A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [93]
Black SUVs bounced by us, KR gangsters and illegal timber merchants behind tinted windows, armed goons riding shotgun. The occasional white 464s were the good guys, the minesweeping outfits, still hard at work in northwest Cambodia. The occasional full-color billboard depicted on its left-hand side a happy farmer walking with his son through their fields. On the right-hand side, the same farmer and son were shown being surprised by an explosion, the stumps of their arms and legs sprinkling brightly colored blood. Our vehicle was a hired white 464 with a very worried-looking driver. He didn’t like us. He didn’t like where we were going. He seemed unhappy about what the road was doing to his car.
From time to time, we crossed a bridge over a deep gorge or rocky stream. Rotten, moldering planks bounced and crumbled under our wheels, the rocks and water below visible through gaping holes as we slowly edged forward. Some bridges were actually suspended from cables – so we had to worry not only about the planks disintegrating under our tires but also about the whole structure swinging unreliably from jury-rigged supports. Overloaded trucks came to a full stop at each bridge as driver and passengers assessed their chances, then sped across as quickly as possible, hoping that it would be the next vehicle that might plunge through the splintering planks onto the rocks below.
Bounce, jolt, lean, grind, crumble, drop, bounce, jolt. We often had to stop and wait for an old woman, a pantless child, or an armed teenager in fatigue top and kromah sarong to remove a big rock or a row of sticks from our path – makeshift roadblocks and tollgates – and wave us on.
I began to see more guns at the checkpoints. And skulls. Arranged on display atop small birdhouselike platforms and shrines by the roadside were small piles of human skulls and thighbones. A warning? A remembrance? I don’t know. As we got closer to what used to be the front line of the last armed conflict, I saw a rusted-out, bullet-pocked APC (armored personnel carrier) by the side of the road. Then a burned-out Chinese-made tank.
The armed guys at the last checkpoint did not look happy to see us. What about the casinos? Didn’t these people want our business? I began to get the idea that I would not soon be enjoying a mai tai in the main lounge, entertained by the comedy stylings of Don Rickles. The likelihood of a buffet or a station to make your own omelette seemed increasingly remote. My driver kept looking in the rearview mirror as he drove along at a breakneck clip of ten miles per hour, echoing my waiter from the TEO with occasional remarks that there were ‘bad peoples . . . bad peoples’ here.
We stopped in a small village to eat and to stretch our ruined backs and necks. At a roadhouse next to a market, a group of agitated Khmers were rather too enthusiastically watching a Thai kick-boxing match on a television in the dining area, shouting and pumping their fists in the air anytime anyone got hit. I had a bowl of some warm beer on ice and some tom yam, a sort of Thai noodle soup. It was the best thing I’d had to eat since arriving in Cambodia – Thai food. Everything was increasingly Thai here, the closer we got to the border. Thai food, Thai money, Thai television. After a meal and a rest, we set out again, with about two hours to go until Pailin.
‘This was where the front was,’ said Kry awhile later, speaking up for the first time in memory. He pointed out a craggy mountain peak and a pagoda. ‘KR used to dump bodies in this mountain. Thousands of bones up there inside the mountain.’
Just outside Pailin, the road was actually graded – probably to accommodate the lumber trucks. (They’re cutting down every tree in Cambodia to sell off to the Thais, a practice that is leaving the countryside even more devastated