Edward Pollard

Preah Vihear, March 2009

Walt Disney got one thing nearly right.  The vultures were lined up on the tree looking down expectantly.  They did not look much like The Beatles though. (And also Walt, while I am at it - there are no Orangutans in India, really, check your Kipling, I am fairly sure he did not include an Orangutan, singing or not).  It was about nine in the morning and the hide was getting hot.  We had been here since before dawn and my bladder was fit to burst.  But I was told in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed relief until the birds were on the cow.  Apparently they are so skitty that the sound of urine cascading from 15m up would ruin everything. So I had to hold on a little longer.

I was stooped over in the world’s worst hide, up a tree in northern Cambodia looking at several vultures that were looking at a dead cow.  We had put the cow there the day before to form what we call a ‘vulture restaurant’.  Not, I hasten to add, a place where people eat vultures but where we give starving vultures a bite to eat.  Fifty years ago the great travel writer Norman Lewis talked about his plane having to dodge vultures on the flight from Phnom Penh to Lao.  Fifteen years ago these same species were a regular feature of any Indian city.  Hundreds of thousands soared the skies of India.  Members of the Parsis group depended on Mumbai’s vultures to dispose of their dead at the wonderfully named Temples of Silence.  It was a central tenat of the religion. But now birdwatchers will pay good money to travel far on bumpy roads to crouch in a hide, and risk bladder conditions to see these birds which are on the verge of extinction. 

In the sub-continent they were the accidental victims of an arthritis drug.  In the early 1990s vets started injecting this into sick livestock.  The anti-inflammatory often allowed the cow to get up and wander off, whatever was ailing it was not however cured and the animal would die somewhere out in the fields.  Hindus would not touch the sacred beast and it would be eaten by vultures. It turns out that the drug, diclofenac, was astonishingly toxic to vultures, who rapidly died from kidney failure.  Unfortunately it took a while to work all this out.  The death of India’s vultures was registered early on, but nobody could figure out what was causing it.  It was assumed to be some sort of pathogenic disease.  By the time the puzzle was solved the vulture populations had crashed by over 98%.  Cows go uneaten and feral dog numbers have exploded leading to a rise in the prevalence of rabies.  The Temples of Silence are now truly silent, without even the swoosh of soaring vultures.  The Parsis consider burial and cremation abhorrent and, scrambling to find new ways to dispose of their dead, are experimenting with elaborate solar methods. 

Meanwhile in south-east Asia the offending drug is not, nor ever has been, used.  The vultures here have undergone a slow decline from a more simple reason, lack of food. Fifty years ago the forests of eastern and northern Cambodia were home to huge herds of wild cattle and deer.  They were described as the Serengeti of Asia.  And like the Serengeti there were large numbers of vultures to feed on those that died naturally or were taken by Tigers or Leopards.  The French, and three decades of war reduced these herds to tiny fragments, even leading to the extinction of one species, the Kouprey.  With them went the vultures. So the remarkably simple solution to their conservation in Cambodia is to give them a dead cow once in a while.  Every month WCS, WWF and BirdLife put food out at several points across the country.  This year the vultures at one site have had a bumper year.  Birdwatchers, keen to see the three species normally found here pay for an extra cow.  The scene in front of the hide was a little gruesome, random bits of bovine bone dotted the clearing. 

The birds remained in the trees for hours.  Eventually a bold Red-headed Vulture ventured down to the now bloated, fly-ridden carcass.  She approached it warily and took a few pecks at a nostril.  She hopped up on the head, got a good grip on a lip and tore off a strip.  This seemed to signal to all the others that had gathered in the trees that breakfast was ready.  They came swarming down, and in few minutes the cow was covered in a squabbling, pecking, flapping mob. Much to my joy the head of the Cambodian Vulture Conservation Project told me it was now ok to pee.  I was then able to watch them in comfort.  So far we had only seen two species, the big Red-headed Vultures, and the more numerous White-rumped.  Having come all this way I still hoped to see the rarest of them all, the Slender-billed Vulture.  I was taking a short break from back strain when something new swooped in.  In my rush to take a look I cracked my head on a low beam.  As the stars cleared from my eyes I looked out at the carnage.  A Slender-billed Vulture, possibly one of fewer than a thousand left in the world, had its head rammed firmly up the arse of a rotting cow.  It was a special birding moment.  

The birds were beginning to get their fill.  Their crops were engorged, they staggered around on the ground, seemingly drunk on the rotten flesh.  Some managed the short flight to a nearby tree, to relax after their Sunday brunch. We hoped that some took food back to nests somewhere deeper in the forest.  Within a couple of hours little remained but skin and bones, but still enough for one more scavenger.  A Golden Jackal emerged from the grass snapping at the vultures, a bold move that worked.  The vultures backed off to let her feed.  Gradually the vultures took to the skies.  It was approaching midday and the temperature was rising.  Vultures rode the thermals and climbed high, looking to see if there was anywhere else where somebody might have conveniently left a dead cow lying around.

[To see a vulture restaurant in Cambodia contact the Sam Veasna Center ]

Phnom Penh, April 2008

The pig entrails turn the stomach, but it is the wigs that are really creepy.  The tourists may flock to the sweltering, labyrinthine ‘Russian’ market, but my favourite is Phnom Penh’s Central Market.  The design of the place is one of the highlights of any visit.  The Russian Market is oppressive under its low tin roof.   The dome of the Central Market, however, soars 30m above you.  The building, put up by the French in the 1930’s, and still known as the Psar Tmei or New Market in Khmer, is one of Phnom Penh’s architectural gems.  Perfectly designed for the climate the deco dome is honeycombed with windows and slats.  This allows light to pour in, and odours and heat to pour out.  Four long arms run out in ordinal directions. You can see it on Google Earth, it’s a +.  Each arm is a high, vaulted hall allowing more natural light to flood in, and providing a through breeze whatever the season.

Each hall houses a different set of goods.  One is crowded with clothes: used 1990’s ski jackets, genuine Preda t-shirts and vivid pink, highly flammable wedding dresses.  Walking back through under the central dome you pass Cambodian bling.  Stalls of brightly lit semi-precious stones or glass, gaudy watches and tray after tray of very yellow gold.  Another arm is electronic goods where you can get your $40 DVD player, or occasionally something that actually works.  One arm is the fresh meat department.  The booths are tiled like an Edwardian bath-house and mystery meats hang from hooks.  Sometimes I can actually identify what they have  - that bit is definitely is a trotter, but next to it, erm...  that’s either cow liver, or a black plastic bag.

Outside the main structure the market extends in the more typical Asian style, a dense warren of stalls and alleys.  Here one can find everything you may ever need.  By the time I have surfaced on a weekend most of the fresh veg has been bought, but there are still piles of fresh fruit.  It’s coming into mango season now, and in the confined space the sweet aroma of ripening fruit can at times mask less pleasant smell of prohok being fried along the way.  Tucked in corners, identifiable by the swarms of blue plastic stools one can pick up a snack.  Generally I like Khmer food, but I have to say that unlike all of its neighbours, when it comes to street food Cambodia lays out a very poor spread.  Or maybe I am just being picky and in time I will develop a taste for roast sparrow, goo in coconut milk, unripe fruit with chilli and sugar, and deep-fried cockroach.

As one works your way around the outside, between the arms, you can always find something new and surprising.  There’s a fresh flower section which I explored once with the enthusiasm of a seven year old at the Elm Ridge Garden Centre.  And then a little further on there’s the plastic flower section.  Here you can buy fake lilies so bright I swear they must glow in the dark. This riot of colour merges imperceptibly into the Chinese and Buddhist paraphernalia zone.  Not even in the Old Quarter of Hanoi have I seen such a concentration of red baubles, gold plastic, smiling dragons/rats/pigs (depending on the year) and those fat, smug, waving cat things.  Last time I visited I happened across an especially dark and dingy alley.  Along it were men huddled over furnaces and crucibles, grind-stones and polishers.  Bellows sent showers of cinders into my path.  I had to glance around to make sure I hadn’t stumbled into a scene from Tolkein.  At the far end of the lane sat a small group of men peering through lenses at the smallest specks of gems which people had brought to be set.  

You name it, Central Market has got it, including wigs.  Just next to women’s clothing, before kitchenware, and just behind the bling.  There are only a couple of stalls, but it is deeply freaky.  They are bundled up and hung on racks.  All styles are available, black to blond, tight locks or ironed flat.  It seems that the only constant is that you have to want to have hair that looks as shiny and nylon as possible.  And if they were not creepy enough there are bewigged manikin heads in plastic bags, like some crazed crash-test dummy with an auto-asphyxiation fetish.

Tonle Sap lake, February 2008

Vegetables can be delivered to your door by a woman in a small canoe.  Which is quite handy really, as you can’t exactly stroll down the road at Prek Toal.  It is one of dozens of floating villages around the shores of the Tonle Sap Great Lake.  I will admit that I had not been all that enthused about the floating villages prior to my visit.  I thought it was just one of those things we had to do on our way to Prek Toal.  I had dismissed it with the nonchalance of a travel bore, “well you know, I never did find the floating villages in Ha Long bay all that interesting”.

Well, I will eat my battered TNC hat (with a logo that is now 3 generations old.  The only thing I have with the WCS logo on is a pen).  This village was really rather interesting.  Our boat had taken us down an effluent-filled creek near Siem Reap, a waterway packed with tour touts, distinctly un-lakeworthy boats, and Korean  tourists, and across the lake.  We motored up river on the North-west corner of the lake as the sun set over the swamp forest.  Children were chasing each other in canoes, much as terrestrial tykes do on bikes.  Fish were being unloaded at floating warehouse where they were being processed.  A few stragglers were leaving the floating church and trying to remember where they’d parked their boat. The river was lined with houses.  Some substantial, grand, wooden structures, others more decrepit huts of bamboo and palm.  About half way along was the village school, with a basketball court.  All on pontoons, all floating.   Looming in the distance, slightly incongruously was a large building on very tall stilts.  We docked below this Ministry of Environment HQ and tied up at a much more suitable floating, wooden building.  The main building towered over us on 10m high piles. It could be accessed via precarious traverse, hopping from one wobbling boat to another.

In mid-February the need for a daddy long-legs of an office is not immediately clear.  Come back in October however, and the water will be lapping at the front door.  I have talked about the rise and fall of the waters in Cambodia before, and probably will again.  It is such a fundamental part of life and culture here.   This hydrological wonder is at its most spectacular in the Great Lake.  February is only half way through the dry season, and for the next few months the water will continue to drop.  Draining down the Tonle Sap river, to join the Mekong at Phnom Penh.  The riverfront in Phnom, with its string of touristy bars and restaurants, is actually on the Tonle Sap, not the Mekong.  When the rains start in April this slowly begins to change.  Rivers coming off the Northern Plains and Cardamom Mountains add some water, but the difference is happening along the length of the Mekong.  Rains in the rest of Cambodia, southern China, eastern Thailand and Laos fill the river adding to a winter’s worth of snow melting in the Mekong’s Himalayan headwaters.  By July, with the river in spate, it actually backs up and reverses the flow of the Tonle Sap.  Sitting in the aforementioned touristy bars and restaurants, we notice when the river swaps direction.  For several months the plastic bags float from right to left, and statements like “the ATM is a few doors upstream from Metro” can get a little confusing.

Like a header-tank refilling, the waters of the lake rise and rise.  Reaching for Colin’s book I can find the breathtaking figures.  The water level rises by 8m , the surface area of the lake increases five-fold.  The total volume goes from around 1.3 cubic km to over 60 (please do not ask me for these figures in fluid ounces, or some other freaky-deaky measurements, just the concept of a cubic kilometre astounds me).  Villages rise, houses shuffle around a little, maybe they move a few hundred metres along the river, and the office on stilts no longer seems so silly.

This annual replenishing of the lake with nutrient rich water makes it an extraordinarily productive system.  It is one of the most productive freshwater fisheries in the world, has upwards of 300 species of fish, and something staggering like 60% of Cambodia’s dietary protein comes from the lake.  This productivity also supports the enormous numbers of birds I described in an earlier Dispatch.  One of the stranger elements of the lake’s natural history are the water-snakes.  There are several species, one which is found nowhere else.  In the boom months numbers reach biblical proportions.  Such a bonanza does not go unnoticed, there is now a serpentine harvest.  In the 2004 wet season it is estimated that 3.8 million individual snakes were dragged, squirming from the lake.  They are used to feed crocodiles in the hundreds of croc farms around the lake.

The floodwater supplies the paddies providing the rice for the standard Cambodian meal of rice and fish.  As the waters recede, some of it is held back in paddies but the more remarkable agriculture takes place in a belt of land which floods deeper.  Between the flooded forest and terra firma are the flooded grasslands.  I have just been here to see the open exposed, apparently desolate steppe.  But this anthropogenic ecosystem hosts some fascinating, and in some cases critically endangered species, as well as a unique form of rice cultivation, deep-water rice.  The rice is planted as the flood begins.  It grows and grows as the water rises.  Until at the peak of the flood the leaves may be floating lotus like on the water-surface, with the roots 2 ½ metres below in the flooded earth.  It flowers above the water, and is harvested as the waters drop.

Prek Toal, February 2008

The trees are stained white.  The birds squawk and squabble.  More soar overhead on unseen updrafts, still others are swooping in to find their place in the crowded colony.  When I bring my binoculars up to my eyes and look around it dawns on me that there really are a lot of birds at Prek Toal.  No, really, I mean a lot of birds.  These aren’t small birds either.  This is not like looking at a big flock of sparrows.  These are big, spectacular things like storks, and herons and ibises.  I am standing on a worryingly precarious platform, on the top of tree in the flooded forest to the west of the Tonle Sap Great Lake.  The site is called Prek Toal after a nearby river, and it is home to one of the largest, most important colonies of nesting water-birds in South-east Asia.

‘Platform’ makes it sound rather substantial.  Grand Victorian railways stations have platforms.  In reality platform 5 is more like a rickety tree house, with a spongy bamboo floor and a ladder of small sticks nailed to the trunk of the tree.  I’m not good with ladders, I am not feeling entirely safe.

However I am soon distracted by the scene in front of me.  As I look off into the haze and the distant glinting roof of a pagoda I see a vast, dense vegetation sea.  It is known as the flooded forest, but at the moment it is not flooded and not much of a forest.  It’s more of a thick, swampy, shrubby scrub.  There are islands in this sea of scrub however, and like atolls in the Pacific emergent trees in the swamp forest are crowded with birds.  As my mind begins to process what I see I realise that there is order in the apparent chaos.  Different trees have different groups of birds.  The area directly in front of me is dominated by Asian Openbill Storks, dirty white and black birds, with a gappy bill.  There are at least 7 trees covered in these.  Below these, closer to the scrub are a couple of colonies of Black-headed Ibis.  Smaller, cleaner, crisp black and white birds, they seem to prefer their own company.  Behind me slightly I find a small number of Painted Storks. These are larger than the openbills, also black and white, but with a beautiful pink blush on their wings.  Far away, barely visible in the heat is a tree of Adjutants.  I try to tell myself they are the globally endangered Greater Adjutant, but I can’t.  I let them go and assume they are the marginally more common Lesser Adjutant (an ugly great bird that I‘ve seen before anyway).  As I look closer at the Openbill trees I notice that it’s not just storks.  I knew that there were huge numbers of storks out here, but what I see surprises me.  Tucked in with the storks are darters, cormorants, Purple Herons, night herons and others.  There is barely a free branch with no bird, or nest, or chick.  Elsewhere great groups of pelicans join the mix and down in the impenetrable swamp one hears coots, and rails and other calls beyond my ken.  There are otters, and Fishing Cats, and even a few crocodiles in here.  The area is most well known for the large waterbirds, but I had not realised there is so much more to the place.

Prek Toal is one of the lesser known, but more remarkable success stories of Asian conservation. It was unknown to the outside world until the mid nineties when the first ornithologists started to poke around a country that was still fighting the Khmer Rouge.  By the turn of this century it was clear that the site was an important nesting area for several endangered species, but that they were under great pressure from the annual collection of enormous amounts of eggs and chicks.   The Cambodian Government, WCS and other groups started conservation activities in about 2002.  One of the first things they did was to crack down on egg collecting through a combination of enforcement, and education.  Meanwhile WCS got to counting birds, which they have done every year since.  Back in 2001 there were estimated to be around 240 pairs of Oriental Darter, 600 Openbills and 700 pelicans nesting in Prek Toal.  Darters and Openbills reproduce rapidly, and can be mature in two years.  Lo and behold, two years after conservation activities began, numbers began to climb.  The pelicans can take up to four years to maturity, and in a wonderfully elegant sign of success we saw pelican numbers begin to rise in 2006.  The increase in populations is now staggering.  In 2007 there were an estimated 4,000 darter nests, 7,700 Openbills, and 2,600 pelican (go on, go back and check the 2001 numbers above).  These are just the species that are easiest to count.  All species, including the critically important Greater Adjutants are increasing their numbers.  We have no idea how high these numbers might go.  There are still more trees to colonise, and plenty more fish in the lake.

Over Cambodia, October 2007

Helicopters are spooky.  One moment you are sitting there looking out the window across the tarmac at a Mig that probably last flew when Ford was in power, and then your stomach lurches and the ground drops away from you.  I recently had my second ever helicopter ride.  The first one was in what amounted to a flying goldfish bowl over the Western Mac’s in central Australia.  That was fun, but a little disconcerting the way it got tossed around like a kit-kat wrapper in the wind.  I think I still have the scars from the nails of my fellow passenger as she gripped my arm in terror.  But this recent trip was much better.  Firstly it was free, courtesy of Conservation International (against whom I will now never hear a bad word said, well ok, maybe some).  Secondly it was much longer.  And thirdly I had some faith that the thing would not drop out of the sky (for the geeks out there wondering what type of helicopter, it was a shiny, red and white one) .

By a series of handy coincidences I had ended up travelling by helicopter from Phnom Penh to the forest where I work.  That is the way to travel.  Smooth, great view, and only a little over an hour, as opposed the seven hours in ‘both front seats’ of a Toyota sedan.  While the pilot, with the strongest Kiwi accent known to man (I swear he only used 3 vowels), communicated with the tower we swung around the north of Phnom Penh.  It was back in October and the Mekong was at its highest.  It looked like pretty much all of southern Cambodia is under water.  Phnom Penh is an island, it is no wonder that the street in front of my apartment floods thigh deep every time there is heavy rain.  There is simply nowhere for the water to go.  It was hard to distinguish between the Mekong and its tributary the Tonle Sap, the only thing that separated them was the main road out of town, and its string of brothels.

Leaving Phnom Penh behind we flew for tens of kilometres over flooded land.  On occasion we would disturb flocks of storks or egrets.  The sight of small boy riding on the back of a water buffalo as it waded through the water often heralded a nearby village.  A ribbon of high ground held a cause-way leading to a cluster of houses and mango trees.  This is what it must have been like before they drained the Fens.  The centre of each village dominated by a dazzling yellow pagoda.  Later we could tell we were over Kampong Cham when mosques occasionally took the place of the place of the pagoda.

In a couple of weeks the water begins to recede.  Tons fertile Himalayan silt are dumped on the land, a little of the water is held back, and a crop of rice can be grown.  Then the dry season kicks in.  There is no rain for 6 months, all the water is confined the main stream of the rivers, and the land bakes dry.  There is either too much water, or not enough.  Not since the hay-day of the Angkorian Empire 800 years ago has anybody succeeded in managing this potential bonanza successfully.  Supposedly the construction of an extensive system of canals and reservoirs enabled the Angkorians to obtain two or three harvests a year.  The number of slaves that must have died in the construction of these works is not known.  When the Khmer Rouge tried to re-create this agrarian idyll millions perished.

Not far from Kampong Cham the land dries out.  We were beyond the floodplain and over the ‘redlands’, rubber and cassava plantations dominated, but we were all pleasantly surprised to see a few large remnant patches of natural forests.  Given the current expansions of plantations and industrial agriculture, the future of these un-protected blocks is bleak.

Across Cambodia, May 2007

As I waited a thought crossed my mind “am I the only person in Cambodia who stops at junctions?” The pile of rattan furniture crept slowly passed.  If I had craned my neck I have might have been able to see the wheels of a motorbike under there somewhere, but I prefer to think of it as the independent migration of rattan back to Cambodia.  The canes are harvested in Cambodia, travel down this very road and across the border to Viet Nam 4km away.  In Saigon they are turned into crappy furniture and sent back to Cambodia, to furnish cheap hotels and apartments for expats of limited budget and imagination.

It was the end of the dry season and I was taking The Badger back to Phnom Penh. The rattle and rumble faded as I left the dirt road and onto the tar.  A short while later I pulled over to stretch my legs.  The best part of the drive lay ahead.  The potholed road through the devastated Wildlife Sanctuary was behind me, it was still relatively cool, and for the next couple of hours the road is smooth and empty.  I was on the edge of Snuol, one of a series of places on the road, including Skun and Suong, whose names are considerably more charming than the town itself.  There was even once a popular parlour game where one competed to come up with the best definition of the noun and verb ‘snuol’.  Somewhere around here is the Hotel Hor Bunny.  Apparently the owner really does not understand why foreigners want to take photos of his sign.  The next town is Memot, which is nearly as grim, but it does have an archaeological museum which lends it a hint of class.  Well I a think it has an archaeological museum, I have never been in.  Maybe somebody just put up a sign outside their house in an attempt to get one up on Krek.

Seventy years ago the rich, red soils of this corner of Cambodia sustained large rubber plantations.  It is only about 100 miles from the port of Saigon, and the rubber produced here went into many a Michelin tire.  Now much of the rubber has been pulled up and replaced with cassava, which must have seemed like a good idea a couple of years ago.  But with the high price of oil and an insatiable demand for cars with tires from middle class Indians and Chinese the price of natural rubber has gone through the roof.  Cambodia is still playing catch up.

In 1970 US forces invaded here.  They had been secretly bombing the area for months under the belief that there was a large Vietnamese base hidden away somewhere.  The code name for the Snoul area was Dinner, and Memot was Breakfast.  They also targeted the area where my camp is now.  I believe they called that High Tea, which I for one find terribly charming, in a sort of illegally bombing a sovereign nation kind of way.  When bombing failed to stem the flow of arms coming down The Trail, Nixon ordered the secret invasion of Cambodia.  Dismayed at not finding COSVN, the secret VC base they swore was there, the US army razed Snoul to the ground.  Which, frankly somebody should consider doing again. They then moved down the road and levelled Memot.  After three months which achieved little, other than driving people into the welcoming arms of the Khmer Rouge, the US forces left again.   

After Memot the road drops off the last of the rolling hills and down onto the Mekong floodlands.  It was still pretty bleak.  The dry season had dragged on late and the rice paddy was parched and dusty.  Within two months the landscape would be transformed.  The rains come with a bang (and a flash, it’s remarkable how many people get killed by lightning strikes at the beginning of the monsoon), and the barren, brown becomes a vibrant, vivid green with the fresh flush of newly planted rice. This is the clichéd Cambodian landscape, rice paddies stretching to the horizon, sugar palms with broad fanned leaves silhouetted against a bleached sky, and the occasional island of dense trees with the high, golden eaves of a temple glinting in the sun.

Coming towards Kampong Cham, and the bridge across the Mekong, the road runs along a high embankment.  Stopping for another break, it’s sore on the arse this drive, I looked out over the flood plain.  The road is a good three or four metres above the cracked earth and impenetrable mimosa.  By September, engorged by Himalayan snowmelt and the monsoon, the waters of the Mekong will be lapping against the side of the road.  I am still 4 km from the bridge.  A little later on I pass houses on high stilts.  In the dry season the ‘ground floor’ is three metres off the ground.  People store chickens, motorbikes and children under there.  At the height of the dry it is the coolest place to be.  In the wet season the houses become islands, accessible only along rickety wooden bridges.  One of the most curious things I see are walls on stilts.  Some of the larger buildings and factories on the approach to Phnom Penh are surrounded by imposing walls.  The walls are supported on two metre tall pillars.  For nine months of the year grazing cows and people heading out fishing wander to and fro unimpeded under the wall.

The road gets busier as I approach Phnom Penh.  A pick-up truck taxi carrying 20 people and a pile of luggage twice as tall again teetered over as it veered around a small boy and a large buffalo.  The roadside becomes one long stretch of anonymous towns, and roadside stalls.  Along one section I could buy jack-fruit, then there is a collection of coconut huts, and a little later large, flattened, salted fish were on offer.  At one of the more established stops I noticed a group of backpackers trying to decide if they want to buy a bag of deep fried spiders from an old crone.

Mondulkiri, January 07

Why Don’t You, Heidi, Kick Start, Children of Firetop Mountain, Brighton’s dilapidated pier and Great Aunt Phyllis's delectable Victoria sponge, they will forever remind me of the summer holidays.  I always wanted to be on one of TV shows.  OK not Heidi, Peter the ignorant Swiss goatherd was maybe not the ideal role model, but the others would do.  Now, finally, 25 years on I am living one.  Kick Start….  Brrroooom.  Except my bike has an electric starter, so it is more like Press Button….  Brrroooom.

I bought the motorbike nine months ago from a Namibian who works for WWF, but what with the seasons and my work schedule I ended up using it mainly around town and little in the site.  It is a Honda Baja, or as my colleague pronounces it, The Badger.  It is tall bike too, and sometimes even I struggle to mount it.  When I am perched on it I tower above the Cambodians at the traffic lights who are riding lowly Dreams or diminutive Chalys.  I guess it is the bike equivalent of a Chelsea tractor.

In the last couple of months however I have finally managed to put it through its paces, taking it down rotten roads and up steep slopes.  Unfortunately nobody has left a pile of barrels in the forest, so I have not yet had the opportunity to try out that most challenging of Kick Start obstacles.  Last month I took The Badger along the French Road  This used to be the main road through the province.  It has long since seen better days, and is now little more than a footpath or at times a rock strewn river bed.  About half way along, miles from anywhere, in the middle of thick, scrubby forest I found an overgrown memorial to a fallen Frenchman.  “In Memorium – Gatille. Emile, Justin.  Administrative Delegate. Born 11th October 1877, in St Amour (Jura), Killed here 26th May 1931, Victim of Duty” .  Now that is a story waiting to be told.  Curiously enough, the nearest village is called Gati.

Last week Chhen and I had to go and put some camera-traps out.  Turns out that elephants are so 2006, the thing for 2007 is Tigers.  Shere Kahn is an elusive beast however, and the best way to count Tigers is to leave cameras in the forest.  Whenever something passes the camera its photo is taken.  When we get photos of Tigers we can identify them from their stripes, and count how many we have.  This is all ever so exciting and I might now actually be doing the type of work some of you have always thought I did.  The only problem is that the elephants do not like the publicity, and have tendency to destroy the cameras.  We lost three that way last year, and one already this year.  We even have a photo from one camera that shows an elephant with another of our cameras in its mouth.

Apparently this appeared in Afghan Scene.  A magazine for aid workers and mercs

Mondulkiri, April 07

There is no word for snow in Khmer.  This had never been a problem until we struggled to translate as a Wakhi pastoralist from north-east Afghanistan tried to explain to a Phnong farmer from north-east Cambodia that his biggest problem is sheep dying in the snow.

Amunudin was one of 7 Afghans who visited Cambodia as part of tour organised by WCS Afghanistan.  They came to learn about conservation in Cambodia, and visit the area where I work.  This was the first time most of them had left Afghanistan (if one doesn't include occasional trips over the mountain to Pakistan).  For Aminudin it was the first time he has left the Wakhan, that finger of Afghanistan that sticks out towards China.  He'd never even been to Kabul, he'd never been below about 2000m above sea level, he'd never seen so much green.

When I had first heard about this plan I thought it was some elaborate practical joke from my boss, "yeah right Joe, there's a WCS Afghanistan and they want to come here. Oh, and we've got 100 elephants too".  But no, it all turned out to be true.  The idea was that the nascent Afghan authorities could learn about conservation in another post conflict country – to which some wag replied "Afghanistan is a post conflict country?".  I was still sceptical.  What could they learn?  I don't think there is another country in the WCS Asia Program more different to Cambodia than Afghanistan.  The Russian Far East maybe, but at least they have trees.

I was wrong.  OK, yes, ecologically speaking Cambodia and Afghanistan are poles apart, but institutionally there are surprising similarities.  WCS in Afghanistan are where they were in Cambodia in 1999.  They are just setting up, doing surveys, trying to find what wildlife is left and where.  Similarly the government is trying to get organised, to develop laws and to create National Parks.  The team that came to visit Cambodia could see what can happen, how things have changed and that an area that seven years ago was a bandit ridden, frontier province, is now the site of a successful conservation project.  With trees.

The team had to travel via Delhi to pick up visas from the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Cambodia to India (now there's a job title, that is even better than 'Chief of Party').  When they were asked what they thought of the city one of them replied "there are a lot of trees".  A week later they were in Mondulkiri.  On the first evening we went for a drive up the road through the site.  After a few kilometres we pulled over and everybody got out.  My colleague Somaart asked me why we'd stopped, were there monkeys?  "no 'Mart, they want to see the trees".  We had stopped at particularly spectacular avenue and the Afghans got out to marvel at the trees, to pose in front as others took photos.  That we should stop here had only occurred to me a few hours earlier.  Kara, from WCS Afghanistan, had given a presentation on the country that not only made me very keen to visit, but also pointed out that there are very few trees in Afghanistan.  Certainly not in the areas where they had come from.  And none of them had seen anything remotely similar to a tropical rainforest with 40m tall trees that are 2m across at the base.  A little later we did see some monkeys, but they weren't nearly so impressed by these as by all the plants.  This was in contrast to a group from Lao who visited in January who were amazed by the monkeys.  Then again the Lao were excited by squirrels, and birds, and well, pretty much anything with a pulse.

The Afghans stayed for about a week, it was fascinating experience for all involved.  My Cambodian colleagues were amazed at the photos of barren valleys and waist deep snow and still talk about it.  And they got to meet Saddam Hussein.  Mr Barat bore a striking resemblance to Hussein.  When they first arrived at Phnom Penh airport they were met with surprise and confusion, nobody at passport control had ever seen an Afghan passport before, and this alone was reason to call all their mates over.  Then one of them noticed Mr Barat "hey, you look like Saddam Hussein",  he then called out across the whole airport "everybody, this guy looks like Saddam Hussein".  The process of going through passport control, which moves at glacial pace at the best of times, ground to a halt as everybody gathered around to stare at the Head of International Affairs at the National Environmental Protection Agency, of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.  Mr Barat thought this was hilarious, and proudly repeated the story several times over the coming weeks.  

A version of this story appeaed in the now defunct Asian Runner magazine

Mondulkiri, November 2006.

I am an evening runner.  I always have been.  The sun was in my eyes, dipping down towards the low hills as I set out from camp.  The light was warm and golden, and although I was in the middle of the Cambodian jungle it was not too sultry.  The wet season was finally coming to an end and we were approaching the time of the year that, with no hint of irony, we call the cool season.  I followed the rutted, bone-dry cart track out of the dappled shade of the forest and into open grassland.  Earlier that morning we had been woken by the trumpeting of a group of elephants, and the next day I would see fresh Tiger tracks, but this evening all was calm, no cause for concern.  I had been working in the forest all day, but I was training for the Siem Reap half marathon, and did not want to miss this evening.  Eight kilometres out and back to the nearest ranger station.  My Cambodian colleagues thought I was mad, they were just settling down in their hammocks.

I passed a small pool and disturbed a pair of very territorial lapwings, they cried out pee-wee whilst circling angrily overhead.  The track ducked back into the open forest.  There was a crash in front of me, my heart fluttered, but it was only a small deer.  The Muntjac bounded away, its barking alarm call echoed through the trees.

I made it to the station in good time.  Recently all my running had been a steeply hilly road and it was a joy to back on the flat lands.  As I approached the hut a Red Junglefowl, the wild progenitor of the domestic chicken, darted across the path. Why do they do that?  I turned and with the sun on my back now I smiled as I thought that what a far cry this is from the Barney Run.  That gruelling 5 mile slog through the Pennines had formed the backbone of my north English schooling. 

Coming around a corner and into another glade I see one, no three, then eight Green Peafowl running along the track in front of me.  These spectacular birds, related to the famous peacock, used to be common in large parts of South-east Asia, but are now highly endangered and confined to a few locations, including eastern Cambodia.  Even here a few years ago seeing eight of these magnificent animals would have been an unusual sight, but the work of the Cambodian Forest Administration means that that they now are an increasingly common spectacle here.  What a thrill it was, especially when they were joined by a male, fully two metes long including his resplendent tail.  With a flick of wings they change course and scurry into the tall grass, and I cruise the last kilometre back to camp. 

Mondulkiri, March 07

Elephant bones are really heavy, and smelly too.  Several months ago I got a message that one of our elephants was dead.  My first response was “e gads, did somebody shoot it?”, but no, I was told it fell off a cliff.  I was sceptical, was this the equivalent of the proverbial “er, she fell down the stairs your honour”?  In order to find it, apparently, all the rangers had to do was follow their noses.  It could be smelt from the road, but it still took a few days to find it.  I asked somebody to go and get a tissue sample, if we can get some DNA, we can compare it to the faecal DNA work that we did earlier in the year, we will know who died.  That was a pretty unpleasant job that Somaat was very stoical about.  When he sent the samples down to Phnom Penh they were accompanied by some photos.  The pictures were hard to figure out.  Swollen and festering in the tropical heat, it looked like a dark grey dirigible had crashed in a deep gully.

There is a market for elephant parts, so over the coming weeks, Somaat and the rangers kept an eye on the carcass.  After about a month they thought that maybe we should go and collect the bones.  A few of us went to investigate.  We took a machete, a mattock, some surgical gloves, face masks and small jar of Tiger Balm.  I was amazed at how quickly three tons of animal can rot and disappear.  We had scrambled down into the gully to find a pile of partially buried bones.  Somaat showed me where he thought the elephant had lost its footing in the mud, slipped and slid down a steep slope and ended up in the stream bed.  I still could not work it out.  It was just a mass of mud and bones, and bugs and wriggling things.  And the smell.  The Tiger Balm helped mask it to some extent, especially after I realised that the best thing to do is actually breath through your nose.  The smell was so powerful that breathing through one's mouth started the gag reflex.  We cleared mud and bamboo away and I started to see bones that looked familiar, spine, shoulder blades, a hip, but no head.  We wanted to get to that, to check if there were any tusks, but we couldn’t find it.  We pulled bones aside and piled them up, small ones in sack, big ones in a heap.  The surgical gloves were soon shredded and the masks hot, sweaty and pointless.  We found four perfect foot pads, cartilaginous and rubbery.  In some places gooey white flesh, heaving with larvae of millions of insects, slid off the bones and pooled in the holes in the earth.  Finally we found the skull.  It was buried completely under the body of the elephant.  It must have slid down the slope, and hit the bottom head first and broken its neck.

Mondulkiri, April 2006

It is surprisingly easy to get used to sleeping in a hammock.  I get much better sleep than I do in a tent, on a wooden platform, or on a hardwood floor.  Generally they are great.  There are a lot of pluses for using them during field trips.  They are light and small, they don’t take long to put up, and you can put them more or less anywhere, it doesn’t matter if you are on a slope or rocky ground.

It is, however, surprisingly complicated.  When we get to our camp site, which is usually near one of the few permanent pools that last through the 6 month long dry season, we have to scout around for a good place to hang the hammocks.  This is not as easy as it sounds.  We need to find the right number of trees of the right size and the right distance apart.  This involves lots of pacing around, spreading of arms and shaking of trees.  I have not got my eye in yet, and usually have to have somebody else tell me which trees to use.  But I can now tie on the hammock using some special knot that I have been taught.  This bit is tricky too, one has to judge the right tension.  Not so tight that the hammock is too narrow and stiff, but not so loose that it sags leaving you with your arse on the ground and you legs over your head.  About one in three times I get this right first time.  Otherwise there is a process of constant fine tuning.

Then the moment of truth.  I think that only after 10 nights was I finally confident that the whole thing was not going to come crashing down.  But even now I sit down gingerly and let the thing take my weight.  Cords twang, trees bend, but it holds.  The hammocks we use have built in mosquito net which is great and come night fall I unzip the side, crawl into my little womb-like space and stretch out.  When it was dry I would lie back and look up though gaps in the canopy at the stars and moon.  The first couple of nights I have to say I did find it a little claustrophobic in the hammock with mossie net combo.  One is basically sleeping in a 7ft long, 2 ft diameter tube, but after a hard day chasing elephant crap I am usually asleep in seconds.  I have even now mastered the skill of sleeping on my side, and in the foetal position.

Rain?, no problem.  Firstly you rig a tarpaulin, which is easy as you just string it from the trees that your hammock is tied to.  There is something else that I had not considered however.  Rain runs down the tree trunk, then down the hammock cords soaking down through the fabric until you have a wet bum.  Thankfully my crafty companions have a solution to this, sticks.  One cuts a notched stick and prop this between the tree and the hammock.  The stick needs to be long enough so that the knot on the tree is below it.  This way the cords run up from over the top of the stick and the hammock is suspended between the sticks like a cantilevered bridge.  That way the water cannot run down the cords.  I still don’t know understand how these little sticks can take all my weight.  I guess I need to be an engineer with cut out pictures of the space shuttle on my wall to comprehend that one.  Whatever, it means you stay dry.

They are not perfect however.  Two main things annoy me about them.  There’s nowhere to put my stuff.  I have to spread my rucksack, binoculars, books and other assorted paraphernalia of a 21st century gentleman naturalist on the ground below the hammock, under the tarp.  If it rains heavily they tend to end up sitting in mud.  At night when I am finally ensconced in my cocoon I listen to the BBC and read a New Yorker by torch light.  But when I want to sleep I have to unzip the side and unceremoniously dump this stuff into the dirt.  There’s not even somewhere for me to put my timepiece.  

More frustratingly than that is that nothing stays where I put it.  I carefully put my sleeping mat (for extra back support and mosquito protection), t-shirt and sleeping sheet in the hammock before I climb in.  The moment I sit down it all slides down and gathers around my backside.  I swing my legs up, lie down, and spend the next couple of minutes trying to fish things out from under me, squirming and wriggling to spread my sheet out and put my t-shit under my head.  Meanwhile the hammock is swaying back and forth precariously and my companions are laughing, saying my tree will fall down.

Mondulkiri, March 2006

I am not sure I will ever get used to sleeping in a hammock.  I swung my legs around and sat up.  My spine creaked and groaned.  The kettle was on, the gibbons were singing, it was time to get up.

So far this field trip had been a load of crap.  Which, unusually enough, is actually a good thing.  I have been out with one of our teams collecting elephant faecal DNA samples.  So far we had collected 33 of from this site, which was significantly better than I was expecting.  Why are we collecting itsy little bits of dung?  Well it is all really rather clever.  These, and hopefully many more samples, will be sent to the USA where smart people in lab coats with pipettes and big machines will be able to extract elephant DNA from the poo and then tell us more or less how many elephants there are in the area.  This is only the second time this has been tried for Asian elephants, and it seems to me ever so high tech, and 21st century.  I bet Watson and Crick never predicted that their little helical discovery would be used to count elephants in Cambodia.  All we have to do is make sure that we find the elephants and their dung.  So we have 3 teams out scouring the forest for fresh dung.  Much to the bemusement of Amboyn, our expert elephant tracker, this means not only visiting area where people have reported elephants recently, but also going to areas that everybody else knows full well never have any elephants.  But we are slaves to sound science (that’s the WCS way) and so have to look just to prove that there are no elephants, or something.

This has involved tramping along rivers, over ridges and under thickets of bamboo.  I have come to the conclusion that unlike parakeets, elephants and interior designers I do not like bamboo.  It trips you and scratches you and stabs you and gets snagged on one’s pack.

When we finally find dung, and it needs to be fresh, damp, fragrant dung, we don latex gloves, and take a clean plastic fork.  About a square inch of crap is teased from the outside of one lump (or as us experts call it, a bolus) of crap and put about a in plastic tube.  Time for random scatological facts.  Did you know that the average Asian Elephant defecates 18 times per day.  And each dump includes about 8 boli.  You see, now I really am talking a load of shite.

Anyway, having used the gloves and fork once we throw them away (or more likely use them as fire starters).  Once the sample is taken we have to destroy the dung, to make sure we do not resample it.  The most effective way of doing this is by giving it a hefty kick.  Fresh dung fragments and splatters all over the place a most satisfactory manner. I enjoyed this part.  During this entire rigmarole Amboyn usually sits back, lights a cigarette and looks on with a quiet smile on his face.

This, the last morning, I sat with my coffee and waited for my delicious and hearty breakfast of white rice and salted fish.  The sun was up, burning off a few wisps of mist that hung over the low hills.  The gibbons had stopped for the morning, but had been replaced the resounding Ka-WOW of peacocks somewhere behind me in the woods.  We were camped at Sre Pleng, an area of saltlicks and swamps, forests and grasslands that is one of the most important parts of the Seima Biodiversity Conservation Area.  It was our last day, we had a few more samples to collect before the pickup came to pick us up.  Yesterday we had found some very fresh dung, it was practically still steaming.  We had been giddy with excitement, not only did it mean more samples, but that the elephants were not far away.  Later, after the serious science stuff was complete, I asked Amboyn if we could go and find the elephants themselves.  He looked at me, trying to decide if I was simply naïve, a moron or mad, quite possibly all three.  You see contrary to the words of Mr Paul Simon, elephants are not kindly (or dumb), they are actually quite mean, but then again “The elephants are cantankerous buggers” would not scan as well.  Most people around here avoid elephants, not actively go after them.  Then again normal people don’t wear rubber gloves and collect small pieces of excrement either, so he shrugged and led me off to track the elephants.

Phnom Penh, December 2005

Charlie thinks that I am Santa Claus.  We are not sure why, but it started a little over a year ago.  Charlie is the 3 year old son of my colleague, Tom.  He and his wife, Laura, were my generous hosts when I came for an interview in late 2005, and then again when I first moved here.  This may be where it all stemmed from.  My first visit coincided with the Phnom Penh Christmas Bazaar, which was indeed truly bizarre.  I helped Laura with the boys as we looked at stalls selling nick-nacks for charity, listened to a group of orphans sing Christmas carols (bah-humbug) and watched the man twist and bend balloons into such amusing shapes as poodle, and an AK47.  There was also a Santa at this event.  Some poor expat sweating it out in a nylon suit and itchy fake beard.  So maybe Charlie remembers meeting Santa and me on the same day, therefore I am Santa.  Alternatively he remembers something about me and Christmas after his parents told him when my birthday is, so clearly I am Santa.