Bamboo

A planned stay of months, or at least one month, on Koh Russei (Bamboo Island), turned into a mere 18 days’ stay.  I’d taken a solo trip back to town to gear up, with a bit more cash and some reading materials.  The collected works of Pablo Neruda, some extra soap, a first aid kit, and around $250 USD — after three nights in the dorm, paying $3 per, your accommodation was free, indefinitely.  It didn’t make great business sense to me, but that was the way they had it laid out, so with each meal costing around $4 and a refill of water on 50 cents, I calculated that I could live quite comfortably on around $10 per day, until my 30 day visa ran out, at which point I could opt to extend, or move on.

But the western company became smothering, unbearable.  Kind people, at heart, all three, Melissa (Philippine but raised in Madrid), Andy, from England but well-travelled, and Andrea, from New Zealand, who was at least 50 years old and only now just starting to travel the world.  I enjoyed Melissa immensely, her positivity and general glee-faced openness and enthusiasm.  Andy was a wake-and-bake stoner who rolled his first spliff around 8 a.m., after breakfast, and didn’t stop rolling or puffing until around 23:30, when he eventually trailed off to sleep.  His capacity for run-on sentence storytelling and arresting all other voices and trains of thought and hijacking them with his own thread increased the more he smoked, until, every evening around dinner, whether I or anyone else in the vicinity liked it or not, we were forced to sit and wait for the deluge of words to end, some people waiting very patiently for enough of a significant gap in breaths to say their “good night” and scurry off to their dorm or bungalow; some risked judgement and simply walked away when they’d had enough.  There was no point trying to add and opinion or a thought to the monologue: everything that wasn’t his idea was automatically wrong.  I remember one of the first nights there when he’d gotten on to the topic of Formula 1 racing, and I told him I didn’t follow it, but that I had seen it in Kuala Lumpur, where it was being held for three days, during which I’d recently been staying in the city, and it had affected all the traffic and public transportation.  He said he didn’t think it was the right time or season for Formula 1 to be running, then, after mulling it over for about 10 or 15 seconds, decided out loud that I was wrong, that it wasn’t on this time of year, even though i’d physically been at the arena, out near the airport, and saw the words “Formula 1 Racing Kuala Lumpur” done with multi-coloured flowers arranged in the soil of the hill on the south side entrance to the track.  Andy had his own ideas, and insistently shaped reality and the facts at hand to suit those ideas.  It got very tiresome, very quickly.  And Andrea, bless her heart, liked very much to use open-minded and open-hearted sounding words, but she was as scared and closed up as any other bird who had never before left the nest.  All music playing in the cafe during dinner time (the only time the Khmer family would have the generator running with the stereo on), if it was’t by a selection of known, familiar artists, say a list of 20 or so from the 60s and 70s, then it was the wrong music, and she would put up no end of fuss.  The dogs, three males and a female in heat, were her enemies, given all that noise they made and the way the males fought each other and left puss-filled wounds and bulging scars on each others’ paws and faces.  That was wrong, and someone ought to do something about that, according to Andrea.  The way they worked, or didn’t work, and who was doing what work and when, that was all wrong, according to Andrea.  The way they raised their children, the way they handled tourists, when and how they did their shopping for supplies, and how it was delivered, that was all wrong, according to Andrea.  The way the tourists who visited the island behaved, and even the sounds from the fishermen out on their boats at night, and the bass beats that could be heard, carried over from the party clubs in the mainland across the way, that was all wrong, according to Andrea.  It was quite impossible, I found, to make a noise near her, let alone a whole word, without prompting a complaint about some thing or some one … though she was always overtly kind and warm-hearted with whomever she was, at the moment, speaking.

All this western bullshit, this politeness, this two-facedness, I just wanted to scream.  I spent as much time as I could in the water, snorkelling, swimming, or hiking around the island with the dogs, or just reading in the sunlight.  Sometimes I would play, around the restaurant area, with Kontia, the little four-year-old girl who was the daughter of the army captain who ran the place with his mother and sister and unpaid “hired” help.  Kontia was a delight.  Giant smile, giant voice.  Essentially spoiled, she had a firm grasp on the fact that her scream, the scream of a small girl being slowly murdered limb by limb, was not something that the customers / tourists wanted to hear or were willing to tolerate, and so any time she wanted something and it wasn’t forthcoming — be it a picture drawn for her in her notepad, with coloured pencils, or for another can of Red Bull to be opened for her since her fingers had neither the strength or the shape to lift the tab — she let out this almighty siren, and her wish was immediately granted by the parents who didn’t want to make a scene in front of their guests.  I had good play time with her, though, and I think she learned to respect me fairly quickly, when she learned that her screaming simply didn’t wash with me, and if I said No, I meant it, and that was that.  In less than a week she was giddy and goofy with happy-to-see-you moves whenever I made my way over to the restaurant, the same as it was with Melissa, who played with her much more often.  We built leaf and sand castles on the beach, played house on the restaurant dining floor area with her tea set, which included a plastic egg and an electric-pink rubber hedgehog toy.

There was usually a delivery on Mr. Pro’s fishing boat in from mainland once a day, sometimes during breakfast, sometimes during supper.  Blocks of ice in burlap-like plastic sacks that smelled of fish, large cellophane wrapped bundles of kitchen supplies, cases and cases of beer and soft drinks.  I’d get my shirt off and lend a hand when I was on hand during the delivery, which I normally was.  Andy would say things like, “Oh, don’t get the ice, I’ll get the ice, it’s awkward,” or “No, no, sit down, I’ll do it,” or “No, don’t bother, oh look now you’ve gotten your clothes all dirty with petrol,” or some such similar line.  Later he would complain about being duped by Mr. Pro to being obliged to help him with the delivery, or some similarly coloured self-complimenting complaint.  It drove me to small fits of rage.  All this western politeness again, saying one thing while meaning another.  All this telling people what to do and how to do it, though they require no instruction and are not his to instruct in the first place, and then later complaining about having to “do everything” and complaining about being left in charge.  I’d come there to participate, with the people who ran the place, not wage war between my patience and another visitor’s ego.  So, after the night that Andy purposely didn’t join the restaurant at the customary time for dinner, having asked Andrea to pick him up something chicken in a takeaway and bring it back to the bungalows for him, and I found him deeply stoned and drinking, and telling me to watch out for Mr. Pro, to not let him “push me around” and “get things for free” out of me, and asking me in so many roundabout words to help him “teach Mr. Pro a lesson,” and then declaring that his takeaway dinner will probably be spit in, I made my decision to leave.

I want to return, though.  I want to learn some more Khmer, and to teach the sister and Kontia some english, if they want to learn.  And to sit, in the quiet, in the rain if it’s rain season, to swim, to think, to pass the hours without much company at all.  Despite all the trash that collects all around the edge of the island, it is a beautiful and quiet place, and excellent for a retreat.  The bungalows on the other side from where we stayed are essentially defunct.  Both areas, our side and the other, have had their contracts bought out, one by Chinese, one by French, and will undergo development within the next to years, probably beginning sooner than one year.  I want to go back while the simplicity still exists.  Before the air conditioning and the digging and drilling and the swimming pools and the facades.

When I travel, I don’t want more of the same from where I’ve left.  I want something else, the way things are in some other place already, not a prescribed experience.  I want to participate.  A sign in the little hung-up library in the common area between the bungalows there features a quote that I agree with, that say, “Life is a book, and those who don’t travel read only a page.”  What I can’t wrap my head around is this, what I understand to be, fear that so many travel with.  Fear of being forced outside of their comfort zone.  Why would I travel thousands and thousands of miles just to find the exact same thing I left behind?  I don’t want anything like that.  I just want to participate, no matter how uncomfortable or off-putting or strange the experience.  I want to be blown clear of my own comfort zone by the very cannonball of experience.  However, if the discomfort comes from the clash with western judgement and western ego than I can find anywhere in America or Europe, then I’ll just happily move along, until I find something more local to participate in.