Trees Growing on, through and over stuff

Bringing you travel news entirely out of sequence with the actual travels...

Every promotional brochure, National Geographic feature and Discovery Channel documentary on the wonders of the ancient Khmer world of Angkor includes photographs or footage of the interaction between the jungle and the ruined temples. Most of these originate from one temple, Ta Prohm. Here the buttresses of vast trees envelop, bend, and sometimes topple the walls of the complex. This impression of the forest slowly consuming this particular ruin was, according to Wikipedia, intended by the 20th century restorers of Angkor; the implication is that not just Ta Prohm originally threatened to disappear forever beneath the forest. Apparently, only the largest temple, Angor Wat itself, was still in continuous use into the present day, despite the collapse of the civilization that built it in the 15th century. Wikipedia sometimes needs a grain of salt, or the application of your personal bullshit detector, to be ruder about it. Of Angkor Wat the collective genius of the world's editing taskforce suggests that this largest temple was protected from the encroachments of the jungle because it is surrounded by a giant moat, as if jungles spread like forest fires, creeping across the land, instead of thanks to the movements of seeds on the wind and in the guano of innumerable birds. The trees do have a chance, and they will take over if mankind does nothing to impede their growth.

It was an inspired choice, to leave one major temple in the managed state of being swallowed. The enormity of the trees growing directly out of the temple complex provide a direct link to the era of its maximum splendor; one imagines the seedlings that became these towering trees taking root just as the Khmer influence was waning. To the rabid environmentalist, they give hope that the natural world can recover from the grotesque impositions of mankind. In the tops of these giants, Alexandrine Parakeets were croaking and cavorting; Robson's field guide to the birds of Southeast Asia actually lists "temple groves" as one of their preferred habitats. Few trees of this stature remain anywhere in the world; only because this is holy ground, and because of the tidal waves of cash that Angkor tourism represents, are they still here.

Laura swears she overheard someone in a group of tourists remark "I don't understand why they don't just get rid of the trees...."

At Ta Prohm, special platforms have been constructed for the express purpose of having oneself photographed in front of the most impressive of the tentacular roots.

 

Language Barrier

Asia sometimes feels like a wall of incomprehension, a collection of impenetrable languages. After almost a month here, I still don't speak more than a few words of Vietnamese (coffee, beer, noodle soup, my repertoire is exhausted). It is disorienting to pass day after day in streets filled with language that I can only register as noise, and I'm in awe of travel writers who spin compelling and informative narratives out of experiences lived surrounded by alien tongues. Writing about Latin America seems so much more natural to me, as a spanish speaker, than trying to decipher what is going on beneath the surface of a place like Vietnam. Still, one can't learn the language of every single place one visits before writing about it.

A couple of my recent posts have suggested (at least to me, and perhaps to close readers, if I have any) that Vietnam is all go, go, go, a country brimming with youth and focussed on the future, the streets teeming with motorbikes, an avalanche of free enterprise, the war a distant memory. It is an easy impression to get, and without language it might be difficult to get any other. But it isn't altogether correct, especially the last point.

Be clear that the language barrier is the traveller's problem. The dilemma is that to experience "the real Vietnam," one needs to avoid the tourist enclaves, where the English-speaking Vietnamese are gathered, making money by speaking English. The people one meets with whom communication is easy are almost certainly in the tourism business. They are guides, travel agent operators, hotel desk clerks, and the odd exile or emigrant, returned for a visit. But in avoiding them, communication becomes limited to gestures, a pantomime routine of eating, sleeping, and laundering. So one has to take one's stories where one finds them.

At the Cat Tien National Park canteen, a brief conversation with a tour guide on his lunch break starts when he asks me how long I have been in the park. Four days, I say. He looks Vietnamese, but his English is so good he might be a tourist.

"Where are you from?" I ask, just in case. I had embarrassed myself minutes earlier by asking four Taiwanese birdwatchers, one of whom attended Stanford, if they were Japanese.

"I'm from Saigon." Nobody calls it Ho Chi Minh City, except government officials. "You?"

"New York, America."

"I ask my people where they are from, and they say they are British, but on my paperwork it says they are American." I understand he is talking about his clients. "They like to look at birds."

"They lied to you about where they are from? Why would they do that?" (I have yet to meet anyone in Vietnam who resents me for being American.)

"Maybe they are British, but they work or live in the USA, sometimes it is like that. That's all."

"Maybe. You have a tour company?"

"I take the permit from my friend. Once, I had my own tour company. But, too much politics. I don't like. I know politics. After the war I was sent into exile."

He looks my age, with just a few gray hairs on his well-combed black head. But he is almost ten years older: "I joined the army when I was eighteen," he says. "I wanted to make the change to the Air Force, and become a pilot."

This was in 1972, when joining the South Vietnamese armed forces already must have looked like a bad idea on the ground. It would have required a certain amount of optimism. Youthful enthusiasm, perhaps. I don't say so though, for there is something odd and pointed in his delivery. He has slipped with an ease uncharacteristic of the people here into a sort of war memorial mode, without any real prompting from me.

"A tiny, dark room," he says. "No support. Shackles on my ankles. Eat. Sleep. Toilet. No food." He gestures to the miniature dish on the table into which one pours a personal serving of soy-sauce as a condiment. "Rice. One bowl, a little bit bigger than this, every day. All the time dark."

"You mean something like internal exile," I say. "Where were you?"

"Mekong Delta region," he says. "Prison."

Prison can be a metaphor for exile, but he means, quite plainly, that he was in prison. It is particular tragedy when the darkest days of a life are forever remembered as the most profound. My friend has slipped so easily into a terrible reverie, thirty-five years later.

"How long were you in exile?"

"Nine months. I shrink. My stomach shrink. I get thin. Before, I used to eat. I liked to eat. Now, still, I eat little." He points to his half eaten lunch of instant noodles. "I am full."

"No support," he says again, "no support at all," and I understand why his clients might have claimed to be British.

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới

Or, Happy New Year, in Vietnamese. Today, for once, the incessant hustle and bustle of Vietnam has slowed by a factor of ten. Hundreds (instead of the usual thousands) of motorbikes are circling the streets of Dalat, but riding them are men dressed in their Sunday best, taking their girls out for a spin, or troupes of youths enjoying a drive on the first day of the year. I don't think I've seen a necktie in Vietnam except on television, but today I've encountered dozens, worn under flash suits. It is almost inconceivable, but commerce has ground to a halt.

A major Dalat commercial strip, still and shuttered

Vietnam celebrates the "Chinese" or lunar calendar New Year, and it is perhaps the most import holiday, with moral, spiritual and familial significance. It is not a grand public fete, but rather a day on which families gather across the land, spending time together and eating. The unprepared and starving tourist must wander the streets looking for the odd open restaurant, for the Vietnamese are at home, consuming Banh Tet, a sort of giant rice-based tamale, or so it looked while watching them being made at Cat Tien National Park a couple of days ago. Rice, bean paste, shallots and bits of cooked meat and pork fat are fashioned into a bundle, wrapped tightly into a flattened cube, and boiled, for a very long time. Ten to twelve hours, I was told. I'm hoping I'll get to try some.

 Bundling the pork fat rice deliciousness at Cat Tien National Park in preparation for Tet.

It seems natural and logical that the New Year should be a time for taking stock and of trying to look forward to a prosperous future. Last night someone told me that "on this day we try to only think about and remember the good things, and leave the bad behind." While all we have left of this notion is the fading tradition of the New Year's resolution, in Vietnam people greet the New Year dressed to the nines, and on the first day of the year they are careful to be positive and friendly, instead of hungover. Being rude, violent or venal on this most important day is thought to sully the entire year to come. The guard at the Ta Nung valley was all smiles today, where he had been surly and near-confrontational on my birdwatching visit a week ago. His small outdoor table held a vase full of yellow chrysanthemums, another key element of Tet ritual.

 A shuttered gas-station, decorated with yellow lilies.

For at least the last couple of weeks vast rafts of yellow flowers have been available for sale on the roadsides, at intersections, and in the markets. Chrysanthemums are cheap, and favored, but almost any yellow flower will do, from marigolds to pricey orchids. These are considered harmonious, auspicious, and all those other lovely pseudo-oriental adjectives based on oversimplified translations of undoubtedly complex and "inscrutable" Chinese notions. On New Year's day they adorn Buddhist shrines, the doorways of homes, the shuttered gates of businesses, and tables everywhere.

 

 These chrysanthemums have not been planted; the stems have simply been stuck into the front yard planter-box. Note also the consumed incense sticks in the front corner of the box.

Until I arrived here, I had no idea that Tet meant "New Year" in Vietnamese; I only knew the word from the "Tet Offensive," the massive countrywide assault by the North Vietnamese forces and sympathizers of January 31st, 1968, in contravention of an agreed-upon cease-fire intended to preserve the holiday. To behave in such a dastardly fashion in the context of the Vietnamese conception of the new year was either a communist rejection of religious superstition or a bold gambit demonstrative of the North's unwavering belief that they were in the right. To attack on such a day must have brought an enormous psychological advantage, for taking violent action on Tet could only, I think, have been done with a persuasive and perhaps infectious courage of conviction. I've heard the offensive described as the turning point in the war, but I was only four years old when it happened, so I don't know if the American press reported on this psychological dimension of attacking on Tet. Do any fogies out there remember? Today, in Dalat, the Tet Offensive seems all but forgotten, although it was one of the only occasions for armed conflict in this comparatively unscathed city. The bad has been left behind, and it's time to accentuate the positive.

Stuff that makes you feel old department

In Ta Nung, a village just outside of Dalat, Vietnam

Boy, do I feel like I'm on the wrong continent...

I emerged from six days in the Vietnamese jungle only to discover that most of the Arab world suddenly, urgently, wants to update its political structures.

A real museum piece

For your cycling pleasure, here is the Vietnamese edition of the Flying Pigeon. It is identical in all structural and mechanical aspects to the bike I rode across Cuba, except that this version has a more modern system of brakes and levers. The fact that in Vietnam this is a certified Viet Cong relic, given its own two square meters of red carpet and a plinth, whereas in Cuba hundreds of thousands of these are still on the road today, tells you much about the countries' two very different strategies for dealing with their post-Soviet growing pains.

The bicycle is on display in the museum at the site of the "Peace Bridge" over the Ben Hai river, the official dividing line between North and South Vietnam, at the center of the DMZ, the poorly-named "Demilitarized Zone." In this context the metaphorical importance of the bicycle is obvious. The centerpiece of the one room museum is a diorama of struggling, pajama-clad villagers raising battered AK-47s and triumphantly charging a phalanx of Imperialist Running Dog tanks and helicopters. The authentic, humble, cast-iron, one-speed Chinese bicycle serves the same role as would a pair of sandals made from an old tire. It represents the modesty of the tools at the disposal of the North Vietnamese and the dire limitations of their resources, which they nonetheless overcame with their perseverance and dedication, despite the tremendous odds against them.

The Bird Wave

 

The catchment pond at "the dam" at Ta Nung Valley, which likely fills up during the rainy season.

I'm not saying I'm better than you. Far be it from me to grip you off, as the Australians say, but I've just seen four Gray Crowned Crocias. You're impressed, I know, although you may never even have heard of a Gray Crowned Crocias before. I had, but I'll be the first to admit I haven't the faintest idea how it's pronounced. Is it CROW-SEE-UHZ? That seems the most probable, but CROWshus sounds reasonable and even CROAK-EE-US is plausible. Birdwatching is full of obscure family names like this, ones which no birders actually know for certain how to pronounce. That's right, we're talking about a bird, here. But as my brother might once have said: what does it matter, for a name is just a social construct. The point is, I saw it.

I cannot claim to be the Christopher Columbus of Crociases (Crociae?). The groundwork had been done for me. After much consulting of the internets, I located the world's most famous, number-one top spot for viewing these cuddly, charming, and oh-so-very endemic feathered amigos, a place known as the Ta Nung Valley, just twenty-minutes motorcycle ride from my hotel in Dalat, in the province or state or department or whatever they call them of South Annam, Vietnam. The only state, province or department in the world in which Gray Crowned Crociaii are to be found, skulking about quietly and discreetly in the dense foliage.

The Ta Nung Valley is a rather grandiose name for a heavily wooded creek-bed, one which has, however, miraculously escaped the worst of the mad third-world woodchopper's chainsaw, at least so far.* The development of an "eco-resort" seems to be proceeding there. Sadly, in the Vietnamese context, this means cutting lots of things down and creating a sylvan but sterile park-like environment, usually complete with cement giraffes and over-manicured topiary. For now, however, the far wall of the Ta Nung Valley is still thickly forested with a lovely diversity of massive trees. There is enough jungle left to make finding the Crocias no easy matter.**

An as-yet-unlogged giant of the forest

As I will demonstrate in a future post, Vietnam is no place to be a bird. In the public perception here, if they have any purpose at all, our feathered friends of all shapes and dimensions are for keeping at home in cages, for eating, and for small boys to target with slingshots. I had forgotten, in the ten years since my last serious birding foray in Asia, in the nearby Philippines, just how skittish and nervous birds in the region tend to be. Even the smallest, most curious and confiding species keep at least triple the usual distance between themselves and any human intruder. Numbers are generally low, and the birds keep well hidden.

The Ta Nung Valley is in this regard a pre-industrial relic. Some trip reports I consulted suggested that a slow day there could be dismal and unrewarding, an exhausting tramp through a silent, birdless forest, especially if one missed the crucial morning chorus between 6 and 8AM. But on my first visit, a sort of scouting mission, I arrived at the very unbirdy hour of two in the afternoon, and found the place humming and chirping with activity. Every birder's dream is the unexplained phenomenon known to birders from Britain and its former colonies as a "bird wave," and to the less romantic Americans as a "mixed flock." One theory is that because many eyes and inclinations make it much easier to spot predators, birds of multiple species, with different diets, habits and sizes will often band together in disorganized parties, moving through the forest together in a gang, so that a patch of jungle that one moment was silent and still will minutes later be alive, a veritable hive of activity. Although there are notable species that never participate in such waves, this phenomenon is consistent across the globe, from the New Jersey woodlands of spring migration to the Andean slopes, the African forests (what's left of them), and the Asian jungles.

 Hey baby, mind if I quickly check your leaf structure?

The avid birder wandering the forest waits and hopes to stumble into a bird wave the way a man crawling the Sahara seeks an oasis. Nonetheless, coming upon a bird wave is an anxiety ridden episode. Consider, as we discuss waves, surfing. The surfer waits patiently, paddling, watching the horizon, letting innumerable opportunities slide beneath her surfboard, before identifying the wave worthy of being ridden, committing, and then trying to make the most of it with grace and finesse. Will all that time be wasted, with a flubbed ride, or the realization that just behind lurked a bigger, better wave? So too, the birder, when the long-awaited wave arrives, must seize the moment, efficiently, remaining calm under pressure. Suddenly, the surrounding trees will be thick with activity. Dozens of flitting shadows and chirps divide the attention of the binoculars. It is crucial, in these situations, to know what one is about. It is easy to waste your time on commonplace species and find the wave has moved, dispersed to who knows where, before you have managed even a handful of identifications. One tears one's hair in frustration. Some waves are small, and hold only the more populous species. Others are gargantuan, multi-level affairs, involving ground-loving species, canopy dwellers and a frenzy of mid-story activity that remains with you until you are sated.

Ta Nung, on that first afternoon, was one big wave from start to finish. Set after set of perfect rollers, crashing in on the beach. Arriving at the dam, I found the surrounding trees pulsating with avian activity. I scarcely dropped the binoculars onto my chest for two hours.

The ideal in a wave is to be able to identify the more common species from the quickest glimpse of a feather, in order to move on, to look for something rarer. Not to be confused by the mass of activity. To recognize a shape, a flit, a motion, as something new and unusual. Here, species like Mountain Fulvetta and Ashy Bulbul may be represented in a bird wave by dozens of individuals. White Throated Fantail and Gray Headed Canary Flycatcher attend virtually every wave. One must not be distracted by their ubiquity, or the shy and retiring prizes will slip away while you are sorting through the hoi-polloi. The Crocias is such a prize, a sluggish and gentle forager that moves calmly and imperceptibly through the foliage of the upper middle story. I did not see one.

But the goal for the afternoon was met, and I saw many exciting species new to me. More importantly, I left feeling prepared for the following morning. I knew the Ashy Bulbul from the quickest flash of its olive-yellow wing panel. The Mountain Fulvetta would never distract me again; virtually any smallish gray and brown shape within ten feet of the ground, I knew, would prove to be one. I would look past the background noise.

The dam

Although this looks like a flower, fallen to the forest floor, it was in behavior something more like a mushroom. Dense and fleshy, it appeared to have sprung open from a red bulbous growth something like a red croquet ball, attached firmly to the ground. I have no idea. Anyone? UPDATE: It's Rafflesia. Thanks, Dodo!

At 5:30 in the morning, the sky still black, I slipped on my helmet and threw a leg over my rented motorbike,  revved the engine and turned on the headlamp.*** Twenty minutes later, when I arrived at Ta Nung, the sky was rapidly going blue-gray. I found the gate at the top of the trail, open the day before, locked. I parked the bike, jumped three low strands of barbed wire, and hiked fearlessly past the frenzied barking of the guardian's dogs. He emerged, did not look happy to see me, but said nothing. I gave him a smile and a wave. Less than a hundred meters below his house, the day began in earnest with a massive single-species flock of at least forty White Cheeked Laughingthrushes, a bird I had not seen the day before. A very good omen. From there, it went on, one blaze of glory after another, one vast tidal wave of frenzied birding until 11:30 in the morning when the sun was blisteringly high in the sky and the activity finally lagged. Today I'm exhausted. I'm taking the day off, internetting and eating noodle soup. I don't want to grip you off, but yesterday was the tsunami of bird waves.

Oh, and the Crocias? You must be wondering. A major accomplishment, to be certain, but still only one episode in a glorious ornithological orgy.**** For a moment, despite the waves upon waves, I thought they would elude me. In an early monster wave I saw a largish white belly with black streaks, leading a cuckoo-like tail, peering and poking its way through an impossibly dense tangle overhead. I knew immediately that this was my bird, but the wave was on the move, and before I could see anything more it was gone, an unsatisfactory sighting in every way. But not ten minutes further along the trail, the one that goes downstream, below the dam, I found another, a bit lower in the trees, and saw it well as it moved through the leaves overhead. Well enough that I moved on to look at other things. Then looking once again overhead, I saw it again, then three together, sitting tightly packed on a branch, as if for warmth. Some people would call this cute. I call it triumph.

The burbling stream, not far from where I saw not one, not two, but three Gray Crowned Crocias cuddling together, cheek-by-jowl, just under the mid-story canopy, in a tableau something like an inspirational kitten poster on the wall of a dentist's office.

*The use of the term "third-world" seems to be steadily sliding out of vogue. "Developing world" is now to be preferred. While some will imagine this semantic shift has everything to do with political correctness, I suggest they are wrong. The reality is that as the United States slides inexorably downward on the lists that used to define third-worldness--quality of education, healthcare, nutrition, income disparity, etc.--it has become preferable to de-emphasize the competitive aspect implied by the designations of "first" and "second" and "third" worlds. The US will never be "undeveloped," and therefore will never lose ground to "developing."

**As some very recent trip reports on this site have noted, the ecotourism project at Ta Nung is quickly altering the landscape, eliminating landmark trees and making it difficult to find trails. I used a GPS, so any birders needing GPS data leave a comment and I'll get back to you with more details. 

***100,000 VN Dong, or $5, to rent one for the entire day. Are you kidding? How does anyone make any money out of that? 


****For those counting, at some point yesterday I broke 3,000.

Anti-ghost Platoon

As usual on trips so densely packed with new and exciting experiences as this, I'm falling savagely behind on my blog posts. Combine the constant onslaught of new sights and sounds with the sentiment that "I didn't fly halfway around the world to sit in an internet cafe" and you will begin to understand the backlog. I've been back in Vietnam two weeks already since Laura and I visited Angkor Wat, but I'm still blogging my way through Cambodia. Expect to be hearing about Southeast Asia for weeks after my return....

Regular readers know that I'm always interested in the supernatural interventions people across the globe choose to put their faith in. My sister-in-law, Melanie, is a foremost world expert in South Indian techniques for avoiding the "evil-eye," and I share her fascination for these sorts of vernacular expressions of superstition, magic and belief. The sociology of the ways in which talismans, amulets, altars, shrines and so on are manifested across the globe is often obscure, but in Cambodia, driving in the countryside, we again and again encountered houses protected by "scare-ghosts," whose genesis and form seems to make obvious sense in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. There is scarcely anything metaphorical about them.

Invariably constructed at the gateway to the front yard, the Cambodian anti-ghost version of a scarecrow is impressively humanoid. An old shirt, torn trousers and some sort of head are usually enough to construct one, but these protectors, stand-ins for an armed guard at the doorway, often have an evident militaristic aspect. They often sport bits of old military uniform, and sometimes a weapon.

Our Tuk-tuk driver, the incomparable Mr. Boret (well, we considered him incomparable until he stood us up the next day when we had scheduled a ride to the airport) explained that these "puppets" (a loaded word in and of itself in Southeast Asia, as it historically described local collaborators with the Imperialist Yanqui) are placed in front of homes to protect against ghosts, who come at night and take people away. Cambodia, obviously has many of them.

A small taste of Angkor

Not to barrage you with globe-trotting braggery, but I've been to Tikal in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras, Chichen Izta in Mexico, Machu Picchu in Peru, Delphi in Greece, Chile's Easter Island, and the Empire State Building. The breathtaking expanse, the countless temples and the millions of square yards of intricately carved rock of the multiple complexes at Angkor Wat puts them all to shame. Compared with the demented stone-carvers of the Khmer empire, the Mayans seem like tropical layabouts with too much time on their hands. If Angkor Wat is Manhattan, Machu Picchu is Piscataway. The Ancient Greeks might've come up with something if only they had been able to develop a work ethic. The loons of Easter Island, who destroyed their own civilization by devoting all their manpower to building gigantic heads, are like a small village of basketmakers by comparison. And so on.

No, the "Huguito" is not a new model of Yugoslavian car...

Last night the Vietnamese news broadcast was on in the open-air dining pavilion while I was replenishing myself. I couldn't understand a thing the fetching, silk-clad anchorwoman was saying until I heard the words "Venezuela" and "Colombia" come out of her mouth. Oh, no, I thought. The only reason those two distant nations could possibly make the Vietnamese news is if they have finally gone to war. Relations between these two neighbors are not the warmest, and minor spats seem routinely to threaten to develop into a full-blown slap-fest.

This morning I googled, and found it may not be so grave after all. I certainly hope this was in the news in the United States, because it has to be my favorite story of the week. Colombia is a major exporter of tele-novelas, those over-the-top latino soap-opera epics of deceit, romance, and riches. Venezuela and Cuba even run them on their television networks, despite certain political differences (in fairness to the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez, most networks in that country are privately owned, often by opposition elites).

The current diplomatic debacle was launched because a current Colombian soap offering features a secretary (a lower-class citizen) named Venezuela, and a dog (a dog!) named Huguito, the diminutive for Hugo. The Chavez government has complained bitterly, and from what I can understand the novela in question has been removed from the Caracas airwaves. I hope the situation is now stable, but wars have been started for less.

They say it's your birthday...

I want to thank the many dozens of facebook friends who have extended best birthday wishes to me on this fine January day. I had hoped by being in Vietnam to minimize the publicity and hooplah attending my inexorable slide deeper into middle age, but thanks to the magic of the internets, so very many fond wishes have found me here on the edge of an 8,000 hectare lowland tropical forest at the beachfront crossroads of Ho Coc, Cochinchina. Greetings have poured in by email, voicemail and facemail, or whatever that's called.

I'm expressing my gratitude here rather than on the faceplant because the prescient communist Vietnamese government, well aware that facebook is a Big-Brother-like information-gathering surveillance and affiliation-tracking operation, and therefore a direct competitive threat to all other authoritarian systems, has blocked access to the website throughout their country. (Thankfully my facebook messages are delivered directly, via normal email).

Many, many Thank Yous for your thoughts and greetings, highlights of which included a link, from Dairo in Barranquilla, of Prince Nico Mbarga singing Happy Birthday, and, from Wolfgang in Manhattan, spectacular self-portraits of his face after a recent bicycling pothole-faceplant injury on New Year's Day.

And thanks to Laura for failing to inform me that I had suncream all over my nose.

Please eat your stinky fruits elsewhere...

Not only are taxi-girls in barred from your room at the Green Garden guesthouse, you're not even allowed to bring home your Durian fruit.

Cambodian Land Mine Victims' Orchestra on NPR's "The World"

This news may be a bit late, since I've already heard from an old friend in Los Angeles that she heard me on the radio while she was driving to work, but PRI's "The World" had my audio postcard from the market of Siem Riep on their Wednesday program. In case you missed it, such things are archived, thanks to the glorious internet. They've credited my photograph of the Cambodian flag to my long lost (imaginary) brother Peter, but I think that's just a typo. Or they've mixed me up with my fellow travel writer, the late author of the superlative Brazilian Adventure. Company I'm happy to be confused with.

The "audio postcard" includes my recording of a Cambodian land mine victims' orchestra. Such orchestras, composed of disabled players, are numerous in the touristy Siem Riep area, and at various temples in the vast and impressive Angkor complex. They are intended to tug at your heartstrings, as well they should. Some of the disabled players are war victims from Cambodia's savage 1970s, but the sad reality is that mine victims in Cambodia can be of any age and may have sustained their crippling wounds at any time in the last 40 years. Cambodia remains one of the most heavily mined countries on earth despite constant efforts at removal, and many, many people are killed and wounded each year by ancient mines that have long outlived the heinous military conflicts that saw them installed. Imagine living in a country at peace, trying to forget the horrors of the past, while living with the constant threat of being exploded in your own rice paddy.