Among the Indochineans

I write this in Siem Reap, soon after returning from a fish massage. In this activity you perch on the side of a large fish tank, dangle your feet in the water, and enjoy dozens of tiny fish nibble and suck at your dirty, leathery hooves. It takes some getting used to. They find their way into all the delicious little crevices in search of your nutritious dead skin.

The little guys were particularly interested in the Western seaboard of my left foot. I don't know why. Also, when I was joined in the tank by another fellow, mine were the tank's most popular feet by a fair margin. I don't know what that says about my feet. Thankfully the treatment comes with a free beer, which is just what one feels like on such occasions.

I am in Cambodia now. For the first two weeks of travelling I was based, with friends, in the North of Vietnam. On the return from Sapa, in the hills, I had my first collision with food poisoning. At first I thought it was indigestion. In replacement of food, on the bus I treated myself to an entire packet of pringles followed by a full packet of oreos. For the following five hours my meal sat malevolently in my stomach reminding me, like an impulsive tattoo, of my folly.

When we arrived at the hostel I immediately retired to a top bunk and dozed and squirmed discontentedly for an afternoon. What I thought was junk food indigestion transformed into illness when I rose, staggered to the bathroom, and energetically regurgitated into the toilet bowl. My vomit was a curious oreo-brown.

While food poisoning is apparently eternal, other aspects of travel are changing. According to my friend Joe, whom I have been with for almost all of my trip, on one front things have moved at lightning speed. Three years ago, when he was last here, travellers would go to internet cafes to reconnect with their lives. Now, in 2015, internet cafes have essentially ceased to exist. They have been slain by Moore's Law and the rise of portable computing, supported by the provision of free wi-fi at just about every single hotel, hostel and eating establishment extant. After ordering your food, the next question tends to be, 'And what is the wi-fi password?' In five weeks we have stayed at only one place without free internet.

A further observation on our connectedness is how football has penetrated here as deeply as anywhere. Youths in European football shirts are a part of the scenery, both in the city and the countryside. All of the major clubs, from Germany to the UK, are represented, as well as a fair proportion of the minor ones. In Vietnam there are Manchester United-endorsed potato chips and you can acquire an Arsenal-branded credit card in Indonesia. Premier League clubs regularly tour the area on pre-season money-spinning projects (United claims 50m fans in Indonesia, where there are also 175,000 of the club's own branded credit card issued in the country, according to the Financial Times). Yet a quick scan of my memory fails to produce a single South-East Asian footballer of any note, in any league, since professional football began. This is in a region of some six hundred million football-mad people.

There is no escaping globalisation. This is not always a bad thing. Our group elected to welcome in the New Year on a package tour of Halong Bay. The unfavourable incentives of these tours mean that, because tour operators will jam bookings onto whichever of the junks have spare room, irrespective of group size, how much they paid or any other relevant detail, the individual junks have no reputation to protect. All they need to do is float to catch their portion of the torrent of undiscerning backpackers on rape-and-pillage tours of South-East Asia, for whom Halong Bay is obligatory.

In our case our vessel was manned by a preposterously resentful crew who sullenly served limp cabbage, soggy tofu and questionable fish. For dinner on the first night they provided one plate of hot chips for each table, which we fell upon deliriously. Eating plays such an important part in travel as each meal time becomes its own gastronomic adventure that you become surprisingly annoyed when it is taken away. Luckily, however, even on board a boat in the middle of the gigantic, arcing bay you have options. Women in rowboats ply the waters of Halong, pulling up to the junks and offering you a selection of food, drink, cigarettes and cold beer. Oreos, pringles and snickers bars were all haggled for and purchased with authentic relief and we happily made our contribution to the commercial empires of Kraft, Kellogg and Mars, Incorporated.

After bidding farewell to two of our group and flying the length of Vietnam, the remaining three of us boarded a bus to take us from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh, in Cambodia. Here, in a crowd of Vietnamese, Cambodians and assorted world-travellers, we sat in front of three New Zealand girls. As the bus crawled out of the HCMC conurbation, we discovered that they were ex-students of Wellington High School. With further uncanniness, our journeys became intertwined as we also encountered each other in a restaurant on the island of Koh Rong, in the Gulf of Thailand, on the pier at Sihanoukville on the mainland and then, a week later, we pulled up in our tuktuk to a hostel in Siem Reap to find them waiting outside for a night bus to take them in the opposite direction. We checked in and were given the room they had vacated moments earlier.

This isn't the first time such a thing has happened to me. Immediately after leaving school I moved to the UK for a year. On the first of my holidays I met a friend in Edinburgh on my eighteenth birthday. There, in a pub on the Royal Mile, about to celebrate my stumbling into adulthood with my first pub-purchased pint of beer, somebody called my name. I turned around to discover two teachers who had just left my High School in Wanganui and emigrated to the UK parallel to me. One of the pair had been our school's designated hot teacher and after a brief chat and the swapping of numbers, I spent the following days fantasising about the sort of suave rendezvous that a teenage mind produces. I haven't seen them since.

Before heading south to the Cambodian coast, we hailed a tuktuk to take us out to the killing fields. The tuktuk is the quintessential method of travel in this part of the world. Compared to a car, the barrier between the passenger of a tuktuk and the world through which they motor is non-existent. The sounds, and most importantly the smells, of your location arrive undiminished to your ears and nose. You can practically reach out and touch those around you on the road. So much so that it is advisable to keep rather a tight hold on your belongings while in your tuktuk because apparently enterprising and unscrupulous people will do just that. Furthermore, whenever you gather speed you receive an energetic and unavoidable light dusting of airborne dirt and insects that serves to enliven the whole experience.

It was on one of these expeditions that the essential strangeness of travelling in Cambodia struck me. Looking around at the busy Cambodians, the thought arises: Every single one of these people has had their lives shaped by the Khmer Rouge. Anybody over the age of about forty either participated in, or was brutalised by, a project in search of a Socialist utopia that saw the slaughter of two million people, many with knives, axes and farm equipment. The regime of Pol Pot liquedated one in four Cambodians. At the killing fields we were shown a tree on which inculcated soldiers bludgeoned infants to death by swinging them by their feet against the trunk. This was thirty-five years ago.

The proximity is chilling yet, strangely, I can't quite identify in what way the four year inferno of the Khmer Rouge has actually shaped this culture. The Cambodians are among the friendliest people I have met (warmer than the more gregarious Vietnamese). Perhaps this is because of their national nightmare, or perhaps it predates it (if it is possible to reconcile friendliness and genocide). Whatever the ripples of history are, they are present and would probably emerge with clarity to anyone who spends some proper time among the people.

According to Joe the islands of Cambodia are similar to the islands of Thailand. That is to say that they are tropical, white-sanded slices of heaven reliably decorated with litter. On all the beaches I have seen the plant life at the top of the beach is entangled with plastic bags, beer cans and chip packets. A traveler is greeted by the uncomfortable juxtaposition of splendor and trash. On some islands like Koh Rong, the first one we visited, legions of young backpackers, enthusiastically help to despoil this paradise. The Cambodians are happy to do the same.

You can, however, frame pictures in a way so as to cut out the mess at the top of the beach and make your location look pristine and untouched. The result is that almost all beach pictures on the internet look something like this. Friends and observers will follow you there, expecting a Garden of Eden, only to be greeted with the same rubbish and detritus. They will then, without thinking, maintain the illusion by taking their own photographs so as to exclude the ugliness (understandably so: who would want the refuse of civilisation staining their holiday pictures). I found myself conspiring to do the exact same thing.

All of this isn't to say that it ruins the experience. Far from it. You can find a spot on a beach, some of which you can have entirely to yourself, and turn away from the debris behind you to focus on what is front of you. And what is in front of you is what you see in the pictures: turquoise, clear water, crisp white sand and open, wonderful skies. It really, truly, genuinely is stunning.

Yesterday marked thirty years of the rule of Cambodia's Prime Minister-cum-dictator Hun Sen. According to a copy of The Phnom Penh Post I picked up in a restaurant (whose tagline is, 'Successful People Read The Post'), "Today, true power resides not in the democratic institutions imported by the UN, but in the flows of influence and mutual obligation linking Hun Sen with dense networks of business and political elites". According to Human Rights Watch, Asia's longest reigning non-monarch has killed hundreds of opposition figures and trade union leaders, in a recent report titled, '30 Years of Hun Sen: Violence, Repression, and Corruption in Cambodia'.

Tomorrow our trio disbands and I move onwards to Bangkok for a few days of gathering last minute provisions before head to the Himalayas and the Kingdom of Bhutan.