Life’s full of big questions that have yet to be answered to my satisfaction. For example, where does all the food from Masterchef go? They reckon Gordon does a fancy fry up for the crew after the contestants have schlepped back to their squalid auberge, but I find that hard to swallow. I reckon he grabs a bottle of bubbles and helms the Ramsey signature chopper to his Vegas gastropub before you can say “deconstructed wild squirrel pie.” And why is the actor who plays the scientist in the Darlie ad wearing a flesh-coloured deep V-neck under his white coat? It’s not a wardrobe choice I would have made to convey “unconvincing but innocuous expert toothpaste researcher looking at microscope in fake studio lab.” He is both unconvincing and nocuous in that get-up – I can see his chest pelt sprouting out the top. He’s got a gateway beard too. Man-bush and toothpaste lead me inexorably to hairs on soap. These questions keep me up all night, and not in a way I like.
My pre-eminent ponderment this past month is: where are all the other proper animals in the greater CharmingVille area? Why do I only see rheum-eyed cats and bow-legged Franken-dogs with unfortunate dentition, and that perpetually indignant monkey taunting ladyboys at Wat Phnom? Why are there only sparrows and sky rats, and one forlorn kestrel or similar no-mates raptor soaring Naga’s air con thermals? Why are there only rodents and roaches and 56 kinds of ants? Where are the koupreys and the leopards and the long-toed stints? The giant Cantor toitles and the Pileated gibbons? I guess I just answered my own question – this town is so full of imported prowlers and gluttons and home wreckers that everyone else has upped sticks and headed to the Cardamoms or is resting in peace in some enormous celestial ark, at last immune to the pillage of our terrestrial, domestic menagerie of doom. We needy bipeds have a lot to answer for.
Antipodeans like to think we got dibs on nature’s best bits. Our cuddliest animals are like fluffy aliens or experiments gone adorably wrong. But the tradeoff for having the world’s cutest fauna is that we also get the worst miscreants nature has to offer. In the universe’s sudden death version of rock-paper-scissors, the box jelly or the blue-ringed octopus beat a paltry lion king hands down, and they don’t even have hands. And did you see that prehistoric living fossil, the uncalled-for frilled shark, hauled aboard off Melbourne’s coast last week? 300 teeth and 80 million years, people. Within a stone’s throw of the MCG. Hey Vancouver, you can keep your prosthetic-eyed copper rockfish, eh.
While it’s not strictly alive, there’s enough roadkill on Australia’s lonesome highways to keep any larder chock full of meal ideas for families on the go. Even in our concrete jungles and our ticky tacky conurbations nature gets all up in our grills. We have CBD-savvy snakes on a plane and on the trains, possums in schoolbags and scorpions in sneakers. We have city slick koalas and kangaroos and, while they’re not exactly roaming the streets in packs and weeing on your lawn, they’ve been known to punch out a few laps in the community pool, or hole up down the trolley park at the local Ikea. You won’t see a tiger wandering round Aeon of a Sunday arvo.
Without an exotic creature to poke a stick at, I was ready to write off Cambodia’s vestigial indigenous and, now possibly late, fauna. I’d almost assigned those mythic beasts to the melancholy lists of wonderful Khmer things that didn’t make it to 2015, thanks to us. And there are some. But on an unexpected layover in Kep I chanced upon a lively pantheon of wondrous wildlife that made me rethink my Big Smoke-y view. A foot-long millipede bustling along my bathroom wall. A baby snake that was unfortunately bashed to death with a decisive flip-flop by an overzealous pool boy. Hey ho. A ginger squirrel raiding a groaning milk-apple tree. A battalion of big red ants on a log. And a lot of showy butterflies, one of which I was later able to identify as a Painted Jezebel.
It’s all very well to whinge about how gross roaches are, or big myself up for scoffing a novelty cricket. But maybe there is cool wildlife around: not to be pilloried, eaten or annihilated, but admired and ooh-ed over, even in town, and I’m just not looking hard enough. So I joined Natural Cambodia’s Facebook page, and sent them a picture of a black thing on legs. A dung beetle apparently. That led me to a page on bird watching – you can find around 400 species, flocks of which reside in our fair hamlet. And who knew, but there are vulture restaurants out in the sticks where eco-centric villagers kill a cow and serve it up to endangered red-headed, white-rumped and slim-billed old world ornithoids.
Enthusiasts and scientists roaming the Kingdom will drop their pocket protectors to joyfully identify what you’ve seen, along with its proper name. They’re not complaining about the traffic, trying to sell used plastic kitchenware or whining about the price of a decent happy ending. They’re out and about, snapping jeweled green caterpillars, posting Floricans in flight and sharing trap camera shots of elusive jungle cats. It makes me want to learn Latin, buy binoculars and wear a mesh camo jacket with plenty of pockets. But a magnifying glass would probably do for a start. According to actual experts, a lot of Cambodia’s wildlife is alive and well, and apparently right before my eyes.