Beyond its temples and macabre tourist attractions, Cambodia is unforgettable for one reason: its people.
In Destination Cambodia, Walter Mason’s light-hearted travel memoir, the Australian author reveals a country unlikely familiar to even the most assimilated cultural warriors. From the obvious to the unbelievable, Mason shares intimate and often humorous tales, all with keen insight into the famously inscrutable natives.
At home in Australia, Mason was for a time involved with a cultish Buddhist sect and his penchant for the spiritually peculiar fuels many of his journeys. An intermittent resident of Vietnam since 1994, Mason – whose previous travel books include Destination Saigon – made his first trip to Cambodia in 1996, succumbing to the Kingdom’s charms almost immediately.
Then a 20-something wanderer with a bent for Eastern spirituality, Mason gravitated toward Phnom Penh’s Buddhist sanctuaries. He helped the monks and students at Wat Koh and Wat Botum practice their English and, in exchange, they gave him the kind of tour of Cambodia that only the young and itinerant ever seem to find.
Mason makes the necessary stops along the way. He checks in at Angkor Wat, the killing fields and most of the travel-guide must-sees. But in Mason’s hands the destinations are all but extraneous; it is the people along his journeys who expose the character of the Kingdom.
Early on, one of the monks asked Mason to join “a quick thing” his pagoda had helped organise. “The casual nature of the invitation, and the fact that when I travel I resolve never to say no to any invitation, caused me to accept, though I had grave misgivings. From experience I knew that official Buddhist events in Asia could be ghastly affairs, with long speeches in languages I did not understand. They were also opportunities for me to make multiple social gaffes. But the monk’s charming and offhand invitation lulled me into thinking it would be a casual affair that I could duck into and out of, so I duly noted it down in my calendar.”
The event was anything but informal. Mason arrived at the Buddhist Institute to find hundreds of monks and a television crew waiting for him to give the event’s main address. Live, on television.
The students at Wat Botum seemed to share a similar sense of humour. They introduced him to the local writers’ association, where he met Suong Mak, among the country’s most recognisable authors from the new generation. Mason was desperate to meet a shaman and, when a friend finally fixed a meeting, Mak agreed to tag along. “Why do Cambodian people believe this nonsense?” Mak asks. “I’m only coming to see what fools you are willing to make of yourselves.”
And so Mason goes, pinballing around the country from shaman to Chinese fortune teller to bull-penis restaurant. He travels in a Mercedes with a Very Important Monk, meets Phnom Penh’s oldest hooker and nearly dies in the Buddhist hells of the cultural village.
At each stop he is greeted with genuine Khmer hospitality: often unpredictable, occasionally unbelievable, but always authentic.
Destination Cambodia, by Walter Mason, is available now at Monument Books priced $18.50.