Christmas in Cat City

For Christmas we decided to drive down from Miri to Kuching and stay at one of our favourite hotels - the Basaga.  It's an old colonial house away from the touristy riverfront with beautiful gardens which make it a green oasis amid the mouldy concrete of Kuching, which oddly means "cat" in Malay.

On Christmas day morning I went for my customary run, which took me along the riverfront as far as this culvert and then inland back in the direction of the Basaga.  On the way I passed St Thomas' Cathedral, Anglican I think.  It was packed with worshippers, including an overspill standing on the steps outside, all singing carols.  All these people devoted to a church that originated in England made me feel a little embarrassed to be an English atheist.  If they had known I guess most of them would have been terribly shocked.

Mostly in this society I keep my beliefs to myself, not because I feel scared or intimidated by people's faith, be it Christianity, Islam or whatever, but because I don't want to hurt their feelings or have them worry about my soul.  To do anything else, outside my home culture, feels like bad manners.

Shell's Ghost Town

Sue left yesterday afternoon for meetings in Kota Kinabalu and Kuching, leaving me with an empty apartment and a new car to explore with.  I started my day with a run in the opposite direction to my first run two days ago.

I headed towards the bridge that links the peninsula to the centre of Miri, passing en route a large and completely deserted housing estate owned by Shell.  I ran into the estate, saying hello to several patrolling "auxiliary" policemen en route.  None of them challenged my right to be there - old white blokes seem to have a free pass.

The estate is in idyllic pine woodland next to a palm-fringed and empty beach and is perfectly maintained - roads swept and hedges trimmed, although no one lives there anymore. Shocking when I think of how many people in Sarawak live in tumbledown shacks.  But then multi-nationals like Shell have the money to do what they want and they always look after their assets.

On the return leg I ran into the Boat Club, an expat and wealthy Malaysian's watering hole within the Shell estate.  Sue has been encouraged to join, but neither of us feel very comfortable in such an overtly privileged milieu.  I didn't find any boats at the club apart from an old glass-fibre dinghy, but there is a great view of the beach.  By the time I said "hello" to the security guard at the gate to Sue's complex I had a real sweat on and the sun was starting to burn my shoulders.  It feels good to back in Borneo.

Miri Yet Again

Seventeen days after getting a dawn bus for Rome in Locorotondo I finally arrived in Miri with Sue yesterday.

This morning I pulled on my running shoes and went for an exploratory jog around the strange peninsula where Sue's apartment is located.  You can see from the map that Miri has a river which snakes inland and creates a long tongue of land between the main city centre and the sea.  This tongue is home to a bizarre combination of smart apartment complexes, like Sues, a golf course, a fishing village, an idyllic but rubbish-strewn and sandfly infested beach and the moorings for literally hundreds of oil rig service and supply vessels, some the size of largish oil tankers.

I ran around the edge of the golf course to the tip of the tongue, where I spotted a couple of paunchy expats finishing a hole while a tanker the height of a four-story building slid slowly down the river behind them.  Then I turned around and ran back up the tongue before stopping to take this photo.  En route I ran a bit of the palm-fringed beach, until I remembered the risk of sandfly bites and returned briskly inland.

On my way back to the apartment I took this photo of the first of the five or six blocks of the complex where it is situated.  It's a gated and guarded compound for wealthy Malaysians and expats.  It's a far cry from the tiny little town of Saratok where Sue and I spent our first two years in Malaysia.

Take Me to the River

When I go out running in a strange place water draws me to it like a magnet.  On our last full day in Phnom Phenh I got up at 6am and headed for the Tonle Sap, a tributary of the Mekong.  After two days in the city I'd got used to the traffic, which behaves more like a crowd of people than vehicles.  When we first arrived we took ages waiting for a clear space to cross the road, until we realised you just have to launch yourself into the flow and vehicles weave around you like water in a rocky stream.

Dawn is a good time to see the city as lots of people come out in the cooler air to stroll, run or take part in group exercises to pop music, doing a kind of cross between yoga, tai chi and line dancing in slow motion.

When I reached the river embankment in the city centre I ran along the wide promenade and headed for the pleasure boat dock.  I carried on along the river back out of the city centre, past increasingly grubby workshops and shophouses until I reached the main road bridge, where I climbed the steps and took this picture.

Looking upriver I could see that the Tonle Sap was lined with shanties as the City petered out into a flat, paddi filled plain.  Then I began my steady jog back to our hotel, where Sue was still sleeping peacefully as I crept back into our darkened room.

S - 21

On our first full day in Phnom Penh I went with Sue to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.  I'm very nervous about genocide tourism, but Sue was very sure she wanted to go and I decided to tag along. The Museum is located in the Kmer Rouge interrogation centre S - 21, which was formerly a primary school.

The photograph opposite is of a notice in the complex and sets out the "rules" of S - 21.  During the three plus years of Kmer Rouge rule fifteen to twenty thousand people went through S - 21 and were executed in the "killing fields" outside the City.  S - 21 itself was only one of 150 or more such centres throughout Cambodia.  It is estimated that between one and three million Cambodians died during the rule of the Kmer Rouge and their notorious leader Pol Pot, or "Brother Number One".  The death toll was from executions, disease and starvation driven mainly by the Kmer Rouge's forced agrarianisation of Cambodian society.

The museum itself is simply the preserved fabric of S - 21 and is filled with photos of the people that passed through the Centre plus photos, drawings and text about what happened there and in Cambodia as a whole while it was under the control of the Pol Pot regime.  There is also information about the ongoing war crimes trials of some of the surviving Kmer Rouge leaders.

One of the most disturbing things about he place is its sheer ordinaryness.  From a distance it looks like any other large asian three-storey primary school.  As you approach you can see the crude fences and barbed wire and inside there are iron beds, roughly made shackles and badly-built cells.  Stood in the courtyard and looking around at the scene and my fellow tourists I felt angry and confused.  I couldn't bring myself to take photographs.

One large party was visiting the site while we were there and I felt a surge of anger rising in my breast as I watched some of the men taking photographs of torture scenes painted by former inmates. Then I felt the anger turning inwards as I thought "who am I to judge these people and their motives?"

In the end I was glad that I went because it helped clarify my thinking and explain my nervousness at going.  The real truth about what happened under Pol Pot or Hitler or any other of the thousands of dictators that stain our history is not that evil men did these things, or the Kmer Rouge, or the Nazis or the Cambodians or the Germans, but that we did it, us humans and anything that looks too closely at the nitty gritty details of these events gives us the chance to pretend that it was those evil people that did it and not our kind and civilised selves, when actually any of us could find ourselves on either side of the concentration camp barbed wire at any time given the right combination of economic and political circumstances and if you think otherwise you are, my friend, a deluded fool.  In fact, our only hope is to hold on to this truth and base our actions on the knowledge that of the many roads we can go down there are always some that lead back to S - 21 and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Old Man Running in Cambodia

We've been over a week in Cambodia now and my morning runs have taken me to some special places.  In Siem Reap, waiting for Sue to arrive, I ran five kilometres up the Siem Reap river, which was used to transport stones to the Angkor temples, and stopped at this bridge.

En route I ran through the outskirts of town travelling against the tide of morning commuters on cars, bikes and motorcycles, many, disconcertingly, wearing face masks.  One woman sweeping the streets was concentrating so hard that she didn't see me and thrust her broom in my path, causing me to jump and at the same time let out a very audible fart.  We both laughed heartily as we went on our way.

After Siem Reap we flew down to Sihanoukville on the South Coast, where we are staying at the fashionable Otres Beach.  On my first morning there I trotted down the beach and at about four kilometres found this river which a young guy was paddling across.

Although it's the height of the season the place is very quiet, though this may partly be due to the phenomenal amount of dope that is smoked here.  After taking this shot I trotted back to the "Pat Pat", the French-run guesthouse where we are staying, for fried egg and bacon, fresh fruit and delicious Cambodian coffee.