Prey Nop: ricefields, lagoons and foaming seas

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Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap or browse all chapters here.

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        Sihanoukville is a beachside town about a three-hour drive from Phnom Penh. Ellie suggested that a private car is the quickest and most comfortable way to go and  recommended a middle-aged family man, Bun Tha, as a safe and cautious driver. When we get out on the open road I understand why this is important. Trucks and cars are barrelling along National Highway 4 at breakneck speed, pulling out, overtaking and seemingly playing chicken with the oncoming traffic.

          Riding atop some of the big cargo-fat lorries, young men, faces masked like agile ninja bandits and shirt tails flapping wildly in the windstream must be employed perhaps, to load and unload, unless they are just cheeky lads hitching a ride. They’re not the only ones: whole families perch precariously upon mountains of belongings on the back of pick-up trucks — twenty or more people hanging on for dear life, travelling from one town to another. The only vehicles not taking part in this crazy game are some charming smaller trucks stacked to the hilt with terracotta pots and household goods. Keeping to the side of the road, they trundle along at snail’s pace looking like they are on the way to a medieval fair.

         The landscape whizzes by — stilt houses; tall ones, small ones, concrete, wood, bamboo, with their giant rain-water jars standing still and solid. Cone haystacks, a cow or two, a water buffalo and chickens running around the vegie patch. Naked kids splash about in a pond or stream and women sit on the big teak platform underneath houses, winnowing rice or stripping corn. Between the small townships, hardly any wide empty spaces, just more farmhouses and roadside stalls piled high with vegetables and fruits for sale. 

           Past a sign telling us we are entering the Prey Nop district, Bun Tha suddenly pulls over.   Under the shade of some scrubby trees a woman sits tending a large metal tub over a small wood fire. Three young children play in the dust nearby.

           ‘Corn,’ he tells me, ‘for my wife, she loves it. This seller has the best. Would you like some? ‘

           I nod enthusiastically and he gets out of the car to do the transaction. A wave of heat bursts in through the open door.  The woman smiles a greeting at him and they exchange a few words. It’s obvious he’s a frequent customer. I watch from the car as she lifts the steamimg cobs, snug in their corn silk jackets from the bubbling water. He brings back a well-wrapped bagful for his wife and passes mine over. They smell delicious. I peel one back to reveal the pale plump kernels and plunge my teeth in. I don’t remember ever eating corn like this before. The fat kernels burst in my mouth in an explosion of salty sweetness.

           We set off again and in no time at all arrive in Sihanoukville. Driving down the overly-wide main street lined with ugly modern shop houses, I can’t see the attraction of this place at all. Built on the tip of a peninsula that juts out into the Gulf of Thailand, it’s a known haven for partying backpackers and pedophiles although I’m sure it must have other attributes. Once a sleepy seaside town known as ‘Port of the Moon, it was developed in the1950s into a commercial port. With a noticeable absence of colonial architecture and major pagodas it has clearly missed out on the French touch.  Still, sea and sand has a knack of enhancing unpleasant surroundings and when we get close to Occheuteal Beach with its lines of beachside bars and bungalows I understand. Everyone loves cocktails by the beach and the promise of fun in the sun, especially when it is cheap.

          A memory of Marj pops up. She loved the beach and on our annual seaside holidays could spend hours tracing the pattern of foam as it rushed up the sloping sand, leaving a necklace of tiny shells in its wake. She would potter among the rock pools collecting sponges and cuttlefish shells, and as the heat of the day waned and the sun dipped low in the west, she would walk along the wet sand, wind in her hair, her dark glasses and satin scarf giving her the look of an incognito film star. One photo from that time shows her sitting atop a sand dune looking out to sea wearing the blue quilted peaked cap that always kept her warm on windy days.

        MD wears the same style of cap in a snap taken at Trouville, the beachside town she fell in love with on a trip back to France as a teen. In the sixties, she managed to acquire a tiny apartment in the grand old eighteenth century hotel Les Roches Noires where she would spend most of her summers until her death. There are other seaside photos too. One taken standing on her balcony looking out to sea and another down on the beach wearing jeans and a sweater, her feet in the sand, hair windswept, looking like a beach bum. Very much a local, MD walked every day on the beach and dined every evening in the same restaurant, Le Central, at table 309. ‘I would like to be known as Marguerite de Trouville,’ she once wrote. * ‘When I write about the sea, the storm, the sun, the rain, about fine weather, I am completely in love.’  *

        Bhun Tha drops me at my accommodation, The Hotel Coolabah. It’s run by Verona, an Australian expat friend of Rob.  She’s also a writer and is coming to the workshop. With a cheery face and curly blonde hair, she welcomes me warmly, shows me my room and lets me know I can grab a snack anytime in the restaurant.

 Despite polishing off both big fat corncobs, I am still hungry so I decide to head down. There are hardly any other guests around but I get talking to a Danish traveller called Bo. Handsomely balding, in his early forties — when I tell him I am in town to give a writing workshop he confides he is a closet writer and would love to come. I find out he works just across the Swedish border in a rather boring job. In his time off he loves jotting down everyday observations and turning them into dark mysteries. I want to know more but I’m itching to walk, so I invite him to join me.

        Serendipity Beach is a few minutes walk away and has a long paved path alongside the beach-shack bar strip and famous white sand beach. Populated with sunbaking lounges, big cane chairs and umbrellas, you can swim and sunbake while being waited on by the staff of the attached bar. It’s the off season and not too crowded so after walking the whole strip and starting to head back, we claim a couple of large bean-bag style chairs and order fresh coconut drinks.

         It’s great to have a companion to share my travel stories with.  While I recount some the things that have happened on my journey so far — the frustrations, the near misses, the coincidences — I find myself making connections as if I was interpreting a dream. In the retelling I am able to appreciate more the unexpected things that have happened and joke about the missed moments.

         On our walk, I’d noticed the cheeky friendliness of some of the vendors we passed on the strip. Local men and women selling massage, manicure, pedicure. One of them, a young Cambodian woman with a most gorgeous smile, plonks down in the sand beside me asking if I would like to try threading. She already has her hands on my legs pointing out how long the hairs are. It’s true, before I left I was so busy, I didn’t have time to think about such things.  It amuses me that Bo concurs, and so I agree.

        ‘Won't it take too long?’ I query.

        ‘No, no, short time, short time,’ and she powders my legs with talc and gets started.

        ‘How much?’ I inquire.

       ‘Oh cheap, very cheap, just ten dollar, special for you.’

        I’ve never had threading before, and while it doesn’t really hurt it feels like tiny insects are nipping at my flesh. Before long her friend appears and talks Bo into a pedicure, so we lie back like beached whales, enjoying a small moment of pampering at a dirt-cheap price.

        This can be a confusing moment for the budget traveller. On the one hand what appears to be a simple exchange of service for money still has all the old colonial overtones. And while western tourists in third world countries may well be the modern-day colonialists, the fact is, a commercial transaction is taking place. The provider of the service in this case is not a slave, but if they are paid very poorly it is difficult not to feel that the old master-servant relationship is alive and well. And just as your Western guilt starts to kick in and you begin planning to give a big tip, they will up the price with some complicated calculation that will have you paying three times the price you agreed to. It does my head in every time. But smooth, hair free legs at $25USD, $15 over the quoted price, I decide, is still a bargain.

         After lingering on the beach until sunset Bo and I make our way back to the hotel. As enjoyable as it is to hang out, I pass on dinner in favour of an early night. 

         I’m not sure if it’s the sound of the sea or wind in the palm trees I can hear as I slip between the sheets, my books beside me. The scrapbook of photos lies half open and I flip through its pages feeling a little wistful that my pilgrimage will soon be over. What does it mean I ponder, to admire a famous writer or singer, to idolise them, make them your icon, collect photographs of them, read their biographies, search down little known facts, follow every detail of their lives, imbibe them, breathe them in, osmose them, go on pilgrimages to the places they lived, visit their graves, follow the roads they travelled? Do you wish you had lived their life instead of your own, or are you simply following a meme, an avatar, a version of the self you aspire to one day be? For me MD’s photographs still hold their charisma —when young, of a delightful young woman, portraying her brightness, lightness, her eros, desire, her fearlessness. And when older, it's MD the writer I admire. Photos taken at her desk, photos at another desk, with a cigarette, without a cigarette, with those thick rimmed glasses, without those glasses, with that wrinkled visage, staring intelligently into space, thinking, thinking, fearless to the end. It is this look of contemplative intelligence in MD and my mother Marj, that I adore most of all.  I love these women in equal measure. I love them both as mothers, mentors, muses. And if I didn’t dislike tattoos, I would have their names inscribed together across my heart. Keeping them close, I tuck the scrapbook under my pillow and slip into sleep.

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* Interview with Roland Godefroy, Ouest-France, 3 August 1992.  https://fr.m.wikipedia.org wiki/Hôtel_des_Roches_Noires  Marguerite Duras de Trouville'