Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin I Love You

One of the few things that can be said, that I can say, to the credit of the guesthouse Joel and I wound up staying at in Siem Reap is that it is conveniently located in relation to Star Mart, which is probably the best convenience store in town, and in any case has both peanut and classic M&Ms. This is no small thing, and if you think otherwise I'm going to go ahead and guess you've never travelled in the developing world for any length of time. The charm, such that it is, of meat-on-stick stalls and noisy street markets in which fifty percent of the goods offered are ceramic cats that wave at you every second faded quickly for Joel and myself, at least as far as everyday shopping needs goes. Now, with the fashionable and jaded air of savvy travelers past, present and future, we make our purchases in air conditioned comfort from polite/at-the-same-time extremely surly counter help.

We buy bottled water - 1.5 liters for 40 cents - three or four times a day. Usually Joel purchases orange juice in a rectangular, East of Eden sized carton, and sometimes an ice cream bar as well. One time early on I bought some sweet potato crisps in a bag soaking in japanese lettering, but they were not very good; now I limit myself to the occasional can of Pringles, which taste the same in Cambodia as they do in Kansas.

We're pretty sure Star Mart is an Australian chain; there were several on New Zealand's North Island, literally dozens in Auckland alone. In New Zealand, where and when we were not just budget travel(l? let's say three "l"s, just to keep Webster from getting complacent)llers but Prophets of Budget Travel, we avoided Star Marts as if they had a reputation for vomiting acid; they were overpriced, sometimes to the tune of $1 overpriced for a $4 purchase. In Cambodia, the mark up is more like 200 percent, but we just can't stay away. I won't - goddamnit, I just can't - pretend that some of the place's appeal, along with convenience and the air conditioning, is the etent to which it reminds us of home.

One of the few things diluting this effect, a last minute curb on the force of the reminder, are the Cambodian Beggar Children who loiter in front of the spotless glass doors of the Star Mart, seemingly 24 hours a day, children who wear instead of shoes tissue boxes taped around their feet - and, if you're wondering, there's no way a roll of duct tape costs less than sandals, I've done the comparison shopping while here. These children know us by now, they knew us the first time they saw us because they could tell that we were white (truth be told, Joel's the only one who looks white, I am now indistinguishable from a svelte Somoan or maybaps a husky filipino, due to my wicked suntan). When we walk into Star Mart they hold us up for a second by standing between us and the automatic doors, clasped fingers bent articulately at their mouths as if not only to indicate hunger, but to suggest that without our help they may well be compelled to eat their hands. When we walk out, carrying junk food and purified water, they murmur disconnected words in progressively quieter voices: "moneys," "sir," and "please." Failing that, they meow after us, exactly like cats. I don't know.

It's hard to express how difficult it is to separate the quite appropriate "look straight ahead and keep walking" approach you find yourself developing, almost unconsciously, to negotiate vendors, tuk tuk drivers, etc while in a place like Cambodia, and the more suspect "look straight ahead and keep walking" approach you find yourself adopting with regard to the miles and miles of poverty and suffering Cambodia brings with it into it's new tourist golden age. You don't know how hard hearted you are until you've shaken your head and pushed past a kid who's clearly operating no scam when he follows you across what should be a sidewalk, asking for help.

Another thing that separates Star Marts in Siem Reap from the ones in Auckland is that you are unlikely to find, walking into the Star Mart adjacent to base backpackers in Auckland's central city, two western men impressing their recently purchased companions with a fifty dollar snack food purchase. Which Joel and I did two nights ago, when we stopped back from this really nice Cambodian - you'd be surprised how hard it is to find an actual Cambodian place in the newly wealthy Siem Reap, although most places have a few Khmer dishes on the menu, and make them exceptionally well - restaurant across the river to get some water before going to bed.

At first it wasn't clear what was going on, in the same way it's never exactly clear what's going on immediately you jump from a rock ledge into the ocean, or in the way you've got to rely on your months of training at Fort Dix to get you safely to the trenches on the other side of the beach upon landing at Normandy, because all is blood and death and machine gun fire, and your Lt. was in the front of the amphibious landing craft when you landed, and everyone in the front of the landing craft was killed before the gangplank was all the way down. What was immediately clear was that two large men and two extremely small women - girls? No, not girls. Sex with children, the Siem Reap Tourist Guide tells us, is a crime. These women were, at the youngest, 15 - were careening through the four short aisles of Star Mart, the women gathering up cookies and skin care products, the men urging them on. Joel got in line ahead of them and watched their elaborate checkout process from a few yards away, I was just behind. It took a while for the counter lady to ring up 50 dollars in products - most of the products were under a dollar, I imagine. While she worked, the two guys stood a few feet away from their prostitutes and, I kid you not, because when it comes to sexual economics, I am pretty much "just the facts," as you've no doubt by now learned - started punching each other in the arm excitedly, giggling. Joel was reminded of little kids in a candy store. I was reminded of two overweight, 35ish guys, one balding and taller than his friend and possibly American, the other either Kiwi or Aussie, with a sort of not quite mullet thing going on and a thin, but strangely in your face bristled forward moustache that would probably - I don't know much about fashion, so let's leave it at probably - damn him to hell if the sexual exploitation didn't already, who were not at all drunk but were really, really happy to be having sex with girls they were paying for sex who were also less than half their age and probably exactly half their size. They were wearing identical stone-washed jeans, the girls. The guys were both wearing pants that, while not exceptionally tight, made their torsos, introduced by thick handles of flesh more aptly described as loveless, spill out improbably into space above their waistline. They looked like polio survivors.

As eager as they were to have the evening continue as their finances dictated, they were more eager to impress the woman at the counter and, by extension, their girls for the night, who Joel and I have been referring to as their "lady massages" because that's what we keep being offered by tuk tuk drivers when we decline their offer for a ride. Tuk tuk? No, we're just walking, thanks. Lady massage? No, no, thanks, we can massage each other. When told the bill was going to be 50 dollars and change, the two guys, who I have not named here out of respect for the fact that I have already used Fernando McGuy and Fernando McBalls in the blog entry below, staged a brief show argument over who would pay - the central argument on both sides was that both, in fact, had *plenty* of money, so it was no sweat over either one's back, before one ponied up the cash. They then loudly and smilingly assured the counter woman that yes, the fifty dollar bill they had handed her was real - after all, they were more or less experts in large units of currency, having seen so many 50 dollar bills before, before making their way back to the taxi waiting for them outside. The taxi was a car, and like most cars had five seats, but the bigger man sat up front with his lady friend in his lap, so as to give his friend and the other prostitute sole usage of the back seat on the ride back to their guesthouse.

Joel and I watched a bit of one of the fifteen karaoke channels we get in our room last night, and for a while they were playing children's music, or at least music sung by children. One of the songs was called "Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin Dolphin I Love You," and the lyrics were as follows.

I love you dolphin
can I swim with you?

I love you dolphin
can I be with you?

I love you dolphin
can I jump with you?

I love you dolphin
can I play with you?

dolphin dolphin dolphin dolphin
I love you

you and me can be together for a long time
because we know that love is
love is to share

(repeat)

The song, was played, with the lyrics scrolling along the bottom and becoming highlighted in time so you could sing along, was accompanied by pictures of adult spider monkeys playing in a zoo. There's something to be said, I think, for cultural exchange; that said, I find that the farther and farther I get from what I hilariously thought of as my "comfort zone" in terms of travellling, distance, hygeine standards, you name it, and the less that "comfort zone" seems to be a limiting factor in what I can experience on the road, the more I permanently decrutch myself from it, or whatever, the more apparent my failure to escape the subtle, apparently universal, astronomy of unkind men becomes. Or, you know, where I fit into it. So that's, I guess, the moral for this blog entry.