The youngest tour guide in Battambang
The young boy sitting across from me in the tuk-tuk smiles politely and asks me my name. I hate to be a cheapskate, put out by the loss of a couple of dollars, especially when everything here is so cheap. But in Cambodia the dollars in question are American and I can’t help but think: “This isn’t what I budgeted for.”
I’ve been in Battambang, Cambodia, for twenty-four hours, drawn here by Lawrence Osborne’s Hunters in the Dark, the British author’s Greene-like thriller in which a young traveller not unlike myself gets in a whole lot of trouble on a visit to the city. It was recently announced that the novel has been optioned. As with literary adaptations, however, so occasionally with literary travel plans: the novel was better.
There are two main routes from the Thai-Cambodian border to Phnom Penh and both describe the contours of Tonlé Sap Lake. Everyone on my bus from Bangkok continued along the northern one to Siem Reap, while I was dropped off in Serei Saophoan and told to wait for a private car. After arriving a little after sundown, it tore through the night, covering seventy kilometres between Serei Saophoan and Battambang in ninety hair-raising minutes. I had dinner at the excellent Jaan Bai Restaurant, surrounded by tourists drawn by its TripAdvisor rating like moths to the proverbial, and wandered back to my hotel through the darkened streets. Some cities never sleep. A few pockets of what passes for nightlife aside, Battambang seemingly never wakes up.
I tell the boy my name and he introduces himself in turn. Mengchou is fourteen years old and works with his father, the tuk-tuk driver, as a tour guide and translator. They come recommended by the proprietor of my hotel, who called them to take me to Phnom Sampeau, a mountain eleven kilometres out of town. It’s the site of one of the Khmer Rouge’s most inventive and despicable killing fields, and of the Battambang bat caves. I negotiated the price down before getting in the vehicle and now feel compelled to ask whether I owe Mengchou something as well.
To my surprise, he says I do not. He and his father come as a package. This is what Mengchou does on his weekends: he works.
We are about an hour too early for the bats and Mengchou asks if I would like to visit the killing cave, where victims were murdered at the rim of a shaft, into which their bodies were then thrown. I respectfully decline. I’ve been to the killing fields at Choeung Ek in the past, and to Phnom Penh’s S21 prison complex, and can’t help but feel that at a certain point one risks becoming a disaster tourist, a voyeur at sites of others’ pain. As one of Osborne’s Cambodian characters puts it in Hunters in the Dark, after his British guest has been asked whether he’d like to visit Phnom Penh’s “cheerful and exotic” genocide museums: “[O]ne gets tired of being an atrocity circus.” One certainly gets tired, emotionally, of visiting them. I’m content to get a front-row seat at the foot of the mountain where tourists are already jostling for position. I buy Mengchou a Coke and myself a large beer.
It is a truism of Southeast Asia that where there are tourist drawcards there will be those who capitalise on them. A hundred plastic chairs will spring up, beer fridges and hot plates will be commandeered, and the air will fill with the smells of barbecuing meats. The road is alive with teeming tuk-tuks as people arrive for the nightly spectacle.
I’m getting some strange looks, hanging out with an fourteen-year-old local, but I also can’t help but notice, as we talk, that more and more tourists are leaning in to listen. Mengchou knows everything there is to know about the bats and divulges his knowledge far more excitably than the comprehensive but rather dour English-language signage. Phnom Sampeau’s three bat caves are home to more than a million Asian wrinkle-lipped bats, he says, which will travel up to fifty kilometres each evening on their mad nighttime rush to eat nearly half their own body weight in insects.
He knows, too, about the Khmer Rouge, with several members of his extended family among the revolutionary government’s victims. Other family members were killed in 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia to bring Pol Pot and his regime to heel. Everything he knows he’s learned on his own, on Wikipedia or elsewhere online, with a mind to better educate foreign customers. Other tourists are soon asking him questions and offering to buy him drinks. When night falls, however, it falls quickly, and the volume of the tourists with it, and there is movement in the gaping maw of the mountainside that causes me to say: “I think they’re coming.”
It would be like something out of a horror film were it not so strangely beautiful. A single black drop into the indigo evening becomes, almost immediately, a raging torrent, an otherworldly, chirping stream. It is as though the mountain is breathing, or exhaling, the bats into the night. At first, it is possible to make out individual animals, a thin filigree of space between them, but they quickly solidify into a unitary mass, which melts almost as rapidly into the darkening background of the sky. One wonders about the first bat: what compels it, what drives it, beyond instinct and nature, to head out of an evening and into the atmosphere? It is the vanguard, not only of an unlikely aesthetic marvel, but of an ecological one as well, the bats saving some 1800 tonnes of rice from insects each year, enough to feed 21,000 people. The airborne procession will continue for a while yet, but the fading light makes it increasingly difficult to make out and it isn’t long until the tuk-tuks start beeping their horns and the tourists their trek back into town.
Mengchou is looking tired. He’s done more tours than usual this weekend, he tells me. He’ll get up at five tomorrow morning and won’t go to bed until about ten in the evening, having completed the school day, two separate English classes, and a Mandarin one, which he pays for himself. He sometimes chooses to nap during his lunch break, he tells me, and the other children laugh at him for it. His older brother refers to him as a “banana,” which is to say as a homosexual, on the grounds that he doesn’t have a girlfriend. He looks at me earnestly and says: “I don’t have time to have a girlfriend.”
Mengchou, it turns out, is a man on a mission. When I tell him I’ll look him up again next time I’m in town, and that maybe he’ll be a professional tour guide by then, he smiles and shakes his head. “What I really want is to be an engineer,” he says. That’s one of the reasons he’s learning Mandarin, he tells me, which will increase his chances of getting work on the hydroelectric projects being spearheaded by China all up and down the Mekong. That’s why he studies so hard and dedicates himself to working on the weekends. His family won’t be able to send him to university — “My father drives a tuk-tuk, all my uncles drive tuk-tuks, my brother is going to drive a tuk-tuk…” — and so he needs to save. “One day I will be an engineer and my family won’t have to drive tuk-tuks anymore,” he says.
Mengchou is the most impressive person I’ve met in Southeast Asia this visit and I wind up trying to tip him after all. Ever the gentleman, or perhaps wary of charity, he gives it back and says it isn’t necessary. We agreed on a price and that’s what I should pay. The youngest tour guide in Battambang is determined to make it on his own.
A shorter version of this piece was published in The West Australian on May 19, 2018, as ‘A novel time in so many ways’.
