Cambodia: ‘King’s Face Appears On The Moon’

I got back to Cambodia a few days after King Sihanouk’s death. The country was holding seven days of mourning to celebrate his life. It was easy to be cynical at a time like this. Much of the media have portrayed him as a Khmer Rouge puppet who stood by when his people were murdered in one of the bloodiest genocides the world has ever seen.

He certainly moved with the political tide from peacefully obtaining independence from France to assisting Pol Pot’s rise to power, and has his own place in the Guinness World Records as having a greater variety of offices than any other politician. But the people were genuinely moved by his death, and there were shrines to him everywhere and flags at half-mast across Phnom Penh.

The taxi driver taking me from the airport to the Central Market sighed as the traffic came to another stand-still. “Everyone come to celebrate the King,” he said. “He was a good man. The people are sad. His son not so popular.”

I’d been warned the bars had been closed for seven days but it didn’t seem to have stretched to the neon bars on Street 51 or anywhere else I could see. The only sign of enforcement was the absence of music.  

As I walked further on, I kept seeing huddles of people gazing upwards, pointing and chattering. I looked up at a building, half expecting someone to be up there preparing to jump. But there was nothing. Just a sickle moon with a faint yellow halo round it.

I carried on walking. More people were gazing upwards. I asked what they were looking at but they just pointed and looked slightly embarrassed. The only ones not looking were the gang of tuk tuk drivers on the corner.

“Hey! Hey sir! Hello, motorbike?” they shouted. I’d forgotten about the relentless hisses and calls from the taxi drivers. It didn’t matter if you walked past six of them, politely declining each time, the seventh would still ask anyway. They had mouths to feed. I was determined to keep my cool this time in Asia. I was determined to remember how it all worked.

The next morning, I found out what all the staring had been about. The Cambodian social media was full of it, but opinion was heavily divided. Was it really the face of the King or just the crescent-shaped moon staring down at them? From the photos it looked unlikely, but I knew from staring at the moon, and its cracks and shadows, or cloud patterns, after a while you can see anything you want.

And for ordinary Cambodians, what they wanted in their time of grief was to stare once more at their former King and hope it was a sign of better times to come. Rather than the increased power of the politicians they’d been left with.

I walked down to the Royal Palace, where the King’s body would be kept for the next three months, embalmed for all to see. Thousands had gathered outside, praying and buying lotus flowers, as the street kids mingled between them begging for hand-outs.

The air was thick with incense smoke. They had given up burning the joss sticks individually and had set fire to bundles, pouring water on from time to time to control the flames. Tears were streaming down the mourners’ faces as the perfumed smoke billowed towards them, filling the dimming light with a spectral haze.

I returned to my hotel as the heavens opened and waited for the monsoon to stop. Then I waded across the road, two feet deep in water. The stench of the sewers was overpowering. The tuk tuks were holding up a computer print-out of a photo one of them claimed to have taken. One of them held a 10,000 riel note next to it, showing King Sihanouk’s face. They kept pointing excitedly and were still going on about it five minutes later when I returned with my iPhone to take a picture.

They might have been half hysterical, they might have been on the pipes, they might have doctored the photo, but as they held the note closer, there was a resemblance. I pointed to the eye shadows on the note, and nodded my head with the rest of them, and then pointed at the corresponding shadows on the moon. It was the King - the man on the moon. I even half believed them.

I waded across the road back to the hotel. The girl on reception was walking up the stairs. “Did you see the moon?” I asked her. She stopped and shrugged. “I tried...I looked for five minutes, but I couldn’t see the King.”

Shame Of Cambodia's Memorial To Slain War Reporters

Anyone who knows anything about the Cambodian Government will know they never do anything quickly. But it’s appalling how slow they’ve been honouring the more than three dozen journalists who were killed or went missing during the bloodshed and turmoil of the 1970-75 war.

I wrote a story back in August telling how the Government was to replace the original polystyrene memorial (pic above) that was unveiled in a park outside Phnom Penh's Hotel Le Royal in April 2010 to honour the 37 brave souls who died over the five years it took Pol Pot's murderous forces to capture the capital.

People had pulled chunks off it, exposing patches of white polystyrene, and the flimsy structure was leaning heavily and looked like it would fall down any minute. Some said it was a crying shame erecting such a cheap monument in the first place - especially for a country so filled with stone statues, and the huge numbers of gifted masons out here working for a few dollars a day.

The Government promised a more permanent memorial would take its place - funded by foreign money of course (anyone who’s seen the luxury limos and four-wheel drives ministerial lackeys drive around, and the incredibly sumptuous buildings they work in, will understand the Government needs to watch every penny.)

But the flimsy monument was removed from outside Le Royal - the unofficial headquarters of the foreign media who reported on Cambodia's takeover by the Khmer Rouge - a couple of months ago.

Back in August, Cambodia’s information minister Khieu Kanharith told me a new one with all the names of the dead and missing engraved on it was on its way, adding: “We will finalise the project at the end of this month.”

Perry Deane Young, of the Overseas Press Club of America, said at the time: “The war in Cambodia was one of the most dangerous assignments journalists faced in the twentieth century.

“It was a courageous band of dedicated men and women who risked their lives to tell the story. It is only fitting that those who made the ultimate sacrifice in pursuit of the truth should have a permanent memorial lest we forget.”

But nearly four months later, there is just an empty patch of grass where the last one stood (pic below). And it doesn’t look like being filled anytime soon - not if the Cambodian Government’s priorities are anything to go by.

No doubt they are now too busy planning a monument to mark the death of Kim Jong-il, an old-fashioned tyrant who bathed himself in riches while his people starved to death. Perhaps it’s a cause more in keeping with current ideologies?

:: Of the 37 slain journalists and photographers, ten were from Japan, eight from France, seven from the US, four from Cambodia, two from Switzerland, and one each from West Germany, Austria, Netherlands, India, Laos, and Australia.

The most famous was Sean Flynn, son of the film star Errol, who set off from Phnom Penh with fellow US snapper Dana Stone in search of a story. They were never seen again.

Pepsi, Smoked Fish And Green Mango Salad

I cycled through the hot, dusty streets around Battambang, Cambodia, for a few hours looking for the old Pepsi factory, when I realised I was looking straight at it.

I’d sat down at a road-side stall selling green mango salad, and was ferreting through the ice box for a second cola, when I turned round and saw the same logo, but this time faded and sorry-looking and without the “Max”, on a disused building across the road.

The place was massive. I pushed open a side-door and an old caretaker waved me away. I offered him some dollars, but still he wouldn’t let me in. So I took a long shot of some old Pepsi bottles that had survived the plant’s sudden closure when the Khmer Rouge seized power in 1975, and walked back out into the yard.

A Pepsi plant was never going to get an easy ride from Pol Pot’s thugs, who’d thought nothing of destroying their own temples, libraries, and schools to cleanse the country of its perceived political enemies, let alone a brand associated with American capitalism. It stood out like a bucket of KFC at an anti-vivisectionists’ meeting.

I was amazed how much of it was still standing. I went round the back, but there was nothing to see apart from a couple of cement water tanks, so I returned to the old man, and handed him another note, and this time he relented. I couldn’t go into the dusty office block, but he opened a gate and let me into the warehouse.

“But no machine,” he kept saying, as he stuffed the notes into his back pocket.

It looked like a film set from an Armageddon B-movie, with shell damage and bullet holes letting in shards of sunlight. The place had stopped in time like an old watch. There was the odd broken Pepsi bottle buried in the rubble and debris. But other than that, a series of switches was pretty much all that remained of the 1960s machinery.

Back then, Coca Cola had reportedly signed a deal with Bangkok to only allow its cola to be manufactured in Thailand, so Pepsi set up the bottling plant on a ferry point in Battambang, near the Thai border, so that it wouldn’t miss out on the Thai market.

I took a few more photos, and had a last stroll around the rubble, watching my step for snakes, and then returned to the old man. He was padlocking the door to the office block. I tried another bribe, but he just shook his head and smiled.

I rode back out and stopped at the stall for another drink. I ordered a green mango and smoked fish salad, and chatted away to the woman as she made it.

She told me the old man and his family were paid to sleep in the factory grounds to keep out visitors. She said the government was planning to turn the whole thing into a huge fresh water-producing plant at some point, but they’d been saying that for years.

She began breaking off pieces of smoked fish and pounding them in a large, wooden pestle and mortar.

The fish was from the prahok market a few miles up the river. I’d been up there the day before to watch them make it.

It’s soaked in brine, and then grilled over smouldering wood for up to eight hours. It’s hard and chewy and full of bones, and has a strong but pleasant taste of that magical, hot-smoked combination of salt and burned wood.

She added three whole red chillies and three peeled garlic cloves and continued pounding away for another minute. And then she suddenly stopped, and frowned at me as though she’d just thought of something.

“But this one we only eat with rice, and you eat only alone? It’s very sharp! It’s very hot, and maybe you get diarrhoea?” she said.

She was right, as I would learn. It was hot. And sharp. Heat-wise, it was as spicy as any som tam papaya salad you’d get in Thailand, even in the notoriously fire-eating Isaan area. But my word it was good.

She continued pounding, and then sprinkled in half a teaspoon of sea salt, a teaspoon of sugar, and about the same again of MSG before I could stop her.

She worked away with a hand-sized mandoline shredding long strips of green mango into the mortar, then mixed it altogether and pounded the salad lightly. She spooned it on to a small plate and garnished it with three roughly-chopped thorny coriander leaves.

“We can use the green mango, but very sour, but when we put the grilled fish, not,” she said, reminding me again of the Cambodian custom of balancing flavours.

I’ve made the recipe again, and it really is good, but very hot, so lessen it to just one red bird eye chilli if you don’t like the heat.

You could always brine and then barbecue the fish yourself over smouldering wood, but Rick Stein recommends the far quicker method of skinning a couple of smoked mackerel fillets, flaking the meat, and deep-frying it in a skillet filled with an inch of oil for a minute or so, until the fish is golden-brown and crisp. You then scoop out the fish pieces and let them drain on a piece of kitchen paper to soak up the oil before pounding them to begin the salad.

In my version, I missed out the sugar and MSG, and instead balanced the sweetness and chemicals with a splash of Pepsi at the end. It was really good, and a fitting reminder of that old soda plant and the days I spent cycling to the pre-Angkor ruins near Battambang that had also survived the Khmer Rouge’s rule.

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