The lost worlds that shape us

#32—Drinking with the mafia and growing old and grumpy.

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your weekly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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I hadn’t got up that morning with a plan to go to a private bar at a Russian mafioso’s hinterland compound, so I was somewhat amused to find myself in that very situation being greeted by an albino-like man with a large golden python wrapped around his shoulders. These sorts of things can happen when you travel through the developing world.

It was 2005 and, backpacking around Cambodia with an old school friend, we two Australian women in our mid-20s had pulled up in a quiet seaside port town on the country’s south coast and found ourselves inside a postcard. Its clean golden beaches were shaded by palms, bordered by a modest town, and home to a friendly community that was pleasantly surprised to see visitors. It was one of those places where the local children followed you around giggling, shyly hoping you’d give them pencils for school. Not enough tourists came here for the locals to have wasted much effort on trying to make money from us. There was no spruiking or haggling. In every sense of the word, it was a getaway.

It was here we met Borey, a bright-eyed Cambodian man barely in his 20s. He was keen to practice his English and show us around, and rather excited to be playing host to two young Australian women. The three of us would cram onto his little motorcycle to scoot up to lookouts or drop in to say hi to his mum in their modest concrete-block home. We had assumed he would want to be paid for his efforts—something common in more developed tourist destinations, but he genuinely didn’t. If anything, he was quite smitten with my friend.

Perhaps Borey was trying to impress us, or maybe he was just curious to see it for himself (my guess is a little of both) when he asked if we’d like to go to a bar on the outskirts of town. The town lacked nightlife, at least, that Western-style bar variety, which was refreshing. But Borey had never been to a bar and we could tell the idea excited him, so we said yes. He told us the man who owned the bar was a Russian who, for some reason, couldn’t live in Russia and now drove around their town in a Humvee (we later saw this for ourselves—it’s hard not to spot a pimped-up Humvee in a third-world country town). Suffice to say, everyone knew the Russian.

The Snake, water colour sketch by Alia Parker.

Borey’s little motorcycle wound its way out of town, through the dusk, alongside paddocks and up over the hills to what was quite a modern compound, the front of which led into a bar. We were greeted by the party-boy himself with his entourage and Burmese python. The bar was quiet, it felt like we had just turned up to a wealthy man’s bachelor pad to hang out with him, his friends and an even greater number of dolled-up Cambodian women, which I’m confident in saying, were prostitutes. This was not the sort of place ordinary Cambodians would or could afford to come. Those here clearly earnt their money in the underworld, which given its strategic proximity to the port, we can assume involved drug, and quite possibly, weapons trafficking. Like many before them, these peacocks in a chicken coop were there to exploit Cambodia’s loose regulations and corrupt officials. We sat on a couch near the bar and ordered some drinks for ourselves and Borey. It had crossed my mind that perhaps he would receive a kick-back for bringing us there, but looking at that young duck out of water as he sat silently sipping his beer, uncomfortably tense, it seemed highly unlikely. And besides, drug trafficking mafiosos don’t exactly need a few extra beer dollars from budget backpackers. They seemed suitably disinterested in our presence. I don’t remember whose idea it was to leave after those first drinks, but Borey looked relieved to make his escape.

It’s fascinating to observe how the places we visit imprint on us; how our knowledge of the world is formed by our experiences. Cambodia was a composition of sadness, resilience and tenacity; its people—survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide that wiped out 2 million people, a quarter of the country’s population, and the decedents of those survivors scarred with intergenerational trauma—carried with them an understanding about humanity that most will never grasp; its beauty and its terror. I remember their friendliness, their humour and their passionate rants against a government they said did nothing for its people; our young alcoholic tuk-tuk driver around Angkor Wat, his bubbly smile, his obvious pain, his seething rants about tourists whose entire experience of Cambodia consisted of a limousine ride from the airport to their 5-star hotel to Angkor Wat and back to the airport. His insistence that we see the real Cambodia, which conveniently passed by some elaborate home rice wine distilleries. Cambodia was a country of passionate people intensely aware they had drawn the short straw in life and wanted the world to see them. These are the things that imprinted on me.

I was reminded of this in M. E. Rothwell’s recent essay on Meaningscapes in which he said:

“This is why travel is always considered to be such a significant part of a person's identity, should they have had the means and opportunity to do so. Places leave an imprint on who we are, on how we think. This fact is inescapable. We would not be the same people without those places. That's why we cling to these markers — these places we’ve been to, lived in, escaped from — we need them to make sense of who we are.”

It’s true, we would not be the same people without those places, and that’s perhaps why I’ve no interest in ever going back to that part of Cambodia. I know it would break my heart.

You see, the older I get, the more I feel like the world I know no longer exists. The places and people that formed me, my memories, are locked in time, travelling ever further into the past. I deeply sympathise with the stereotypical grumpy old person who’s resistant to change because I’ve come to realise that this sort of change is cloaked in mourning, not just for nostalgia, but for a lost part of ourselves. Our imprints have been messed with.

I get disorientated when I return to the area of Western Sydney where I grew up. Entire suburbs exist where paddocks of Shetland ponies once grazed (their demure size oddly fits well in that space that’s neither country or city), rows of houses have made way for bus lanes, two-lane roads have become four, high-rises tower over once quiet streets, train lines and light rail run where nothing did before. There is something familiar, yet so far removed from anything I know that it feels sadly jarring. I’m displaced, and I know this is what it would feel like to return to the lost worlds where I have spent time in the past. Worlds change.

If one thing is certain, that world in a coastal town called Sihanoukville in Cambodia is well and truly lost. Like the Russian mafia that came to exploit it, others followed. The laid-back paradise of my memory is now a mass of empty city skyscrapers, remnants of the more than 100 casinos that had been predominantly built and owned by Chinese investors—part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Money laundering and human trafficking became rife, they still are, and government officials are complicit in it, locking trafficked people behind barbed wire-laced buildings and forcing them to work on online scams. Such scams bring in more than US$12.5 billion to Cambodia annually, which is about half the country’s ‘formal’ GDP, according to a report by the US Institute for Peace. Ironically, when surging crime finally forced the Cambodian government to crack down by outlawing the online gambling licenses many of the casinos used to operate, COVID-19 hit and almost overnight, dodgy investors fled leaving a ghost town in their wake. Over 1,000 construction sites were abandoned, employment disappeared, and the charming battle-scarred Cambodian people of Sihanoukville, delicately defiant and vividly aware of the injustices inflicted upon them, now and throughout history, were once again left to find a way to survive.

That world I walked though almost 20 years ago, the way I saw it, those giggling children, Borey on his motorcycle, and my friend and I on the beach, the sand between our toes, that world is lost, except in one place—inside me.

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Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week

• Meaningscapes—by

  M. E. Rothwell
  via Soaring Twenties Social Club

  Thoughts on how places imprint meaning.

• Hà Nội: street scenes and Circle K tour—by

  Laura Jeffries

  Laura’s been posting a series of enjoyable photo essays from her travels in Vietnam.

• The Weight of Emptiness—by

  Peter Blinky

  A beautiful exploration of emptiness and its ability to create form.

  

  Etymology Monday

  For those who missed it on Substack Notes, this week’s word is: soul

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