Sentimental; where is that hat?

Home is where my hat hangs. I have said this many times to the eternal question of where is home, as I have criss-crossed over Australia for work and leisure and now living in Cambodia since 2005. The idea of home was so simple when younger. Where ever I had my meager belongings, including the above quoted hats, was home. I had no ongoing connection to the country town where I completed my schooling due to family breakup and the eventual relocation of both parents. Conveniently they ended up only 3 hours apart on either side of Sydney so over the years I have got to know Sydney as I visit, individually, family. Having never lived in or near Sydney though, it’s not in anyway ‘home’.

The last two times I have visited Australia I lived in a remote Cambodian province that was far from the bustling modern Asian capital of Phnom Penh. Far away physically and culturally from fast internet, bookstores, daily newspapers and groceries I immediately loved the remote location and in 3 years my happiness and sense of ‘home’ only grew. It was definitely and easily where my hat was hanging!

Then the change in where and what was home, as I acknowledged it was time to move on, took place. The change was due to wanting new work challenges and time for cosmopolitan distractions such as art galleries, opportunity for making new friends, options for exercise and a fast variety of food.

But now 3 months after the relocation to Phnom Penh where is home? My hat is hanging in a charming, homely and secure apartment in inner city. Yet is it home? Its not home in the simplified way that Ratanakiri was immediately and absolutely home. Now I confuse myself, as I vaguely think of home as Ratanakiri. It’s vague they as I not really believe its home. It’s where I felt at home but already the town has moved on without me and it’s no longer where my hat hangs. Physically I am here in the city but I feel like a long-term visitor.

How complicated when I also think of Australia as home. My hat is not hanging there?! I will visit there for 6 half weeks in the southern hemisphere spring and I am really looking forward to it. Will it be home? It will be emotionally wonderful to be in Australia but intellectually distressing as I try not to take the materialism and bureaucracy as criminal behaviour by compatriots! Aaaaaggh, where is home! I panic at times? Have I lost home?

It’s complicated now. I liked the simplified time of having the ‘where my hat was hanging’ definition. What has happened to that sense of space and place as I get older? There was no agonizing over definitions of home in my 20s or early 30s.

Very traditional Buddhism believes that if we move too fast and too many times, our spirit will lose itself as it moves slower than our physical body. Such a concept might suitably be used to guess that my spirit is still making it way down along the Mekong River, as it leaves our northern home of Ratanakiri. By the time my spirit rejoins myself, maybe I will know where the hat is hanging.

How low is ‘low season’?

Annual figures are that more than 1 million people visit Siem Seap, so as to see the amazing Angkor Wat Temples. That’s a lotta bods, I think to myself, again. Spread out unevenly across 12 months of low and high season, surely that’s still a lot of people. I look in wonder at empty streets and cafe. I never guessed low season would be so quiet.

I never guessed exactly how low a ‘global financial crisis’ can get. I suspect I am viewing the evidence of that crisis? A total of 50 people at most in ‘Pub St’, usually the busiest part of an incredibly busy tourist town. Its all too weird to grasp from Phnom Penh where I live in a very Khmer neighbourhood. The basic market on the street below my apartment, in Phnom Penh, through to the fancy mall two blocks away, are always busy to my eyes. ‘Country cousin’ that I am, at times, coming from a remote province I forget that Phnom Penh also is in low season. The locals’ food market not likely to alter but of course other tourist areas in the city will get busier once into high season. Hard to imagine the city even busier? Which is why I know I am bit of a ‘country cousin’ in the ‘big smoke’, when assessing what is busy. Come September as high season begins its tourists will fill certain areas of the city and then I will remember that I moved to the city in the off season.

Back to Siem Reap, what I am seeing is the low season plus something else. I knew and lived in Siem Reap in the high season back in 2005/06. I can’t believe that this stillness and lack of people is only due to low season.

Speaking to the long-time staff and owner of the café where I am the sole diner, they assure me they have never ever seen this lowest ‘low season’. Maybe there is no ‘high season’ in September they query rhetorically.

Will I see an impact of this financial crisis once I visit Australia in a few months? I always was aware of the depth of people’s impossibility to understand the poverty, lawlessness and optimism of Cambodia’s economics; I myself not sure I know the depth of these contradictions. Now I realise being based in a developing country, I not understand much more than the superficial, of this global crisis. Cambodia’s tourism industry is its biggest industry and the garment factory is the second. The garment factory has lost a third of all contracts so there are many unemployed. Now I see for myself, the almost complete shut down of tourism. How many people in Cambodia are currently impacted by the global crisis?

Omens and criteria for decisions

I knew I was leaving Ratanakiri soon, when I saw my favourite lake spot on far side of lake where hardly anyone went, disastrously changed into a public swimming platform! The walk around the lake always existed and within steps beyond the original swimming platform, the path became narrow, overhung by bamboo and seeing reptiles or birds was common. ‘My spot’ was about 150 metres up around a bend and then I stepped off the path into a natural waterway, where there was a little shallow rocky ledge that made entering the lake okay.

On my visit before going to PP for final interview with Friends I saw the workmen had widen the path, made a little creek crossing into a substantial bridge and had started on a large 40metre square platform that goes over the water and with steps down into the water. Its perfect for tourists and locals. Such infrastructure is required as tourism increases to the lake.

But its ‘my spot’!

Not any longer, was what I reconciled myself too. It was an omen to move to PP. It was a message that I was able to move on, just as Cambodia’s most provinces were changing.

In PP messages and criteria are little more subtle if not contradictory ….

I made my criteria for a place to rent. It must have good security, be in a locals’ area rather than expat high-rise apartments and have a great kitchen. So I chose a French colonial building with what seems to be a fab Khmer family whose father works in the Ministry of Interior and has no kitchen! Well they will add a kitchen. Of course. Yet my inflexible, I know what I want, have made my predetermined criteria of a kitchen was so quickly swayed by other factors ….

In PP, the staircase entrances to apartments has caught my eye. Most of them are horrid! They are narrow, hot, smelly with steps that make me mince along, teetering on edge of the tiny steps, unable to pass through a doorway with my small backpack on, as its all so narrow. Ugh! And keys for metal gate-like doors with padlock after padlock.

Thus I adored the wide, open, breezy and clean stairwell of my French colonial building. It’s a marvel as its wide enough for two people to pass, is open on one side and the spiral effect means the steps are not steep. Did I just choose a place due to its stairwell ….?

Top two pics are of the temporary home's gated, narrow entrance and stairs and bottom picture is the French influenced spiral stairwell