Part 1 - 6th August, 2008 (Day 5)

When I first visited, Phnom Penh had the feel of a place emerging from the dark ages, overlaid with a high level of tension due to the suppression of the democracy movement and a (possibly fake) attempt on Hun Sen's life (a couple of hand grenades were lobbed into his back yard while he was out). About half a dozen citizens were being shot in the streets each day by the police and I saw my fair share of live rounds going off. One night I was tootling along on a rickshaw and we passed close by a soldier on a street corner. Sensing he was up to something, I braced myself, so when he squeezed the trigger on his AK47 and let off a shot three feet from my right ear I didn't give him the satisfaction of jumping. Later though, we beat a very undignified pedal driven retreat from a hail of gunfire on Monivong Boulevard (the main drag), where demonstrators were being dispersed from the ministére de l'intérieur.

The political situation is very much more stable these days, the Khmer Rouge a spent force to most people, but there is a rising crime rate, thefts of all sorts happen all the time while armed muggings and bag snatching are especially in vogue. Corruption is also de rigueur with a coterie of rich and powerful families running most things.

Phnom Penh has become a hectic chaotic Asian capital, typical of many at an early stage of development - hot, dusty, hard to navigate on foot, but there are good guesthouses and eating places and its inexpensive. I've done a bit of the 'this was where I was shot at' nostalgic wander, but the place has changed almost out of recognition in a decade. Streets are paved, lit, and crowded. Last year I passed through and was taken aback at the touts and backpacker traps. While I tire of saying 'no thanks' to moto drivers they accept a knock back with a bigger smile than in most places.

Packing up and heading off to live for years in a dusty third world backwater isn't any easier the second time - knowing what you are getting yourself into is not a help, it's a distraction, and it just makes the lists longer (especially the 'bloody hell, I meant to do..' list). If ignorance wasn't a help then the U.S. would never have got to Northern Iraq.

Having 10kg less baggage allowance didn't help; airlines are getting really tight on weight and I wasted hours trying to get an excess allowance, but in the end I got through unscathed, with pretty much all I really wanted to bring, though struggling with carrying loose jackets and stuff in a way I'd normally avoid like the plague. (And if you think I don't know what that's like, I once had to cancel a visit to a project in India to avoid an outbreak of the plague, so there.)

I really really hate overnight flights, in fact the whole plane/airport thing is getting pretty old. It just adds insult to injury when after 6 hours of lumping bags through two airports, blagging two airlines' check-ins, dull waits and cramped seating you can see the lights of home passing 40,000 feet below. With sleep deprivation and a respiratory infection the whole pack - travel - arrive thing was a bit of a blur. After a few hours sleep I got up to meet my new boss who was passing through Phnom Penh and is quite excited to have me coming which is nice. The rest of the weekend I spent mostly in bed. [ I did get to see a riveting doco on toxins on the Discovery Channel. It was reported in the 1800s that natives of Siberia gathered the bright-red-with-white-spots mushrooms to make a hallucogenic soup. In winter the less fortunate would wait outside these parties with wooden bowls and collect the urine of the inebriated, which they drank to get their own high. This could explain the Australian usage of 'getting pissed'. Later theorists say that shamans were the consumers, able to fly out of their bodies, enter homes and perform healing arts in their altered state, and point to the red and white colours, the illusion of flying that you get while high, and the fact that moose also indulge, as likely precursors to the modern legend of the flying Santa.]

"PP" has a rare system of street names: they are all numbered. Sounds pragmatic, I hear you say, but they are numbered in no particular order. There are groups of them that number in series, sort of in the order they were laid out I guess, but no unifying logic. Only a few have names, at least officially. Finding a street on the map can be a lot like a very dull monochrome version of 'Where's Wally'.

I am staying in a nicer area than my last visit, on street 278 which became known as 'Golden Street' as there are about a dozen hotels in a block all named Golden something .. star, sun, comfort, palace, bridge etc. Now it is becoming known as 'expat street' as it is the epicentre of foreigner café society - aka 'NGO Land'. Its better than being in 'backpacker street' - I hate those useless bludgers who have nothing better to do than bum around Asia for a year at a time. (Yes, I know I did, it was research, alright?) Asian hotels tend to bandy about titles like 'resort' and 'bungalows' with complete disregard for the facility, but I am staying in an 'apartment' which actually earns the title, boasting a full kitchen along with the cable tv, hot water and air con. Its mid monsoon season so afternoon rains are the norm and the mercury gets to about 30 degrees. The weather is not unpleasant, though following the horror of an Adelaide winter on the back of three years in the tropics, my body is not sure if its relieved or in shock. Maybe it's a shocked relief, like you get when your Qantas flight lands with two out of three cargo doors still attached.

My first language lesson came with a nice surprise .. I'm not just going to learn to speak Khmer, I'm going to learn to read and write it too! In a month. Well, of course I am. Given that there are 34 consonants, 24 vowels - of which all but two are pronounced in two different ways depending on which consonant precedes them, no consistent transliteration to Roman characters (and most work in the area was done by French ascetics in antiquity - if anyone can write phonetically its NOT the French) and the writing looks like the trails left by stunned ants escaping a particularly vicious ink bomb attack (producing a lot of erratic squiggly lines author Andy McNab would call 'paperclip'), I feel a little like a nesting dung beetle advancing on the south col of Everest. Still, khnom sok sa:p ba:i (I'm fine).

There are a few similarities between Khmer, or in their own language khmae (pronounced Cahm-eye) and Thai - the Khmer for trouser (khao) means leg in Thai and the khnom sok sa:p ba:i above is sabai dee krap in Thai - but the only really useful bit is that the numbers above ten are the same. If only I could remember the damn things. Last year I could count to 100,000 in Thai. In Thai you have a number (eg three sam) and then add the word for ten to get the tens (eg 30 is sam sip). In Khmer they use this system (and the Thai words - sort of) for the tens, but the numbers one to ten are completely different, so that 33 is sa:m sep bei, with sam and bei both meaning three. So we have to learn two sets of digits to count to 100. I'm not about to accuse an entire nation of being obtuse, but George Bernard Shaw must be spinning in his grave. Still, let he who speaks a language without irregular verbs cast the first stone.

To compensate, the ordinals are created by adding a single word to the number, unlike in English where we have to learn first, second, third etc.

I am really struggling to get over the 'flu and the rest, and my attempts to riәn phiәsa - learn the language - leave me a wreck, especially trying to write those upside down 'e's (try it, it goes against all you learnt from primary school spankings), so enough for now.