Naked in Dangerous Places

by Cash Peters

  “AND ANOTHER THING: PLEASE STOP CALLING THE NETWORK EVERY TIME YOU HAVE A PROBLEM.”

  —oops.

  1 Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. Of course I refused. Are you crazy? No freakin’ way! The instant the camera was off, I removed my harness, traveled back to safety on the side of the gorge again, and retired to a café for a glass of wine and a long sit-down. The lesson? Never give in to peer pressure, kids. Go your own way, even if it means sabotaging your TV career to do it.

  10

  The Girl with No Nose

  “Well, Cash, good night. I wish you many blessings.”

  I'm lying on the floor in a stupa.

  Not a stupor, a stupa. Some kind of Buddhist meditation building with a raised platform at one end.

  Four timid young monks in saffron-colored robes stand over me, each one an expressionless mannequin, elevated by love and light and infinite patience into a state of lofty indifference that sets them above life's minor tribulations. Which is how we'd all like to be, I'm sure, only some of us have bills to pay.

  It's around 8:30 P.M. Almost dark outside. Lit by a couple of bare bulbs high in the ceiling, the meditation room is murkily uninviting, although thankfully the temperature, which has been in the 100s all day and sticky, has dipped a little. Now it's just oppressively claustrophobic. Fairly typical, I dare say, for a Cambodian summer.

  While I wait and watch, fumbling hands unroll a thin mattress onto the bare wooden boards and rig a simple tent of blue mosquito netting over it.

  Buddhist monks are by tradition nonviolent, honest, patient, effortlessly kind, and sober. So, of course, you'd never want to hang out with them socially. But here at Wat Bo Monastery it allows them to be very accommodating hosts, eager to welcome passing travelers to share their basic ways: eating simple food, wearing simple robes, and spending the night on a simple bed. And quite honestly, beds don't come much simpler than not having one.

  “Our temple is open for the public of the world,” the head monk told me on the way here. His name is Preah Maha Vimaladhamma PIN SEM Sirisuvanno, which unless I'm mistaken is also the chemical name for aspirin, and a bit of a mouthful, even for a Cambodian.

  “So I can come and stay for free?”

  “Yes. For one, two, three days,” he said.

  “Wow, this gets better and better!” The word “free” has the same effect on me that a hefty tax rebate has on others, or finding a neighbor's expensive magazines stuck in my mailbox by mistake. Nothing can quite beat the rush of exhilaration I feel on learning that something is to be handed to me on a plate with absolutely no effort on my part. “And where will I be sleeping?”

  “This way.”

  Down on the floor of the stupa, I find myself addressing Vim's bare ankles. (I call him Vim for short.) He's a slight, round-headed man with the permanent strained expression on his face of someone who's expecting a balloon to be popped close by his ear at any second. Despite his calm-enough-to-be-mistaken-for-dead demeanor and the noble position he holds within this young spiritual community, unfortunately for him he also possesses the voice of a fiendish supervillain, a creepy nasal monotone drone emitted through barely open lips, like an English tavern sign creaking in the wind, the way they do in old werewolf movies—nyeeeeeerk nyeeeeeerk nyeeeeeeeerk. Somehow within that sound, words are formed. Fiendish-sounding words.

  “Well, Cash, good night…”—nyeeeeerk—“… we wish you many blessings. Tonight you are sleeping here alone. Is it comfortable for you?”

  “It is very comfortable,” I respond through the netting. “So what do I do tomorrow?”

  “You get up to have breakfast with us.”

  “And what will we be eating?”

  “Rice porridge. It is traditional for Cambodian monks to eat it.”

  Rice porridge, eh? Hm. Maybe I'll sleep in.

  The monks press their hands together, give a little nod of the head, then shuffle from the platform in single file, while I turn over and make as if I'm going to nod off.

  “Okay, cut,” Jay says, rushing in. Jay's our super-motivated new director for this show, taking up where Mark left off. “How was that, Kevin?”

  Oh, yes, and we have a different cameraman.

  After a quick check of the tape, Kevin shakes his head. Not enough light.

  Back come the monks, pattering softly in loose sandals, to fan around my sleeping bag for a second time, looking amused at the idea that reality can be relived. Though why that would bother them I don't know. Isn't it the very essence of reincarnation?

  This time a brighter indoor lamp is positioned in one corner and we go again.

  “Well, Cash,”—nyeeeerk—“tonight you will sleep alone here. Is it comfortable?”

  “It is. Thank you very much. I'll see you in the morning for breakfast. Good night.” Relieved, I close my eyes and roll over.

  The room I'm in seems to be some kind of run-down auditorium. Intimate and musty with a high, raftered ceiling and a small raised platform at one end, it's like something the Southeast Asian touring company of Call Me Madam might rehearse in. The platform is where I'll be sleeping tonight. Or trying to. Because, after a few seconds of snoozing, I realize that the monks haven't gone away. They're still outside the mosquito netting, staring down at me.

  “No, no, cut!”

  Jay circles the room in big purposeful strides and explains again. “After Cash says good night, you all need to move away from him. Go this way,”—he outlines a path to the door—“the way you did the first time.”

  Vim translates for the others. Nyeeeeerk. They get it.

  “Good. Let's go again. Action.”

  “So, Cash, tonight you sleep here alone. This place doesn't have any …” nyeeeeeeerk “… sound to disturb you. We will see you in the morning for breakfast.”

  “All right, thank you very much. Good night.”

  Through the wall of my makeshift sarcophagus I see four shaven heads bob this way and that, each checking to see what the others are doing, before maneuvering themselves with anything but certainty toward the door.

  “Aaaaaand … cut!” Convinced that mild confusion is the best he can hope for from these guys, Jay puts us out of our agony. “All right, that's it for today. Thank you.”

  Yay!

  The lights are switched off, along with the camera. Hot but relieved, everyone disperses into the fresh air, leaving me lying on bare boards in the dark, because I have to stay here for the entire night now—that's the new rule. Previously, we didn't think this was important. We weren't making a survival show, it was entertainment, remember? But then I started to hear rumblings. Rumblings and grumblings.

  “Don't question me about it,” a slightly testy Tasha said when I asked, running a hand through her bleached ends to flatten them, then giving three sharp tosses of the head to make it all look wild again. “I'm not allowed to say. All I know is, you have to spend the whole night in each place from now on.”

  “Really? Who said?”

  But she wouldn't be drawn. Nor would the rest of the crew, nor anyone at the office when we got back. How frustrating. This whole TV production process is so threaded with intrigue and secret lines of communication, I doubt anyone fully understands what's going on. But if they do, then they're not leaking any of it to me. However, if I had to take a crazy stab at a guess, I'd say that Vanuatu is at the back of this somehow, and here's why.

  The week after we finished shooting on Tanna, I came across a short puff piece on a Vanuatan news website, proclaiming in its own peculiar form of English:

  The program … has ended with a positive note for a visitor to experience reality on an island. For this episode, the host is dropped off at a location unknown to him. Over the course of the show, Cash and the viewers at home experience a new place together with Cash showing viewers how to survive in a tropical island, what to do, what to eat, what one is expecting to see and what not to do on the island.

  The article carried on to say that the show:


  … represents a terrific promotional opportunity for the tourist destinations, which features the reality of an island and the experiences in Vanuatu.

  Hm.

  As nice an idea as this was, that's not quite how things turned out. We planned to show viewers what life was like in an unspoiled tropical paradise: exciting, dangerous, sweaty, and full of bugs. Full of bugs. Bugs that suck holes in your legs. In other words, we intended to tell the truth. What could possibly be wrong with that?

  At some point I even recall giving a short interview to a newspaper in Texas, which appeared under the banner “Itinerant Traveler Has One Tip: Avoid Vanuatu!” in which I'd summed up in two words my advice to anybody planning a trip to Tanna: “Don't go.”1

  Kidding, of course.

  Well, okay, half-kidding.

  So here's my theory: what if this silly little article found its way onto the desk of someone important in Vanuatu? Not the part of Vanuatu that's without trousers or phones, or even desks, but on Efaté, for example. The capital, Port Vila, is a modern growing city of mod cons: web access, cars, and refrigerators, food that doesn't run away as you're trying to fry it, and electricity. They also have lawyers—uh-oh. Lawyers who, because they're not fleeing in terror all day long from erupting volcanoes, have plenty of time on their hands to read foreign news articles about their country, which everyone is desperately anxious, for economic reasons, to promote to the rest of the world as a must-visit tourist destination. And what if this unnamed, and possibly nonexistent, lawyer discovered that I'd told people “Don't go!” to his lovely country (or, worse-case scenario, he'd watched the actual Vanuatu episode on his magical flickering light box), and freaked out? The way the people of Solvang freaked out.

  “Hey, wait a Wuhngin-damned minute!” he may have said to himself in Bislama. “This program, she is not ‘a terrific promotional opportunity for the tourist destinations, which features the reality of an island and the experiences in Vanuatu.’ No, man, this is bullshit.”

  And, oh my God, what if he instigated a top-level inquiry and Joe spilled the beans that I'd not spent the whole night in Yakel Village, only part of a night, and the nonexistent lawyer had threatened to reveal this to the world?

  As I say, it's all guesswork and I could be way off the mark. But even if it wasn't that, something serious must have happened to compel us to play by these new sleeping rules.

  While the crew is packing up outside, Jay and I hold an impromptu meeting.

  “So how long do I have to stay here, d'you think?” I ask, wriggling to find a comfortable spot on the hard floor. “How many hours?”

  Through the veil of my tent, Jay, a mercurial wisp of a man whose face in repose invariably sags into gloom, stands like a red-haired phantom against a darkening sky. “Five,” he volunteers.

  “We're saying a night lasts five hours? Really?”

  His eyes sparkle mischievously. “Well, some people only sleep for five hours a night, don't they?”

  Sure. Parents of newborn babies. People passing kidney stones. Fugitives.

  It's an audacious stretching of the truth, but we're running with it. From now on, all I have to do is sleep or rest in a place for five hours, and that apparently counts as the whole night. Agreed.

  Cambodia is not what it was. And thank God for that! Because what it was, and we're talking only a few years ago, was a bottomless swamp of Communist tyranny, war, and genocide; a place you could fly to and, within a short time of your arrival, pretty much count on having your ass blown off.

  In the early 1970s, the political situation here was ugly. Not only were they having serious problems controlling an unruly group of rebel commies called the Khmer Rouge, but there was also a right-wing military coup going on, trying to declare Cambodia a republic, a move planned and funded in part by the U.S. government.

  As you can imagine, this coup was a source of major upset to their neighbors, the North Vietnamese, who were enraged. “How dare you!” they fumed, and straight away expanded their military presence in Cambodia, building camps and joining forces with the Khmer Rouge to destabilize the republic, which in turn enraged the United States. “No, how dare you!” President Richard Nixon blustered at them from his office back in Washington, safe from all the fighting2 and ordered U.S. troops to attack the camps and kill insurgents using land mines. And in case you're thinking, “But how did any of this make things better?” It didn't. Wars don't, generally. Their only real purpose is to thin out the global population and keep it at reasonable levels. In due course, anyway, such blatant antagonism enraged the North Vietnamese and the communist insurgents further, to the point where they too began planting land mines in an effort to kill Americans.

  From here the situation spiraled into hell. When the republic fell finally in 1975, the Khmer Rouge was left running Cambodia under the rule of a guy called Pol Pot.

  In photos he's quite the charmer, with a smiley, kind face. The sort of guy you'd let babysit your grandkids or count the collection money at your church. Whereas, in reality, he was an odious psycho-madman who'd kill one and steal the other.

  As prime minister, he banished thousands of city dwellers into the countryside, where they perished of disease and starvation. He confiscated and destroyed private cars, made it illegal for anyone to wear jewelry or glasses, and stomped out any religion he didn't happen to care for, including Buddhism. Random atrocities became the norm. People were shot on the spot for being gay. Others were made to dig their own grave, then beaten unconscious with a hammer and pushed into it. Whole families were run over with tanks and flattened. Children were tied to posts, where they were whipped without mercy. Horror upon horror upon horror. It was one of the worst bouts of ethnic cleansing in history. Furthermore, Pol Pot set about mass-murdering as many eminent teachers, politicians, librarians, police officers, intellectuals, monks, and social leaders as his attack-dog soldiers could get their hands on. Anyone senior enough, enlightened enough, or literate enough to recall the good old days before the Khmer Rouge rose to power, and who might, God forbid, pass on stories about those days to others, maybe causing the young folk to rebel against the obvious joys of life under Maoist Communism and demand freedom, was slaughtered.

  Nobody's able to pin a final total on the carnage, but a conservative estimate has 25 percent of Cambodia's 7 million inhabitants dying at Pol Pot's hands during those years; 1.5 million have since been recovered from mass graves. Statistics that are impossible to comprehend and that left a dark stain not only on the region, but the world.

  I read recently that roughly one million antipersonnel mines were laid during the civil war days, and in the most innocent of places too—places ordinary people might walk: in forest glades, on footpaths, in the vicinity of small villages, alongside rivers. Yet, despite concerted clearance efforts, thousands of them, not to mention antivehicle mines, booby traps, and bombs left over from multiple air raids, remain scattered across the countryside.

  This makes the job on a show of this sort that much more difficult.

  In other locations, when we're shooting B-roll, the cameraman simply points and says, “Okay, Cash, see where I'm pointing? Go stand over there and start walking toward me,” and that's what I do. But yesterday, when Kevin, our zippy new camera guy, tried this, ordering me to amble through a sunlit forest glade (check), along a footpath (check) that passed close by a village (check), beside a small, lazy river (check), for obvious reasons I freaked out and refused.

  “Cash, you'll be fine. There are no land mines around here,” he said. “Siem Reap is a major tourist destination. I'm sure somebody—the government—cleared them away.”

  “How sure?”

  “Well, er …”

  Precisely. He's not that sure. Not sure-sure. Nobody is.

  In the past few years, millions of square meters of land in Cambodia have been cleared, coordinated by the Cambodian Mine Action and Victim Assistance Authority, or CMAA for short (which, cruelly, also happens to be the last soun
d you hear after you step on a mine). Princess Diana was involved at one point in raising awareness, as was popular actorvist Angelina Jolie. For that reason, and because there is no greater natural force on the planet than the force of celebrity, progress is definitely being made.

  Which is great news. But I'm still not budging.

  Since the late 1970s, there have been almost sixty thousand land-mine or bomb casualties in Cambodia. Sixty thousand!! And 98 percent of the casualties are civilian. Which is why, before I'll walk anywhere, on-camera or off, Jay or Kevin or one of the others has to stride ahead of me, covering the same ground, while I stand far away with my fingers in my ears, cringing. Of course, I pay for this cowardly reluctance with another Crew Look, but so what? I don't care how many mines the CMAA has cleared, I don't even care if Angelina Jolie went out there personally with a chimpanzee and a big long stick and exploded them herself; there are still thousands more to be found, lying in wait to ambush the unwary.

  On a brighter note, and all nightmares aside, Cambodia is as stable nowadays as any culture with a history of genocide, invasion, and protracted political turmoil could be. Stable enough at least to have become a popular stopping-off point for thousands of backpackers and other wandering souls as they go zigzagging through the backwoods of Southeast Asia and who come here to experience one place above all else: a monument just outside of Siem Reap whose staggering mystical grandeur will haunt them for a lifetime—Angkor Wat.

  “Angkor Wat temple is one of the Seven Wonders of the World,” a young rice trader called Rith informed me yesterday in the p'saa, the market in Siem Reap, shocked that I'd not heard of it.

  “So how do I get there? How do I reach Angkor Wat?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Fleuv naa teuv Angkor Wat?” (That's your actual Cambodian.) “Is there a bus?”

  He shook his head. No bus. His best suggestion for reaching the temple complex was a tuk-tuk.

  “What's a tuk-tuk?” I asked.