Be more Ernest

Day 4 - Phnom Penh

We'd waited a day longer in Phnom Penh than we would have otherwise chosen to. The Bon Om Touk water festival's climactic day caused this. As I've said people travel to the capital from the countryside to support their local team of rowers. Forty or fifty men fill a long, narrow boat painted in a single primary colour. The rower's shirts match the colour so that when they are racing it all forms one machine of many parts heaving down the river towards a finish line that will decide whether they return to their villages and towns as heroes or failures. Two boats at a time race, starting at a point on the river I could only barely see through the haze of the day. They pull their oars rhythmically through the brown water and are kept in time by the cox standing on the prow, standing so stable and sure that he could be on top of a million year old mountain. The crowd sits on a concrete incline that reaches from the promenade above down to the muddy waterline. The incline causes parts of picnics to tumble past me every now and then. An unopened beer is chased, a tomato is left to its fate. A roar comes from a section of the crowd when some particular boat wins a race. The wearing of team colours does not extend to the fans so it was hard to know who anyone was supporting until they cheered. It hardly mattered to me and there was none of that kind of support that requires against its yin of love a yang of hate. I was a happy part of an event that I could understand the mechanics of but not the significance or the emotion. I was glad of that because it meant it wasn't altered by the western gaze, what I mean by that is that it hadn't been made into something that it wasn't because people from other countries have lots of money and little time. It is self-centred to expect foreign countries and foreign experiences to fit themselves within your frame of reference. It is self-centred to feel let down by them when they do. To be a modern traveller is to be hard to please. To be a goldilocks where an experience is too fake or too real and so rarely in between. If I am being cynical then I mistrust any cultural experience that comes too easily. But I liked the boat races, they didn't feel inauthentic. There wasn't any great crescendo to them, the boats went about their business until at some point the racing was done. As dusk fell the boats were slowly paddled back up river to receive the acclaim of the crowds still packing the riverbank. Hundreds of coloured balloons were released from the opposite shoreline and from barges as the last of the racing boats disappeared behind a bend in the river. A fine spectacle came to a close.