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Heroes & histories

Exclusive: chapter one of a lavish new book on the making of this, our kingdom

The first rays of the morning sun play across golden temple roofs. A couple of saffron-robed monks, alms bowls in hand, meander down the riverfront, lined with shop houses and colonial-era villas. Residents patiently wait in front of their homes with food donations for the bonzes, as tradition dictates. A lone open truck, loaded with garment workers on their way to their factory, all of them wrapped up against the sun, rumbles around the Independence Monument, the women’s laughter trailing after the vehicle. Store owners pull up the iron shutters of their shops or give thanks for their first sale of the day by brushing bundles of riel, the country’s currency, across their wares. In front of the Royal Palace, a couple of women have set up shop with pyramids of small wooden cages, filled with tiny birds. Passers-by are invited to release one of the birds, for good luck, and for a modest fee. On the Tonlé Sap River, fishermen steer their long-tail boats through choppy waters, catching their breakfast right in front of the palace. A gang of half-naked children uses the jutting wood planks of a construction site as a jumping board from which to drop, with accompanying woops and screams, into the brown waters below. It’s a fleeting moment of peace and quiet, in which Cambodia’s capital looks like an urban idyll, a fairytale small town from a children’s book. An hour later, the riverfront is crammed with the morning rush-hour. Thousands of motorbikes, separated now and then by taxis, trucks, huge SUVs or gleaming Mercedes, push along Sisowath Quay, the road along the river, at a snail’s pace. Disparity of wealth dictates traffic flow. Pedestrians and stall owners fill the sidewalks; blind street musicians among them, usually led by children, play mournful tunes on the tro che, a Cambodian fiddle, its neck long and thin, its body covered with snakeskin. Women balance trays piled high with lotus pods – the seeds are a popular snack – or fried insects, another traditional fast food, on their heads and patrol the river promenade. An elephant proudly ambles from Wat Phnom, the hill from which the city derives its name, down to the palace and collects fruit from several restaurants en route, trailed by children making a living from selling English-language newspapers to the tourists attracted by the pachyderm.

By midday, the excitement has died down, the market vendors have retreated into their hammocks, strung up in their tiny stalls above their produce and the heat tires even the most ambitious of street dogs. Every now and then a cyclo, a pedal-powered rickshaw, floats by in slow motion, its driver invariably smoking a cigarette, his face hidden under the brim of his hat, in search of a fare or the next patch of shade. In the late afternoon, shops reopen and by early evening, the city centre becomes clogged once more. Now youngsters cruise around on their mopeds, showing off new-found wealth, out to impress members of the opposite sex.

Phnom Penh is an attractive, manageable city, dotted with temples and markets, largely free of high rises, and it comes with a somewhat ramshackle atmosphere that mirrors Cambodia’s turbulent colonial and recent history. Walk the back streets in the late afternoons, around Phsar Thmey, the yellow domed art deco market, its hundreds of stalls selling anything from a side of beef to photocopied Lonely Planet Guides, or drop by the National Museum, a stunning colonial-era terracotta structure, a sight in its own right, and the world’s finest depository of Khmer sculpture, and you might feel like a temporary participant of time travel into a retrofitted Indochinese past. Phnom Penh, lacking many of the benefits and challenges of your average Asian metropolis, has style, a vibe, a sense of quick familiarity that is nine parts illusion and one part make-believe.

In 1967, Lee Kuan Yu, Singapore’s first prime minister, visited Cambodia’s riverside capital. As he sat next to his host, Norodom Sihanouk, then Cambodia’s head of state, in the back of a Mercedes convertible, passing along the capital’s wide tree-lined avenues, Kuan Yu remarked: “One day, my city will look like this.”

Phnom Penh, current population around two million, 90% ethnic Khmer and, like the rest of the kingdom by the Mekong, predominantly Buddhist, has been many things: a trading post in the 15th and 16th centuries, often dominated by Siamese or Vietnamese interests, almost stolen by Spaniards and Portuguese mercenaries and freebooters, the city was taken over by the French in 1865 who affectionately praised it as the ‘Pearl of Asia’. Following independence from France in 1953, King Sihanouk ushered in what many Cambodians today consider as the country’s golden age and brought profound changes to the capital. But this brief era of cultural and architectural bloom came to an abrupt halt in 1975, when the communist Khmer Rouge turned Phnom Penh into a ghost town and Cambodia into a graveyard.

Many Cambodians today would like their capital city to look something like Singapore. But Phnom Penh is still a long way away from realising such ambitions and remains hugely overshadowed by Angkor’s grandeur, the main reason Cambodia’s capital receives less accolades than it deserves. A turbulent history, fascinating local and colonial architecture, a stunning riverside location, a friendly population and a sense of proportion make the Pearl of Asia one of Asia’s most enigmatic, unspoiled and relaxed capital cities in the region.

The legend of Phnom Penh

Phnom Penh’s origins are soaked in myth and legend. It’s said that in the 14th century, a rich widow named Daun Penh discovered several tree trunks that had been washed up on the shores of the Mekong. The trunks contained four Buddha statues and a statue of Hindu deity Vishnu. Daun Penh was so impressed by this apparent miracle that she animated other local people to create a small hill, crowned by a temple built to contain the sacred Buddhas – the fruit of the widow’s labours is today’s Wat Phnom. Phnom means ‘hill’ in Khmer and, combined with the widow’s name, Penh, the name of the capital was established. A separate shrine was built for the Vishnu icon. For centuries, Wat Phnom remained the city’s highest point, until a bank constructed the Cambodian capital’s first skyscraper. Today, it’s still possible to climb the modest elevation, via a wide stairway flanked by sacred naga snakes, right up to the temple – the current building dates back to 1926 – where locals make daily offerings. The widow Penh is thought to have turned into a powerful spirit, to whom a smaller shrine on Wat Phnom is dedicated, as well as a new statue, erected in 2008, which stands between the capital’s only hill and the new, heavily fortified US embassy. A large chedi near the hill-top temple contains the ashes of King Ponhea Yat, who is credited with moving the Cambodian capital from Angkor to Phnom Penh, following the Siamese sacking of the ancient Khmer kingdom in 1422. At the foot of Wat Phnom, souvenir vendors, fortune tellers and gamblers all congregate in the course of the day.

A city is born

Contemporary scholars suggest that the establishment of Phnom Penh was directly related to Angkor’s declining fortunes. The area had probably been inhabited by village communities for some two thousand years. In the 15th century Cambodia, choosing a new capital was all about trade. Phnom Penh, then called Chatomuk, the ‘Place of the Four Faces’, lay right in the heart of the country, on the banks of the Tonlé Sap River, and in spitting distance of the Mekong, one of Asia’s most important streams. Phnom Penh could keep a tab on river traffic from Laos, moving rare gem stones, highly priced bird feathers and other natural products from the Southeast Asian interior south to supply Chinese trading vessels. The city was also close to the nation’s main source of protein, the nutrient-rich waters of the Tonlé Sap Lake in the centre of the country, and had easy access to the flow of Chinese goods that moved up the Mekong from the southern river delta in today’s Vietnam. By the end of the 16th century, Phnom Penh probably numbered between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants.

Following the fall of Angkor, Cambodia’s immediate neighbours, Siam and Vietnam, flexed their political, economic and military muscles more frequently and Cambodia became increasingly weakened by continued invasions, courtly intrigue and political infighting. As a consequence of shifting regional allegiances and conflicts, the capital moved from Phnom Penh to several other locations in the area. Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, missionaries and freebooters also played pivotal roles in the city’s emergence during the 15th and 16th centuries, by marrying into local nobility and ingratiating themselves with various royal factions, but Christian missionary efforts were lost on the devoutly Buddhist population and early European influence faded as quickly as it had become established, leaving behind few traces. In 1772, Phnom Penh was sacked by the Siamese, further destabilising the country.

Cambodia’s colonial capital

Only in 1865, during the reign of King Norodom I, as the French established a protectorate in Cambodia, did the city become the nation’s permanent capital. The new colonial masters embarked on an ambitious campaign of urban planning. European engineers and local labour drained swamps, created a city grid of roads and landmarks, constructed canals and built a viable port. The shape of Phnom Penh as we know it today, first outlined during the reign of Ponhea Yat in the 15th century, really came into its own under French administration and had grown to around 25,000 inhabitants by the 1870s.

The heart of this colonial city is dominated by the Royal Palace, built in the 1850s and similar in design to the Grand Palace in Bangkok. The palace remains the residence of Cambodia’s royal family. It was constructed in the location of an older citadel which had been ransacked by the Siamese in 1834. The high walls around Preah Barom Reachea Vaeng Chaktomuk, as the building is known locally, contain a wonderfully maintained tropical garden, dotted with various royal buildings. The Khmer Rouge left the complex intact, though many royal possessions were looted. Today, visitors can enter the 59-metre-high Throne Hall, built in 1915 and adorned with ceiling frescoes depicting scenes of the Reamker, Cambodia’s national epic, a variation on the Ramayana, one of Hinduism’s great poems. The more impressive Silver Pagoda is aptly named after the 5,000 silver tiles which cover its floor and were laid just prior to the Khmer Rouge years. The Silver Pagoda houses a life-size golden Buddha encrusted with more than 9,500 diamonds. Locals know this building as Preah Vihear Preah Keo Morakot, ‘the temple of the Emerald Buddha’, which, dating back to the 17th century, also survived the years of recent turmoil.

The area in front of the palace serves as a meeting ground for the city’s population. In the evenings, the garden in front of Preah Thineang Chan Chhaya, the palace pavilion, is home to snack vendors, mobile stalls selling plastic toys and sweet sellers plying their trade. This is one of the best spots in the city to enjoy Bon Om Tuk, the annual water festival. During this three-day festival, which celebrates the reversal of the Tonlé Sap River’s flow, more than a million Cambodians flock to the capital to watch boat races in the day time and barge processions at night. Nearby, Wat Ounalom, the city’s oldest temple, said to have been built in 1443 but possibly much earlier, is the residence of the head of Cambodia’s Buddhist council, the Sangha. The National Museum, designed by French archaeologist George Groslierand constructed between 1917 and 1920, stands just a little north of the palace.

Directly to the south of the palace, the area formerly known as the Cambodian Quarter once housed court officials and powerful politicians and remains a preferred residential area of the families aligned to Cambodia’s ruling party. Just north of the palace, Sisowath Quay is teeming with bistros, restaurants and hotels, the well-known Foreign Correspondents Club among them. During the French occupation, shop houses on this stretch of riverfront served the many trade ships that came up the Mekong to visit the city. Following the rainy season, when the rivers were swollen, vessels up to 6,000 tons would call, load and unload here. Today, riverside apartments are sought after by the thousands of highly paid international aid workers that make Phnom Penh the world’s donor capital.
The city’s main thoroughfare, Norodom Boulevard stretches from Wat Phnom all the way to the Independence Monument. Between this traffic artery, lined by ministries, embassies and hotels, and the river, the Chinese Quarter, home to Phnom Penh’s formerly sizable Chinese population who controlled much of the commerce in the city, spread until the 1970s. Further north, around Wat Phnom, the French Quarter, once a picture-perfect pocket of provincial France, formed the heart of the colonial government infrastructure as well as the occupiers’ main residential area. Many of the old villas are gone now, but the post office square, partially restored, gives visitors an idea of what the French effort in L’Indochine once looked like. In recent years, the area has repeatedly served as a film set, for Matt Dillon’s beautifully crafted independent movie City Of Ghosts, as well as for the French production Deux Frères, for which the post office square was temporarily redesigned to its full colonial glory. Besides the post office, the National Library and the National Archives, the luxurious Hôtel le Royal and the former residence building, once home to France’s highest-ranking official in Cambodia and now a ministry, remain. Built between 1934 and 1937 on a former marsh in the area, Phsar Thmey, the Grand Market, is a stunning art deco dome, recently restored to its former egg-yoke colour glory.

Phnom Penh’s golden era

Following independence, Phnom Penh, under the leadership of the enigmatic, capricious and ultimately disastrously vain king, prime minister and head of state Norodom Sihanouk, quickly transformed from a French colonial backwater into a modern capital.

Sihanouk, thought of by the French as a pliable monarch, proved to be a self-confident visionary in the early years of his reign, which continued in one form or another until 1970. Young men whom Sihanouk had sent to France in the 1940s and 1950s to study returned with new ideas and skills. Artists and architects transformed Phnom Penh into a capital so stunning, not even the French could have envisaged it. Among the young king’s urban visionaries, one man truly stood out: Vann Molyvann studied law and architecture in Paris in the 1940s. Having been trained by Le Corbusier, he returned to Phnom Penh in 1955 and was appointed chief national architect. Over the next fifteen years, Molyvann built scores of monuments for an independent Cambodia that fitted well into the older colonial grid of the city. Molyvann designed the city’s first apartment blocks, the Independence Monument, the Olympic Stadium, parts of the university campus on the road to the airport and the Chaktomuk Hall, by the riverside, north of the Royal Palace. His building style, called New Khmer Architecture, corresponded closely to Sihanouk’s vision – to marry Cambodia’s glorious past with modern aesthetics – and remains the only significant architectural school to emerge in post-war Southeast Asia.

Phnom Penh: city of ghosts

Following the coup against Sihanouk in 1970, the golden era quickly unravelled. The economy, long used to American dollars, faltered and Phnom Penh’s building boom ended. In the early 1970s Phnom Penh swelled from half a million to two million inhabitants, with countless refugees trying to escape US bombing and widespread fighting in the provinces. But the Khmer Rouge quickly grew in force and on April 17th 1975, they took Phnom Penh. The city’s darkest chapter was about to unfold.

Within days of the overthrow of the Cambodian government, the stone-age communists forced the city’s entire population into the countryside. Homes, hospitals and schools were emptied and those not strong enough to walk were left to die. Educated urbanites and those with obvious connections to the regime were branded ‘New People’ and many were killed outright. Hundreds of thousands of others were forced to work in huge communes, where many starved. Almost overnight, Phnom Penh turned into a ghost town. A few ministries, factories and foreign embassies remained open and the innocuous Tuol Svay Prey High School was turned into Tuol Sleng prison, also known as S-21, where some 17,000 alleged enemies of Democratic Kampuchea, as the country was now called, were tortured before being killed at Choeung Ek, the city’s most prominent Killing Fields, fifteen kilometres outside the city. The Vietnamese, facing little military resistance, liberated Phnom Penh in January 1979. Following the Vietnamese occupation and the ensuing civil war, Phnom Penh remained in a dangerous and tragic limbo for more than a decade.

A painful rebirth

In the 1980s and 1990s, some former inhabitants as well as thousands of rural squatters in search of opportunity slowly reoccupied the city. But restoration was slow and around the turn of the millennium, many roads in the centre remained unpaved and barely lit. Armed robbery was as common as public services were non-existent. The city’s fortunes began to change in 1992, when Untac (the United Nations Transitional Authority) rolled into town and organised elections. Thousands of well-paid foreign soldiers and consultants created a new economy almost overnight, and bars, shops, brothels and hotels sprung up all over the city centre, providing the basis for the vast NGO-orientated infrastructure Phnom Penh is graced with today. Cambodian politics remained turbulent and following the 1993 elections and the UN’s departure, civil strife continued for some years, including intense fighting in the capital in 1997. Luckily, though, Phnom Penh has managed to retain a great deal of its glorious past, partly because the city was denied ‘development’ for so many years, and it will take some time before all the traces of its golden era have been removed. For now, Phnom Penh retains an easy 20th century charm – a capital that is still some way from becoming one of today’s Asian mega-cities. If only Lee Kuan Yu had paid proper attention.

Cambodia: A Journey Through The Land Of The Khmer, by Tom Vater (copy) and Kraig Lieb (pix) is available now at Monument Books for $35

Guilty Pleasures: Water Festival

Naysayers worried and whinged in the lead-up to this year’s Water Festival. My favourite gaudy vested anchorman finger-wagged a lot about it. A poor show this year: apparently just 248 boats, instead of the usual 800. Given the festival’s recent tragic history, mums in the provinces naturally fretted about their kids in the big smoke. The TV got grannies from Prey Veng to Battambang predicting something supernaturally shady with the whole shebang. There was carping down the Panda Mart about the loony street closures and which crooked rozzer was selling VIP access to locals who were entitled to pass for free.

Most vocal, though, were the rheum-eyed jades, those been-there-done-that couldabeens who shuffle the seedy expat path between babytalking their lap-sat bodega girls down 51 in broad daylight and late-night, pompous tit-for-tat grammar scuffles on their bitter ‘Cambodia is Crap’ Facebook pages. The races may be over, but those gouty dotards are still bitching about the lack of shady daydrinking spots on the riverfront, and how that provincial plastic-belt salesman cheated them out of half a pent. You’d think they would’ve ironed their cleanest singlet and fucked off on the apparently extortionate $8 bus to Snooky or the sexpat express to Pattaya for the duration. Or forever, even. Anything to get away from the crowds of everyday out-of-town Cambodians (or ‘peasants’, as they’re called on the official Tourism website) spending hard-earned cash, overcoming natural trepidation and enduring a 14-hour chickentaxi sauna to come root for their home-grown boats hauling arse.

And, shiver me timbers, didn’t they?! I’ve enjoyed my fair share of sweaty slappy man comps in which vigorous teams of colour-coded beefcake achieve something thrilling together, but I didn’t expect to see that kind of manly action – and with far more august historic pedigree – this past Bon Om Touk. ‘Cos let’s get real, Khmer fellers. Though props for handcrafting a space-visible religious wonderment, you’ve snoozed on your laurels since 1150AD. Drinking coffee en masse at every available street corner and screaming at John Cena fake-beating the crap out of an actor in lycra tights and a bedazzled cod piece don’t count. It’s yelling at American TV with a bunch of similarly skiving mates. An active celebration of the majestic tradition and awe-inspiring cultural muscle that created a once great empire it certainly ain’t.

Every year since I’ve lived in CharmingVille I admit I’ve upped sticks and headed out to somewhere beachy or chill, but this time me and The Hubster decided to stay. I didn’t know what to expect except maybe a beer concert and some kind of half-arsed regatta. So imagine my surprise when, after negotiating the three separate road blocks in the 100 yards between Marital HQ and Riverside, my Lifemate and I met with the spectacle of hundreds of thrusting mariners standing shoulder to shoulder and rowing in perfect unison, club coloured and kroma’d, while clumps of floating lotus and water hyacinth swept by. Delighted citizens thronged the banks and cheered and selfied and snacked. Wiry blokes just off their boats with muddy legs and lip-hung fag ends still had the energy to tomfool with rivals and pose for toothy portraits. Monks shared prehistoric binoculars, ladies in eyewatering jimjams, toesocks and matching hats sold pneumatic bags of squid floss to toddlers half their size, and a wizened codger sporting a pork pie hat and amulet tattoos sat on the parapet swinging his legs and teasing his giggling grandkids. I looked up and saw throngs of smiling tourists watching the races with icy cold beers and cameras from balconies and rooftops along the Quay. Cops of every stripe hogged the shade.

I felt a bit wrong going into the ‘foreigner’s only’ tent, but they had white satin chair covers and headsets translating the live commentary in English. Hubster pretended he was Malaysian. We sat there in relative cool with a great view of the flower-festooned water dragons, some with female crews and apsara coxswains, knifing through the swift, olive Tonle Sap and urged on by their hometowns on both banks. I learned that some had rowed kilometres down various rivers to get here. We motoed across the Japanese Bridge early on Day 2 as the first racers geared up and watched 40 men in yellow T-shirts and red krama climb down the hasty ladders to the mash and trash of sludge below, 80 flip-flops left behind as they pushed off with rousing chants. These dudes meant business. These rice farmers and shop keepers and motodops and fishers. These 21st-century strugglers, stoic, shy, dirt poor. And usually invisible. They outshone the Ministries’ lacy floating light show, and the fireworks, and all the combed-over, white-suited Oknhas and their bejewelled wives. They brought the pomp and swag and vigour of Angkor princes and stirred us pasty city folk, for just three days of the year, and I was so glad to see it. Young guys full of noble piss and vinegar, old ones quietly confident and twinkly, all justifiably proud of a tradition 1,000 years old, and giving everyone who stayed behind a Very Good Show.

Diplomatic interests: Britain And Sihanouk’s Cambodia

From the outset, it’s worth nothing that this isn’t a book for everybody and it probably won’t be flying off the shelves. It’s a nearly 400-page-long, densely annotated analysis of the diplomatic relations between Britain and Cambodia between 1964 and 1970. That may or may not be your thing. If it is, you’re gonna love this book.

The problem, however, is that Britain played a pretty minor role in shaping Cambodia’s history during this period. British influence in the region had faded alarmingly after India’s independence in 1947, and even more so after Burma’s in 1948, so despite the flood of diplomatic cables and papers quoted in the book, its role really didn’t amount to much. In 1967 the British closed its military bases in Malaysia and Singapore, really bringing the curtain down on its strategic role in the region.

Of most interest to the author, Nicholas Tarling, is the gap between Britain’s need to play along with the diplomatic interests of the United States, at the height of the Cold War, and its own rather more neutral King Sihanouk-centric philosophy.

While Sihanouk bravely strove to maintain Cambodia’s neutrality, caught between the superpowers’ travails in Vietnam, both China and the US put him under enormous and unsustainable pressure. Britain also had to try to find a middle ground, recognising as it did the existence of the People’s Republic of China (which the US did not, until 1979) and would have been happy to see a non-aligned Southeast Asia, much as Sihanouk would have done.

King Sihanouk is the most interesting personality in the book (almost all the other characters being minor Foreign Office mandarins of the mid-1960s). While Tarling talks of Sihanouk’s ‘baffling’ and ‘mercurial personality’, his ‘flamboyance’, ‘exaggerated vanity’ and ‘outrageous speeches’, one never really gets a sense of the man; buried beneath the thick layers of academic verbiage, Sihanouk fails to come alive as the spectacular character he clearly was.

While Britain privately admitted that it had had ‘nothing but trouble from the touchy, temperamental and doubtfully sane ruler’, it recognised that continuing diplomatic relations might help prevent Cambodia becoming a satellite of China, and ‘exasperating and unpredictable though the personality of Prince Sihanouk might be, he has so far maintained the peace and unity of Cambodia’. Sadly, this was not to be: Sihanouk was overthrown in March 1970, and Cambodia’s long slide into the hell of civil war and the Khmer Rouge really began.

Far more interesting to the general reader was Britain’s behaviour towards Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge: between 1985 and 1989, authorised by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s elite SAS military regiment ran a series of training camps for Khmer Rouge allies in Thailand close to the Cambodian border and created a ‘sabotage battalion’ of 250 experts in explosives and ambushes. That sadly falls outside the scope of this book.

Britain And Sihanouk’s Cambodia, by Nicholas Tarling, is now available from Monument Books for $39.50

The City: Now & Then

The looming, angular hulk of the central railway station stands incongruously at one end of what appears to be a sodden football field. A once black-and-white photograph of a typically colonial French villa, touched up in after-the-fact colour, morphs into the broad grin of a chuckling face. In one ageing ink rendering, modest fishing boats bob in the waters around a small cluster of shacks with corrugated rooves, the fronds of giant palm trees reaching between them for the skies.

That was Phnom Penh then. Other, more familiar, images capture the city more as we, its current residents, know and love/loathe it. This is Phnom Penh now. And a new six-week festival being launched by the Institut francais du Cambodge pays homage to both then and now and everything in between. Once Upon A Time, the trilingual event (English, French and Khmer) which runs from September 30 to November 9, encompasses exhibitions, an architecture contest, film screenings, conferences featuring expert speakers on the issue of urbanism, and at least one party. Here’s the Advisor’s guide to what not to miss:

EXHIBITIONS:

Once Upon A Time: An Urban History Of A Capital
Archive photos, maps and records trace the ‘rich history’ of the city.

Photography: Contemporary Perspectives On The City
Jean-Francois Perigois (France) charts development at the city’s ubiquitous construction sites; Chhay Khana (Cambodia) captures traditional buildings.

CONFERENCES:

Phnom Penh, Heritage City
6:30pm October 2
Men Sisowath Chandevy explains the Heritage Mission’s work to preserve the city.

Sangkum: An Urban History
6:30pm October 7
Khuon Khun-Neay, deputy director-general of the Apsara Authority, traces the history of Sangkum-era architecture.

Phnom Penh, Today & After
6:30pm October 14
A panel of experts offers different perspectives on the ongoing urban development of the Cambodian capital.

SCREENINGS:

6.30pm October 9
Metropolis
In a futuristic city sharply divided between the working class and city planners, the son of the city’s mastermind falls in love with a working-class prophet who predicts the coming of a saviour. Directed by Fritz Lang (1927).

4pm October 10:
Another Tale Of Two Cities
Examines the transformation of neighbourhoods in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine area of Paris and the Spitalfields-Whitechapel districts in London.

6:30pm October 10:
One Night After The War
At the end of the Cambodian civil war, a former kickboxer, who lost most of his family to the Khmer Rouge, struggles to return to normal life.Directed by Rithy Panh (1998).

10am October 11:
The Man Next Door
An Argentinian tale of a clash between neighbours, shot in the only residential home designed and built in the Americas by French architect Le Corbusier. Directed by Mariano Cohn & Gastón Duprat (2009).

2pm October 11:
Espaces Intercalaire
A crow’s-eye view of the city of Tokyo and its inhabitants in their entirety. Directed by Damien Faure (2012).

5pm October 11:
Fellini-Roma
A semi-autobiographical, poetic comedy drama depicting film director Federico Fellini’s move from his native Rimini to Rome as a youth. The only character that develops in the film is, of course, the Italian capital. Directed by Federico Fellini (1972).

5pm October 18 at Bophana Centre, St. 200:
Twilight
An ailing Khmer prince falls in love with his Indian guest, little suspecting the devotion in his nurse’s heart. Directed by Norodom Sihanouk (1969).

WHO: Francophiles and urbanites
WHAT: Once Upon A Time festival
WHERE: Institut francais, #218 St. 184
WHEN: Now until November 9
WHY: Vive la city!

Rockefeller

With the National Police planning to establish its own Khmer-language newspaper, Rockefeller Without Borders would like to make a few recommendations that will surely help guarantee this paper’s success. Firstly, never report on crime. That just scares people. And besides, if a crime has already been committed, it’s old news. Nobody likes old news. The police should report on the stuff they wish was a crime. No, not the obvious things like booting farmers off their land or reckless driving, but the unreported ‘non-crimes’ that are tearing at the fabric of this great country. I am talking about road signs and people wearing gauze facemasks.

Both send such confusing – if not decidedly dangerous – mixed messages to society: stop accusing me of going the wrong way and you do know that mask you are speaking through makes me feel like a leper, right? The police should also do their own blotter. But make it more bladder than blotter. And like any full bladder, empty yourself of all the things you would like to tell residents and visitors. Don’t hold it in. And never cut it off mid-stream, that’s not healthy. A missed connections section would be great, too. You: cute, short, dark hair, wearing a T-shirt that said ‘I’m the person your mother warned you about.’ Me: slightly chubby, low-ranking policeman (but dieting and ambitious). You glanced at me helmetless from the back of your friend’s moto last Wednesday on the corner of 240 and 19 at 5pm. Coffee next week?

Surely no contemporary newspaper should be without a food column. I suggest one entitled ‘Guilt-free recipes for people who have committed crimes’ (gluten free, of course). How about this for a handy lost-and-found section: ‘Weird things found on backpackers’ feet when they foolishly walk our streets barefoot’ (win free penicillin if you submit a particularly intriguing photo). Don’t forget a section at the back that discredits those who impersonate police officials or simply give police work a bad name. I’ll start: the cop from the Village People. Real cops never form boy bands with construction workers, cowboys and sailors. The British bobby. What kind of coppers don’t pack pistols? Pacifists have no business fighting crimes. Yosemite Sam. Nice try, Sam – though you do have a moustache any cop would be proud to call their own.

And yes, we definitely need a What’s On page where you can promote your events and gigs. When I saw that cover band from police post 12 do speed-metal show tunes at Sharky’s recently. I was awestruck. Annie Get Your Gun, Oklahoma and South Pacific never sounded so good. Then there’s the contemporary art section that will inspire us all to think about the most creative uses for recycled barbed wire.

My next suggestion might be a bit radical, but I’ve been mulling it over for a long time and really feel like it would work. A taxidermy wish-list page: creatures you would like to see stuffed and mounted on the back of tuk tuks (those ads on there now are so unoriginal!). Personally I would like to see Big Foot (‘Sasquatch’ to his friends) finally retired to taxidermy. Call me callous and cruel, but how long do you let him roam around all hairy, homeless, naked and ill like that before even National Geographic gets bored of chasing the story? And besides, (alleged) clear cutting and deforestation has driven him from the jungle. He’s not suited for cities (side note: apparently BF – one more ‘F’ and he’s saved forever, people! – recently spotted at Golden Sorya Mall at 4:30am with a girl calling him ‘handsome’ and promising to love him for who he was). I sent Ricardo to investigate and he returned a week later, filthy and unshaven – but with a really great haircut and tattoo – insisting that this is how all hipsters look now.

Police poetry would almost certainly go over well. Strictly haikus. I’ll start: The criminal roams… moonlight beckons… bang. And finally, a sex column where police men and women share their most intimate… nah, scratch that one from the list.

If you would like to submit your recommendation, please send Rockefeller Without Borders $5 in a self-addressed stamped envelope before we consider your request.

Along In The Jungle With Wild Things

Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrqqqq…

A friend recently remarked that no matter where you are in Cambodia, someone will be using power tools. Add to this the Makita choir weddings, funerals or a plain old karaoke session, and it’s pretty hard to image a world that’s tranquil and natural.

Adrian Stoeger, self-proclaimed sonographer, is out to redress this with his release Sounds From The Cambodian Wild, available through Bandcamp. With sounds including gibbon calls, the cries of great hornbills, croaking frogs and the lapping of waves on the shores of Koh Thmei, Adrian’s recordings offer a natural respite from the Penh’s manufactured cacophony. The Advisor caught up with Adrian to ask him about the release, starting with the most obvious question:

What exactly is a sonographer?

Usually people going out with material to record sounds are called ‘field recordists’. However, this sounds too technical and most people can’t associate anything with the term, so by using ‘sonographer’, I’m hijacking a [medical] term in an attempt to place audio recordings in the same context as photography.

What attracted you to recording the Kingdom’s natural sounds?

What attracted me were simply Cambodia and its natural habitats. I am German, grew up in France and arrived in Phnom Penh from Berlin in 2011, where I had been working in the music industry for the last few years, but I was growing bored just working from my desk.

At one point a friend with Save Cambodia’s Wildlife asked me if I could help them to make a CD of recordings of Cambodia’s natural habitats. That led to a one-week expedition into the Virachey National Park and Cardamom Mountains. And that was it. I knew this was something I wanted to do.

Also, making nature recordings is a great reason to get out of the city and organise trips you’d never consider otherwise. How many people in Cambodia have spent several nights in the jungle, sleeping in hammocks and surrounded by the forest?

What field equipment do you use and what do you do with those sounds once you’ve captured them in the field?

I usually use an Audio-Technica shotgun microphone, which can record sounds from the front. Back at home I import everything into my computer and start listening. This is a very important part and often a great recording will be discarded because I can hear something in the distance; I simply don’t want any human sounds! Once I’ve identified a good sound, I then start working on it.

Ideally the sound will stand as it is and I will do nothing; sometimes I increase the overall volume a bit, but that’s it! I don’t add any effects, like reverb, for more space. The ambience of the forest is like it is.

How do you decide on the sounds you use? Do you go out seeking a sound, or simply use what you capture?

It’s very easy: the sound must be compelling, the quality of the recording must be impeccable and there must be no noise pollution from other sources, and there must be at least a few minutes of material. Also, the ‘feel’ of the recording is very important. I want people to enjoy listening to it, bringing nature closer to them. I will sometimes leave out cicada recordings that are interesting, but so loud and high-pitched most people wouldn’t enjoy them. That screens out about 90% of recordings.

Is there a ‘wild sound’ out there that you were compelled to capture?

There was. It took me three trips to Virachey to get the gibbons the way I wanted. Three trips to Ratanakiri for five minutes of gibbons! But hey, as far as I know, nobody has recorded them in this quality in Cambodia. Soon after I was staging a listening session at a Meta House. Afterwards a man came and told me that he simply couldn’t hold back, he had tears flowing while listening to the gibbon calls. These wonderful, endangered primates have made their voice heard – that’s the greatest satisfaction I can get.

Sounds From The Cambodian Wild is available for $7 at adrianstoeger.bandcamp.com. Get 25% off before September 13 by entering the code ‘advisor’ at checkout.

Last chance to see VI

A female-only lizard species which reproduces by cloning and was only discovered after a scientist spotted it on the menu of a Vietnamese restaurant was among more than 200 new species identified in the Great Mekong area in just 12 months in 2011. Spanning Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos and China’s Yunnan province, it is of the world’s most bio-diverse regions and has produced hundreds of species new to science over the past decade. Their discovery, often the result of increased human activity, is a double-edged sword, according to the World Wildlife Fund: while building roads opens up remote habitats to scientists who can then venture into previously unexplored areas, it can also result in greater exploitation of the land which destroys these fragile ecosystems. Continuing our series investigating the plight of the region’s rarest fauna and flora, a nod to the work of British author Douglas Adams, Southeast Asia’s most dedicated conservationists describe the here-today-gone-tomorrow creatures that inspire them.

Forest fool: Tonkin’s
snub-nosed monkey
This extremely rare skull-faced primate, Rhinopithesus avunculus, has yet to be seen alive by any Western scientists. Captured on camera for the first time in 2011 by wildlife photographer Jeremy Holden, who works with Fauna and Flora International, this Old World monkey’s stubby snout has a peculiar side-effect: when it rains, the water falls straight into the creature’s upturned nostrils, triggering convulsive sneezing fits.

The species photographed by Holden, first discovered in Myanmar and known locally as mey nwoah (‘monkey with an upturned face’), spends most of the monsoon season with its head tucked miserably between its knees. Sadly, rain is the least of its problems: of the estimated 300 in the wild, the only scientifically observed specimen had been killed and eaten by local hunters by the time researchers found it. Holden also spotted them with their young in the remote mountain jungles of Kachin, on the border with China.

“I still have a vivid recollection of the first time I saw them in the wild,” says Michael Dine, of the People Resources and Conservation Foundation. “The survey team had stopped for a break. A group of four passed directly overhead through the canopy, allowing us to see this wonderful animal close-up. Due to extremely high hunting pressure, such a close encounter is extremely rare and we thought ourselves most fortunate.

“Tonkin’s snub-nosed monkey is an intriguing and unusual-looking animal. It could be described in the same breath as most beautiful and incredibly ugly, but I prefer the first adjective. This is in particular due to its unique facial features, which include a small upturned nose with the tip nearly reaching the forehead, pale blue around the eyes (think somebody has given them black eyes without the swelling), and bluish-black around the mouth, with large, juicy red lips. It’s the monkey version of the clown.”

Gentle giant:
Asian elephant
Although revered by many Asian cultures, the Asian elephant – Elephas maximus – is today tusk-to-tusk with extinction. “Asian elephants were previously found across 8.6 million square kilometres of southern Asia, from Iran to China south to Indonesia, but recent reviews suggest they are now only found in 10% of their original range and only a small proportion of that range is adequately protected,” explains Dr Hugo Rainey from the Wildlife Conservation Society.

For thousands of years, domesticated Asian elephants have been used in traditional ceremonies, to haul felled trees, for milling during harvest season and even as weapons of war. They boast the greatest volume of cerebral cortex available for cognitive processing in the animal kingdom, ranking their intelligence alongside that of the great apes when making and using tools.

Eating as much as 136 kilograms of roots, grasses, fruit and bark every day leaves little time for sleeping and these gently lumbering behemoths are almost constantly on the move. Herds are matriarchal: the dominant elephant is female, usually the oldest, largest or most experienced, and they communicate via low-frequency rumbles that can carry distances of up to 16 kilometres.

Their numbers, warns Dr Rainey, are rapidly dwindling. “The situation in Southeast Asia is particularly acute because large agro-industrial concessions are being developed rapidly in forested areas. Strategic planning of economic development rarely takes into account the needs of elephants for large contiguous areas of forest and wetlands which provide them with food, water and shelter throughout the year. For example, elephants may feed in open forest in the wet season when plenty of water holes and lush vegetation are abundant, but they may retreat to dense evergreen forest in the dry season where permanent water is found.

“Cambodia has probably five remaining populations of elephants scattered across the country and only three of these receive effective conservation protection. These populations are small, but they are some of the few remaining in Southeast Asia and should be saved to maintain Cambodia’s natural heritage.”

Leggy alarm clock:
giant ibis
Cambodia’s national bird is a relative monster. The giant ibis, Thaumatibis gigantean, stands a towering one metre in height, yet despite its imposing size it is rarely seen in the wild, where only 100 breeding pairs are thought to survive. So it was with much excitement that Wildlife Alliance announced in 2012 that a camera trap in Cambodia’s Koh Kong province had successfully captured an image of one ambling nonchalantly past the lens – the first definitive record in Koh Kong since 1918.

Found mostly in northern and eastern Cambodia, giant ibises are extremely sensitive to habitat disturbance and hunting – key factors in the declining population. The bird has a distinctive, alarm-like call and its preferred habitat includes marshes, pools, wide rivers and seasonal water-meadows in open lowland forest, generally at least 4km from the nearest humans.

Kampong Som valley, where the most recent image was captured, is an amazing ecosystem of flooded grasslands, wetlands, small lakes and a wide river mixed with regenerating deciduous and semi-evergreen forest. The area has been protected by the Cambodian Forestry Administration and Wildlife Alliance for the past 10 years in a bid to restore the corridor link between the western and eastern forests of the Southern Cardamom Mountains. The next steps for conservationists are to determine the size of the population and whether the bird photographed by Wildlife Alliance indicates the presence of a breeding population and, thus, new hope.

“The giant ibis shuns people,” Jonathan Eames, programme manager for BirdLife International in Indochina, has previously noted. “It’s a magnificent bird that, with its evocative call, will only be saved from global extinction when more people recognise that the economic values of the dry dipterocarp forests of Cambodia extend beyond cassava plantations and poorly conceived biofuel projects.”

Last chance to see V

Mostly harmless” – that’s how intergalactic traveller Ford Prefect describes Earth, after 15 years of research, in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. What his entry neglects to mention, however, is that its dominant life forms are anything but. Douglas Adams’ portrayal of the destruction of our planet by invading aliens was originally intended as a joke, but when the author realised the rate at which we are snuffing out the species that share our small blue-green world, he shifted from fiction to fact and spent a year travelling the world in search of the weirdest and most wonderful endangered species on Earth. His adventures, broadcast by the BBC in hit-series Last Chance To See, served as the inspiration for this series, our very own nod to the magnificent work of Southeast Asia’s most dedicated conservationists and the often peculiar creatures they are fighting to protect. Enjoy – and spare a moment to consider just how Vogon-like the human race has become.

Tree spirit: colugo

“The colugo is also known as a flying lemur, although it isn’t a lemur and it doesn’t fly,” explains Chris Shepherd, regional director of Traffic. Named because of its nocturnal habit and the shape of its fox-like head, “It does glide, however, and is an amazing animal.” Traditionally believed to be related to bats, colugos are in fact related to primates – and the most aeronautically skilled of all gliding mammals. Their gliding membrane is as large as geometrics will allow, and surrounds almost the entire body, extending from the tips of the fingers and toes to the tail. Even the spaces between the fingers and toes are webbed to increase the total surface area (as in a bat’s wings, hence the confusion), allowing the most determined examples to soar distances of up to 136 metres – the longest ever recorded – in one apparently effortless motion.

Graceful in mid-glide, flying lemurs almost never descend to the ground, where their huge flaps of skin render any attempt to walk upright almost impossible. Instead, they spend their days sleeping in tree hollows or hanging upside-down from branches, clinging spread-eagled to tree trunks and climbing in short hopping bursts. Although boasting the kind of teeth normally associated with carnivores, the colugo’s diet consists of fruit and leaves. “It’s a very specialised feeder, eating parts of leaves with comb-like teeth which they use to ‘scrape’ the layers off.” It isn’t the only specialised feeder in the region: almost 90% of the Philippine Eagle’s diet consists of flying lemur.

“There are two species: one, Cynocephalus volans, endemic to the Philippines; the other, Cynocephalus variegates, here in parts of Southeast Asia. Amazingly, the best place to see them is in Singapore, possibly because there aren’t too many predators left there. Their coloration makes them blend perfectly with the tree bark. Often one does not even notice them until that bump on the tree glides away into the darkness.”

Singular serpent: Mcgregor’s pit viper

“Snakes are renowned for creating a sense of fear and loathing in many people, and as a consequence have become maligned creatures, but there are also those who love them, as a fascinating topic of study, as photogenic subjects for wildlife portraits, or as exotic pets,” says wildlife photographer Jeremy Holden. “One particular snake, perhaps the prettiest in all Southeast Asia, has inspired all of these things. McGregor’s pit viper, Parias mcgregori, is a singularly striking example of serpent-kind. At less than a metre long, it’s a pygmy compared to some of the region’s largest snakes – the king cobra can reach up to 6m and the reticulated python up to 9m – but in this case, small is beautiful. This viper, unlike many of its family, is not cryptically coloured. Whereas many snakes try to blend into their surroundings, especially ambush predators like the vipers, the Mcgregor’s is an immaculate golden yellow or sometimes a ghostly ivory white.

“This unusually beautiful snake has suffered because of its looks. Collectors will pay thousands of dollars for a specimen, and until recently this species seemed destined for extinction in the wild. The problem is that Mcgregor’s pit viper is restricted to Batanes Island in the Philippines, and because of rampant deforestation is now found only on the forested slopes of a single volcano, Mt Iraya.

“It’s a recipe that has caused the extinction of many species in the past: a high monetary value and a very restricted range. But it can also inspire conservation action, and such has been the case with Mcgregor’s pit viper. A captive breeding and release programme may help to save this species from extinction. It will probably never be common, but if its remaining habitat can be protected at least now it may have a future.”

Costumed ape:

red-shanked douc

Glimpsed from afar, the red-shanked douc – Pygathrix nemaeus – looks not unlike a little potbellied man clad in grey shirt, black trousers, maroon leg-warmers and white gloves. Smiling eyes are shaded by powder-blue eyelids and its face is ringed by a long, white ruff. Known as the ‘costumed ape’, this leaf-eating Old World monkey “is one of the most colourful primates in the world”, says Larry Ulibarri, head of Vietnam’s Son Tra Douc Research and Conservation Project, and Frankfurt Zoological Society. “They inhabit a diversity of tropical forests in north and central Vietnam, east-central Laos and the northern most tip of Cambodia, living in small families that are loosely connected within a large social group and regularly come together to sleep.”

Between dozes, doucs move almost silently through the treetops. Adult males lead the troupe from branch to branch, followed by females and infants, with juvenile males bringing up the rear. When spooked, they bark loudly and rush around the trees slapping branches to sound the alarm. Sociable creatures, doucs have been known to dine communally. Their portly bellies are the product of having a large stomach divided into sacs filled with bacteria that digests the cellulose in leaves, which in itself causes another, equally noticeable by-product – conspicuous burping.

The main predator of these peaceful primates is, as always, humans. Native people hunt them for food and body parts, which are used in traditional medicine, and the illegal wildlife trade in doucs continues to thrive due to a lack of effective law enforcement. During the Vietnam War, much of the douc’s habitat was heavily bombed or destroyed with defoliants such as Agent Orange. According to one less than pleasant rumour, soldiers also used them for target practice.

“Images of doucs often grace maps, books and tourism advertisements in Indochina,” says Ulibarri. “Considering their striking colouration, this is not surprising, yet surprisingly little is being done to protect these charismatic monkeys. Decisive measures are needed if the doucs are going to have a chance to survive.”

Last chance to see IV

Continuing our homage to the wonderful conservation work of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams, wildlife experts from across Southeast Asia showcase their favourite exotic creatures who are eyeball-to-eyeball with the spectre of extinction.

Parachute with a pulse: Wallace’s flying frog
Wallace’s flying frog, Rhacophorus nigropalmatus, is “one of nature’s wonders,” says wildlife photographer Jeremy Holden. “First documented by Alfred Russell Wallace (along with Darwin, a co-discoverer of the theory of evolution) in Borneo, it’s a tree frog that has developed the technique of gliding. Although known as a ‘flying frog’, it actually uses the expansive webbing on its hands and feet, plus flanges along its body, to turn itself into a living parachute. In the rainforests of South East Asia, where the canopy is open, this allows it to glide between trees, or sail gracefully down to the small forest pools in which it breeds.

“Loss of forest has impacted flying frog numbers, but a more serious threat is caused by the depletion of large mammals within the frog’s habitat. It breeds only in wallows: pools used by deer, pigs and rhinoceros to coat themselves in mud as protection against parasites. The frogs probably use these wallows to breed because the water in them is contaminated with faeces, creating a kind of soup for the frog’s tadpoles. As large mammals become scarcer, so too do the forest wallows, meaning the frogs have less chance to breed.

“I noticed this dynamic at work in Sumatra. This species is very photogenic but difficult to locate. I knew some places where it bred, but when large mammals stopped using these pools to wallow, the rain eventually washed them clean and the frogs stopped using them. These frogs live high in the canopy, only coming down low when they breed. To try to draw them in, I began urinating in the pools, trying to recreate the features of a used wallow. Within a few days the frogs would be there, lured by the smell of the fetid water.” Wallace’s flying frog occurs in the rain forests of Indonesia, Malaysia and southern Thailand.

Extreme angler:fishing cat
An accomplished angler, the fishing cat, Prionailurus viverrinus, is perhaps the only feline named after what it does. This cat spends so much time underwater in pursuit of fish, frogs, lizards and even water birds, which it has been known to seize by the legs, that its ears have evolved into tiny stubs. The cat attracts fish by lightly tapping the water’s surface with its paw, mimicking insect movements, and then dives in, using its short, flattened tail like a rudder. Extended claws make perfect fish hooks with which to grab prey, and when it emerges from the water with its ears slicked back to keep them dry, the fishing cat could almost pass for an otter – albeit substantially rarer.

“This small cat must be one of the most poorly known carnivores in the world,” says Dr Hugo Rainey, a former technical adviser with the Wildlife Conservation Society in Cambodia. “It has a supposedly huge range, from western India east to Indonesia, but there are few reliable observations and it is therefore classified as endangered.” Hunted for food and fur, and increasingly starved of their natural habitat, numbers are dwindling at an alarming rate. “Records from the past have proved so unreliable that places such as Laos and Sumatra, where this species was once believed to occur, have since been removed from their distribution.

“Although in India and Nepal the fishing cat is found at inland sites, surveys in Thailand and Java found that only a very small number of coastal wetlands still contain this species. In Cambodia the fishing cat is known from one observation at the coast, but unlike in other parts of Southeast Asia, it has been recorded occasionally in the interior of the country around the Tonle Sap, the world’s largest floodplain lake. Surprisingly, one was photographed by camera trap on the northern plains of the country in Preah Vihear – the only fishing cat observed in the wild in Cambodia. The frequent floods and many waterholes of Preah Vihear may be why this species is found so far from the coast.”

Doe-eyed danger:pygmy slow loris
Deceptively doe-eyed, the pygmy slow loris – Nycticebus pygmaeus – is a solitary night-walking primate which feeds primarily on plant juices, such as gum, and insects, and can fit inside a large coffee cup. A reflective layer in the back of its very large eyes allows it to navigate safely through the night, but don’t be fooled by its come-hither look. “Lorises have a gland near the elbow which oozes a strong-smelling substance whenever the loris feels threatened,” says Dr Ulrike Streicher of Fauna and Flora International, who in her capacity as a wildlife veterinarian has been studying them in northern Vietnam since 1998 and is considered one of the world’s leading experts (although she modestly insists “that’s easy to say” because there are only about three people in the world who actually specialise in them). “The loris licks this liquid – which, when mixed with saliva, turns toxic. Because of this, the loris’ fierce defensive bite can induce anaphylactic shock in its victim.”

You might imagine such knowledge would be enough to deter would-be predators, but sadly no, at least not the human variety. Almost wiped out during the extensive burning, clearing and defoliating of forests in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, today the loris – confined to Vietnam, eastern Cambodia, Laos and China – fares little better. “Despite legal protection, they are heavily hunted for use as pets and traditional medicines. Dried lorises can be found in many markets in Cambodia and live lorises are sold as pets for as little as $10 in Vietnam.” All lorises, which communicate with each other through whistles and scent-marking, are included in Annex 1 in CITES and the international trade is severely restricted, “but hunting and trade continues and recent surveys show that they have become rare across much of their range and nowadays the species occurs almost nowhere at normal densities any more. With their slow breeding rate (lorises give birth to one or two infants every two years, always in February or March) and limited ability to cover large distances, it is difficult to see how populations of the loris will ever recover.”

Last chance to see III

In honour of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams, who spent a year tramping to the ends of the Earth with biologist Mark Cawardine in search of near-extinct creatures for the BBC in 1989, we continue our own nod to the magnificent work of nature right here. Teeming with almost as many exotic creatures as the Amazon, Southeast Asia is a hot-spot for fauna and flora that risks becoming a black hole if the destructive urges of humankind aren’t brought to heel. So, without further ado, meet some more must-see species. Book early, to avoid disappointment…

Furry 4×4: serow

So adept at scaling rugged mountains that it inspired the creation of an off-road motorcycle, the mainland serow, Capricornis milneedwardsii, is a shaggy black mountain goat that lives among the lofty limestone hills of mainland Southeast Asia (the Yamaha model, whose nature-loving, litter-collecting fans call themselves ‘serowists’, has now migrated as far as the US). Solitary, elusive creatures, they’re suckers for sunbathing and can spend hours rooted to one spot. Shy and largely nocturnal, they’re among the region’s lesser-known rarities – and are set to become even rarer if the rate at which they’re being snatched to feed the traditional medicine market doesn’t decrease. “They are one of the most heavily hunted and traded mammals in Southeast Asia,” says Chris Shepherd, deputy regional director of Traffic, “but because they are not striped and don’t have ivory, few pay any attention to them.” The serow does, however, have horns. While they may not be particularly impressive to look at (they grow to a mere six inches and are mainly used for headbutting would-be turf-challengers), these horns are much sought-after by poachers: the tip is used to make a deadly spear which can be attached to a rooster’s spur before cock fights. Some serow are destined for the dinner table, others are destined to have their heads boiled for oil. “They’re traded largely for the oil in their facial glands, oil in glands on their feet and for the fat in their stomachs,” says Chris. “This goop is used for a variety of medicinal uses, such as to make one’s joints supple, to make your skin soft and to treat a variety of other ailments. At one point, a dealer in Myanmar dumped some of the stuff on my arm and it did indeed make my skin soft. It also made me smell like a goat…”

Twitchers’ Holy Grail: masked finfoot

Glimpsed from afar, which is usually the closest these shy water birds allow their human admirers to get, the masked finfoot – Heliopais personatus – could almost be mistaken for a common duck. “But although it looks like a duck,” notes Adam Starr of Fauna and Flora International, “it is in fact one of the rarest and least-known birds in the world.” Found only in a few pockets of wetland habitat scattered across Asia, the finfoot, which has a call that sounds like someone blowing bubbles in a glass of pop, is something of a loner. It rarely ventures out in strong daylight, preferring instead to sift through the mud for tiny aquatic creatures under cover of thick vegetation in the early morning, or simply hide out in the bushes on the bank of a creek until any interested third parties have safely passed by. You’ll know a finfoot when you see one: while swimming, they jerk their heads back and forth with comical effect. Masked finfoots rarely fly, and when they do, it’s usually only about a metre above the water’s surface. That’s not to say they can’t get up to quite a speed: unlike ducks, which have fully webbed feet, the finfoot’s striking pea-green toes are lobed, which allows it not only to propel itself through the water like a torpedo, but also to move adeptly on land. Far from clumsy, it can run surprisingly fast and even clamber into trees. Distant relatives of cranes and rails, finfoots have been recorded twice in Cambodia’s Mondulkiri Protected Forest. Because of their secretive nature, population estimates are all but impossible, but conservationists warn their numbers are dwindling fast as Asia’s wetlands and lowland forests continue to deteriorate and, in some cases, disappear. There is, however, an even more urgent human-induced threat to the survival of this ornithologists’ Holy Grail: during a recent scientific study conducted in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh, more than 60% of local fishermen interviewed admitted having dined on – you guessed it – masked finfoot.

Hairy humanoid: Cao vit gibbon

Famous for having the longest arms of any primate relative to body size and able to swing between trees that are more than ten metres apart, the cao vit gibbon (Nomascus nasutus) has a haunting call not unlike that of a rare bird of paradise. In ancient China, according to Fauna and Flora International (FFI) primatologist Yan Lu, poets and painters often immortalised these radiant creatures in their work “because the gibbon’s swift, graceful movement and beautiful song are considered representative of higher intelligence”. Rediscovered by FFI on the China-Vietnam border in 2002, where it exists in just one small patch of forest, the cao vit, also known as the eastern black crested gibbon, is the world’s second-rarest ape. Less than 110 are believed to still survive in the wild – and all are at risk of falling victim to hunting, along with the destruction of their natural forest habitats for fuel wood and to make way for increasingly rampant livestock grazing. To allow such a thing would be tantamount to fratricide: gibbons are considered close relatives to us humans in China, and commonly group themselves in family units of one male and one female (occasionally two) that mirror our own. “This is very similar to human beings and they have all same the kinds of emotions that we have,” says Yan Lu. “Gibbons like to sing at dawn and their song can be heard for as far as two kilometres in the forest. It is an extremely graceful sound, and serves as the wake-up call for all other forest-dwelling creatures.” Females of the species sport a magnificent disc of fur which encircles their face. A dark streak down the gibbon’s back adds to its distinctiveness. “This black fur runs from the top of the head all the way to the back of their shoulder, just like girls with long hair in the breeze.”

Nature’s percolator: civet

The global explosion in coffee culture has perhaps taken no twist more peculiar than that involving kopi luwak. Known in Vietnam as caphe cut chon (‘fox-dung coffee’), its beans have basically gone in one end of a small animal and come out the other. The Indonesian palm civet, Paradoxurus hermaphroditus, is an expert tree-climber. This lithe little mammal, with its distinctive spotted hide, can be found wrapped around the boughs of palms where it sucks up the sap used traditionally by locals to make sweet liquor known as ‘toddy’. Today, far too many civets are forced to spend their time prowling around coffee plantations and gorging on the ripest, most primo cherries – the sweet pulpy fruit that encases the beans. Too tough to digest, the beans make their way intact through the civet’s digestive system and are promptly scooped up, sifted through and sold. Once upon a time, impoverished Indonesians made their living by collecting the civet’s excretions and brewing the digested beans into coffee. Then some bright spark figured out that, if they played their cards right, they could sell it to white folk for as much as $1,200 a kilo. Only about 500kg are produced in a year, making kopi luwak, according to one online retailer, ‘the ultimate in exclusivity and rarity’. Thanks to the growing market, its source is getting rarer – snatched from the wild in ever greater numbers for their meat or hide or to be hustled onto coffee farms. If you can bring yourself to ignore where kopi luwak comes from, a fact that brings new meaning to the phrase ‘this coffee is shit’, it is said to have a rich, full-bodied, almost syrupy quality. “While this seems to be increasingly popular, I cannot help but wonder why,” says Chris Shepherd, Traffic’s deputy regional director. “Who was the first person to try this? Having said that, who was the first person to eat seal penis, pangolin foetus or owl eyes?” Enjoy your morning brew, people. Want perineal gland with that?

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