From the end of 1974 until the beginning of 1975, when I was 18, I lived in Cambodia for about six months during the war against the Khmer Rouge.  During my stay in Cambodia, I tried to make a living teaching English as a second language.  The first couple of months were quite difficult as I didn’t have very many students and I almost didn’t have enough money, to feed myself.  In a two-month period, due to a bout of malaria and lack of food I lost 10 kg (about 22 lbs).  During this lean time I had made the acquaintance of the first secretary of the Australian consulate, a Mr Dixon.  Mr Dixon (unfortunately I can’t remember his first name) could see the straits that I was in.  I guess he felt a bit sorry for me, and since he had a government supplied house complete with a gardener, chauffeur, security guard and cook, he would invite me around the dinner, and also to the occasional consulate do.

On one occasion I was invited to a barbecue at the consulate for Australia Day (26th of January) in 1975 .  On the invitation, it said come dressed casually.  In my minds eye, I had envisaged a bunch of the egalitarian Australians standing around a fire with steaks on the end of sticks, barbecuing their own meat with a beer in the other hand, dressed in T-shirt, shorts and thongs (also known as flip-flops or jandles). Just like back home.

It came as quite a surprise to me as I turned up at the consulate dressed in a tattered old T-shirt and frayed jeans to be sat at a long, linen covered table, set with heavy silverware, next to the uniformed militarily attaché.  There were about 40 of us seated at the table, which was outside next to a large swimming pool.  When the food was served it was brought to us by uniformed staff, who dished out the French style food with silver service.  All the other men who were at the “barbecue”, with the exception of the military attaché, were dressed in polyester safari suits.  I guess in diplomatic circles, safari suits are considered casual, and barbecue was code for alfresco dining.  Opposite me at the table were my friend Mr Dixon and his secretary.  I was later told that Mr Dixon had made sure I was sitting next to the military attaché because he knew I would provide some entertainment, as I drove him crazy with anti-Vietnam-war talk.  As a matter of fact, the military attaché was quite annoyed that I’d managed to dodge conscription by being out of the country traveling.  He also opined that it would probably do somebody like me a bit of good to be under some military discipline for a couple of years.  I was definitely the youngest, scruffiest, noisiest thing at the table, and I’m sure the military attaché would have liked to punch my empty head in.

I felt that I had infiltrated an alternative world.  Making a living wasn’t difficult for these people, as they all had profitable diplomatic jobs or positions in non-government aid organizations.  The life of well-paid expats in Third World countries is redolent of the life led by the British Raj, as they all had servants and chauffeurs to smooth the way through the ubiquitous soirees and heat.  I envied them.

The conversation around the table was fascinating to someone like me. One fellow, from the British Embassy was telling us about one of the new guys at his work, who had scandalized Phnom Penh diplomatic circles by making the great faux pas of turning up to a diplomatic event drunk and in the company of two hookers.  Another guest at the table was telling us how Cambodia had become a brass exporter, because Lon Nol’s wife had arranged for much of the artillery ammunition supplied by the Americans to be fired, just outside of the city, so they could get the brass casings and sell them.  There was also talk, about an Australian persona non-grata who had worked as a mercenary for the Cambodian government forces. 

I had met the guy who they were talking about and I asked him why he had worked as a mercenary. He told me that he met the owner of a plantation that was now under Khmer Rouge control. The mercenary (I can’t remember his name) said that he had been promised a job as a supervisor, after the war if the government forces won, if he could help the plantation owner train his personal squad of men to fight.  I asked him how it went and he said it was a total shambles.  Apparently there was absolutely no discipline, and all the Cambodian soldiers under his command were conscripts who didn’t really understand why they were there and they were impossible to control.  He told me one time that when he was out on patrol in a rice paddy that a Khmer Rouge soldier broke from his position and ran across the field in front of them, only about a hundred meters away, and that all his soldiers opened fire, and that all 20 or 30 of them missed as they sprayed bullets in every direction until their magazines were empty.

I’ve seen evidence of this sort of thing when I was in Phnom Penh myself.  One day when I was in my hotel room, not far from the central market, I heard a series of rifle shots.  About 5 shots in quick succession were fired, so I ran out on my balcony to see a group of about three soldiers shooting at a man fleeing from them.  The fleeing man went around the corner and then down a lane that I knew was very narrow, and I felt the sure they would get him as I heard about another 10 shots being fired.  I quickly grabbed my camera and ran downstairs and then to the lane, fully expecting to see some triumphant soldiers standing around a body in the lane.  But no, every single shot had missed.  As somebody who’s been in the army cadets and been trained to shoot, I couldn’t believe that so many shots would have missed, particularly in the narrow lane.  On reflection, I’m even more amazed that none of the bystanders in the streets were shot.

Over the years often thought of the kindness that Mr Dixon showed me and I’ve tried to track him down, without any luck, to thank him.

Whilst I’ve always been attracted to motorcycles I’ve also been very wary of them.  One of the reasons why, is because my father died in a motorcycle accident when I was about three years old, and another reason is, that I recognize that I love speed.

On several occasions, while I’ve been traveling I have rented motorcycles to get where I needed to go.  Quite often in Third World countries, all that one needs to hire a motorcycle is some valid currency, as opposed to a valid driver’s licence.  As a matter of fact, when I was in Bali, I admitted to the people renting me a motorcycle that I had never ridden a motorcycle before.  They said no worries, just come next door into the empty lot and we’ll show you how. After five minutes of instruction, I was out on the very dangerous Balinese roads without a helmet.

A fellow traveler, who I’d met a few weeks previously in Portuguese Timor (as it was known back in 1974) was also renting a motorcycle at the same time, and he also received the same intensive training as I did. Later I was told by his friends that unfortunately, he failed to lean as he made a turn around a corner and left the road, crashing into a deep ditch and broke his neck, paralyzing himself from the shoulders down.  To make matters worse, the Hindu beliefs of the locals made it very hard for this unfortunate fellow to get any medical assistance.  Apparently the locals felt that it was the will of the gods that people have accidents and that he was doomed and going to die anyway.  Nobody would help, and the injured man’s friends were frantic trying to get him to hospital, but nobody would stop and help with transportation.  Finally, the injured man’s friends just stepped out into the road and blocked traffic and made a guy driving a car, take their friend to hospital.  They told me, they almost had to use violence to get the man to put their injured friend into his car.  To make matters worse, when the motorcyclist got to Hospital his friends were told there wasn’t really anything much that the local doctors could do for him.  So they telephoned his parents to arrange for him to be taken back to Australia for further medical treatment.  When the injured man’s parents rang the airline company to arrange to get him to come back to Australia.  They were told that they would have to buy five first-class tickets, so he could be laid in a stretcher and he also had to be accompanied by a trained nurse.  It must have cost a fortune and because of this story; I always travel with travel insurance nowadays.

A few months after Bali, I was in northern Thailand and I visited the hill tribes of Chang Mai.  Back then, there wasn’t really any public transport to get up into the hill tribes and you either had to go on an organized tour or rented a motorcycle, so I rented a motorcycle. 

 The bike, I rented was a Honda 125cc dirt bike. About half of the journey to the hill tribes is on the highway and the driving was quite easy, but then one leaves the road and travels on dirt tracks that were more pathways than roads.  It had been raining that day, so it was very muddy, and as an inexperienced rider I was having a great deal of difficulty negotiating the steep slippery terrain.  Eventually, I did get to the hill tribes and got to see the villagers, and it was all quite surreal, as there was a very fine misty rain falling, it was almost like a fog. 

In amongst the mist, little people, dressed in black would pop into and out of view. It was all very strange as there wasn’t really any infrastructure to deal with visitors to the villages and people just sat in their doorways out of the rain staring back at the strangers in the mist. 

 There weren’t that many men in the village, I guess they were all out working in the poppy fields.  Most of the people I saw were either women or little children minding other smaller children.

On the way back from the hill tribes, I had to cross a small creek, and as I was going over the muddy bank of the far side.  I flipped over the motorcycle onto my leg and the hot exhaust pipe burnt my inner thigh.  It was very painful and within a few days I had a very nasty tropical ulcer suppurating on my leg. I had applied anti-bacterial ointment to my burn, but the ulcer just got worse and after about a week and a half I was getting quite worried.  By then, I was in Huay Xai, Laos, so I went to the doctor at the local Red Cross outpost.  Back in those days, if you had a tropical ulcer, the remedy was usually surgery, but I was lucky as there was a new antibiotic called Bactrim,and fortunately the Swiss doctor was able to prescribe some for me.  It worked a treat, and within a week and a half there wasn’t any sign that I’d had such a serious infection on my leg.

Interestingly, while I was waiting to be seen by the doctor, I met a fellow traveller, and he looked very yellow, so I said to him I thought that he had hepatitis.  He told me that he’d been feeling very run down and sick during the last month. When he was in Chang Mai he’d gone to see the doctor and they did exploratory surgery on him, but they were unable to find out what was wrong with him.  I guess at that stage he wasn’t yellow enough for them to see that he had hepatitis, which I could plainly see and I wasn’t even a doctor.

Fast-forward several more years to the early 80s, when I was in Puerto Rico.  I had rented a dented, dirty Kawasaki 100, because I wanted to see some of the countryside of Puerto Rico.  Like most rental motorcycles I’ve seen outside of the first world it was a piece of ill maintained rubbish. The motorcycle was supplied without a helmet and my safety gear consisted of T-shirt, shorts and thongs (otherwise known as flip-flops or jandles).  I set off first thing in the morning while was the sun was still coming up, and there was still a heavy layer of dew on all the roads.  I was surprised at how good the roads were as I headed out of San Juan.  They had four lanes and were as smooth as an ice rink.  Since the roads were so nice, I thought I could open the bike right up and see how fast it went, which was only about 100 km an hour, (about 62 miles an hour). So down the road I sped, as the poor little “Kwakka” revved its heart out.

As I was riding along, enjoying the countryside I started hearing strange clicking sounds coming from the back of the motorcycle.  I had no idea what the noise was but I was soon to catastrophically find out.  All of a sudden, the back wheel locked up as the chain came off and the bike started to go down so I stuck out my foot to upright the bike.  As soon as my foot touched the pavement, my thong was torn off, but at least I had managed to keep the bike upright. The bike then flipped over towards the other side and was about to go down.  By now, the adrenaline pumping through my system was like like honey on the gears of my perception and I felt as I was partaking in a slow motion movie of my own demise.  As I started to go down in the opposite direction, I found myself contemplating my end.  I thought to myself, so this is how I die. So this is where my story finishes.  Somewhere in-between exclaiming OH SHIT! And contemplating oblivion, I suddenly had the strange thought that I could do a somersault if I wanted to. This all happened in less that a second.

As somebody who has grown up in Sydney Australia, I’ve spent quite a bit of my time as a youngster at the beach, and as a result, I’ve done lot of body surfing.  Now, if you’ve ever gone body surfing at Bronte Beach in Sydney.  You know how to handle a dumper.  Dumpers are large waves that don’t break in open water but smash straight down onto sand, and if you’re not careful, you can get hurt.  What one does to avoid a broken neck, as one is falling off the top of the wave onto the sand, is to tuck one’s chin into an one’s chest, and put one’s shoulder forward to hit the sand with your shoulder in a rolling motion.  So there I was, on a motorcycle with a locked up back wheel quickly going out of control, contemplating somersaults and remembering childhood body surfing.  In an instant, I made a snap decision.  I stood up on the foot pegs and jumped forward over the front of the motorcycle as it went down into the highway. I was flying through the air at about 100 km an hour, no helmet, dressed only in a T-shirt, shorts, and one thong.  By this time, I was in, what I guess was an adrenaline driven calm.  I felt very tranquil, and as though I had all the time in the world to perform a few somersaults, and as I neared the verge at the side of the road my body surfer instincts took over and I landed on my shoulder and rolled to a sliding stop in the loose gravel with a slight graze on my shoulder and nick on the back of my hand. As I sat on the side of the road in a daze, I watched my motorcycle in slow motion go end over end, bending the whole frame in half so that front wheel nearly touched the back wheel.

With the clear and present danger over, and my life preserved, I went into shock.  Being in shock is a little like just waking up, in that, one is groggy, conscious but not really aware.  I had the presence of mind to pull, the mangled motorcycle off the road and then hitch hike back into San Juan. I went straight to the motorcycle hire place and told the owner what had happened to his motorcycle.  He wasn’t too happy, but he wanted to know where the bike was, so we all got into his pickup truck and went down the highway to get it.  He couldn’t believe that I was in such good shape considering what the bike looked like when he saw it.  He soon got over his disbelief and then started to try and accuse me of trashing his bike and demanding that I pay for the damage.  By now my shock was starting to wear off and I wasn’t feeling as dozy as before so I let him know in very angry terms that he was very lucky I didn’t try and sue his arse off for providing me with a motorcycle that had a loose chain that nearly led to my death.

So there you go, motorcycles and me aren’t a good match.

In Australia, there is an unwritten law of the desert that if you see somebody by a car that has broken down, you always stop to help them. 

Two years ago, my wife and I went to America, and we drove from Las Vegas to Santa Fe in a rental car.  After visiting Zion National Park and the North Rim of the Grand Canyon we headed east through to Hovenweep National Monument to visit the old Ancestral Puebloan ruins. 

Both my wife and I were quite surprised at the fact that there were stone buildings built by the American Indians. 

 As Australians, our knowledge of the Native Americans is mainly informed by television.  The only sort of American Indians that one that tends to see in westerns are a pastiche of various Plains Indians with large eagle feather war bonnets on horseback who lived in buffalo skin teepees.  It was also interesting to find out that the Navajo who now are the largest Native American tribe of the U. S., actually came from the north in Canada back in the early 1400s, about 100 years before the Spanish. Apparently the word Anasazi is a Navajo word meaning “the old enemy”, and it is incorrectly used to describe the Ancestral Puebloans.

A year later, on another trip, we visited Mexico, and we noticed that the stonework of the pyramids near Mexico City had the similar decorative use of smaller stones in between the larger stones, just like in Hovenweep.

Perhaps the Ancestral Puebloans had some sort of cultural contact with the Aztecs of the South. 

The more time we spent in the southwest the more we came to feel that American history, as we knew it began in the mid-1800s and there didn’t seem to be very much acknowledgement of Hispanic, and Native American history in contemporary American society. 

We left Hovenweep as the night was falling and as we were passing Mesa Verde we saw a small Toyota pickup truck pulled over on the side of the road with its hood open and a guy standing next to it hitchhiking. 

 The area around Mesa Verde is semi arid and borderline desert, so we thought we should pick up the hitchhiker and help him out.  As soon as we opened the door, as our hearts instantly sank with regret as the smell of alcohol filled the interior of our car.  The fellow that we picked up was totally off his face drunk, and it would seem that he had driven into the desert without enough fuel in his tank.

Apparently he’d come from Cortez and was going to visit some family near Farmington because he had a fight with his girlfriend and had been thrown out of her home.  The reason why he had been fighting with his girlfriend was because he wouldn’t get a job and had been drinking too much lately.  He went on and on about what a bitch his girlfriend was because she wanted him to get a job and stop hanging out with his friends and getting drunk all the time. 

The really sad thing about this fellow was that he was a Native American and he was living up to, or should I say down to the stereotype of the drunken Indian.  As visitors to the United States of America, both my wife and I were quite interested in the indigenous culture, and we both found it very disappointing that the only contact we had so far, with any Native Americans, was with the drunk, we now had in our car.

Although our passenger was quite inebriated he was very proud of being a Navajo, and he liked to remind us at various intervals during his tirade against his girlfriend, that it was by the grace of people like him, that white people like my wife and I, were allowed to visit places like Hovenweep.  It was the old play on white guilt thing, and how we had taken away his heritage rant.  When I mentioned to our passenger that Hovenweep wasn’t Navajo, and that it was possible that the Navajo hadn’t been in the area that much longer than the white people, he just shifted back to his tirade about his girlfriend who just didn’t understand him, the bitch! Just because she had the job and paid the bills, she didn’t own him! The bitch!  Just who did she think she was? The Bitch!

After about 45 minutes of listening to his drunken ranting, I had just about enough and when we reached Shiprock I told him that we were staying there for the night and I dropped him off by the side of the road.  I lied. I went and filled up the car with gas, and headed onto Bloomfield.  A few miles out of town, I saw him again and much to his credit, he was running by the side of the road towards his destination about 20 miles away. 

The next day when we were in Chama, we met a woman in a store and we got talking about what had happened the day before, with our hitchhiker.  She was a very nice woman and as I told her our story, I could see a flash of anxiety streak across her face. In a very sisterly way, she pointed out that we should never pick up hitchhiker’s in America, due to the fact that so many people owned guns and that we were very lucky, nothing bad has happened to us.