Tokays

In all the years I lived in Malaysia, I never encountered a tokay.  On one of my visa runs to Cambodia, I stayed in a bungalow in Kep. I discovered droppings on my bathroom floor that looked like they might have come from a medium-sized, cloven-hooved mammal.

I went to the makeshift rattan-bamboo bar, ordered something to soothe my nerves and asked the Belgian proprietor if he keeps goats.
"Goats? No... no goats.  Why?"
I described to him the pellets on the bathroom floor.
"Ah! That's from the tokay!"  He seemed pleased to provide this information. "You know -- the big gecko."
"I know about geckos," I informed him. "I live in Malaysia, and I have cicaks in my apartment."
"Oh, but those are the little ones. The tokays are big."
"I'm telling you, these pellets in the bathroom had to have come from a sheep, or a goat, or a... how big, exactly, are these tokays?"
He pointed to the ceiling. "There's one."
I stifled a scream.

People keep these things as pets. Some people.

Stuck to the roof of the bar by its little suction-cup feet was a baby crocodile. With polka-dots.

The smaller gecko, which Malaysians call a cicak (pronounced chee-chahk), is small enough to pass through the tiniest opening, and it also has sticky feet which enable it to hang out on walls and ceilings with nary a thought of gravity.  

Unfortunately, the cicaks are not house-trained, either, so one does need to wipe up after them. On the plus side, they eat mosquitoes, and since I've lived in the tropics, any enemy of the mosquito is a friend of mine. 

Both of these creatures' names are onomatopoeic. The little one emits a very high-pitched "chee-chahk". The big one barks. It chatters, and then it proclaims, "To-kay! to-kay! to-kay!" in a voice that's somewhere between alto and tenor.  

Here is an example of one that I found on YouTube, but the tokays around my house have a much deeper, more authoritative bark. Thanks to the screens on windows, doors and ventilation slots, they stay in the great outdoors.  I find when they're not stuck to the ceiling directly over my head (do they ever fall??) and not dropping fecal pellets on my floors, I feel much more fond of them. I've come to enjoy their calls.

My dear friend, Mark, loves the Habsburg Empire and rues the day it ended. When I once mentioned this gecko to him, he -- clearly ignoring the amphibian context -- began to wax lyrical about Imperial Tokay. This, he murmured piously, was the most revered tipple of the haughtiest Habsburgs -- a sweet wine from the grapes of a particular district in Hungary.  Now that I think about it, the big gecko's bark is a bit imperious. Maybe I should make an effort to find a bottle of Tokay and put a wee dram out for my polka-dotted neighbours.  

Staying safe, staying sane

Crime is a frequent topic of conversation amongst expats in the Phenomenal Penguin. I get unsolicited advice from nearly everyone I speak to:  Keep your bag behind your feet when you're in a tuktuk. When walking, carry your bag in front of you, where you can keep an eye and a hand on it. Whatever you do, don't wear any kind of a bag when riding a bike. Don't carry anything of value. Don't use your mobile phone in public. Don't walk alone at night. Don't walk here at night, or over there at night, either. In fact, don't walk anywhere at all at night.

These bits of advice are always well-intentioned, and they aren't baseless. There is a significant amount of snatch theft, often armed. It gets much worse in the times leading up to the big holidays, when many Cambodians find themselves without adequate funds to go home to the provinces to celebrate with their families.

Last Thursday night, I had an invitation to join a group of people, and I found myself fussing about it most of the day. Should I go? If so, how -- on foot, by bicycle, or by tuktuk?  Maybe you should just stay home with a book, nudged my inner reclusive misanthrope. Prepared to be mired in claustrophobic traffic jams on the way there and mugged on the way home, I headed out on the bamboo bike.

My destination was a 15-minute ride from the house. Although I could hear heavy traffic on Monivong Boulevard behind me, my area was relatively free of traffic. I needed to look out for kids playing in the streets, or neighbours meeting outside their gates to chat. I don't think I saw another white face along the way. Our gathering ended about 9.00pm, and it was well and truly dark by then. There are no street lights along my route, so I worried about slamming into a pot hole that I couldn't see. There was enough light from doorways, though, that I could see plenty of people out on the streets -- talking, buying snacks from pushcarts, on their way to or from their favourite seafood-beer gardens. I was deeply happy pedalling along through the night streets of Tuol Tompoung; in no rush to get home, I took a meandering route. As I finally parked the bike next to the house and switched off the outside light that Yee, my landlady, had thoughtfully left on when she saw that my bicycle wasn't there, I regretted the evenings I'd decided to stay in.

I went through this same process when I lived in KL. As the city's crime rate soared,  the stories were inescapable. If my friends and acquaintances weren't the victims, they knew the victims, and we were all deluged with reports in the press. Bags snatched from shoulders, from car seats, from toilet stall doors, from moto passengers, from blind masseurs, from posh shopping malls at mid-day. Houses and cars burglarised, gold chains torn from necks, mobile phones ripped from hands that held them to ears.

The trick for me is to find that elusive balance between security and liberty. I don't want to be a blithering idiot, but I don't want to barricade myself inside my house, either. I now carry a bag that I can pull around in front of me when I'm walking; when I'm cycling, I stow it in one of the panniers, so no one can grab it and pull me off the bike. It's a locally made fabric bag, not even a faux Louis Vuitton. My mobile phone and netbook (both of which are at the low-cost end of the electronics spectrum) stay in my bag when I'm out on the streets. I see a lot of young expats tinkering with their iPhones and iPads while they're riding along in tuktuks, and I think, "Wow, that little device represents more than a year's salary for a lot of Cambodians..." I bet a lot of Cambodians think the same thing as their hands reach out for the grab when the light turns green.

Both in KL and in Phnom Penh, the crime conversations come around to the neighbourhood. Brickfields has had a shady reputation for decades; it's always been one of KL's red-light districts, and there have been reports of Indian gang activity. Many people suggested I was mad to live in such a dodgy part of the city, but you know what? I knew my neighbours, at least by sight, and I felt relatively safe there. I walked through Brickfields as I walk through Phnom Penh:  very alert, with an attitude that I know where I'm going and I intend to get there. I always greet the local folks I pass along the way, especially if I've seen them in that spot more than once.

Boeung Trabek is mostly residential, with small retail shops here and there, and it's mostly Cambodians living here. Some people say they worry about this area, because it's too quiet. That's a valid point. When I come home from The Flicks at night, there might be no one else on the street when I stop to unlock our front gate. If a dastardly moto driver whipped around the corner, I'd be easy prey. On the other hand, I look at BKK1, a more affluent neighbourhood peopled mostly by expats and wealthy Khmers -- it is better lit and has shops, restaurants and cafes open til all hours. If I were a thief, though, I wouldn't be hanging around Boeung Trabek; the pickings are probably much better in BKK1, and better still down by the riverside, which is packed with tourists, most of whom are drunk.

So I will ride my bike down to Tuol Tompoung on Thursday nights, and I'll ride it to The Flicks and back when I want to see an evening film. I probably won't ride it to the other side of the city after dark; I'll take a tuktuk for that, or I'll walk with my friends, Malcolm and Lin, but not alone. I think those are considered and calculated risks that I can live with.  If I shut myself up in the house after dark, I'll have bats in my belfry as well as on my balcony.

I may meet with some trouble one day or one night. That's life. If I do, I won't hesitate to ask for help from anyone around. Call me a Pollyanna, but I believe that most people are good. I got myself into a potentially disastrous mess late one night in Brickfields, and it was an act of sheer stupidity on my part. There had been a pack of feral dogs on our street, and every night they would interrupt the sleep of everyone in my block of shoplots. They'd fight with each other over food scraps or over a bitch in heat. They'd bark if anyone approached the rubbish barrels they considered their food bowls. They would chase and sometimes kill the rough cats. Other times they seemed to bark for the sheer hell of it. One night, totally sleep-deprived after about about four hours of non-stop canine mayhem, I snapped. It was about 3.00am, and I stormed down the stairs with my umbrella.  I started chasing the pack of 15 or so dogs, waving the umbrella and menacing them with it. They scattered. Some of them turned and ran directly away from me; others slinked away to the sides. After a moment, I heard a man running up behind me, shouting fiercely. Oh, that's it, I thought. Now I'll be murdered. The man, wearing only a pair of shorts and bellowing in Bahasa Indonesia, was flailing a big stick. He was not in fact trying to kill me -- he was going after the 7-8 dogs who had circled around behind me and were closing in fast. Also sleepless, my Indonesian neighbour had come out onto his balcony for a cigarette. He saw me go after the pack, and he watched them split up. He knew enough about pack behaviour to know that I was in a very bad situation. (I knew that packs will divide and conquer in this fashion, too, but in my crazed, sleep-deprived rage, I just wasn't thinking.) This fellow, one of those "foreign workers" who gets blamed for a lot of the crime in KL, possibly saved my life -- he certainly prevented a wicked mauling. Bless him.

I hope I've found a sane balance for my life here. I hope I'm being neither foolhardy nor overly cautious. I hope that when I do something witless, the damage will be minimal, and I hope I will keep my belief that most people are good. That would be my greatest loss.

After the move, it's still a great Camembert.

Way back when, there was a best-selling self-help book titled Who Moved My Cheese?  It was about our attitudes toward change, whether it's change that we initiate or change that is inflicted upon us. I never read the book, but it occurs to me that my move to Cambodia was partly my doing and partly not. It's not been painless, but overall the change has been a positive one.

I returned briefly to Kuala Lumpur last week to say farewell to a dear friend. Vinca and I haunted Brickfields together for nearly a decade, but now her employer is shifting her position to Geneva.  The visit was an emotionally turbulent one -- joy at seeing friends again, and deep grief that Brickfields, like most of KL, has changed radically, and in my opinion, for the worse.

On the night I arrived, Vinca and I joined Alvin and Barry at a place that -- blessedly -- has not changed much since the 1940s. It's a building in the Cantonese section of a large Chinese cemetery across the river from Brickfields. It has served as a shrine, an administrative office, a Japanese interrogation centre during the war, and now as an impromptu pub. There are three tables outside, and the older Chinese folks there serve a few kinds of beer. Visitors are welcome to bring their own food (which Alvin did, in his mother's glorious antique tiffin carrier) and other tipples for those who don't care for beer (Vinca grabbed a bottle of Bordeaux for Barry and me as we left her apartment).  Sitting in the middle of a cemetery, this place is peaceful, green, quiet (except for the caged songbirds) and quite probably haunted. We adore it.

A last supper, of sorts

Here's to you, little cemetery pub -- may you never change.

Malaysia's social harmony, much touted by the Ministry of Tourism, is increasingly besieged by the racial and religious squabbles fuelled by all the other ministries, collectively known as the Ministry to Ensure the Eternal Rule of the Present Government. That said, there is still one thing that all Malaysians stoutly agree upon:  If you eat durian and simultaneously drink alcohol, you will die.  No, you will not suffer indigestion, or diarrhea, vomiting or dizziness -- your life will end.  I have disputed this many times, citing first-hand, experiential studies, but Malaysians still insist the combination is fatal.  I suppose it's simply a matter of time. I'll die eventually, and then the Malaysians can nod and congratulate themselves for knowing the cause.

But I'll die happy.

I was in KL for only four nights and three days, so the whole time was a whirl of reunions with friends. I wish I could say my reunion with the city was as happy. I'm not averse to change, not opposed to development if it makes sense. In the Klang Valley, luxury shopping malls and condos are popping up like mushrooms on a manure pile, each one larger and glitzier than the others. Meanwhile, housing and shopping areas on a human scale are disappearing. Neighbourhoods? I guess they're becoming vertical if they exist at all -- you speak to the people who ride up and down in the lift at the same time you do. Malaysians who can't afford to live or shop in high style are being edged out of the city's center, and then people complain about the soaring crime rates and largely non-Malaysian population that moves in to fill the vacuum. The developers don't care about heritage, about liveability, or increasingly about style -- many of the new constructions are aesthetic abominations. See a patch of bare ground? So what if it's a public park? There are people in city hall who will see it nicely tranferred into a developer's hands for yet another high-rise monstrosity. If there is any public protest, the politicians may or may not show up to hear the pleas and complaints, and the development will proceed regardless.  There is just too much money in play to consider anything else.

Long before the concrete jungle, this was the
neighbourhood of the railway and the brick-making yards.

This is Brickfields today. When I moved there in 2004, the only two high-rise buildings were the two white hotels toward the right.  All the others have come up since then, many of them inches apart. Those who bought a condo five years ago with a long view of the Petronas towers and the whole city skyline now enjoy a view into their neighbour's living room.  "You were never guaranteed a view," the developer told them. Banners showing the Prime Minister's face hang here and there, proclaiming KL's new "Central Business District".  I suppose it was insufferable that the arch-rival to the south should have a CBD, so now Brickfields has been sacrificed in the latest keeping-up-with-the-Joneses-in-Singapore spat.

Brickfields has always been the community of the blind; the Malaysian Ass'n for the Blind is located there. With the rapid development, constant construction and now chronic congestion, they can barely navigate. Further, the rising rental prices will edge them out soon. Many of them lived in the same block of shoplots in which my apartment was located -- the low, black-roofed row at the lower left in the photo.  Shops and restaurants were at the ground level; our apartments were above. I can't believe developers will allow these blocks to survive much longer; there is too much money to be made by razing them and putting up another high-rise, taller than the ones across the street.

See that little field, or padang, at the lower right?  It's the only green space left in that part of Brickfields, and for years all the locals said, "Oh, that's protected. They'll never build on that."  Some said it was the Sultan of Selangor who owned it; others said it was gazetted as a public space. Now it belongs to the YTL Corporation. That last bit of peace and nature, of open space and greenery, will soon be under construction. A new hotel, condo, shopping mall, office building?  The greed is truly bottomless. They seem to have no sense that they're not just building something, they're destroying something else. Or, more probably, they just don't care.

Wait a minute, you say -- isn't this a blog about the Phenomenal Penguin?  Why are you going on about KL?

Because, indirectly, this trip to KL made me realise some things both about Phnom Penh and about myself. I left Malaysia because I had no other choice; they changed the long-term visa requirements just in time for me to be unable to meet them. Even as I told my Malaysian friends, "No, really, it's ok -- I actually do like Phnom Penh", I could hear in my own voice the suggestion that I was trying to make the best of an unfortunate situation.

As I stood in Vinca's living room (from which I shot the photo above), a few things became very clear to me. When I feel homesick for Malaysia, I'm pining for a KL that no longer exists. My friends are still there, still very beloved, and I will stay in touch with them, visiting either here or there as often as I can. The move to Phnom Penh, though, was a good one for me. The city is still on a liveable scale. There is development, and it may get out of hand as Malaysia's has done.  Then it will be time to move on again. I used to say I wanted to spend the rest of my life in KL.  I am loving Phnom Penh today, but I'm not making a lifetime commitment.

There's a house back there, well-hidden.

In February, I snapped this photo of Jacky, the young realtor who had been driving me around most of southern Phnom Penh on that little moto for the better part of a day. I could tell he was getting weary of viewing one place after another and getting noncommittal responses from me. "Ok," he said. "One more place maybe good."  His tone of voice suggested that he didn't hold out much hope for this place. We pulled up, and he called in to the owner.  I could barely see any of the house behind the trees, but somehow I had a sense that this might be the place, so I ducked across the street to photograph... what? Trees? Gates?

As I sit here now, on the opposite side of those trees, absolutely revelling in all the greenness, I am enormously content. Slowly, slowly, I meet people and form new friendships. Some of them will move on in time, and if our connection is deep enough, we will stay in touch. If I ever hear myself complaining about Phnom Penh more than I sing its praises, I will know that it's time for me to move on, too. I hear Battambang is a great little city.

Here is one last rant about Malaysian development, placed thoughtfully at the end of the post, so you can click yourself out of here if you've had enough.  There is a new terminal for the budget airlines in KL.  Called KLIA2, it opened in the spring, well beyond its scheduled completion date and wildly over budget.  As my Air Asia plane taxied in, I mused that the terminal looks like its architect may have been a fan of the 1970s, perhaps related to the fashion designers who gave us bell-bottoms, platform shoes, and polyester leisure suits with coordinating floral shirts.  It's one ugly structure.

At a very brisk walk, it took me 25 minutes to get from the plane to the Immigration checkpoint. I was grumpy and lugging a wheeled suitcase that was (ahem!) a tad over the carry-on luggage allowance, but I'm generally fit and have a good, ground-covering gait. I tried to imagine the same trek for someone with bad knees, weary toddlers or her elderly mother-in-law in tow.

After clearing Immigration and Customs, I wanted to be on my way to Brickfields, pronto. To get from the arrivals lounge to the public transit, I had to navigate several levels of -- I know I shouldn't have been surprised -- a shopping mall.

On the trip home, it was the reverse:  I arrived at KLIA2 with all my luggage, and before I could check my heavy suitcase I was forced to weave up and around three levels of the shopping mall.  Imagine you're going on holiday, and you show up at the airport with the whole family and tons of baggage. Do you really want to shop for clothing and shoes, jewelry, luxury housewares or electronics before you check in for your flight? Mmm, I didn't think so.  But you'll have to pass by damned near every shop on your way to the counter.

So you finally reach the Air Asia check-in counter. Phew! Ah, but you've still got miles to go before you fly. My friend, Charlene, snapped this photo of the banner at the entrance of the departure hall.

Flying with us?  Maybe, if you can make it to the plane.

Please note the suggestion at the bottom of the bunting to allow 50 minutes to walk from the check-in desk to the departure gate.  Given my 25-minute speed walk in the opposite direction, this seems like sage advice. It would be lovely if Air Asia made mention of this when you purchase your tickets or check in for your flights on-line, but they don't.  If you spot this sign when you're standing at the check-in counter and don't happen to have nearly an hour to spare simply to walk to the gate, well... maybe you have rollerblades in your hand luggage?

On these long-distance jaunts to and from the plane, I noticed one section of 'travelator'.  It was about four metres long.  I noticed it as I was walking past those who were standing upon it, all of us probably wondering, what the hell is the point of this? Why even install the thing for such a miniscule distance? "Because Malaysia boleh," grumbled Charlene. (Malaysia boleh, or Malaysia can, is an expression which started life as a patriotic motto and is now usually muttered very ironically when noting the latest mad screw-up.)

So yes, behold KLIA2, which, according to the adverts, offers "a world-class shopping experience" and which requires budget airline passengers to walk halfway to their ASEAN destinations.

Vinca, we had ten glorious years in Brickfields -- meeting for char kway teow at the kopitiam on the corner, for tosai at the stall under the trees, waving to the ice man as he puttered about delivering blocks of ice from the sidecar on his moto, having beer in the cemetery and in the pub on the brothel street. We weren't Malaysian, but it felt very much like our neighbourhood. I'm crying again as I write this, but I am happy here in Phnom Penh, and I pray you'll be as happy in Geneva. I have a bamboo bicycle, and you'll have Swiss chocolate, and we'll see each other again somewhere or other.