ongoing saga

It is time to give a full accounting of my recently ended association with the Bokor Mountain Lodge. I will start at the very beginning. When I lived in Phnom Penh in 1994, working as a photo archivist at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum, I frequented a restaurant called the DéjaVu, on Street 240 just next to the Royal Palace. Sitting on the balcony you could look over the high yellow wall into the compound and see armed Khmer Rouge soldiers milling about. They had been given sanctuary by the King who was trying to broker a peace treaty with them and the newly formed (UN installed) CPP/FUNCINPEC government. The restaurant was run by Antony and Kelly, a brit and a kiwi. At this time there were only a handful of western run eateries and of the few that I frequented (the Cafe No Problem, the FCC, the Wildcat, the Rock Hard Cafe) the DejaVu was by far the nicest, both in ambiance and quality of food. This is how I know Antony.
During this time travel to the coast, either Sihanoukville or Kampot, was prohibitively dangerous. Three friends of Kelly’s were abducted and killed traveling down route 4. Several NGO workers were held for ransom by the Khmer Rouge. Kampot remained dangerous for another six years, with various backpackers being kidnapped and killed.
A few years later Antony took over the FCC, and made it the special place it is today. He has a real love of the old colonial architecture and aside from making it a really comfortable establishment he always had the best trained staff and he took very good care of them.
My nine months in Phnom Penh will be permanently etched in my mind and will only be described through my fictional writings as the reality was indeed stranger than fiction. I returned to Cambodia several times but it was in 2005 that I finally visited the coast. I took the bus to Sihanoukville, suffering from an eye infection, and spent 5 days at Occitali Beach. Then I took a cab to Kampot. I stayed at the Bokor Mountain Club, knowing it was operated by the FCC. I stayed in a really shitty room (room #3) for $15 / night. But I was pleasantly enchanted by the location and the employees. I met a good friend and fellow writer, Ioannis, visiting from KL, whom I am still in correspondence with. The bartender was a charming young Khmer named Tula and his infectious smile went a long way to alleviate the smelly bathroom and the loss of my favorite white shirt to their laundry service. He saw my Apple laptop and told me about his old manager, Paul, who had the same computer and would hook it into the stereo to play music. As the bar was only playing Khmer music I offered to hook up my iTunes and it greatly improved the ambience of the place. I told him as I was leaving that I would be back one day and be his manager.
I returned to Cambodia in August of 2005 with a half finished novel in my mind. I took a container ship across the Pacific to Tokyo to spend the nine days writing. After a week in Tokyo and a few days in Osaka I took the ferry to Shanghai. After a week there I flew direct to Phnom Penh. I stayed the first few days at the FCC. I met Antony there and asked if he could help me find an apartment. He called Sam who had an apartment just down the street above Hurley’s Cantina. It was a long treacherous stair climb, but the apartment was nicely furnished and had a great view of the river. Sam said he would give me a special deal, $350/ month as I was an old friend. I wasn’t sure if this were true until I learned later that the apartment had been renting for $400 and after I left it was again renting at $400. Sam also introduced me to one of his employees, Nith, a young man who worked at the Rendezvous Restaurant and spoke excellent English. Nith spent a day helping me get a cell phone and would not accept any money from me. He was interested in my work at Tuol Sleng and invited me to a seminar at his university. The seminar was about the future of Cambodia, but it did address ways to reconcile with the past, Nith suggested I speak about what should be done with the museum at Tuol Sleng, as I had been telling him that it should not be treated like a tourist attraction and that if it were to continue as a museum it needed to include more contextual information, not just gruesome titillation and old Vietnamese propaganda. I missed the deadline for submitting my thesis to the seminar (it would have cost me $10 to speak).
During this time I spent a lot of time reconnecting with old friends. I spent some time talking with Antony about the people we knew back in ’94 and the changes in the city. I mentioned enjoying my stay at the Bokor Mountain Club and expressed my intent to live in Kampot to write my novel. He told me the hotel had been closed for almost a year and that I could rent it for $400/ month. I thought at the time that he was kidding but later I asked Paul, who used to manage the Club, and he said Antony was probably serious. A little later I asked Antony if it were still on offer, but he said someone had already made an agreement. Paul introduced me to Eric, Antony’s uncle (in law) and after becoming friends I learned that Eric had intended to rent the BMC, but was having second thoughts. He had already taken the step of having the exterior repainted for $2400. It was at this stage that his negotiations with Antony had stalled. Eventually, Antony and Eric and I were all sitting at the FCC when the BMC came up again. Antony suggested that he would help Eric open the hotel and that they should hire me to be an ‘artist in residence’ to keep an eye on things. Eric still wanted Antony to reimburse him for the cost of the painting, but Antony thought Eric had paid too much. Eric asked me to look over some documents Antony had given him; old spread sheets from the BMC, memos, ect ... I told Eric it seemed a viable opportunity and suggested that I might be able to raise some money to go in with him as equal partners. I figured if I could get $5000, and he put up another $2600, we could get the place up and running. I even went so far as to make some spread sheets of my own, based on the old numbers from the BMC and therefore most likely underestimating the potential traffic as Kampot was quickly becoming more accessible while the rest of Cambodia was rapidly reaching a tourist saturation point. I also put together a rough estimate of the start up costs, keeping them under $10k. I should note that one of the striking things about the memos was that the action points remained the same from one year to the next, as if nothing had been accomplished.
There were occasional stories about Kampot in the Cambodia Daily, mostly about an ex-pat American who ran a small cafe and had a web site promoting euthanasia. He was encouraging people to come to Kampot to off themselves as there were no laws against it (not true) and it was easy to get the vodka, vallium and plastic bags that he recommended as a release from this mortal coil. There was a movement to get him deported. This increased when a British woman, suffering from terminal illness, died of an overdose of vallium and vodka in her guesthouse in Kampot. It is likely that if she had done the same in a advanced country she would still be alive as all she needed was to have her stomach pumped. In Kampot if you are sick or dying the only thing they can do is give you an IV drip (glucose) and send you on the 3 hour drive to PP where you will probably die of some complication in Calamity Hospital. So there was some bad publicity about Kampot, but nothing that would deter tourists. I would recommend anyone considering suicide come to Cambodia, but not because it is legal or easy to off one’s self, but because a few weeks here should be enough to make you appreciate whatever life you have. And if you remain suicidal, just walk around Phnom Penh at night, someone will do you a favor.
Eric had the use of a Hyundai Land-Monster SUV, so we drove down to see the condition of the hotel. As we drove out past the airport a land-mine went off in a nearby field. Hopefully just a cow. We felt the shock-wave and then saw the plum of smoke.