In Phnom Penh

I love the city. It is a sensual treat; sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.

Peeking at the city on Google Earth was, as I suspected, not to ruin the sense of discovery and surprise. I am as oriented as if I had studied a street map, but no more familiar with Phnom Penh. We arrived late evening on Thursday and hired a tuk tuk to take us into town, to our new home. “The Tuk Tuk is your friend,” I read on another traveller’s blog, when back in Canada. It is a version of the auto-rickshaw. A motorcycle is harnessed to a two-wheeled wagon, with two benches facing each other and a canopy over top that cantilevers out over the driver. This will be important, we discover a few days later, when we ride through the streets in a downpour with water so deep the motorbike stalls. Our driver, wrapped in a plastic raincoat—the plastic as thin as a vegetable bag at a grocery store—struggles to keep the tuk tuk afloat and on the road. When the bike stalls, he dashes to a group of onlookers sitting on their porch to borrow a rag to dry the carburetor.

The ride in from the airport is a barrage of sights and smells. Not our high speed float through Seoul, we weave in and out of traffic, swimming with a school of motorbikes and other tuk tuks. These are the dominant vehicles of the road, though, there are way too many SUVs and sport trucks in the city. This is especially the case in our neighbourhood, which is ground zero for NGOs and international corporations (real estate, construction, logistics). We pass shacks, mountains of garbage, billboards, crumbling, unpainted concrete apartment blocks, glass towers, neon advertising bars, casinos, massage, dental and eye care, happy hour, happy garden, happy restaurant, Chinese, Korean, Italian, Russian, Mexican dining. Throngs of people mill about the streets, buying food from small kiosks or from a person with simply a burner on the ground and a few bowls to serve up something. On an early morning stroll about the neighbourhood we see people with a pole slung over a shoulder carrying two squat open baskets. One has the stove, fuel, and food to be cooked, the other bowls and spoons and more food—each component carefully separated by banana leaves: on their way to work; to their corner of the city, and presumably, new and regular customers.

As I type it pours and the city has become one sound: a gamalon of water drops on tile, dirt, leaves, roof tops, and increasingly, water on water, as the courtyard below fills up. The night of the wet tuk tuk ride the courtyard had 10-15 centimeters in it. Now I hear a child screaming with delight (at the rain, such a common occurrence, or at some dry, indoor activity?). Our first night a dog next door barks frequently, awakening and keeping us awake. Given what we’ve read about Cambodian diet I can’t but wonder if it’s barking about its last night. But it is with us still, a pet, though one who keeps vigil through the nights. Our household has two diminuative and nearly voiceless cats. They seem quite typical of the area. All the cats I have seen are small, maybe 6 pounders. The polyphonic drone of cycles is the root sound of Phnom Penh, though. Underlying all the other commonplace and exceptional sounds (of construction, laughter, birds, dogs, roosters, car horns, kitchen cutlery from the surrounding houses) there is the traffic. We are lucky. Ours is a quiet street. Everyone says this and we agree. The streets around us bustle with shops, traffic, restaurants, construction, but ours is a quiet affair of stately walled homes, many the headquarters of development agencies. At one end are two stores selling gigantic truck tires, piled high on the sidewalks; at the other a featureless Chinese restaurant with a French name and AIR CONDITIONING. This makes it especially popular, the sidewalk and street a parking lot of SUVs. As the rain eases, I hear the staff below me bailing water from the courtyard.

Comparisons with Cuba are inevitable; and the night air as we drive into town is thick with heady smells. We travel through waves of scent: flowers, ginger, smoke, chili, garbage, barbeque, diesel, humidity. Does humidity have a smell? I think so. It is a combination of all the day’s smells, stuck, hovering, a veil that lines the walls of your nose. In Holguin, I always seem to arrive at night (though I doubt this is true), arrive from the thin, scentless winter of Canada. The air is rich with gardenias. Arrival in Cuba is a greeting of gardenia and diesel. Phnom Penh is a greeting of chili oil and sweat (probably my own).

Because we have not yet had a good introduction to the local food stalls, we have shopped at the Lucky Supermarket. Obviously Western items (imported for the expat community) are expensive. But it is a good source of local staples at, what seem to us, cheap prices: limes, lemon grass, young ginger (the skin is edible), a vast array of mushrooms (familiar and new—fresh straw mushrooms, seen outside the can for the first time), nappa, and a host of greens. Until I enroll in cooking school and we get to a local market this will do. It is also the source of beer, at sixty to ninety cents a can. We have been cooking in our mock Asian style, and eating well, but hope to take this up a notch soon. The first morning we awoke hungry and locked in. Keys to the gate were not passed on for several days, so we had to coordinate our comings and goings. Dara, one keeper of keys and a resident with us, attends school from 7am to 11am. When finally we are released it was Western scrambled eggs, fresh orange juice, toast, coffee and hash browns. Everything but the hash browns beating out our regular greasy spoon, the Checkerboard. But Sunday we go to the Amok restaurant and have Tofu Amok, served in a coconut shell (for $2). A complex mix of chewy tofu, chili, lime, edible lime leaves (not at all like the dried inedible ones we purchase in Asian stores at home), coconut milk, and I’ve no idea what else, this will become a regular for me.

The tuk tuk may be your friend, but the ceiling fan is your lover. Naked at night, not always under the single sheet, the fan caresses, its cooling breeze rippling the sheers beside the bed, and at its low speed alternating waves of air that evaporate the heat, the smells, the day. Otherwise, while the heat is not unbearable, it is tactile. Our skin, slightly adhesive, altered by a thin layer of sweat. The morning following the big rainfall, with the stalled tuk tuk, there was a dead rat in the kitchen. Not a large one, and out of the way. (Ah, to have staff—it later disappeared.) The kitchen is in the other of our two buildings, a short covered walk connecting it with our house. It has both a solid door and a screened door, but neither seems to be closed at any time. Two walls have a very low (mid-thigh) tiled counter, open below. At one end is the sink, at the other, 4-5 meters away, is the cook top. Under the counter, near the cook top, the rat was in repose. I am sure that four months of bending over the counter will perpetually stoop my back. The locals are generally not tall, and I suppose the counter height is more adequate for the buildings intended and original occupants. This morning Anna-Marie entered the kitchen early to make coffee. We seem to be waking around five. Though this is exceedingly early, we are not yet upset, as this is a beautiful time of day, cooler, the sun just coming up. In the gloom in the kitchen, in her bare feet, Anna-Marie steps on fur just inside the doorway. Anna-Marie leaps back in disgust, a cat leaps back in surprise.