10 days in sleaze street – Addis Ababa, ETHIOPIA

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Fake police or corrupt cops – Nairobi, KENYA

Outside a church disassembling its Sunday mass a self-declared “Christian” approached me. He wanted to talk life. I thought okay, what-the-hell. He asked many questions as he led me to a quiet, outdoor cafe. There he told me his story.

He, a Rwandan who’d trekked across mountains to escape the tribal massacres, was on a Kenyan transit visa and needed to get to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where he’d an uncle at the university who could help him. He asked me for money – $40 – so he could continue his journey, and I was replying no, sorry, when two men approached our table. One guy in a suit; the other dressed casual. Neither smiling.

They flashed ID – SECURITY / POLICE !

I thought – What-the-fuck? The bulky, casually-dressed dude took the Christian away as the other smaller, suited guy declared that the guy had been arrested. That he was a wanted terrorist! I thought this some kinda bad joke. And scoffed. The officer got shitty. He demanded to see my passport. I told him it was back at the hotel. He started asking questions: What was our business? What had we talked about? How did I know this man? He got aggressive; threatening me to take this situation seriously, to co-operate. 

The big man returned. They said they’d been watching us with binoculars from that tall circular tower – Nairobi’s landmark. They accused me of supplying him with false traveller’s cheques, then of giving him drugs. I started to shit myself: corrupt cops who wanna frame me for anything that pays.
 
The small, shrewd copper told me of the marijuana penalties. I replied I didn’t smoke. ”Not even cigarettes?!” demanded the other. ”No.” They inspected my hands. No stains. I couldn’t fathom whether they were convincing con men or corrupt cops.

And was that “Christian” part of it? They told me to stop lying, threatening – “Do you want to talk here or at the station.”  I replied “Here”; knowing that if these guys were cops it’d be very
difficult / very expensive getting released from a station, especially if they began the paperwork. I continued being polite, patient but firm.

Maybe I can get rid of them with a small bribe?

They insisted I show my traveller’s cheques, to compare mine with the suspects. If they didn’t match, then I was clear. I didn’t trust them. And was reluctant to reveal my hidden moneybelt (luckily, I’d left my visible moneybelt with my passport back in the hotel). I didn’t budge. I was to be charged.
 
They asked how I felt about spending time in a cell.

As they escorted me across the park another man appeared. The boss. I went through my story again. He too demanded to see my traveller’s cheques. A car was now waiting. I knew if I got in the car – or was forced, I was in for some serious trouble whether these guys were cops or con men. I then decided to show them my stash, and with their permission I walked alittle way off and out of their view I pulled a $20 cheque from my hidden moneybelt. I reckoned I could handle losing 20 bucks. I showed them the Amex cheque, a distinctively Australasian issue because it had – Westpac Bank – printed across it in red. This I pointed out: that the suspect couldn’t possibly have the same issue. It stumped them.

They wanted a couple of bucks – for beer, then said I was free to go.

During that hour I remained uncertain of their real identity. It seemed likely they were con men yet, as corrupt cops they fitted that ruthless stereotype typical of Hollywood movies depicting the Third World. Either possibility seemed plausible …

                                                         *

PS: a clipping from a Kenyan paper I came across while there: The Daily Nation: letters to the editor: POLICE MARRED HAPPY TOUR

[I and a fellow Kenyan recently toured Tanzania for five days ... as might be expected, we bought a few things, including three t-shirts, five cloth materials, a food mixer and a souvenir. We set off for Nairobi ... our luggage and papers were checked at the border and okayed by immigration officials. We then boarded a matatu (taxi-van) for Nairobi. We got to a road block in Kajiado and were asked to open our bags - only my friend and I. The police found in our bags the items earlier mentioned and asked us to produce "permits" for them, which, of course, we did not have. They asked the driver to leave us behind but he instead pleaded with them to have mercy on us. The police said they would consider it if my friend and I bribed them with Sh500 each. My friend and I were scared ... the police finally conceded a Sh100 discount and accepted Sh400 from each of us. The second nightmare came just after Maasai Girl's School, where we found another road block. The same process followed and bags were turned upside down again. Two policemen took Sh300 from us ...]

> photos of Nairobi & Kenya

Lingering vibes – Saigon, VIETNAM

FROM MY DIARY:

SAIGON (Ho Chi Minh City): 24th June 1994: Monsoonal torrents drenching the city; rain pounding for hours; damage confined to flooding streets, slower scooters, scattered commuters. Unconfirmed reports indicate that the siege has lifted, that Saigon has been relieved by the sun.

                                                                              *
 
It’s great to be back in Saigon. Am staying in the same hotel. The view from my (4th floor) window shows worn-out urban Asia: shabby, decayed concrete blocks jumbled, half-finished, and continuing to grow, roof-tops with low brick walls and bamboo-scaffolding, balconies sprouting gardens, or boarded-up for extra room. And above this crusted, hap-hazard skyline looms mist and drizzle.
 
All day – splattering.
  Rain and iron.
  Rain and wood.
  Rain and concrete.
  Been rainin’ since I woke … since I woke in this room with a vibe: like G.I Joe has been here before me: bonking with a Vietnamese gal to sound of a storm.
 
Nothin’ seems changed since the Yanks left. Military radar, and row upon row of concrete hangars and miles of old tarmac at Saigon airport. The streets crowded by cyclos (cycle-rickshaws), scooters, bicycles, conical hats … but clearly lacking cars. On the hotel wall the SAIGON TOURIST agency rules state:  

1. Show your passport with valid entry / exit visa at the reception …
2. Do not bring into the hotel: weapons, toxics, explosives …
5. Prostitutes are not allowed in the hotel …
 
Maybe something has changed during the 20 years since the Communist North seized South Vietnam. Once, Saigon was famous for it’s sex.

                                                                                  *

At a cafe I met a woman selling postcards. She wanted to talk. I bought her a bowl of noodles and a Coke for lunch, and during our conversation – in broken English – came her offer of sex. The idea attracted me. (An unexpected mid-day romp … why not?) The problem was being busted by the police – she was afraid. So instead of going back to my hotel she took me to a discreet, family-run place; up some stairs, behind locked doors then into a room overlooking the street; the noise entering thru the shuttered windows as she showered, as I lay on the bed drinking beer, fan-blades swishing at the humidity. I paid for the room. I paid for the beers. I paid her price – 10 American dollars. But I forget her name.
 
She looked younger than her 23 years. Her body tiny, skinny, weakened by the birth of a baby (a year ago). Since then her boyfriend had left; she now lived with her mother. And that afternoon I was drawn into her world, lured by her beautiful but sad gaze, by those eyes of despair.
 
But our encounter brought me more. Whenever we met in the street, she demanded gifts or soft drinks or food. My (lust-induced) goodwill became an unexpected sponsorship. A contract I’d not foreseen. An English-speaking cyclo driver, who I’d befriended and who knew this woman said, “She says, you belong to her”.
 
But I, like G.I Joe, left Saigon to fend for herself.

The killing of a country – Phnom Penh #2, CAMBODIA

FROM MY DIARY:

Tonight, as I rest on my bed and write, I feel uneasy, still queasy, you see, I’ve several reasons for feeling sick.   

Earlier I’d bought a hard-boiled egg from a street vendor. I sat on a stool beside her bucket as she cracked the shell, then handed me the spoon to scoop out a well-cooked yoke. Firm white and yellow – but containing the tiny black body of a nearly-born bird. Fuck! I thought. I can’t eat that! I ain’t eating that! I must’ve looked pale: I felt ill. I paid the woman, excusing myself after the first teaspoon of hard-rubber. She smiled. So did I. My first taste of Cambodian street food – this a national delicacy, has killed my desire to eat another egg ( … for many months).
     
This afternoon, I rode on a motorbike along a lonely rural road to arrive at fields of healthy green grass surrounding dozens of dirt pits – littered with decayed human bits, rotting rag and bone poking from the earth; cows grazing as an Autumn breeze swept the spindly coca palms across a cloudy grey day, yet, still the sun shone, there in the chilly vibes of sudden death. There at one of Cambodia’s many Killing Fields.

There stood these signs in the pits:    
 
GRAVE  No. 6:  Mass grave of 450 victims.
GRAVE  No. 5: Mass grave of more than 100 victims. Children and women whose majority were naked.
GRAVE  No. 7:  Mass grave of 166 victims without heads.

I wandered round the Killing Fields with a Cambodian in his 40s (the motorbike-taxi rider; he’d survived the onslaught, his family had not). He pointed to clumps of flax bushes – their large branches edged with hard serrations, and these he said were used by the Khmer Rouge to hack-saw heads off living people (In the Bangkok Post I’d read about recent atrocities in Cambodia; how KR guerillas had hacked-off the heads of Cambodian Army officers with a blunt, rusty saw.)

At the pagoda serving as a memorial to the dead, peering through the glass-side walls were zillions of busted skulls and bones, bits stacked from floor to ceiling. Near this human pagoda a sign read: ” … 86 of the 129 mass graves were unearthed in this extermination camp and 8985 corpse were found … All the victims (peasants, workers, intellectuals, ministers, diplomats, foreigners, women, children) detained and tortured during interrogation at Tuol Sleng (S-21) were later sent to Choueng Ek (where I stand; peaceful farmland) for liquidation … We are absolutely determined not to let this genocidal regime to reoccur in Kampuchea.”       

Down the hotel corridor – amid the early-evening noise flooding from the street – comes the reverberation of a person puking. I anticipate more …and again comes his heave and splatter. Then for a third time, he violently vomits, then blows his nose, raking his throat and gobbing. And me, I still feel sickened. Dead chickens in edible eggs. Decapitated people in pits. Then there’s S-21…
 
A bleak prison camp … one of the interrogation rooms is empty, bar a steel bed-frame. A large photo on the wall shows the same steel bed with a mutilated body upon it – dead, and the floor wet with blood; another victim hacked with rakes, hammers, hoes. It is said that KR guards often laughed, as victims screamed, as skin was torn, shredded, ripped by steel.

                    THE SECURITY REGULATIONS
                     (quoted / translated from the walls of S-21)

 1.  You must answer accordingly to my questions. Don’t turn them away .
 2.  Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.
 3.  Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
 4.  You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
 5.   Don’t lie to me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
 6.   While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
 7.  Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do  something, you must do it right away without protesting. 
 8.   Don’t make pretexts about Kampuchea in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
 9.   If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of electric wire.
 10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you shall get either 10 lashes or 5 shocks of electric discharge.

Phnom Penh’s night is noisy and humid as I draw on a joint, as I reflect on the Killings Fields and S-21. Still I feel the vibes, hear the victims, their fear and suffering remains in my head. My $2-a-night room – is a windowless cell; with only a bed and a fan – with only one speed. It rattles fast; whirling and mocking me: chop-chop-chop. (Like them, I could lose my head.) Here on my bed, knees hugging chest, I’m near-blinded. The fluorescent-white-light, the formica-white walls, the shiny-white floor tiles are glaring; as traffic hums, as horns beep / shriek from the street. It’s too much. I try to shut it out, imagining angels singing – suddenly a southern gospel, becomes an air-raid siren, then the sadistic laughter … of prison guards. Everything in my room, in my mind – is tortured. I see cows chomping human-fertilised grass, trees that hack-saw heads, a pagoda of busted, smiling skulls. I am sick from the killing of a country.

Recent U.N. discoveries of more Killing Fields brings the latest estimates of the number of Khmer Rouge victims now at 2 MILLION MURDERED. 

City under shadow – Phnom Penh #1, CAMBODIA

FROM MY DIARY:

From the balcony of this run-down hotel I gaze along the street to where the pace of life is slow, calm, nonchalant – as dense, creeping grey slowly smothers the sun and sky. Another monsoonal rain-rage shadows the city, threatening to spill. For an hour I’ve watched the grey growing closer; blacker. The pace of the street picks up as chilled air alerts. With the first drips dropping – vendors fold up their trays of cigarettes, remove their stools and goods from the pavement; women shelter their noodle stalls with plastic sheets as a motorcyclist honks past a slow-churning rickshaw in this quiet, canyon of crusted concrete – where opposite me, clothes hang along the railing of an apartment-block balcony, where an old man sits bare-chested, reading a magazine, seemingly unaware / unconcerned with the approaching storm.

But really, two shadows loom over Phnom Penh: the capital of Cambodia (once Kampuchea and still gripped by a recent, brutal, unrelenting history). Since the Nam conflict Cambodia has been thrashed by civil unrest and war.

When Viet-Cong guerillas used eastern Cambodia as a corridor to attack into South Vietnam, the US responded with a temporary invasion and B-52 bombing. Then with the country embroiled in civil war the Communist Khmer Rouge – led by Pol Pot, seized control of Cambodia in 1975. There followed chaos as the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated the cities to set-up a radial agrarian society; to ban the state religion Buddhism, and to commit mass genocide as the country remained closed to the outside world. During the Killing Fields period of late 1978, Cambodia was dragged into further turmoil when provoked by Khmer Rouge attacks, the by-now-communist Vietnam (the South fell to the North in 1975) invaded Cambodia to kick-out the KR and set-up a pro-Vietnamese government. Civil war followed – commie against commie – til the Vietnamese left a decade later in 1989. Despite the Paris Peace Accords and deployment of the U.N – Khmer Rouge guerilla armies still create problems in Cambodia.

 So after 2 decades of instability there lingers this heavy, haunting vibe.

Phnom Penh remains threatened from its past: soldiers stand in the central market and checkpoints come alive at night. Phnom Penh is a city that has been left to decay; there is a stark lack of newness. The university was sacked by the (anti-intellectual) Khmer Rouge and the tower block remains a skeleton without windows, the campus entrance tangled with barbed wire. Roads are pot-holed. Inner-city tenements stacked like shabby egg cartons, their once white walls now worn and blotted by dark bare-concrete like thick mould. And during the monsoon season this damp decaying city seems even greyer. 

Gloomy.

It exudes a sombre vibe. People in the streets stare, taking some moments to trust, to smile. Phnom Penh is a place desperately needing fresh paint, needing a fun fair to hit town – to lighten the load, a country anxiously awaiting a fresh chapter to begin in Cambodian history. That of lasting Peace and Hope. 

A scooter-taxi guy I befriended, who’d lost his family in times past, told me this: To see foreigners returning to Cambodia reassures Cambodians that finally, their country is safe.

Avoiding another accident, Tehran #1 – IRAN

Having been in a major bus accident on route to Tehran the prospect of another disaster was now looming straight ahead.

He drove like a maniac rushing home to rescue the oven fries he’d left baking by mistake, cutting lanes in an effort to get back before his house caught fire. And if this was the case he’d no worries about pulling the french fries out golden and crisp and not a minute overcooked. But being in Iran I guess this wasn’t the reason why he drove the way he did. I assumed french fries, hamburgers and Coke were no-no’s in Islamic Iran; believing Americana made the locals sick.

Downtown central Tehran

Over the years the media had created a bleak picture of Iran (usually the negative news – and it was this what stuck in my head): a closed society ruled by religion and hostile to the West, obsessed with martyrdom and wrecked by war. A land of crazies.

I felt this might be the case as the taxi driver grinned at me in his rearview mirror and said “Where you want?” Where do I want to go? Shit, he’s already asked me this twice. I realised – too late I’d taken the wrong taxi: the driver didn’t have a clue where I wanted to go. And he drove recklessly – not that I minded; I enjoyed the speed.

We cut lanes blindly, honking our way into gaps and tooting at anyone who did this to us.

Every second car around us was a Hillman Hunter with dented door panels or scratched and patched paintwork. This taxi was also a Hillman “Chariot” (as the Iranian versions are called). But it had no fancy extras -in fact, many were missing bits. Vital bits like bumpers. But at least this rattling wreck had a rear-view mirror – apparently not necessary as my driver used it only to maintain eye contact with me, and something from which to hang Koranic script and beads.

“Where you want mister?” “The Foreign Ministry!” He grinned in the mirror and said nothing. “Visa, you know?” I waved my passport in the air, stamping it with my fist.

From the taxi’s window came my first impressions of Tehran. A dusty-brown-concrete-block city, with L.A. style freeways clogged by cars. The motor-flow looped Tehran like mechanical spaghetti, strangling it like frayed rope. The city choked on its smog. And having arrived in late summer I could barely see the Elburz Mountains; they were hazy and lost, like my driver.

He pulled over and asked directions from a pedestrian for a second time, then we charged back into the traffic.

Iranian drivers displayed skills only seen in the West at demolition derbies. I wondered: Is there a road code here? Vehicles ran the gauntlet at intersections. Traffic lights didn’t work, nor were policemen present. Survival meant accelerate and swerve. And honk!

And continue honking. At one stage my driver got abused by a cyclist – who’d averted a crunching by fending-off our taxi with a hand-barge to the roof. At another intersection three cars circled a fallen cyclist, drivers holding up the flow as they bickered over the blame.

Potential accidents occurred every minute, often three within as many seconds. Scenes so chaotic that it is unimaginable to New Zealanders accustomed to orderly roads.

Motorists in Tehran practiced a road code that I’d seen in other developing nations, like some unwritten but respected motor hierarchy. The King-of-the-Road was the truck and everything
else gave way. Buses threatened cars and big cars fought smaller cars, while scooters – the greatest menace to the pedestrian tended to drive on both sides irrespective of direction, and also weaved along footpaths.

Accident scene abandoned (in Isfahan)

Later as a pedestrian in Tehran I was shown how to cross busy streets. After waiting for a break in the traffic – which never came, an old man grabbed my hand and led me. We dashed amongst the traffic, stopping mid-way as cars whizzed past, then hoping approaching cars would slow, we sprinted across before the gap closed.

After half-an-hour we’d found the Foreign Ministry. The driver left in a hurry as I strolled to the entrance. But a soldier greeted my cheerful “Hello!” with an expressionless, “No. Closed.”

His answer confused me: it was 10 a.m, mid-week. So I asked him again. “VISA, I need a visa extension.” “Closed. Tomorrow.” After some minutes of asking passers-by I found an English speaker. He said it was a public holiday. And whats-more I was at the wrong building – this was NOT the Foreign Ministry … I was lost in north Tehran and at least 5 cm off my out-of-date map.

At a bus stop I couldn’t read the Farsi destinations on the front of each bus. And it was only thanks to an elderly man’s help that I made my way by bus from north to central Tehran. I’d decided to get to Tubkani Square: it had been a struggle to board the crowded, battered surburban bus. And when this bus had arrived people rushed it like sharks to bleeding sailors. The old man grabbed my arm and we ploughed into a scrum of males squeezing through the rear door -three at once. You see, the front door was for women and the bus was segregated into two: women in black chadors in the front half and in the back, crammed the men.

As the bus drove down the tree-lined boulevand towards the concrete smear of central Tehran, the old man hardly spoke, just smiled. He told me when it was my stop. I thanked him, said good bye and disembarked from the crush and onto the hot, dusty streets.

I remember the old man’s words as we’d waited for the bus. “I am happy to be able to help you, he’d said, insisting on paying for my ticket. “I do not see many foreigners in Tehran. Before the Revolution many came here but since then I have seen only three Europeans. I hope your coming to Tehran is a sign that more Westerners will return …”