat out onto Tonle Sap, cross over to the mouth of a river, and chug upstream to Battambang. The following day, we planned to rent a 464 and driver and travel seventy to eighty kliks over the worst, most heavily land-mined road in Cambodia to Pailin, near the Thai border. This was not an auspicious time to be visiting with the Khmer Rouge. Recent developments in the capital indicated that the government was planning to revoke its agreement with Ieng Sary, the leader of the KR’s Pailin faction, and bring him before an international tribunal for war crimes. The mood in town, we assumed, would not be good.
The road to Pailin. It’s not a Hope/Crosby movie – and Dorothy Lamour is definitely not waiting in a tight-fitting sarong at the journey’s end. I’d wanted to go up a no-name river to the worst cesspit on earth and, for my sins, I got my wish.
I set out from Siemreap in the early morning, along with Chris, Lydia, and Kry. Kry, who is something of an expert on the Khmer Rouge, had been to Pailin before, during the last fighting. But the moment we set out for Battambang from a muddy creek off the lake, he was struck dumb, nearly speechless for the duration. From the very get-go, things did not go as planned. Our skipper and a mate, who concerned himself mostly with a noisy, clanging, and dubious-sounding engine, couldn’t agree on exactly where to find the mouth of the river. After crossing open water, we floated around the lake, looking for landmarks, broiling in the late-morning sun. I ate a packed lunch from the Angkor Grand of saucisson sandwich, Camembert cheese, and a nice bottle of Côte du Rhône and waited.
The river, when we finally found it, was wide and clean and pretty to look at. But after about thirty miles, as we approached a floating village, our skipper, without warning or explanation, pulled over to a waterborne police station bobbing on fifty-five-gallon drums. A few uniformed officers in death squad-chic sunglasses and two very dodgy-looking characters in red kromahs and olive drab fatigues stood there waiting for us. Without asking, the two fellows in kromahs and military clothing boarded our vessel and sat down by the skipper at the helm. The cops waved us on.
Now, the red kromah is an almost universally worn accessory all over Cambodia. It’s worn as headgear, as a scarf, as a bustier top for women, as a sarong. In a pinch, it can be used for pulling an oxcart