Our Year of Living Dangerously
Featured in The Australian
The three of us are cycling through the Cambodian jungles of Angkor Wat on bicycles that are rust-ridden and rickety and seen better days, when the storm breaks. Above there is a flicker of lightening that streaks across the aubergine sky, a rumble and a clap and then rain drops, the size of thumb nails, come smashing down against our skin, soaking us in moments. Orly, my five year old son is perched behind me, his arms gripped around my chest as we splash through potholes in the tarmac. Dow, my eight year old, is behind us riding solo, his little legs peddling madly, shrieking with exhilaration, as choking traffic rattles by, spitting up the rain-clogged mud: honking trucks, dented cars, carts overladen with fruit, vegetables, hay and timbre, a scooter carrying two live pigs. I've never known rain like it. We can barely see in front of us. It hammers against our skin. It pours down our faces, drowning us and filling our boots. We are still seven kilometres from the safety of Siem Reap - seven kilometres of treacherous road and the onset of darkness.
My two children and I have been traveling since November 2011 now, a trip that has taken us around Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Australia and in the coming months will take us on to Burma and Laos. According to the Thai solar calendar, it was the year 2554 when our plane touched down on Bangkok's rain washed runway nine months ago. The city was awash with flood water. Roads had become canals, bathtubs had been converted into boats, mattresses into rafts. Crocodiles had been found in living rooms and the motorways had become giant car parks. The British government was advising not to visit. But our flights were booked. Our bags were packed and we'd locked our whole life away into boxes. We were officially homeless, shackle free for a year of boundless vagabonding.
It was confusing at first, a lot for a five and eight year old to take in as they came across scarlet lipped, scantly dressed transvestites who paraded the walkways of Bangkok and children who lived in the gutter. Everything was lower on the ground. Cooking pots spread out over the cracked pavement, filling the humid air with the smell of fried fat and herbs. Men sat on their haunches selling cigarettes and warm coke. Women with baskets that hung like weighing scales across their backs, tip toed from street to street with pineapples and starfruit. Barbers set up short cuts and shaves on the pavement with a broken mirror and a comb. The world around us was poorer, dirtier, a land from the past, an uneven mix of medieval and the new, that crept in clumsily.
Add to that the fact that the boys were constantly squeezed, pinched and on occasion groped in the groin by smiling, toothless locals, photographed and stared at like pop stars and their first impressions were a mix of awe inspired excitement and bewilderment.
Two days in and Orly had fallen into the river Kwai, cut his hand on a machete, and got trapped in the toilet on the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Dow had swallowed copious amounts of river water filled with elephant dung and fallen into a tank full of doctor fish as they nibbled the dead skin cells from our feet in a massage parlour. Food was interesting, a game of roulette, never sure until it was too late whether hot meant just hot or spicy hot. Sleep was the same. Home was a jumble of tribal lodges, jungle camps, home-stays where bed was the floor, five star boutique hotels that eased the travel tiredness from limbs, and ten dollar windowless rooms with tea stained coloured walls and wiry beds that creaked like some jurassic skeleton beneath us.
However, right from the outset the boys have embraced the whole adventure with that life affirming energy that children have. We have travelled with that deluded belief which opens up only in a foreign land, that somehow we are invincible, that somehow because we are living life to the full we will be rewarded for doing so and be kept far from harms way. I've taken risks I would never take with the boys at home. We've ridden on motorbikes, all three of us sandwiched together. We've sat on the roofs of long-tail boats for days on end to reach a destination, squashed into rickety buses, and shared tuk-tuks with live chickens. We've dinned with Hmong shamans, played with orphan children, sailed down the Mekong on Bassak boats, ventured into bat infested caves and kayaked though the back waters.
Traveling with children has been so different from the many years I've spent traveling alone. I've been a travel writer for the past ten years. The maternal instinct to protect has been all the more poignant with the unfamiliarity of the world around us. But at the same time the world has opened up in ways that it didn't when I travelled alone. People respond differently to children, and children themselves don't always see things the way we see them. In the city of Hanoi, the largest of Vietnam’s Northern cities, I remember we found ourselves standing on the curb, contemplating as all foreigners had done before us, the seemingly impossible task of how to cross the road. There was a faded zebra crossing etched onto the pitted tarmac, but in the blur of passing traffic it was difficult to make out. The boys stood either side of me, grasping my hands tightly, as we stood waiting for a break to appear. None came. Just when I was about to give up, a young man joined us on the curb. He sat on a small trolley that supported his twisted hunched body, and walked with his hands, using them to push his wasted legs along the ground. It was hard to look at him, to contemplate what his life might be. He looked poor. His clothes were ripped and worn. I was wondering how the boys would respond, started to prepare a speech about life not being fair, when Orly squeezed my hand.
“Can you see him?" he whispered and his whole face was lit with wonder. “Can you see the funny little elf?” and he was looking right at the young man, tentatively, as if to look too hard would break the vision before him.
The man stepped down into the oncoming traffic. But a few feet ahead of us, he turned, and looked right at us, bright eyed with a hazel tinge that separated him from the crowd. He gave a small, almost imperceptible nod of his head, indicating for us to follow. There was nothing to be done, but take a deep breath and step out into the traffic after him.
Mopeds, trucks, bikes sped towards us. Step by step we shuffled forwards. “Don’t stop,” we'd been told by the hotel staff. “Keep moving forwards.” When finally we reached the other side, hearts hammering, all three of us were still alive.
"See," Orly had said. "He is an elf."
Some of our best experiences have been the simple ones. In the Vietnamese village of Phuoc Hai near Hoi An, we fished with local fishermen, setting off on a long tail boat that was as blue and green as the sky and the pampas grasses around us. We headed towards the archipelago where shores of white sand glimmered between palm fringes. The fisherman’s boat bobbed on the water just off from the beach. He was an old man, nearing seventy maybe, with only one tooth in his upper jaw.
“Sometimes in the bad weather a fisherman can loose everything," he told us. "Even their lives. To be a fisherman can be a dangerous job. So we sing to the ocean to calm it.”
He showed us how he held the cast net in both of his hands, one side slung over his shoulder, the other weaved through the fingers of his left hand. He rocked for momentum, back and forth, back and forth, three times before flinging the net out and up into the air where it splayed like a bird in flight, beads of water in the nylon catching the light as it fell over the surface of the sea and slowly sunk beneath it. Once it had disappeared he waited momentarily before reeling it in, hand over hand. He would cast this net for ten hours a day, throwing it out and pulling it back in, like a gold-panner ever hopeful that his catch would hold riches of mullet, gobi, or sea bream.
Other experiences were spectacular. In Thailand, right from the outset we were moved, awed, terrified and seduced by the elephants, those moon beasts with the crescent tusks. Without them Thailand would not be the country that it is today. They built it. Literally. We saw our first elephant the night we actually arrived: a street elephant who came trumpeting out of the humid night air, its feet shackled in chains, its trunk curled like a saxophone, led by its mahout who begged for change. After that we made sure our experiences were at sanctuaries, where the elephants were looked after, rather than abused.
At The Elephant World Rescue Sanctuary, thirty two kilometres from the town of Kanchanaburi, we washed elephants in the river, their hides the texture of an old leather couch, and painstakingly fed them balls of sticky rice. Nothing will ever beat the sight of the two most precious beings to me in the world, riding barebacked out of the water, like real life Mogli-boys, off into the jungle on two lone elephants. They moved like clouds, large and grey and floating gently across the land.
Elephant transportation, tuk-tuks, cycles, scooters, red and shiny like scooters should be, and the old hay cart - our means of getting around was like a continuous fairground ride for the boys. One of our most memorable forms of transport was the bamboo train in Cambodia's Battambang, the life line from one middle of nowhere to another. It clicked and clanked its way along warped, misaligned rails, hammering beneath vertiginous bridges, jarring our backs and rushing the wind through our hair. It was a simple contraption, a three meter long wooden frame covered with slats of bamboo, that sat on two ancient steel axles with cast-iron wheels and a motorcycle engine that thrummed merrily at the back. The boys and I couldn’t stop grinning. It was like flying on a magic carpet, hovering above the ground on a rug of swirling vermillion as the ground rushed away beneath us, heading towards a distant point of mauve and hazy heat waves.
It hasn't all been light and life affirming. There have been places and stories that have challenged us. We travelled to The Killing Fields of Vietnam, on a clear day, the sky salt coloured, and when finally we reached them what was most apparent, after the thunder of Pheng Phong, was the silence. We began the walk around the fields, a tape recorder in one hand as a solemn voice explained how on the 17th April 1979 Polpot took over Cambodia. Four years later he had decimated the population.
Twenty thousand people were murdered in the fields in which we walked. They were brought in trucks, blinded and bound, tortured and starved. They were accused of crimes against the state and killed before they could defend themselves.
“Better to kill an innocent by mistake than to spare an enemy by mistake,” Pol Pot would say.
They dug their own graves as music played out into the night to drown the sound of people screaming. Victims knelt in front of pits and did not see the expression on the faces of the men who killed them.
The boys and I walked pass these mass graves, past the meadow flowers that now grew up from the long grasses, the butterflies that flitted through the air, the birds that sang, and would not have known them for what they were but for the voice on the tape recorder telling us. That and the bones fragments beneath our feet, that rose up in the wind and rain and lay on the surface.
We stopped beside The Killing Tree. It was where children were picked up by their legs and swung against its trunk, their heads smashing. I looked at Dow to see whether he’d understood what he was being told, wondering if he was too young for this information. He reached out a hand, pressed his palm against the trunk, before bringing it to rest against his own head. That’s all he did. Just a hand to head movement, an expression of touch.
I have not hidden the harsher side of a foreign land from the boys. You can't. It's there in front of you. But sometimes the things that have been the hardest to see have turned out to be the most special.
One of my most poignant memories from this trip is of a street boy in Chao Doc, Southern Vietnam, who we used to watch from the veranda of our dilapidated guest house. He was no older than Dow. Eight years of age and he slept curled by the roadside, his arm for a pillow. The only objects he owned were a small battered metal bowl, and a blue string sac that he dragged behind him.
“That’s his home?” Dow had asked the first morning we saw him, wide eyed and anxious.
“Yes, sweetheart. That’s his home.”
“Does no one look after him?”
“No one.”
Each morning he crossed to the water tap, where he undressed and washed himself. Afterwards he ambled on up the street, shuffling between choking exhaust fumes, searching for the jetsam of the day, collecting discarded plastic bottles in his string bag and selling them for pennies at the stores that would use them for refills.
One morning we rose before him and were already out on the street when he woke and headed off for his daily wash. I could see Dow watching, could see the allure and the hesitation. In the end an interaction happened between them just as it would at home. Boys everywhere are drawn to water, to the rushing stream, the muddy puddle, the garden hose. T shirts removed, mine approached tentatively at first. The street boy took them in for a moment, registered that they were different from him; whiter than him, richer than him, but then his dirt-smeared face broke into an easy smile and he moved aside to share the stream from the tap. They took it in turns to fill his bowl, pouring water over themselves, eyes blinking, mouths gasping for air. They could have been anywhere in the world. Three boys: two blue eyed, one brown, playing in a water fountain to while away the heat of the day.
Back in Siem Reap the rain is still hammering down, the light is fading and the boys are shivering with cold. Somewhere in the giddy highs of riding alongside Cambodian life, up close and personal with the locals, shoulder to shoulder in the rain, as everyone we pass, literally everyone, shrieks and waves, seemingly delighted at the sight of a drenched white woman and her two young children on their bikes, the mother in me is taking stock, aware that all might not end well if we continue. People are bruised by the rain here. The ground can slide away from where one is standing. Houses can disappear down steep slopes, trees, whole forests.
I see a small coffee stall at the side of the road and pull in to find a group of locals: men, women and children, all sheltering inside, who rise from their seats with helpful inquisitiveness, amused by the sight of us. As the boys are being wrapped in blankets by a group of smiling women, a tall man with cheek bones so sharp they look like points, rushes to our aid, offering to fetch a friend of a friend who owns a tuk-tuk. There is a lot of cheek pinching going on but the boys are in good spirits, basking in the delight they are creating. Eventually the tuk-tuk arrives and a man with eyes the colour of olive oil, assures us all will be well as they load up our bikes, one in the front, one in the back and a tiny damp place for the three of us. The crowd waves us off, all cheers and grins. And somehow we manage to make it back through the down pour and the flooded roads, the darkness and the blaring oncoming traffic, to the safety of our guest house. We had been dancing with death in our own little way. But it hadn't felt like that. It felt like we were living life to its utmost, with our heads held back, drinking water from the sky, and the world passing by in a blur of watercolour.
