Davone, a villager in Sophoon, shaves her homegrown cassava in Phongsali province, which is considered one of the country’s poorest and most remote. Sophoon, however, enjoys relative prosperity: most families have enough rice to sustain them through this year’s dry season. The village sits on a swiftly flowing river, which spins family generators that power a lightbulb, TV, satellite dish and DVD player (often bought from Vietnamese traders in a package deal).
It’s always strange, emerging from a week or two or three in the outback, where word-of-mouth remains the only source of news—even in these technological times. Our encampment at the Sophoon village dispensary had no TV, no radio, no Internet, and only the barest of cell phone connections. (And only sometimes.) True, many families have spent a few hundred dollars on a river-run generator that provides them with evening entertainment (see caption above). In theory, those families could watch Thai TV news—but they didn’t. If anything, they listened to Lao pop music or watched Thai movies until about 9 p.m., when the village went totally dark and the world slept. We, too, finished most nights by candlelight with books in hand and eyes squinting at dimly lit pages. I confess: I loved the serenity.
As for information: it traveled the way of the old “telephone” game. One person told another person told another person told another person told another person. Bits and pieces of a story—any story—made their way through the village so that every villager had a general idea of what went on in Sophoon. If he didn’t, his neighbor did. Like that. But almost no one had much of an idea of what went on in Udomxai or Luang Prabang or Vientiane or Bangkok.
So, what a treat the other day to sit to a cup of hot Lao coffee at Luang Prabang’s Scandinavian Bakery (one of the longest-running foreign-oriented restaurants with great coffee, yogurt and bakery items) and READ THE NEWS! The Vientiane Times, three days’ worth! I quickly noticed a slew of food and farming stories, from all across Laos, and I took note. In no particular order, here’s what’s new in the Laotian food world:
• Severe water shortages have wreaked havoc with northern Lao’s rice harvests. The rivers are too low to provide water for irrigation.
• Officials met to discuss worries over environmental degradation and the future of tourism. Businesses along the Nam Ngum, Nam Theun and Mekong rivers reportedly dump waste directly into the water, causing high levels of pollution as well as parasites in the people living nearby. There is talk of imposing an environmental tax on polluters.
• International fast food comes to Laos, with the opening of Swensen’s and The Pizza Co.
• Lao fish farmers are losing business to Chinese fish farmers who are selling their fish at lower prices.
• Officials met to discuss a five-year poverty eradication plan, 2011-2015. Eighty percent of the country’s total land area is considered remote; and 80 percent of people, villages and districts are categorized as poor.
• Illegal gold mining in Xieng Khouang province has poisoned water sources with cyanide and mercury. These toxins are mixed with soil to create the foundations of people’s homes. Cyanide and mercury are blamed for livestock deaths and polluted rice fields, rivers and lakes.
• Vientiane farmers are asking to postpone debt payments after last year’s crops failed due to water shortages. Many fruit trees and vegetables died in the past month because farmers didn’t have enough money to buy pumps necessary for irrigation. “Unusually low water levels in the Mekong River” are cited.
• Lao farmers are losing business in light of illegal chicken egg imports. Lax border controls are blamed.
• The demand for shrimp has risen sharply in the weeks before Lao New Year.
This is not the fish we had for breakfast. This happens to be a fish we had for lunch last year in a village along the Mekong. It was a big meaty snakehead, straight from the river, and our host, Monin, paid a pretty price for it. The fish above was not farmed. It had swum freely through the river.
What we had the other morning for breakfast was a big steaming tureen of sour fish soup, fragrant with all the lemon-balmy goodness of paddy herbs, and a slightly green tint to the broth with copious amounts of morning glory. Whole garlic cloves and chunks of galangal simmered in the soup, over a candle flame. But the fish? Tiny, bony, sad. We slurped the broth, devoured the herbs and left the bones on the side.
Ten years ago, that fish would not have been served in that soup in that way. Ten years ago, Khmer sour fish soup routinely came with thick, fleshy slices of fish that had been caught from the river or lake that morning. Times have changed.
You might recall last spring my post on the demise of Cambodia’s great staple, its freshwater fish, upon which this culture thrives. What we’re seeing today on restaurant tables is the picture of decline. I’ve said it before (and I know some people disagree), but I stand by my interviews and observations: Cambodians are losing their lake and river fish. Talk to Tonle Sap fishermen and their wives. Read the reports. Visit with market vendors and household cooks and the owners of aquatic farms, where the fish are raised in pens and fed diets of meal mixed with large portions of rice waste. It’s no simple task for the average shopper to find big, healthy freshwater fish for sale in the morning market. With combined pollution, population increases, changes in seasonal flooding, and reports of illegal overfishing—there simply aren’t as many fish to feed the Cambodian family anymore. Gone are the days of ubiquitous fish-dominant dinners. In fact, they may be gone entirely if and when China’s many plans for upstream dams go through.
The other night, we ate a streetside meal of ginger fried chicken and sour soup (another type, with tomatoes and pineapple). Fish wasn’t even an option. The smiling old Khmer woman had none to sell at her stall—only chicken, beef and pork.
And just now, as I type in a pleasant Siem Reap restaurant with WiFi, the Khmer couple beside me tried to order a plate of fish. The answer? “Mien moan, ch’hrouk,” the waiter said. We have chicken, pork. “Awt mien trei.”
Seaside view from the Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, before the tsunami
Exactly five years ago, on the morning after Christmas, an earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra. With a magnitude surpassing 9.1, it was one of the mightiest quakes on record. It spurred a series of tsunamis that devastated parts of Asia and Africa, and it killed at least 230,000 people. Jerry and I had just spent a month in Sri Lanka, one of the hardest-hit countries. When we heard the news, we shifted our holiday plans and traveled to Phuket, in southern Thailand, to cover the aftermath. What follows is an essay based on my journal notes from our month of travels along Sri Lanka’s edges, before Mother Nature altered the coastline forever. It’s the second in a two-part series. The first, a personal essay about reporting on the tsunami from Thailand, ran yesterday.
The Sea Before
Note: We visited Sri Lanka during a ceasefire in a 30-year civil war between the majority Buddhist Sinhalese government and the minority Hindu Tamil Tigers. That war ended in May 2009, but thousands of Tamil civilians remain in camps, and country is scarred by war. Jerry and I visited both south (predominantly Sinhalese) and north (predominantly Tamil) during our travels. In every corner of the country, Tamils and Sinhalese agreed: war would come again—and it did. Below are scenes from Sri Lanka’s waterfront, as it was in late November and early December 2004, just before nature pitched Sri Lankans a curveball in already catastrophic times.
Nov. 24
A storm comes. Black towers of clouds fade into a sheet of gray as lightning prickles distant rooftops. It comes, like most Asian storms, hard and fast. We dine tonight on the ocean, in Mount Lavinia, just south of Colombo. We order devilled fish, chicken curry and spicy rice. Two cats mingle with our feet and whine for scraps — feisty.
For a long while, we are the only people at this restaurant, so barren is this beach. A tropical beach with little hint of tourism. A couple of quiet men stroll through the darkened sand, talking and smoking, their silhouettes like mist. They have no light but that faint blip of a cigarette. A southbound train rumbles past, people cramped inside and spilling out the doors. The tracks follow the shoreline, closer to the water than any road. This place has the feel of a town abandoned after battle; roughened, empty, a little spooky.
Nov. 25
This morning I talk with Marcus, the desk man at our guesthouse. He spent 17 years in the Navy, in the north and east, and he describes his combat days with the hallmark precision of a tragic remembrance. “Our camp was attacked by LTTE in 1985. Third through fourth of May 1985. I was engaged in that face-to-face attack. We retaliated after 48 hours of attack.” He remembers three soldiers died and eight were badly injured: an amputated hand, an amputated leg, shrapnel wounds. After all these years, he still remembers the names of the dead and the cities they came from.
Marcus tells me he was excited to fight, not scared. He felt a duty to defend the lives of innocent people from “terrorist insurgents.” He thought he would die in that attack. “I thought there was no way — I must sacrifice my life.”
He admits the Tamils have not been treated kindly in the past 50 years; they suffered under the Sinhala-only law, which made Sinhalese the official language. “We must look at both sides.” But warfare aimed at civilians — bombs and raids in public places, a mark of the Tigers — is unconscionable, he says. “We must stop this nonsense.”
This afternoon, Jerry and I catch a train to Colombo. It takes 30 minutes in a shabby car with hard seats, hordes of people. The tracks skirt little shanties by the sea — nothing else on this coastline. Nothing but the poorest of homes, shacks huddled against each other. Women bathe at communal spigots, dogs laze in the shade. I watch their eyes as we slowly bounce by. (I remember their eyes later when I see pictures of these tracks, ripped from the earth and all these homes, gone.)
We arrive at Colombo’s main station amid hustle-and-bustle and a riotous noise. A moaning, more like it. Buddhist monks occupy the sidewalk, chanting in unison, protesting the LTTE. They do not want a separate country, a monk tells Jerry. They want a unified Sri Lanka, Tamils and Sinhalese. So they sit and chant their story amid the frenzied rush of humanity getting on and off the trains.
The sea, Colombo
Strolling around Colombo’s seaside fort: it feels as though the war is not over. Snipers skitter atop skyscrapers; two wiggle and wave when we spot them from the street. All government buildings hide behind thick barriers of sandbags and concertina wire. A lone soldier peeks from an empty seaside lookout on a playground of rainbow-colored swing sets.
We pass bombed-out buildings, just the shells still standing; we pass others reduced to heaps of broken bricks. Again and again, police officers stop us and ask where we go — no problem to look around, but no photos allowed. Colombo is a place at odds, with the tarnished remnants of colonialism and the feel of a city quietly under siege. There’s a police post, sponsored by Coca-Cola, beside the Galle Face Green, the city’s great promenade. There are checkpoints on the roads. There is tension and worry.
It’s Thanksgiving Day, we’ve almost forgotten. We drink beer at the Galle Face Hotel as the sun sets over roiling seas. Construction workers pound behind us; the ocean pounds before us. A chipmunk visits, taking my offerings of fried spicy cashew, propped on the leg of my chair. Crows cackle in the palms above us. The Indian Embassy stands within view; it is well-guarded, like all others. Soldiers prepare for another storm, erecting a tarp over their rooftop perch beside a mounted heavy machine gun. The sky blackens, the sea turns slate, the air cool and good. The rain chases us inside as it pummels the banquet tables on the lawn, white cloths and glasses drenched. Men in white shirts and black pants leap the wall and sprint to retrieve the dishes.
We return to Mt. Lavinia that night by taxi. As we pass through the Tamil area of Bambalapitiya, our driver tells us Tigers are bad for business. “Tiger people are dangerous,” he says. “They are suicide people.”
I tell our driver we are from the United States.
“Ahh… Bush,” he says.
I ask what he thinks.
If Bush had not been re-elected, he says, America would face more problems with Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda is a problem he understands — terrorists, he says, like the LTTE. How many times have the Tigers blown up hotels? Terrorists are bad for business, he says.
Nov. 26
It’s a Poya day, a Buddhist holiday, and the streets are bare. We head to a cramped little office in Bambalapitiya to buy LionAir tickets to Jaffna in the Tamil north. These days, the agent tells us, Jaffna is “more normal than Colombo,” where every day brings a new murder or three.
LionAir resumed flights to Jaffna with the ceasefire in 2002, after a four-year hiatus. The company opened in 1994 but, “Unfortunately,” the agent says with a downward glance, “one of our planes was shot down.” All 48 passengers and crew disappeared off the coast of Mannar Island.
Egret, Jaffna
Nov. 27, Jaffna
We drop closer and closer to Jaffna, passing over sparkling estuaries. Emerald forests, egrets in rice paddies, red dirt roads, crisp air: It’s beautiful, stunningly so. But the airport is a bunkered high-security zone. More soldiers, more encampments, more looks of war. There is nothing to indicate it has stopped. This is Tamil Eelam, at the northern tip of the island.
The 17-kilometer road into town passes shot-up schools and bombed-out homes, businesses with nothing left, buildings with trees and bushes growing inside; mile after mile destroyed. Most every corner in most every neighborhood is guarded by a Sri Lankan Army bunker with soldiers watching.
Nov. 29
We hire a van for a day trip, driving north and east, then back to Jaffna and west. It’s potholes all the way, nothing maintained. And everywhere, we see the Sri Lankan Army, the Sinhalese. Soldiers occupy the best beaches, Tamils tell us, and they’ve mined them all.
The young soldiers we talk to admit they don’t like it here. Tamils and Sinhalese living together, in fear.
These torn causeways wind through groves of palms, flush with birds and cows and goats, and more birds and butterflies, and more birds, all day long. Brahminy kites and cormorants, spot-billed pelicans and black-crowned night herons, little egrets, great egrets, grey herons, painted storks, red-wattled lapwings. I’ve never seen such birdlife in such abundance. The birds, so light on their legs; they walk through minefields with peaceful feet.
The homes we pass were lovely and elegant in a previous time, perched on the property of retirement dreams. Before: there were colonial art-deco villas set deep within coconut groves. Now: there is nothing but shattered walls and rooftops gone. So many families vanished, and all the contents of those homes with them.
Dec. 2
I’m on our balcony in Jaffna. A cow swishes its tail across the street. People pass on bicycles and a small fire burns against a wall. The sun strikes upon the bombed buildings around me.
We spent the day in a three-wheeled taxi driven by Mr. K, a newfound friend. He has a difficult past, having traded the life of a Tiger for that of a family man. He knows men have been killed for the political thoughts he now harbors – all he wants is peace and normalcy, a future for his children.
Mr. K drives us to Kurikadduwan, where we board a ferry to Nainativu, a small island where Hindus and Buddhists meet. Amid 5,000 Tamil villagers sits a Buddhist temple where the Buddha himself walked 2,500 years ago. He came to Sri Lanka, ironically, to stop a war. Legend says he left his footprint here, which is why thousands of Sinhalese Sri Lankans make pilgrimages to this island. Hence, the government stationed a Navy garrison here.
Just outside the temple, along the road from Buddhists to Hindus, is a Navy bunker. A 21-year-old soldier asks Jerry if he’d like to photograph his gun, a T-56 LMG. The soldier comes from the inland city of Kandy and has been stationed here six years. I do the math and realize he was 15 when he came to this island of peace.
Back on our balcony in Jaffna, the rain comes lightly from a heavy cloud over wavering sun. A clunky armored personnel carrier shuttles a load of soldiers up the road. A bus follows with more officers, then a truck. There has been rioting in Jaffna for the past two days. The circumstances remain cloudy, but it seems to be a squabble over fishing and money. At night, we’ve heard the jolting booms of grenades.
Mr. K has told us two boys died in last night’s fighting. A curfew was set from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., though we don’t know if it still stands. There is no news here beyond word of mouth. This afternoon, we had hoped to see an old ice factory, a five-story building on the coast, so Mr. K began driving in that direction. The narrow road met a cramped intersection crowded with people. We inadvertently found ourselves in the center of rioting, where yesterday’s deaths occurred. The locals politely advised us to leave immediately.
Jaffna has grown on us, but its troubles run deeper than we can go.
Fishing, Trincomalee
Dec. 7
Trincomalee, the eastern edge of Tamil Eelam. It could be Seattle, but it’s decidedly not. A city on a bay, islands and harbors, hills and fishing boats, birds and blue sky. Trinco sits on gorgeous land buffered from the sea. But it shelters the worst of ethnic hatreds and war-formed mentalities. Buildings are barricaded and marked with skulls and crossbones. As Jerry says, it’s as though no one here gives a shit, and shit is literally everywhere. So is garbage, so are guns.
The owner of our guesthouse is a man named Tilko, a Tamil who came of age in London. There, he drove a taxi, washed dishes and put himself through engineering school. He says his people are deeply united in their fight for freedom. “We are terrorists in the world’s eyes. But the people have suffered.”
Tilko returned during the ceasefire to help rebuild. He has opened several hotels, north and south, but he waits for lasting peace to pursue his grandest visions – he wants to build a resort on a small seaside plot outside Jaffna, and another one here, facing a coral island that’s good for snorkeling.
But it is not yet time.
Now, it is time to live with war in mind. Tilko plants rice and bananas on his vacant lands. That way, if the bombs fall one year, the fields can be replanted the next, he says. When he works on his hotels in town, he buys only cheap (though tasteful) materials because he knows the building may not last. “If there is war, we have to rebuild.”
Jerry and I take a tuk-tuk to the nearby tourist beach of Nilaveli. Our driver turns down a dirt trail and there it is, big wide sand, a few men casting lines, and nothing. No hotels, no restaurants, no tailor shops or tattoo stalls. It’s what happens in paradise when paradise goes to war.
A few scattered hotels lie farther up the road. We stop at a place where, for $17, you can rent a basic room with a porch overlooking the ocean. The pool-in-progress remains as it has for years. A military bunker sits next door. There are no guests when we visit, but the manager assures us things pick up in spring.
Dec. 26, Thailand
A tsunami strikes Asia, killing 230,000 people or more. Hardest hit are Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
Early January
The little hotel we visited in Nilaveli is gone; we read about it in updated online guidebooks. “Flattened,” “totalement detruit,” “completamente distrutto.” Much like the streets we strolled in Trinco, where the waves scattered landmines far from their designated fields. Much like the tracks south of Colombo, where the tsunamis killed at least 800 on a southbound train. That train was called the “Queen of the Sea.”
A week or so after the tsunamis, an envelope arrives from Mr. K. “I pen this letter to remember you. I and my family are in good health,” he writes. But northern Sri Lanka is not. Mr. K sets off around the Jaffna Peninsula, to help where he can.
Mr. K sets off to do what millions of Sri Lankans have hoped to do for decades: rebuild and renew. And restore life to a devastated land.
Exactly five years ago, on the morning after Christmas, an earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra. With a magnitude surpassing 9.1, it was one of the mightiest quakes on record. It spurred a series of tsunamis that devastated parts of Asia and Africa, and it killed at least 230,000 people. Jerry and I had just spent a month in Sri Lanka, one of the hardest-hit countries. When we heard the news, we shifted our holiday plans and traveled to Phuket, in southern Thailand, to cover the aftermath. What follows is a personal essay I wrote about this reporting job. It’s the first in a two-part series. Tomorrow, I will post an essay based on my journal notes from a month of travels along Sri Lanka’s edges, before Mother Nature altered the coastline forever.
After the Waves
I can’t kill the stench, can’t stand the reek of my clothes. I smell like rotting bodies, like the bloated corpses that lie in heaps here at Wat Bang Muang. Death smothers the temple and eats through its shine.
Some of the victims are covered, hundreds are not. They don’t look real, faces so puffed, tongues extended, bellies distended, breasts and penises erect. I see a child with maggots in the gut, a woman with a gash in the breast. Dry ice swirls in eerie loops.
Worker, bodies and dry ice at Wat Bang Muang
Workers tiptoe through these morbid avenues yelling “falang” when they identify a foreign corpse. Shell-shocked survivors scrutinize the piles. The bodies are no longer people. They are not humans, no life, nothing — absolutely nothing — of a loved one’s being. They are bloat and rot and food for scavengers. I understand the longing, the wanting to know what happened, the desire to bring a body home across miles of ocean to a family in waiting. But nothing remains of these people. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, they are returning to the same Mother Nature that killed them.
This is Khao Lak, January 2005. Jerry and I are here to write this story, photograph this news. On Christmas Day, thousands made merry on the beachfronts of southern Thailand, sunning and sailing and smiling for cameras, with the backdrop of bliss all around. The next day, everything changed. Death gushed through the door and broke it down. We’re supposed to look at the remains and somehow assemble them, sanitize them, for family readers back home. Editors don’t want feelings and opinions in the face of gore. They want truth without the tears.
Yet reporters do cry. I’ve seen it many times.
“If you do not see the reality, you will never understand what happened here,” an Austrian volunteer named Walter Dreier tells me. His vacation has turned into a search-and-rescue mission. For days, he picks through rubble, looking for Austrians buried in sand. He finds identification papers for two people, no more.
It’s a reporter’s bitter struggle — my struggle — to convey the visceral feelings aroused by a wave that killed a quarter million people. It was nature, unbiased, invoking random selection. Pictures and words alone don’t always work. They don’t translate smells or sounds or the overwhelming clench of desperation.
The sewers in town stink of death. I step over a manhole and I smell the temple; I smell my clothes, my hair, my bag, all over again.
I smell sad irony, too: The airport is warm and flowery, like paradise, like it should be. But the tarmac is stacked with coffins.
Remnants of a Khao Lak resort
I hear it: Calm waters lap against placid shores. A red sun slips over a docile ocean, as stunning a view as ever. But strips of metal dangle from a ceiling, creaking in an creepy wind, as bulldozers crush their way through mountains of rubble. In some spared spots, little lizards rustle through lush vegetation. In others, nothing green remains. We wake one morning to helicopters thundering round and round. It’s the drone of disaster.
I taste grief in sweet tangerines and greasy fried chicken, offered freely by hundreds of men and women toiling over bubbling woks. They’ve volunteered to feed the workers and journalists who have flooded this island. The cooks are happy to give but heartbroken for the reasons why.
I come to understand this catastrophe through the absence of sensation, too. I walk one night, alone, along the beach in Patong. It’s a black cavity of nothing — nothing of what was here before. Think of Waikiki, snuffed of life. Bricks are stacked to be made into sidewalks again. The road is open, the debris mostly cleared. But no lights, no people, not even dogs. Step two blocks inland and the beer flows, the music thumps, in near-empty bars. All the customers are scared away — or gone to another life.
On Khao Lak beach, the waves pulverized everything in their paths, turning high-end resorts into piles of refuse. Everything is where it shouldn’t be. Doors and windows litter the ground. An overturned truck rests in a hotel lobby. Electric wires lay in ditches. Concrete posts are snapped in half. A tree sprouts from the broken windshield of a vehicle stuck in mud.
Rescue worker searching through the rubble of a Khao Lak resort
Rescue workers pick through the detritus. It’s meticulous work by hand, down in the sand. A man from Singapore digs through broken wood and concrete, pawing carefully, sniffing for the telltale smell of human remains. He is momentarily drawn to a curious spot, but his boss tells him never mind — it’s only the odor of rotten fish.
Up the beach a bit, Jerry and I watch a Korean team going through similar motions. They find a backpack and spill its contents: a wallet, a cell phone, medications, lipstick. It belonged to a woman, that’s all they can discern. The team has found 11 bodies and one leg in five days. The workers doubt they’ll find more. They’re moving north, where the tsunami wiped out an entire fishing village.
Evidence of the missing surfaces in tattered bits — a photocopy of Toth Ildiko’s Hungarian passport, a March 1 Turkish Airlines boarding pass from Bangkok to Istanbul in Oliver Gutzke’s name.
Miles inland, there is life—lights, voices, movement, progress. The living keep going. But on Khao Lak beach, there is only the sea against the sounds of searching. It is overwhelming, and it shows on every face here. The tragedy lives behind every little white mask.
Most unnerving are the third-floor rooms of a Khao Lak resort, left as they were that morning. Jerry and I climb the dirty stairs. We see what life was like just moments before, as though we’re traipsing through time. We find an open tin of mackerel, a glass of grape juice, John Grisham at the bedside. The next room over has crayons and dolls spread across a table. On the floor sits a survey measuring “the opinions of international tourists toward Khao Lak.”
In another room, we try to guess the course of events: The female occupant went swimming, met the first wave and lived. She ran to the room, kicked in the door, grabbed a few items and fled. She left little spots of blood on the bed.
We come to know the missing: One family had kids, one guest had a cold. Someone loved tea, another liked silk, someone else took expensive care of her hair and skin. These rooms harbor little freeze-frames of life before it vanished.
When people need more answers, they visit “the wall,” an hour away in Phuket town. It’s a sobering corridor of photos and fliers and phone numbers, lists of dead and injured, places last seen and pleas for help. It’s the only information available. Everything else is sealed in coffins or scattered through unknown graves of sand.
Workers here answer the phones 24 hours a day. It is chokingly sad to talk with the volunteers, the people who field these calls from hither and yon. A young woman named So Pida fetches a list of names and the resorts where they stayed. Most all the way down the page it reads: Khao Lak, Khao Lak, Khao Lak. “We work all day, all night. We cannot sleep,” she tells me. Only ten times have people called her back to say they found their loved ones alive.
I write about So Pida, the wall, the bodies at Bang Muang. I write many paragraphs, yet the words don’t suffice. I can’t find adequate imagery for the things that haunt my head, for the details unbefitting a family newspaper back home.
Instead, I drink a beer and my thoughts turn to puddles. It’s the same for Walter, the Austrian volunteer. After five days, he removes his mask and takes a break. He can’t go back to those dreadful beaches, he says. “Last night I thought, ‘I have to go out, I have to drink some beers.’” But he couldn’t even drown in an alcoholic elixir.
“It didn’t work.”
Walter can’t shake the images, so he changes his mind and vows to search through sand again. “I have to,” he tells me, with tiny tears misting his eyes.
And I have to look away. My eyes are equally blurred.
Ever hear a sandhill crane directly overhead? The voice is a warble with a prehistoric ring, the wings a primordial whooosh. These are sounds in evidence of lifecycles that have endured far longer than we.
The birds visit New Mexico each year in an ancient ritual that maps their lives from the far northern reaches of the Rocky Mountains down to the deserts of the Southwest.
Just an hour south of our house, thousands of cranes (plus ducks and geese) gather in the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where the Rio Grande welcomes the world’s largest gathering of sandhill cranes. The refuge is strictly managed to provide ample water and food. In earlier times, habitat loss along the Rio Grande posed severe threats to the birds; 70 years ago, only 17 cranes visited the region. Although this river still has its problems, officials today count more than 17,000 cranes in Bosque del Apache.
But I don’t have to drive anywhere to meet these birds. Several times a week, I ride my bike through the long stretch of forest bordering the river about a mile from our house. When I don’t cycle, I run, often along the acequias connecting farm to farm, neighbor to neighbor. Today, like many other days this fall, I encountered a congregation of cranes feeding in the fields along these waterways. They bob their heads and go about their business, almost oblivious to my presence. Of course, they know I’m there. But they seem to have learned through the years that sometimes humans mean no harm.
And they seem to have learned, through ages of practice, that humans rely on the same waters as they; that farmers plant fields each year resulting in the diets cranes love: grains, tubers, mice, snakes, insects and worms.
These relationships linking the water to the farmers to the birds have lasted centuries. I ride my bike along the Otero Lateral, an acequia dating to the 1600s (and marked accordingly with a sign). The early Spanish settlers followed the Puebloans before them, using a gridwork of irrigation canals to supply water throughout the desert region. Those same canals continue to feed people and birds today.
I’m reminded of a spot, halfway around the world, in Cambodia. Something similar happens in the little village of Tmatboey, where endangered giant and white-shouldered ibises gather in ancient watering holes known as trapeangs, which date to the Angkor empire. Long ago, the ibises likely followed buffalo and elephant herds as these animals churned up the ground and created pockets where water could collect. Today, the wild ungulates are mostly gone, but farmers and their domestic livestock create favorable conditions for the birds. With their thin, elegantly curved bills, the ibises nose around the fields for insects, worms, eels and small crustaceans.
Something happens when a bird this big flies away and I can feel the flap of its wings in my heartbeat. It’s as though my body shrinks in the shadow of an age-old system that has nourished more cycles of life than a single human can ever know.
Someday, I will write an apt description of the Cambodian road. The dust, the sand, the mud, the puddles. The dips and gouges, rocks and ravines. The way butt and thigh muscles work together, tensing and gripping the motorbike seat. The stamina it takes just to hang on. “Plau roaum,” Khmers say. Dancing roads.
It took ages of this beneath a broiling sun, plus a wooden boat with an ear-popping motor, to reach the Tonle Sap fishermen who live in and around the villages of Kampong Pluk district. They told us unanimous stories we have heard time and again; they showed us the proof: fewer fish, smaller in number and size.
I chatted with one fisherman named Koeun while his wife, Touch, chopped the heads off of the previous night’s catch. By the time these fish reached the village, he said, they already smelled. No one would buy. So Touch would make them into prahok instead. Most every Southeast Asian culture has a favored fermented food, often fish. In Cambodia, it’s a particularly rich and potent paste that makes the national dish, often referred to as Khmer cheese. (I recently pointed to a bin of turmeric-colored prahok with little pea eggplants served in an Old Market restaurant. What’s this? I asked the waitress. “Cheese,” she said.)
Touch told me her method for making the family’s prahok. “First we cut the heads off and take out all the innards,” she said. “Then mix with salt and dry. Then we put the fish in a jar and pound, to make it very soft. After that, we must keep it in the jar 15 days—and then we can eat.”
Touch uses her prahok in homemade sour soup with vegetables. “Prahok is also good for grilling and eating in the field,” she said.
*Hint: Many Cambodian restaurants serve prahok, some more pungent than others. Tourist-oriented restaurants tend to serve milder versions. For a super-intense sweet-sour version, try Socheata Restaurant behind Siem Reap’s old market. It’s served from a bin at the front of the shop. Eat it with the accompanying raw vegetables.
Cambodia is losing its fish and rice. We’ll be investigating this further in the coming weeks; it’s a story that spells a sad future. The country’s great, nourishing rivers and lands are vanishing for many reasons — land grabbing, land sales, over-fishing, upstream dams, diminished waters, new hotels, villas in the countryside. Meter by meter, farmland turns to something else. One by one, fresh-water fish disappear. One friend tells me the majority of fish sold in the market these days are farmed. He can taste the difference, and he doesn’t like it.
Yesterday, we had the good fortune to eat lunch the way Khmers have for ages. Our friend, Monin, took us home to T’aek village on the sandy edges of the Mekong. He phoned his aunt ahead of time, asking her to cook rice. Along the ride, he stopped to buy a snakehead fish, trey diep (Channa micropeltes), for his aunt to fry. He specifically asked for a river fish. “The river fish is best, very best,” he said. “The farm fish — not good taste. I don’t know why.”
Aunty Ngim scraped off some of the scales with a cleaver, then rubbed the fish in salt and rinsed it in water. She put the whole fish into a smoking black wok over a fire burner on the dirt floor beneath her nearly 80-year-old (!) house on stilts. The fish sizzled in oil as she prepared the dip: salt, smashed garlic and tamarind water from the pods that grow on her tree. She removed the fish, chopped it in half and returned it to the wok, flipping occasionally until it cooked all the way through.
She prepared seats for us on a slat platform, then set the meal before us: fresh fish, sweet and salty tamarind, a bowl of fragrant basil and rice from the family paddy. “I wanted a papaya with the fish,” Ngim said, “but I could not find.” The lunch reminded me of years past, of many meals with friends, and the fish flavors I always associate with Cambodia. The farther you live from these rivers—the Mekong, the Tonle Sap—the slimmer your chances of tasting a fish such as this. Sweet. Meaty. Perfect, without a hint of mud or muck. It’s no longer easy to find.
But no matter where you live, you might get your hands on a few tamarind pods, a clump of garlic and a pinch of sea salt. Soak the pods and use that water to mix with the garlic and salt. It’s a simple concoction that adds life to any thick, white fish — and zest to any village meal.
FYI, if you happen to fly Cathay Pacific this month, we have a story in the inflight magazine, Discovery, on hip Singapore venues that blend old colonial architecture with sleek, modern design. To name a couple: the National Museum and the uber-popular shops and restaurants of Dempsey Hill.
I think Singapore gets a bum rap for having destroyed remnants of its vibrant past. But really, it has retained far more of its historical architecture than most cities in the region. Take a stroll and look around; Singapore far surpasses the concrete jumbles that dominate much of urban Southeast Asia. Plus, honestly, most historians will tell you that a “vibrant past” was also a stinky one—and an inefficient, unsustainable one. Just read about the days when the city’s streets buzzed with vendors and the waterways clogged with pollution. Some people lament the loss of open vending. But back then, the lifeblood of the city—its water—was unusable. Singapore relied on Malaysia for its water. Not so now. Decades of clean-up efforts have turned this city around. In the future: look for more waterside parks, boardwalks, kayaks and other ways Singaporeans integrate clean water into their daily lives.
No, I don’t quite understand the disparaging remarks about a modern Singapore. But more on that another day….
Some books feel like forever. You write and pitch and write and edit and rewrite and plan and write some more. Weeks turn to months turn to years; so long, you almost (but of course never really) forget. But then one day, you get an ISBN number (978-0-8032-1138-4) and a cover, and you remember: it’s real, it’s a book, soon to be bound and in the hands.
The last days of October dawned gray and rainy. Every afternoon was sheathed in a musty, gloomy air. It was the end of the off-season, the last week before Thailand’s coastal resorts book solid for three straight months.
Granted, I had hoped for more sun and less muck. But then we might have had to share the Dawn of Happiness with far more guests. We might have missed the pleasure of a swing in a hammock on the beach, alone, as the tide thundered in and the moon shone through a break in the clouds.
A construction worker searches for dinner at low tide
We slept in a bungalow with the sound of waves rushing toward our window. So loud, I awoke and peeked through the curtains. There it was: high tide, just a few feet away.
By day, we tested the ominous skies and kayaked the craggy coast. Had there been no rain that week, our free, borrowed kayak might have been occupied already. We would have missed the dip in aqua waters on a secluded beach. We would have missed the kingfishers and Pacific reef egrets and water monitors that crossed our path. Nothing compares with the view from a kayak. Alongside cliffs, under mangrove branches, through rocky passages — a kayak lends perspective no other vehicle can.
The Krabi landscape
And surely, had there been no rain, we would not have dined alone on a beachside deck, sipping gin and tonic, eating spicy gaeng som with tender bamboo, one of many southern specialties.
Yes, the end of the low season is really the height of the high season for me. Those who visit Krabi now will find the sun — and heaps of other people. Instead, we found Krabi at her kindest, dressed in the dense green colors of jungle, swaddled in sweet air.
Fishermen rest in a rock grotto
This was not meant to be 100 percent vacation, just 70 percent respite before we embark on two months of work. As you read this, Jerry should be in Calcutta (Kolkata) and I will soon follow on another flight. From there, our plans take us into the far northeastern Indian states, then all the way cross-country to Gujarat.
It might be a while before you hear word of these travels (then again, maybe not). But don’t go away! In the meantime, I will post a few goodies I’ve had on the backburner for some time. And then: all that India offers us, in good taste.
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Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
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