Travel Report 12: Siem Reap – Angkor Wat II

A rusty pen is what I feel at this point. Or should I say rusty blogging thoughts. So let me just begin where I left off, and last wrote to you all and to my diary in disguise (Whatever will happen to that anyway when the servers of the world unite to form the machine overlord? Form a new consciousness? Disappear into human battery fed 0s and 1s?). I told you – RUSTY, forgive. Rustiness = rambling even more than usual.

Second try at beginning where I left off. At Siem Reap on the last day – planned – of my stay there. I decided on this day to take a TukTuk out to the River of the Thousand Lingas, on my way there I would see this, for Angkor Wat standards, smallish temple, which made up for its size disadvantage with incredibly detailed stone carvings and empty morning feelings. Again the stupid anthropologic-comparison thought moves; how this ancient culture produced this, and proceeded to disappear, while my silly St. Stephens Cathedral keeps hanging around. My Tuktuk is only 14 Dollar for the whole day on the night before, at the end of the day it was 40 - remember to spell better next time.

We arrive out at this outpost of no tourists at all, surrounded by the usual stalls of crap sellers, who seem desperate to the point of attacking me, the lone visitor, with “you buy Mr, cheap cheap, when come back, you promise.” The river of the Thousand Lingas is exactly that. A river, in a rocky bed, thousands of Lingas carved handsomely and obsessively.

It is about a mile up this jungle mountain. I feel like Rambo, except I am not chasing the bad guys, only bad penises. You laugh? That only shows you got no clue what a Linga is. JFGI (nubes to this, my most humble vehicle of informing my friends and family of wellbeing, mine that is, you must follow the link, to find out what JFGI is, and kindly leave a thumbs up to third in list – no, I will never give up this obsession with putting this Stamos-Illo word creation to its rightful place at top of silly list. See, we thought of it first, but didn't think to urbandictionary it).

The hike is lovely, if uneventful, no green mambas, scorpions, Khmer Rouge remnants lurking in the foliage. I do however see two locals sweeping (sweeping?!?!?) the dirt path that leads me into this jungle with their palmfronds brooms. I had noticed the exceptionally clean condition of this jungle path, and was puzzled by the neat patterns of lines across it as I hiked up. They resembled those that would be left by – a broom made of palmfronds, apparently. I must admit, first I was a little scared of the strange jungle monster that would leave tracks like that. But you don't know Peter, if you think THAT Kinkerlizchen - not Rumpelstilzchen - would divert him from rapture by a thousand penises carved into a river bed by fertility obsessed hindoo-rockcarve-wallahs. Nevertheless relieved that no centipede of enormous girth and even larger appetite was doing a jig across the path in recent history, I refocus my thoughts on the proper phallic objects, the carved ones instead of the creepy-crawly ones.

I reach my destination after about 30 minutes, the usual contingent of one guard against thieves of ancient penises, tourist guide + 1 couple of Euro Tourists and local woman hovering are present at the river bed. A bench invites me to sit and rest my weary soul; slightly rotten, holes in it, but good enough for me and this jungle. Sit down for a few minutes, drink water, wonder where the thousands of promised Lingas are hiding. An incredible stabbing pain in my left ass cheek. I jump up, hollering in pain and surprise, turn to stare at the rotten bench – Nothing. Under it – Nothing. My upper quad starts hurting burning, pain moves shoots all through it. Check around the bench on the ground – Nothing. Big artery leading on inside of leg up to belly starts pulsing something fierce. Try to gesticulate to bored guard, who did hear me yell, that something bit me. Reaction is a blank stare. Rather panicked at this point, I decide to go and ask the tour guide a couple of rocky defiles further down the river for local advice. Ignoring the two Euro Tourists I head over to him.
'Hey man, I was sitting on this bench up there’, he can tell I am freaked, ‘and something bit me’.
'Did you see what it was?'
'No, tried to look, but was gone.’
'Show it to me.’
I think: I can not possibly show this guy my ass.

'Uhm, it's in a rather sensitive location.’
He doesn’t get it. Really pulsing up my artery/leg now. So I, down pants and up shorts, point to where I think it happened, I can’t see the exact spot. He now gets the sensitivity of it. Bends over, examines the tender area, makes sounds of worry and faces of What should I tell this already freaked out white boy that won’t immediately put him in the ground with a heart attack?
'I don't think it's a snake', relief, 'there are only two puncture marks', faint. Well, not really, but only thing keeping me from fainting is remembering that calmness is primary now, so poison doesn't travel even faster to heart and immediate seizure. He bends over again, to look at my ass closely, gently probing with his fingers - never thought I would say these words.
'Maybe spider or what do you call that…?’ makes snaking movement with his index finger '...with many legs.’ You have got to be shitting me! You have centipedes the size of fingers that bite people in the ass? I look for my Rambo knife.
‘Yes’, but he can tell my weak little white heart is doing flips and wants to bounce out of my throat, so he refrains from further gory details.
‘Slowly go down mountain, home and rest, it will go away in two hours or so. Whatever you do, do not put menthol on it’ Why would I put menthol on it?
‘If you put menthol on it, you die’. Ohhhh-kayyyy!

So I dismiss his menthol phobia in my mind, thank him, and slowly, painfully, in a fear/emotion controlling manner I limp down the jungle mountain. Cursing Rambo, green mambas, dirt-path-with-broom-sweeping locals, lingas and my own stupid curiosity, which apparently did kill the cat and maybe also me.

Later, after an interminable hike down jungle of worst euro-tourist-nightmare, my pale face works wonders and none of the hawkers bother me, which is a good thing, because at this point I feel like puking my guts out, and what would they think of us round-eyed barbarians if we all start vomiting on their flipflops just because they are trying to make a meager living?

Go over to guide, tell him story, he looks freaked out at the possibility of a dying tourista – I guess it would be bad for business – runs over to stalls, jibberjabbers with sales girl, comes back with little jar.
‘Put this on.’
‘What is it?’ He already has it open, I smell it. It’s Menthol. How the heck did the guide know? I decline politely, he nearly insists, I refrain to repeat what the guide told me. He asks me to show the thing to some people who are sitting there. And I kid you not, Peter Illo exposes his not inconsiderable, rather hairy backside to a bunch of locals sitting around a table playing cards.
‘OOOOH!'
'JIBBERJABBER!'
'HMMM!'
Lots of head shaking. Some laughing. They all seem to think I better head to a clinic pronto. So I walk back over to Tuktuk, really looking forward to the ride back on my broke-ass ass, riding out all those potholes in the 30 miles of dirt roads, which I now remember in advance detail. Suddenly my body wants to completely vacate. I can barely control this attack of a need to explode from two main and one minor orifice simultainously, in the middle of all the stalls selling crap. I do not want to add my load to the wares on display. So I supremely effort my bodily fluids under control. Would be somewhat undignified.

Long story short, we head back, and into the first clinic that we see in a small village. The nurse only looks on in consternation as my driver explains the situation. I don’t bother exposing the guilty party as she is completely clueless, which surprises me. Shouldn’t animal bite treatment be priority # 1 in these remote jungles? What does she do there, if not treat various bites? Cure Cancer? We get back in Tuktuk and decide to head all the way back to Siem Reap, good clinics there.

Suddenly huge rainstorm, Tuktuk guy comes to sit in back with me, waiting storm out, passing the time with a smoke and – detailed stories of what will happen to your body when poison-bitten, and the different ways of dying of snakebite.
‘Don’t worry, if it would be really bad snake, you would not have come down from mountain. You'd be dead already’ (thank you for sharing), and ‘There is this one snake, if it bites you, you must not go to sleep for 12 hours. If you do go to sleep, you will never wake up again. Thats how the poison works. ' I don’t know if I should smack him or thank him for this excursion into Cambodian poison lore.

Insidious, I tell you. After about 30 minutes of rainsoaked horror stories we go on. My ass doesn’t hurt so much anymore, but I can’t stay awake for the love of god. I keep passing out. Of course this is easy for you to read, knowing that if I am writing this, I obviously wasn’t bitten by that particular anti-insomniac-snake. But imagine my horror at comfortably slumbering away. A waking nightmare. He probably told me on purpose.

I wake up, back in Siem Reap at the red cross clinic, some quack Chinese doctor, examines me, comes to the conclusion that it was probably a centipede of gigantic proportions and that I should lie down and sleep it off. Gives me activated charcoal to eat (30 pills, try and swallow that in one go) makes a paste out of activated charcoal and smears it on my ass cheek. I go home and sleep it off, and actually feel well enough to board the bus to Phnom Pen on the next day.

I don’t have a moral from this story, only a picture of proof that it would seem better for little Peter to stay away from obsessive compulsive Linga-search-behavior.