by Sue Perkins
He signed in resignation.
DOCTOR: Do you have a headache?
ME: Yesh. I can shee two of you. Are you twins?
Another doctor appeared.
DOCTOR 2: Oh, God, not another one. Does she need her stomach pumping too?
I closed my eyes and desperately tried to remember the patron saint of sobriety.
That ignominious scene was at the forefront of my mind as I entered the hospital in Phnom Penh. Admittedly, this time I was dressed as a bargain-basement Indiana Jones, rather than a holy woman – but I still expected the worst. A gaggle of men shouted at me in Khmer and my bloods were taken. After a cursory check over, they seemed satisfied all was fine and I wobbled out. But I didn’t get any better.
It became apparent that, for insurance purposes and in the name of good practice, I should get myself seen by the doctors at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases on my return home. By that point, I’d given up on finding a diagnosis, and instead resigned myself to feeling a bit below par for the foreseeable future.
I love the staff at the HTD. They are gleeful. They cannot contain their glee. Their glee is unbridled. A quick scout through my travel itinerary and their eyes were positively bulging with excitement. So much possibility! So many pathogens! Such diverse disease vectors!
It was here I learned the word ‘zoonotic’ – as in ‘I’m afraid I can’t come to work today, as I have acquired a zoonotic disease.’ It was a perfect new addition to my hypochondriac’s arsenal.
I proffered my right arm, and four phials of blood were taken, labelled and put into the centrifugal machine. I’ve never had so much blood taken. After a thorough examination, I was diagnosed with chikungunya, a nasty little mozzie-borne disease, and suspected typhoid. Yes, typhoid.
DOCTOR: Oh, one more thing, Sue – when you got seen in Phnom Penh and they did the blood test …
ME: Yes?
DOCTOR: … did you check they used a clean needle? I mean, did you see it come out of the packet?fn2
My silence was all he needed to start afresh with an HIV test on my right arm.
12. The Pig of Kratie 2
The village of Kampi is essentially a dirt track, bordered by wonky wooden shacks, that runs parallel to the Mekong. Knackered fishermen lie on hammocks, smoking, out of reach of the fierce midday sun. Kids play with sticks in the dust. The women squint into the distance with intense thousand-mile stares – looking for the Bigger Picture.
The road is lined with makeshift stalls, all selling carvings of the Irrawaddy Dolphin. I’d like you to get a real sense of this scene so, at this point, I’d politely ask that you turn to your preferred search engine and call up a picture of that magnificent beast. The Irrawaddy Dolphin. When the image pops up, do any similarities spring to mind? Yes! You got it! It’s a little bit, well – penisy, isn’t it? Let me tell you, it’s even more penisy-looking when it’s been hastily rendered in wood for the tourist market. Imagine thousands of them, big and small, thick and thin, lined up on never-ending trestles. When we arrived, it looked like there’d been an explosion in a rural Ann Summers factory.
It turned out that Dildo Alley was neither photogenic nor appropriate for your average BBC2 viewer, so we headed down to the water once again, to place the Mekong geographically and emotionally at the heart of the story. As we snaked behind one of the larger huts, we came across the usual South East Asian visuals – mounds of plastic bottles, trees heavy with bronze dust, a scattering of chickens and dogs – but then we came across something we’d never encountered before.
A MEGA PIG.
Matt and I both started laughing uncontrollably – trying to comprehend what we were seeing. Because when I say MEGA PIG, I mean a
MEGA PIG.
I am a fan of pigs. I had the opportunity to raise a couple during the filming of The Good Life – a series in which Giles Coren and I attempted to be self-sufficient in the style of Tom and Barbara from the legendary TV series. During this period of intense husbandry, I learned several things about our porcine chums, namely that they are (a) not as clever as dogs (for some reason they don’t want to say sausages, however intensively you train them) and (b) they reach sexual maturity an awful lot sooner than you’d expect. Or, indeed, want.
The show featured many handy practical tips on home thrift, such as how to render your pet cow into candles and how to make nettle cheese through a pair of tights. Useful, see? But I’d be lying if I said that the programme wasn’t somewhat challenging to make. The pigs were great, don’t get me wrong, as were the goats and the chickens (the odd flare-up of anal mites notwithstanding). It was the location of the shoot that presented the main issue. In the sitcom, Tom and Barbara escape the rat race by transforming their surburban semi into a make-do-and-mend paradise. Up pop their nouveau-riche neighbours, Margo and Jerry, and the odd bit of well-meaning capitalist versus off-grid badinage occurs.
Britain, of course, has changed hugely since 1975. So, instead of Margo and Jerry as neighbours we had an observant Jewish couple on one side and a devout Muslim family on the other. Both were a delight. Neither, however, was a fan of pigs.
So, rather than being a meditation on the joys of ‘getting away from it all’, we spent months negotiating a religious and cultural tightrope, while trying to stop the male pig getting his curly cock up something he shouldn’t.
And they say the licence fee is wasted.
Anyway, back to
MEGA PIG.
Imagine a Shetland pony. Then imagine it pink and hairless. Then imagine it with a gut that could sweep the floor as it moved – like a puce wall made entirely of fat. That was Mega Pig – and, Mekong be damned, I had to stroke her. She was tethered, with a loose rope, to a pole at the base of the house. As I came within petting distance I saw that her head actually came level with my belly button.
A smiling lady with blackened teeth emerged from the shadows. She seemed to be Mega Pig’s right-hand woman.
ME: Wow! She is amazing!
The woman nodded. I suspect she was used to this reaction to her pet pork-ship.
ME: What did you do to get a pig this big?
Om translated. There followed much discussion and laughter.
LADY: Nothing! We were very lucky. We are very blessed!
You bloody liars, I thought. You’ve been busy genetically engineering this pig under your house. You’ve been mating a Middle White with an Asian Elephant. Sod Dolly the Sheep, this is a Pork Colossus.
‘Is she friendly?’ I asked, even though I was already running my hands along her ears. They resembled the flaps of a marquee.
A couple of minutes’ chat, and then a two-word translation came back.
LADY: Too friendly!
More laughter.
Too friendly. My imagination ran riot. What would an over-friendly pig be like? Where do you draw the line? At what point does friendly pig tip over into over-friendly pig?
LADY: This is not our biggest pig. The biggest pig was even more friendly. It was a problem. She used to wander around the village and say hello to everyone.
I couldn’t conceive of an even bigger pig. My mind conjured the image of a vast bacon fortress with whiskers. Saying hello. I bet it was a problem, I thought. I bet there was a real frisson when the locals were down at the riverbank, washing their smalls in the water, and a two-tonne hog bore down on them desperate to make their acquaintance.
I didn’t ask what had happened to over-friendly Mega-mega Pig. I imagine she had gone on to be an over-friendly ham that had fed the entire population of the Mekong delta.
Om beckoned me over.
OM: This lady has a question for you. Are you married?
Oh, God, not again.
It’s fair to say that Pig Lady was starting to take a real shine to me. For the next hour she walked around glued to my hip, as if we were part of a Cambodian three-legged-race.
Finally, Claire interceded: ‘C’mon, Sue!’ She had the patience of a saint, but even she had grown weary of my
need to stroke every animal I came across. ‘Stop petting the pig. We need to go next door and make cakes.’
I said my goodbyes, and left. Mega Pig’s parting gesture was to back up onto the post and rub her buttocks against the rough wood. Now that’s a pork scratching. I watched on, in awe, as the whole house vibrated in time to her anus.
Our next encounter, with a group of cake-makers in the village, was meant to illustrate how the womenfolk of Kampi supplemented the income of their family. Everywhere we went, fish stocks were down and life was hard for the beleaguered fishermen so it fell to the wives and daughters to diversify and find alternative sources of cash. I came into our contributor’s house, took off my shoes, and fired out another round of excruciatingly pronounced hellos. I sat down next to the mother, who was squatting by a small fire with her kids around her. She was silently making ‘cakes’, local specialities that took on a number of forms. One was a confection made of warm rice, wrapped round a hard cone of sugar, and another, a greasy rice batter cooked on the fire until it browned into a cross between a pancake and a waffle. These would then be sold at the local market bringing in a few much-needed riel.
I had just started watching the woman make these cakes when Pig Lady re-emerged. I don’t know what she had been doing, but by now her hands were almost completely black. She waved at me and I clocked her gunk-coated palms. I waved back nervously. She chatted to the other women, and suddenly they all started shouting at one another. I had no idea what was going on, but tempers were distinctly frayed.
Pig Lady came over and unceremoniously plonked herself down next to me. There was a sudden and strong whiff of farmyard billowing from her skirts. The other ladies moved away from me as she took her seat, seemingly afraid.
It was then I understood what the argument had been about. Pig Lady had laid claim to me. I was now her property. Her bitch, and hers alone. It had all got rather Orange Is the New Black.
Worse was to come. Pig Lady was so keen to impress me with her culinary skills that she leant across the mother and grabbed a ball of sticky rice from the pan. Her fingernails oozed dark liquid as she pressed the rice round the sugar, and the grains took on a slightly grey colour from where she had manhandled them. Then, just to make sure that everyone in the room knew I was under her protection, she offered the completed confection to me.
Oh, God. Oh, God, no. Not again.
It was time to walk that tightrope once more – the delicate balancing act between accepting hospitality from your hosts and preserving the sanctity of your intestines.
I put it into my mouth.
Genuinely, if I had licked Mega Pig from snout to tail and back again, it would have tasted less barnyard than that cake. In the phraseology of Masterchef’s Gregg Wallace, ‘First you get mud, then sweet, sweet sugar, then comes that strong back-note of Babe.’
Thank you, Kampi. That’s one mouthful I’ll never forget.
13. Banlung
Making a film with an environmental message is hard, not least because there is no happy ending. Not one in sight, at least. I felt we’d done as much as we could on the ground, and that now it was time to get a different perspective. It became clear the only way we could truly and meaningfully show the devastation of the landscape was to film it from above, so we managed to charter a chopper to take us to our next destination, Ratanakiri.
The airstrip was a makeshift affair, a wide boulevard of red dust on which sat a spanking white helicopter, ready to go. As we approached, a crowd gathered – the kids begging, the adults staring at us with hatred in their eyes. I felt like an interloper. Like I was part of the problem. In a journey that had so far made me feel deeply connected to the people, this felt decidedly Them and Us.
Annie was our pilot for the day, a ballsy South African in mirror shades, with one hell of a health and safety speech:
ANNIE: Right. Before you get in my chopper, you zip up everything that’s got a zip. Your flies, your pockets, your hoods. You lock everything down. You tie up your shoelaces, you secure your sunglasses, you fasten your hats. Do you hear me? You make sure that everything on your person stays on your person. One thing comes loose, one tiny thing comes loose, this bird is going down.
I was half terrified, half excited. She had actually referred to the helicopter as ‘this bird’. It was all so magnificently Top Gun.
Her speech proved highly motivating. We started panic-checking our belongings, every pencil, pen and notebook buttoned in and patted down.
Matt was filming out of the side of the chopper, so was bound to his seat with reinforced ropes and carabiners. Then the camera was bound to him in the same way. The rest of us double-buckled, then buckled again, rammed earphones over the top of our caps and kept our fingers crossed. We took off, hovering shakily like a may bug, creating wide circles in the ochre dust below. The kids watched for a moment, then ran for cover as the dirt tore into them.
And we were off.
For the first ten minutes all I could hear was the sound of Claire, heavy breathing down the intercom in raw panic. Occasionally we’d shout out to each other, ‘Are you OK? Are your pockets secure? Are all your zips zipped?’
It reminded me of the first time I’d ever been in a helicopter. I flew in an open-door army chopper for an episode of Armando Iannucci’s topical comedy show, Saturday Night Armistice. The sketch was a protest against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The deal was, I had to fly over the Palace of Versailles and let out 40 kilos of mushrooms, thereby creating our very own mushroom cloud. What I didn’t know was that Steve Bendelack, one of comedy’s most brilliant directors, was frightened of flying – so I did the whole thing, hanging out of one side of a military copter with him screaming, ‘SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!’ in a frenzied loop. It made for a fairly stressful, high-stakes three minutes of comedy.
Annie flew us over acres of pristine forest and, for a while, I felt like nothing could possibly be wrong with the world. Then, after we’d been airborne for fifteen minutes or so, we saw it – the great scars in the landscape ahead, the ground razed to dust, trees smoking.
We looked on in silence. I don’t think there is anything more awful than the sight of a forest on fire.
Once we’d landed in Ratanakiri, we trooped to the hotel. Dusk was falling and we were shattered and caked in grime.
‘Best get the Deet on,’ said Kate. ‘This is a really malarial area.’
You’ll know by now I’m not a fan of Deet. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it’s like Agent Orange, but rather than destroying acres of foliage, it destroys your arms and legs.fn1 On the plus side, your arms and legs are rendered so toxic that mosquitoes don’t fancy landing on them – so it’s swings and roundabouts.
I think it’s truly horrid stuff. It’s a solvent – because that’s what your skin has been crying out for: solvent. It burns through plastic and eats at your clothes. I don’t want to think about what it does to your innards. The internet tells me it is ‘mainly safe’, which, for a hypochondriac and serial catastrophizer, simply isn’t safe enough.
KATE: Oh, and Sue, have you remembered your Malarone?
ME: Yes. Of course! YES!
I was seething inside. Why must you all treat me like a child? How dare you imply I’ve forgotten to take my anti-malarials? But, most importantly, how DARE you be RIGHT?
Malarone was our prophylactic drug of choice. You’re supposed to take it days before you enter a high-risk area. Oops. I wondered if I could pop a few extra and protect myself that way.fn2 I guess that would be like having unprotected sex, getting pregnant, and next time you sleep together, wearing five condoms.
I didn’t want malaria. I was just starting to feel better, and the last thing I needed was to be laid low again.
Claire emerged from the gloom, her face glazed a vivid yellow with the spray.
CLAIRE: Sue, you got the Deet on, love?
ME: YES! Well, no. I’m getting it on. I’m getting it on now.
It’s hard to know whic
h came first: everyone having to look after me, or me being totally unable to look after myself.
The air filled with the stink of solvent as the crew started applying the spray. I didn’t touch it. I had other plans. I had been mis-sold natural remedies before, but this time I was confident. I took out my alkalizing ayurvedic mosquito repellent, then spritzed it around my midriff and the back of my neck.
I headed to my room. Once inside, I plonked my suitcase on the bed, noticing that the management had left a handful of citronella coils on the table. I set about placing them around the bed and lighting them. All of them. On reflection, I might have overdone it, as, ten minutes later, the whole hotel smelt like an arson attack on an aromatherapy clinic.
I turned on the ceiling fan, which pirouetted drunkenly on a loose, exposed electrical cable. Then I fanned out my mosquito net, weighing it down on the inside, as I always did, with the things I might need in the night – books, snacks, water, a hundred photos of my dogs and more snacks. Sorted.
Next, I grabbed a hand towel, and began checking every square inch of the walls and ceiling, swiping at everything that looked faintly insect-like that landed on the white emulsion. All clear.
Finally, when I was satisfied that the room was mosquito-free, I opened the door to the bathroom and walked in.
The overhead light didn’t seem to be working, but no matter: the room was faintly lit by the light of the full moon. In the gloom, I could just make out a makeshift bath to the right, and to the left, set against the wall, a shower-head. Luxury. I went over, turned it on and got undressed.
I had been under the water for a few minutes when I began to appreciate how truly bright the moon was. I looked up and there it was, right above my head. That’s so cool, I thought. A glass ceiling. How wonderful to be able to have a shower and see the heavens above you. I carried on lathering my hair and body in as much soap as possible. My skin started to prickle, so I turned the heat down. It still prickled, so I turned it off completely.