A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [94]
Pailin. Unpaved, littered streets, mangy dogs, sullen locals who glared at our arrival. A few signs indicating karaoke massage, a barber, a few gem retailers selling chip-sized rubies and sapphires, a run-down, hopeless market. No casinos. No neon. No jumbo parking lots, new entertainment centers, dog tracks, or air-conditioned necropolises filled with one-arm bandits and Keno. No Seigfried and Roy. No Debbie. No Steve and Edie. Nothing but naked hostility, squalor, and scary-looking guys with guns. The Hang Meas, Pailin’s only hotel, was a smaller, drearier version of the TEO. Same cautionary sign in the lobby about AK-47s. Same karaoke massage booth. Same white tiles, creepy stains, drain in the floor.
I ate some soggy stir-fry in the hotel restaurant, then took a ride around town on the back of a motorbike with a young man who wanted to show me where I could score some good rubies. There wasn’t much to see. Ramshackle buildings, two-story businesses, a pagoda. The homes with the satellite dishes and the SUVs and new 464s out front belonged to the KR. Apparently, only Communists get to make money in Cambodia. I bought some overpriced and undersized rubies. Yes, there are uncut rubies strewn everywhere – by the riverbanks, in front yards, in the soil – but they cut the gems in Thailand, and they rarely make it back from the other side of the border – like most of the country’s resources.
We sent Kry off to talk to the official in charge of tourism and information, a former high-ranking figure in the KR. Unsurprisingly, considering recent developments in Phnom Penh, he didn’t want to talk about Pailin’s future as a destination resort. He was not interested in showing us the casinos. The casinos, it turned out, were about thirty kliks beyond Pailin, in the jungle and mountains near the Thai border.
‘He say you want to go there to shoot film? Maybe you get shot,’ said Kry when he returned. The KR official did not care to talk about economic development or Hard Rock hotels or anything else to do with tourism. He wanted to talk about what the KR would do if Ieng Sary was in fact indicted and dragged before the courts. He wanted to talk about returning to the jungle. Rearming. Going down fighting with their leader in a blaze of glory. Not what we wanted to hear.
That night, at 3:00 a.m., someone began pounding violently on Chris’s and Lydia’s door. Lydia, whom I had seen leaning out of fast-moving cars to get a shot, who has filmed on paratrooper bases, in jungles, and in minefields without fear, told me later that she jumped out of bed and huddled in a corner, shaking as Chris finally opened the door. Fortunately, it was a drunken Thai businessman back from an evening of karaoke massage, confused as to which floor his room might be on – not a KR security cadre with radiophones and alligator clips.
The next morning, I ate breakfast in the hotel. I was depressed. Things had not turned out as I’d hoped. Two days of travel up a no-name river and across the worst road in the universe – and for what? This was no gamblers’ paradise. The ‘vice capital’ was the same collection of dreary whorehouses and bars as everywhere else, only less welcoming. The citizens seemed stunned, lethargic, frightened, angry – not what you want in a destination resort. My dreams of becoming some kind of Southeast Asian Bugsy Siegel were shattered. Everyone wanted to leave, Kry and our Khmer driver more than anyone. The food, particularly compared to the delights of Vietnam, was uninteresting – mostly watered-down Thai, served under conditions incompatible with freshness. While I sipped my instant coffee, two guys in fatigues pulled up on a motorbike and dumped a dead deerlike creature on the ground with a plop! They dismounted and went to talk to the chef. Two children in rags hurried to the carcass, probing the large exit wound by the creature’s neck with their fingers, then sniffing