Thanksgiving

I was away working last weekend, so I wasn't really thinking of Thanksgiving as a holiday. I usually work right through October, so a proper Thanksgiving celebration only happens by chance. Sometimes a little late, like the one I had this year. But with or without the dinner, I'm still thankful for things that happened and those that didn't.

Things happen and things don't. Whether they happen or fail to because of our own skills and planning, because of stochastic processes, or because of an omnipotent being, I am grateful when the right things happen and the wrong things don't. Neither history, nor science, not even religious texts seem to indicate that gratitude or the lack thereof has great influence on what happens and what doesn't, but I still have gratitude. The engines turned when I needed them to. The electricity flowed when I depended upon its service. The ice and the air and my wings did not interact in a way that had a disastrous effect on my flight. Over the years, the malfunctions that have occurred in flight did so after sunrise, within single-engine fuel range of a usable airport, once I was clear of IMC, when I had sufficient altitude, or before I was too tired. I saw what I needed to, and am surrounded by those who look out for me. I am grateful.

Also, you will find it hard to convince me that there is a better way to eat leftover turkey than cold, with my fingers, while standing in front of an open refrigerator.

P.S. to foreigners: Thanksgiving is a post-harvest festival that Canadians celebrate on the second weekend of October. It's not a public spectacle or a commercial event (for places other than grocery stores), just something you do in your home. People with normal jobs get a day off work on the Monday, but family or groups of friends will get together on any of the weekend days for a meal, usually involving roast turkey and seasonal vegetables, especially squash. If you're crafty you can score two or even three turkey dinners over the weekend, and everyone eats turkey sandwiches, turkey soup and turkey salads for a week afterwards.

Elephants and Temples

The next day's adventures started early again, to catch the cool of the morning and avoid crowds. We visited a number of temples, including the one that was used as for some exterior shots of the Tomb Raider movie with Angelina Jolie. It's a very popular movie here, because just as Canadians all get excited when we're mentioned on US TV shows, even though it's usually just to mock us, or make us the bad guys, people from countries many Americans have never even heard of are delighted to be recognized by the steamroller cultures of rich countries. The temple is overgrown with trees, right up on top of the walls and buildings, their roots simultaneously pulling the stones apart and holding them together. A busload of Japanese tourists was taking turns posing in front of one of the root-framed doorways, all miming shimmying up ropes or dual wielding pistols. As we leave we pass more tourists from all over the world. Listening carefully I could hear the name "Lara Croft" in a dozen different languages.

The terrace below was just a walkway, probably one of hundreds in the old metropolis, but this one happened to be a stone terrace all decorated with bas reliefs of elephants. As we said in more than one temple, bas relief isn't the right word, as many of the frescoes almost amounted to half-sculptures. Look at those elephant trunks! Many of them had been repaired over the years. One of the most interesting things about the elephant terrace was that it wasn't just a raised walkway with one side holding up an embankment, but for some reason it was a series of closely-spaced walls with staircases that allowed you to go down into the little spaces between them, and then wind your way around corners. It made no sense that they were built that way, and you could barely look at the sculpted walls because they were all so close together. It felt like being in a secret passage.

My second favourite temple in the whole of the park was Bayon. It had lots of interesting climbable structures and instead of being topped by towers or pyramids, it depicted huge faces with amazing personality. It so happens that I took my favourite photograph of the trip here, too. Right inside the walls of the temple was a structure with steep steps, probably one of those not-really-a-library libraries. I climbed up it to take pictures of apsara carvings on the walls, to see what was at the top inside and just because it is fun to climb things. There wasn't much inside, but it was a terrific vantage point to look at the layout of the rest of the temple and to take pictures. While I was there a group of monks came in and took turns taking pictures of themselves in front of it, then all filed along the side to go into the main temple. I love the colour of their robes against the stone, and their forms as scale for the giant faces.

The staircases inside were also very steep, and some had "Warning! Climbing at your own risk!" signs, a rarity for Cambodia where it seems to be understood by most people that no one else takes responsibility for your actions. The terrace at the next level puts you right up eye-to-chin with the giant statues. This is lots of people's favourite temple, and it's quite crowded. I'm standing on a ledge looking at some women costumed as apsara dancers. I think you can pay money to have your photo taken with them, but what I'm trying to do is line up a photograph of a Khmer man such that you can see his face at the same angle as one of the giant heads. A monk is coming by along the same ledge and I get out of the way, pulling my headscarf out of the way so it won't brush him. He doesn't make any effort in the other direction and I'm left wondering how much of this "monks can't touch women" rule is to enforce the monk's celibacy and asceticism, and how much is just asking women to stop what they are doing and throw themselves out of the way when a monk comes by. Women in my culture yield more to other people in a crowd than men do anyway. I didn't think to try out just standing my ground like a man and making the monks go around me, but it might have been interesting. I would have felt rude doing it, though. When in Rome.

Outside the temple there was a quiet side with an amazing fresco wall covered in a story that someone could probably spend a whole PhD thesis studying. You'd have to know the whole history of the wars and military campaigns mounted by the king who built this place, and learn about the equipment and battle strategies, and possibly individual generals. The whole length of that wall in row after row was covered by the pictorial story of soldiers and horses and elephants.

Below is a detail with a war elephant and a horse and some of the fallen soldiers. I think some of the bricks have been repaired or replaced, as they don't look the same as the others. I buy a couple of small pineapples from a vendor. They are pre-peeled and cored, and cut in a kind of spiral pattern so it's still in one piece, but easy to eat. I give one to the driver and eat one myself. It's incredibly sweet, not like the pineapples that come out of cans at home. We go for lunch. The menu offers "hold chicken" but I'm full of pineapple and just order a glass of cane sugar juice and some rice. The cane sugar juice is sweet, tastes like brown sugar, with a hint of of lime and coconut. It could believably be a Starburst candy flavour. I guess it's just not a very complex combination of esters.

While we are eating some French tourists just outside the restaurant are being besieged by child trinket vendors. "Une, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six ..." the kids demonstrate, counting the postcards and waving their coconut shell bracelets. I wonder about the whole economy of the trinket vendors. They all have such similar wooden apsaras, silk scarves and wooden flutes in palm frond cases that it's not plausible that they are the result of independent artisans, even if they are all copying one another. Someone is coordinating the design, manufacture and distribution of these things. They're so cheap even at the tourist end, that the people who make them must get next to nothing for them. It is always more fun to buy things from the actual artist or his or her family. One man is selling rubbings that I do believe he has done himself, and I really like one, so I buy it. He gives me a palm frond tube to keep it in, and it keeps it safe all the way home.

By afternoon we have had enough of temples for a while and ask the tuk tuk driver to take us for a tour of the town. He offered one on the first day, before I asked to go to the temples. He takes us to a market, and we try to explain that we really don't want to go shopping, we'd like to see other sights. He takes us to another market and we struggle to explain. We'd rather see parks, famous buildings, a view of the river? What sights are there to see? He says there is a park and as we approach I see a tourist office and ask him to stop there. It's on the edge of the park, so we will go to the tourist office and then the park. The tourism staff are helpful and give us a map of town and some suggestions. I also ask them if there is a restroom here. That's the sort of thing one expects in a tourism office, but I don't see one. "Yes," he says, "behind my office," and gives me the key.

It's on the outside of the building. The floor and the toilet seat are wet, but not with urine. I assume it's just the humidity, but when I'm done I realize that there is no toilet paper and not that they are out of toilet paper, but that this is not a toilet paper using country. There is no bracket for a toilet paper dispenser, or anything. There is however a sprayer on a flexible hose, just like the one in a shower. I noticed these in the well-equipped toilets near the temples, but there there was also toilet paper and I assumed the sprayers were for cleaning or something. Now it dawns on me that they are cleaning me, and that the sprayed water everywhere is the result of similarly clueless tourists trying to use them. I now understand the prohibition sign that was posted in the temple toilets, and I have great sympathy for people who immigrate to Canada and are forced to figure out how to clean themselves with scraps of flimsy paper. It's not like you can ask, or that anyone will be able to explain it to you. I still have no idea how to do the job with a sprayer without getting water everywhere.

We walk in the park, which is kind of an adjunct to the royal residence in Siem Riep. Workers in the park are mowing the grass with gasoline-powered weed whackers, swinging them in slowly advancing arcs across the huge expanse of lawn. Other workers with rakes are collecting the clippings. They've upgraded from scythes and rakes to powered equipment without changing the job one iota. I can see people working with exactly the same motions a thousand years ago, keeping the royal residence well groomed. The king is not here, in fact he's never here. He spends most of his time in China. "China? Why China?" I ask incredulously. China, it turns out, built a nice home for the King and it's more comfortable and convenient for him to live there. "Aren't you worried about that?" I ask. "Doesn't it seem wrong for a foreign power to have that much influence over your leader?" Suddenly our driver speaks much less English than he did earlier. Oops. Clearly he too sees the same politics in play that the ancient Angkorians tried with their gods. I find something else to talk about.

Later I ask to go to the post office. He finds it and I go in, all ready with the Khmer for "Please I would like stamps," although it should be obvious what a woman with a stack of addressed letters and postcards wants. That's not necessary as the postal worker speaks good English and sorts quickly through my stack going to New Zealand, Canada, the USA, and England, weighing the envelopes and counting the postcards. She gives me a total in riels, which I pay in US dollars and she gives me the correct change, not the street rate change, and then just keeps the letters. She's going to put the stamps on herself. I thank her and walk away. And it seems you all got your letters and postcards, which to me says that there is not much corruption in that part of the civil service. It would be easier to take a foreigner's money and postcards and throw them away, but the system is such that everyone trusts that it will be done correctly, and it was. It was a good sign. Honesty was common in Cambodia. For all the merchants' hustling, they didn't try to cheat us on change or take advantage of us misunderstanding and handing over more bills than necessary.

In the evening I walked up the hill to Banteay Phnom and watched the sunset, then rode an elephant back down the hill. I sat in an upholstered seat strapped to the back of the elephant and the mahout sat on the elephant's neck and directed it by tapping its head with his bare feet. He never stopped texting on his cellphone the whole time.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is what people call all the temples together, everything that remains of this ancient city, and the name also applies specifically to the largest temple. It's the iconic image of Cambodia, featured on the flag, the beer, the t-shirts, pretty much anything that needs to say Cambodia. We first saw it while passing by to get to other temples, and stopped by it to see inside, the first afternoon. It's hard to appreciate how big it is, because it's so big you just think each part is further away than it is.

It's accessed via a broad stone walkway over a waterway, I guess you might call it a moat. There were people in boats on the moat. I don't know if they were collecting trash, doing maintenance, hunting for frogs, or just having fun in boats. There was so much going on that I didn't think about it until now, trying to describe the experience. Once upon a time there would have been stone railings all along this walkway, but they have almost all fallen away. The walkway itself must have been a thousand years old, but it was more solid than most of the roads at home. The first set of towers, the ones you see in the photo above, are just part of an outer ring. You go up the stairs, pass though it, and follow another long stone walkway to the main building. There are more remnants of the snake-style handrail along each side and some "small" (bigger than my house) buildings in the fields either side of the walkway. They, and other buildings like this within courtyards are called "libraries," just a name some archeologist gave them, and that they were never repositories of documents.

At the end of the long walkway is Angkor Wat itself, but it's again a series of rings, kind of like cloisters at a monastery. There are roofs overhead in some places, but I note that they are very crude. Perhaps the rough stone was originally covered by carved wooden ceilings like in European cathedrals, or by silk draperies. The stone ledge around the top would easily support a ceiling. Interestingly, much of what they know today about Angkorian era woodwork comes from the apsara doors. The stonework there mimics woodworking joins so closely that it shows how they made doors. A lot of the stonework is not entirely finished. You see walls that have been partly decorated and even a few that have obviously amateur copies of the apsaras and designs, something between ancient graffiti and apprentices trying their hand at master work.

This many-armed Buddha statue was probably not representative of the original deity worshipped here, as the Angkorian kings were mostly Hindu. There seems to be a fair amount of give and take between Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance isn't it the Hindu gods, not Buddha, who are usually depicted with many arms? I thought this odd at first, and then I realized it's closer to the norm than to the exception. It's true for other combinations of religions that have existed in the same area for a long time. Christianity is so irrevocably intertwined with paganism that ancient fertility symbols like trees and rabbits are still central to Christian holidays. Judaism and Christianity have half a holy book in common. Religions branch off others and absorb pieces of others they come into contact with, like other aspects of culture.

The orange drapery on the statue is similar to a monk's robes; it's a distinctive colour that makes monks extremely photogenenic, especially against the stone, grass and sky. We see lots of monks at Angkor Wat, I think more because it's a fascinating place to visit as to worship at any particular statue. They are definitely tourists just the way we are, posing for photographs, looking at the old buildings and exchanging tips on what sights to see.

A monk is not allowed to touch a woman, not even an accidental brush between clothing. We found out that the monks weren't allowed to go to the water festival because the crowds were so dense it would be impossible not to come into contact with females. If they do accidentally touch a woman there is a purification ritual they have to go through, so I'm mindful of this and give the monks room. I am also not allowed to initiate a conversation with a monk, and presumably this includes gestural conversations, like miming, "May I take your picture?" Nevertheless, I want to take pictures of the monks so I keep watching where they are going in the hopes of setting up a good photo. I saw a group of three walking down a cloister, but the light was poor. When I got to the end of the corridor, I realized that they had gone out onto the promontory at the end of the gallery, where the sun hit them. The background was a little plain, but I might be able to get a shot from an angle, partly framed by the temple. As I'm trying to unobtrusively maneuver for this shot, the oldest of the three greets me with his palms together and the words sak sabai. It's a "how do you do" type greeting, and the response is also sak sabai. In retrospect the response is probably something different when you're talking to a monk, because the language has masses of parallel vocabulary used just for monks (and another set for royalty). How dependent on social registers is a language when I tried to work with it for two weeks and couldn't even manage to learn the pronouns? But it's incredibly obvious that I'm a foreigner, so he can't expect proper vocabulary. Actually he looks slightly surprised that I answered at all. Maybe some tourists shriek and run away. I follow up with my best Khmer for "I am from Canada," and then it's my turn to be surprised.

He responds with, "So am I. I'm from Ottawa," in perfect English.

He has a Khmer accent, and looks Khmer. When I'm done looking confused, I put it together that he emigrated to Canada and now has come back here to study as a monk. He confirms that, and we chat for a bit. I ask if I can take their picture and he says sure, don't you want to be IN the picture? He hands off my camera to the youngest monk and I come out in the sunlight to sit with them. Sorry, you only get half that picture, and the toe of my shoe as I sit crosslegged with them.

At the centre of all the rings of galleries are steep, steep, crumbling stairs up to the iconic rounded towers. One of the staircases is augmented with scaffolding supporting wooden stairs and a handrail, still steep but usable. Reaching the head of the line, visitors are assessed for the propriety of their clothing before being issued a pass to go to the top.

There's not a whole lot different at the top of the towers. It's most interesting as an opportunity to see the towers as closely as possible, and for the view of the whole complex, as you walk around and look out the different sides. You just see jungle beyond the walls now, but I suppose once wooden and palm frond houses would have surrounded it. There's no real central area or anything, just fancy decorations and vistas. It's not really intended for people to marvel at, but for the gods to be comfortable and happy. The idea is to build a fabulous residence for the gods so they will spend time near you and be avaialble to hear your prayers and well-disposed towards answering them.

Looking back toward the west you can see the outer ring, the walkway and the libraries, plus the courtyard below. The rubble was arranged in rows and catalogued with numbers. The handwriting style and the age of the markings makes me suspect that it was a French project.

This was as close as one could get to the towers at the top of the structure. I think it's interesting that the rounded shape is actually composed of straight lines and square corners. It gives a very interesting effect. I wonder who first came up with the idea and how.

This was the central exit archway from the complex to the east. When you walk right to the edge of the ledge it's just a drop off, no stairs, no ramp, no crumbled ruins, just a three metre drop to the ground. I found out later that it's the exit where you walk out to mount your elephant. Of course. I wonder where the valet elephant parking was, back in the day.

We didn't see any elephants at that temple, but there was a dog, in good condition, and a lot of monkeys sitting around nursing their babies and grooming one another.

At the end of the day we go to dinner at a huge tourist buffet restaurant and I get a chance to find out what some of the things I have been eating are called. They don't have any ngeuv though. There's also Chinese food and "spagbol". (Oh that's what I want to eat when I'm travelling, a Cambodian imitation of an Italian dish as interpreted by the British). The food is pretty good. Cambodian desserts aren't as sweet as we're used to, just slightly sweetened, but palatable. I take a sample of everything, including something that looks like green jello (hello Salt Lake City!) but turns out to be similar to Turkish delight, and my favourite of the whole selection.

The highlight of the evening is the traditional dancing. There are apsara dancers, contorting their hands and feet the way the temple carvings do, and folk dancing in other costumes, all telling traditional stories. I realize looking at the Khmer writing on the wall behind the dancers that the squiggles are becoming a little bit recognizable now. The words that means "Amazon" (shown in my apsara post yesterday) start the same way as the word for "Amok," one of my favourite dishes, that I see on bilingual menus, and the word "America" which I copied onto postcards going to the US, just for fun. I'm pretty sure the post office can handle French and English.

Apsaras

This is not an account of any particular day, just a collection of images and notes on a particular type of temple carving, the apsara.

The apsara was probably the most ubiquitous image in all the temple carvings. She is a dancing woman, but not just a woman, she is half-goddess, half-woman. The guidebook calls them celestial dancers who entertain the gods and are the sensual rewards of kings and heroes who die bravely. In Hindu mythology they always performed with the celestial musicians, but in Khmer mythology they were elevated alone to special importance in temple decoration. The hand gestures represent various forms of the lotus, which in turn symbolize phases of life, seasons, etcetera. The raised hand on the one above (from the main temple at Angkor Wat) shows the blossom, and both hands on the one below (also from Angkor Wat) show the leaf. Traditional Khmer dance includes human dancers emulating these temple carvings, and they really can do the unnatural-seeming things with their hands and feet, and legs. They practice and work to enhance their flexibility from a young age

I could spend a week just going through temples here only looking at apsara carvings, learning the forms from different eras. I'm not sure now looking at the different ones, what is the choice of the individual artist, a change in fashion with the centuries, or just a different aspect of the dance being shown. I probably have a hundred photos of different apsaras (I keep wanting to make the plural "apsarae," for no good reason at all), and I haven't kept excellent records of which were on which temples or where they were on that structure, but I can work most of them out from memory or the order of photographs.

The ladies above were on the east face of Angkor Wat and the ones below were the dinner entertainment at a fancy tourist restaurant. My camera ran out of battery for the day before the dances and then at the end I managed to wring a few more photos out of it. That's why I don't have a very good shot of the dancers.

I perceive the carved apsaras as being bare-breasted, with necklaces and waist ornaments and skirts, and ancient accounts of the temple dancers describe the colour of the women's breasts, so presumably they were. I'm curious about the point when the dancers became more fully clad. They've done a good job of costumes that match the depicted dancers closely enough that I'm not absolutely certain that the originals aren't also wearing close-fitting garments. They have belly buttons but I don't have any photos where I can say for certain that they have nipples. That's not saying they never did, as they are almost all worn, from weather and handling, we'll call it worship. This lady, still an active object of worship, was in Preah Kahn.

The next one is from Angkor Wat. She, thousands of her comrades also decorating that structure, and the parade of monks moving through the temples made me think: boys enter the monastary at eight or ten and stay for a few years until they leave to get married. I seriously doubt that over the last thousand years the fundamental nature of young teenaged boys has changed any more than the appearance of beautiful young women has. And here a major, if not the major decorating element of their places of worship is a mostly naked goddess. It amuses me to think of these lovely and serene ladies fuelling the fantasies of centuries of young monks who are forbidden to touch a woman, and even supposed to avoid speaking to one.

The next apsara is from Bayon near the top level. When I spotted her, there was a large tourist sitting down for a rest in the shade provided by the same walls that seem to have sheltered her from damage over the centuries. I was scoping out how to take a clear picture of her when a tour guide came around the corner, telling his charges that she was the best preserved of any apsara in Bayon, at which point the tourist realized that he was blocking a view and got up and moved.

A lot of the images were badly damaged, many deliberately, probably in attempts to steal them. Some were repaired and in some cases blocks where their faces would have been had been replaced by plain stones, repairing the structural but not aesthetic damage done by the thieves or vandals. I concentrated on finding the best images.

I had to climb around a little ways on the structures to capture some of the images. There were hardly any restriction anywhere on touching or climbing. I never touched the stone carvings, even though they had the oil of thousands of previous touches on them, just because I'm used to not touching precious things on display. And really shouldn't I buy them dinner first?

The structure below is obviously a door, and the first time I came across one I stared and thought, "Door? how can there be a thousand year old door?" Then I realized that it was stone, just a carved representation of a door and that didn't make a lot of sense either. There was noting behind it, no way it could open, so what was it for? It's an apsara door. The apsara is a celestial being so she doesn't need a real wooden door. Khmer temples, you see, unlike religious structures in Canada, are not intended as a gathering place for worshippers. There are no concerns for access, assembly, sightlines, acoustics, public galleries or pulpits. The temples are palaces for the gods and goddesses, temporary abodes, and the aim is to build a place for them so sumptuous that they will want to come and stay a while, thus making them nearby and more likely to hear or heed your prayers. The apsara can pass through this door into whatever other part of the temple, or perhaps the universe she pleases.

It's such an exciting idea that I can't believe Tomb Raider didn't have Lara Croft press the right combination of buttons to have the ancient apsara door open on hidden springs and hinges, instead of just inelegantly hauling down the door with ropes and manual labour.

Now We Become Tourists

I chatted with the hotel desk clerk the morning before we finished the build, about religious education in Cambodia. The vast majority of the population is Buddhist, but, while people attend ceremonies officiated by monks, there isn't a structure whereby people attend regular lectures on how to honour their religion, in the manner of the Christian sermon. During the Khmer Rouge years, religion was banned and monks persecuted, so was there any rebuilding required there? The clerk says that people learn about how to be a Buddhist mainly in the home. Boys may go to live as monks for a while, where they have nothing to do except study. There is some jealousy in his voice as he explains this. Everyone in Cambodia values the opportunity to study. He says guys just join the monastery to get an advantage in marriage. They leave the monastery and then get married. If a man has been a monk, the woman's father will look much more favourably on him, as he is assumed to be more mature and intellectual than the man who has not. That implies that one's father still has a strong role in whom one marries, here. He also says that not as many boys join the monastery now as previously, that 95% of the population may be more Buddhist than another religion, but maybe only 80% are really Buddhists.

I thought at first that if every family is interpreting the religion in their own way for their kids that it is subject to a lot of distortion, but that's exactly what happens with every family. They choose the church, mosque or temple they go to according to their personal beliefs, and there regardless of your religion there are all kinds of variants, depending on what has been added, subtracted, emphasized or disregarded along the path that it has taken to you. Plus if many of the men in the village have spent time as monks, that would tend to standardize the teachings, too. I think monks get to travel somewhat, kind of doing exchanges with other temples.

After we completed the build. we were scheduled to eat dinner at a fancy restaurant called Titanic, but were unable to get a reservation for a group as large as ours. Today is the official day of mourning for the deaths on the Diamond Bridge during the Water Festival. Many restaurants are closed, so the ones that are still open are busier. We all went out on our own in small groups for dinner. I can't take credit for the idea, but the group I was in said, "Let's go to the Titanic anyway. They probably have room for five of us." And they did. In fact they probably would have had room for everyone (but perhaps not enough staff to serve us all). They asked us to sit outside, for reasons that weren't clear, but we probably would have requested outside, given the choice. The temperature was perfect, with a breeze off the river and there was a dancer and a musician on a small stage. It was a very fine waterfront restaurant, literally ten times the price of the regular street restaurants I had been going to. Which means that a superb water buffalo dish cost $10.50. That may have included a drink. I can't remember the details of the meal. I think it was stir fried with vegetables, but I've forgotten which ones or how it was spiced. As you would expect, water buffalo is just like lean beef. They are domestic animals here, not the same water buffalo as the very dangerous African mammal. You see them lying in ponds and ditches up to their noses, like moose at home.

Our group of five happened to consist of four women and one man. The waiter showed amusing deference to the one man in the group, starting with him at each round of orders and serving, and literally looking at him for confirmation when we ordered. It was an aspect of Cambodian society that we hadn't noticed up to then: women drive motos, run stores, and had up to that point appeared to be societal equals to men. I figured it was a remnant of communism. Every time the waiter went away we would joke about what else he could do to entrench the role of our lord protector, and every time he played into our expectations we would collapse in hysterics. We all started having so much fun with our lone male's regal position that we got right into the parts; he started granting us permission to do the things we were doing anyway, and at the end when we got the bill, the girls all gave him our cash, so that he could appear to pay the bill for his harem. It continued to be a joke for the rest of the trip.

After the restaurant, we asked our tuk-tuk driver to take us to the Diamond Bridge, where we could pay our respects to the dead on this day of mourning. The bridge was roped off by police and barricades, occupied only by memorial wreaths, it looked like hundreds, probably one for everyone who was known to have died there. There were a lot of people there at the barricades to look. We stood a while then got back in our tuk-tuk. A child who was trying to beg or sell us something we didn't want actually jumped on board the little motorcycle trailer with us as it pulled away. "Where are his parents!" exclaimed one of the group, but we knew the answer was probably, "Over there by the wall, telling him to do it." I suppose that kind of behaviour is deemed cute by some tourists. It was, however, the worst of the unwanted attention we received for the whole trip.

Before bed we went to the Lucky Mart, a large, Western style grocery store that sold lots of imported foods as well as local ones, to buy snacks for the boat ride tomorrow. I paid another visit to my newsstall tutor, to thank her for the effectiveness of the phrases she helped me with, and then packed my dirty work clothes and my souvenirs so far into one suitcase to store at the hotel while we travel. "Keep this with you always," says the desk clerk as he gives me my claim ticket.

Happy Winter Holiday

This post is scheduled as the sun is directly overhead the Tropic of Capricorn, giving northerners like me the darkest day and the beginning of the return to longer days. No, I have no pagan upbringing. I like physics and I like understanding the model of the solar system that allows for a simple explanation of seasons, day length, and apparent solar and lunar positions. As far as I'm concerned, the reversing of the seasons is like the reversing of the Tonlé Sap river, an obvious reason to celebrate. Lots of people celebrate lots of things, about this time of year, and many of their festivals involve lights, probably influenced in timing if not in substance by the beginning of the end of the winter darkness.

I feel a little improper pronouncing to people what is in effect the blessing of a religion I don't strictly follow. Of course I do it sometimes, just as in Cambodia I gave many polite greetings and gestures that I didn't have the cultural or linguistic background to understand. I'm feel equally hypocritical wishing someone a happy Hanukkah or giving them Diwali greetings. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing so, nor in giving a religious greeting to someone who doesn't follow the corresponding faith. One Christian I know assured me that, despite the antics of some of his coreligionists, it is okay by him that not every joyous greeting or commercial activity in the entire month of December is labelled with the name of his God. In that vein, I will simply thank you all for reading, commenting, correcting, informing, and participating in what has turned into a quasi-community that I have the honour to host. I'm especially grateful to everyone who donated to the Cambodia effort, and I promise to continue telling you all about that next year.

I'll be back just before New Year's to see how I did on resolutions this year. I know already it's "badly," but a tradition is a tradition. It made me disproportionately happy when reader GPS Direct rolled off a list of silly and serious descriptors of me and admitted to knowing what my usual end-of-year topics would be. I think I didn't yet have "having people remember something about me" on my list of things that make me happy, but it should have been there. Thank you all for remembering my URL well enough to keep checking up on me for all this time.

In the meantime, enjoy anything you like to celebrate, and please keep an eye out for people for whom this is a season of pressure and loneliness. If you are someone who hopes only to survive this season, please hang on, and know that I at least am not expecting you to be automatically filled with joy and happiness just because of the date on the calendar, or the position of the sun with respect to the equator.

The Depressingest Day

This is not a cheerful post. The faint-of-heart may wish to skip it and read about happy cute children, tomorrow.

The next day I come down to the breakfast room at 6:30, when breakfast is scheduled to start, but it's not open yet. I go out into the lobby to find out if there is a problem and before I can say anything some members of my group say, "You haven't heard?" Uh, heard what? They gesture at the TV and tell me: hundreds of people were killed and injured last night during the fireworks.

The bridge that I saw night before last and realized must go over the river I was looking for was the site of last night's carnage. There's an island in the river, a festival site, and the police were trying to set it up so there was one bridge to the island and one bridge from the island, but policing, as I've unintentionally documented, is stretched thin and not in your face. I think in a culture that was so recently so devastated by brutal police action, it's important for the police to not be party killers. People started going both ways on both bridges, causing a human traffic jam, like the one I was in the night before. All it takes at that point is for someone to faint or otherwise fall and people to push over them and trip, and you have a pile-up and people trampled. Tragically the police tried to clear the logjam with water cannons, while people were trying to escape by grabbing onto the electrical wires overhead, leading to electrocution as another cause of injury. I see by this article (I know it's from an unorthodox source, but it gives most of the other information as I know it) that officials deny electrocutions, so that is not confirmed. Some people jumped off the bridge to escape and were injured or drowned that way. This Guardian article has an interview implying that some people may have drowned without realizing they could stand up in the shallow river.

It's so Third World. You hear some kind of news report like this at least every year. Hundreds of people killed in a firetrap building or a ferryboat sinking. We gasp and murmur about how it wouldn't happen here because we have safety standards, then the news moves on to the stock market report or a by-election in Sudbury. But now it is here. The TV is tuned to a local station, showing the grisly remains on the bridge after surging crowds trampled some people and others were electrocuted by overhead wiring while trying to escape. Desk staff switch the TV station to CNN in English for the foreigners. CNN moves on to catalogue other mass deaths at public events and we switch back to the Khmer station. This is footage from last night showing people being carried away from the scene, dangling by their arms and legs. Local television live coverage shows some close-ups of the bodies laid out on the ground like so many items in the lost & found, as relatives walk between the rows, looking for missing loved ones. The customs of what media show are different here. In Canada they would take some footage of the shoes, clothing and souvenirs that still litter the bridge, and interview a bereaved family. Here we see the actual victims of trampling and suffocation. Another detail that struck me from the English language newspaper story is the actions of bystanders trying to help. It said that they placed pieces of cardboard over the faces of people who were obviously dead, and used pieces of cardboard to fan those they felt might be alive. In Canada it would have been jackets or blankets. The generic thing that an untrained or unequipped person does in a first aid situation in Canada is to cover the victim with a blanket or jacket to keep them warm. I wonder how many first aid manuals have that advice, oblivious to the fact that the opposite may be called for.

The Prime Minister is announcing a national day of mourning. After breakfast I Google for local mourning customs and then change into a white shirt, it's a pilot shirt, the only white I have.

We get on a bus and go to the Tabitha headquarters to be briefed on the project. We go in through the store, upstairs past all kinds of brightly coloured silk items and up to the roof where chairs are arranged for us under a cardboard awning. Some women are sitting up there working on handicrafts. Someone hands out bottles of water for us and Nari introduces herself. Jean, the founder and head of Tabitha is not here because she is in hospital. She would normally give this briefing. Nari is Khmer and apologizes in advance for her imperfect grammar and accent, but is perfectly understandable throughout.

There have been 1053 houses built this year under Tabitha's auspices. I don't know how many have been by clumsy foreigners and how many by local contractors. She teaches us and has us practice a formal Khmer greeting jum reap sur and good-bye jum reap lea. Ground rules include a strict admonition not to touch children: the parents may think we want to take them, and may actually offer them over, producing bad feelings all around when we reject them. We must not cry out or show pain or anger if we are injured during the building. It's bad luck for the house. Smile, walk away, and seek first aid at a distance. There will be a latrine for our use. Bring toilet paper. Eat salty food for breakfast on the morning of the build and be sure to drink at least eight bottles of water--that's four litres--during the day. Take a water break every twenty minutes. Wear sunscreen. Tabitha will have bread and water for us, it's up to us to buy sandwich fillings if we want them. (We want, and already have a committee organized to do that). Do not leave food behind: the villagers don't know how to eat cheese and butter and other foods that we consider normal. There will be a table provided for us to put our personal belongings, where they will be safe. Don't stash things elsewhere in the village, because they can't vouch for things not being touched there. Get permission to take photographs. No gifts for anyone, unless we have the same for everyone in the village. The Cambodians will finish up at the end of the day if we are unable to.

Today we have some mandatory sightseeing so that we understand the context of Cambodia's situation, and Nari is going to send us off with her personal story. In 1975 when the Khmer Rouge marched into the city to overthrow the government, people welcomed them, believing that this would mean the end of the civil war and the US bombing attacks. The army announced that the city was to be evacuated immediately because of an imminent attack. Nari's family took very little, both because of the short notice and because they were told it was to be a three day evacuation. She was gone for three years eight months and twenty days. During that time, young Nari was immediately separated from her parents, and there was no school, market, banks or hospitals. They had to work from four a.m. until nine p.m. in the rice fields then walk back to their camp. Sometimes soldiers came in the night with flashlights to take people away for interrogation. If you answered their questions properly you were okay, but the interrogation might take until four a.m., meaning no sleep before you had to go back to work. As she tells it, it's almost as if she's willing to accept those working hours, even willing to endure interrogation, but that stealing her sleep is the last straw. She's clearly still angry at that. She uses the two syllables "Pol Pot" to refer to the whole episode. "In Pol Pot" means "during the Pol Pot regime" and "the atrocities perpetuated by Pol Pot" and anything else associated with that time.

In 1979 she was allowed to leave the camp and went straight back to Phnom Penh to find her parents. She went to S21, where our tour group will be going next, when the blood was still fresh on the floor to look at mugshots. Nari was the only survivor of her whole family. She still fears the night. They have stolen her sleep permanently, not just for those almost four years.

She says that Tabitha is not about giving people things, but getting people who have become passive from occupation and abuse to do things for themselves. She describes the first time that she was sent to greet an arriving build group at the airport. She didn't speak English, she wasn't used to foreigners or strangers, but she was just told to go. The anger at that is still there, too, but she says she went, with a sign and found the group, and so on from there. I assume from the fact that she is giving a briefing normally made by the head of the organization that she is a senior administrator, but she doesn't have any more airs about it than the women who sit on the floor behind her, occasionally checking us out as they work.

She thanks us, and we thank her, and offer her the formal goodbye that she taught us. We have a few minutes to shop in the store before we go, buying beautiful handmade silk things at factory polyester prices. I buy Christmas presents. And how about a new handbag to go with those shoes? We hang onto those colourful pieces of silk, because they are the bright spots in a pretty grim day.

We get back on the bus and stop at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Yeah, it's going to be that kind of day. This is a former high school in an urban area, but when the Khmer Rouge closed all the schools and evacuated everyone from urban areas, they converted it into Security Office 21, a detention and torture centre. Everyone who had an education, a profession, spoke a foreign language, or even who wore glasses was a suspect. Our polite tour guide, probably born more than ten years after S21 closed down, recites graphic details of the meaning of each room and artifact without a hint of sensationalism. It's not as if he's trying to shock us, definitely not to be dramatic. More like he's trying to convince us that these atrocities really happened, and convince us in the most scientific manner possible. Later I read the brochure I was given at the beginning of the tour and see that that is precisely what they are doing. The mandate of the museum is to collect and preserve evidence, for eventual trials, or to prevent people from denying it happened. The brochure says, "preventing new Pol Pot from emerging in the lands of Angkor or anywhere else on Earth," but I know that there's no amount of documentation that will prevent the next systematic genocide.

This might mean no laughing or no smiling. It didn't matter, as I had no urge to do either.

I don't really want to write about what went on at S21, but I didn't include details in yesterday's history post, so I suppose I have to. We toured first through the torture rooms, furnished with iron bedframes with shackles and various everyday implements made sinister by their presence here. It is still easy to see that the rooms are ordinary classrooms divided in half with brick walls, but most classrooms do not have such dark stains on the checkered tiles. They also put glass in the windows to minimize the screams escaping the facility. When the Vietnamese took the city in 1979 the guards and prisoners were all gone with the exception of fourteen decomposed murder victims still chained to these beds. I remember one of my group members saying, "They killed him with a shovel, and left the shovel." The guide was not making remarks that specific, but rather presenting the evidence and allowing us to draw the conclusions. One of the fourteen was female, and when we are in the room where she was found he says there is no way to know what torture methods were used on which prisoner, but that there was a mosquito net in this room, and not in others, and they would not have used mosquito nets for the benefit of naked prisoners. Each room contains a black and white photograph of what it looked like when it was found. Other than removal of filth and human remains, the rooms are pretty much as they were. I can't imagine being a prisoner. I can only just put myself in the shoes of the people who discovered the facility, going from room to room discovering and documenting what they found before they burned the corpses.

He shows us a chair that looks like an implement of torture, but is actually just the chair where prisoners were photographed. Many of the mugshots are displayed around the walls. They look at us, the captors, with fear, resignation, confusion, defiance. They're all individuals. One of them has a t-shirt with cute little bare footprints across it. I think I had one like that in 1979. Some of the prisoners are children. Some women hold babies. In the early pictures the prisoners hold simple numbers. In later ones they have more elaborate mugshot data with the date of arrest and prisoner number. The guide insists on showing us the range of numbers on a particular day, proving that there were sometimes hundreds of arrests a day. If someone was arrested, they took their whole family, even children, to avoid retribution later. If a prisoner died during torture, the guard was suspected of colluding to keep their secrets, and also arrested. Perhaps that is part of how Cambodia is not consumed by hate. It wasn't really one group of people doing this to another. It was a horrible epidemic that swept people into doing and having done horrible things.

While they were not being tortured, prisoners were housed either in individual cells, each 80 cm by 200 cm, tiny bricked sections of a classroom, or upstairs in unconverted classrooms, all shackled together in rows by the feet. He shows us the shackles, a photo, and a painting by a survivor. Approximately 20,000 people, including children, came through this facility. There were seven people known to be released alive. One of them was the founding curator of this museum and still works to train the tour guides. I can't even stand to tell you all the details of my visit, and this guy re-lives it for the guides. I can't really listen to it all. Fortunately, it's a little bit of work to understand the guide's accent, so after I have had enough I stop making that effort and just look at the pictures. Every once in a while a phrase filters though and I hear, "and that is how they killed the babies" while being aware that the words "sharp stick" are still in my mental buffer.

Above: A view of one of the individual cells. The black metal pieces have been added by the museum to prevent the poor brickwork from collapsing. Below: A room where the cells have been removed, but marks on the floor show the cell size relative to the people standing on it.

Part of what made it so horrific was that it was a high school. Everyone has high schools. Movies tend to make torture facilities some dark dank dungeon or high tech sterile room. It's more insidious for the imagination to make it a high school, because you're going to see those every day. The construction materials for the conversion are the same kind of bricks we see every day in construction projects all over the city. This piece of apparatus was originally used for the kids to do gymnastics. They repurposed it. It's not a gallows: executions were not conducted here.

In another room there are untidy shelves overflowing with skulls. There used to be a map of the country made out of skulls here, but they moved it to another museum. I feel uncomfortable not about the presence of human body parts, but because I understand that Buddhists believe that the body must be treated with respect in order for the soul to be at peace. Even without Buddhist beliefs, it seems a little callous. If prisoners were still alive after about four months in this facility, once they had confessed to being spies for the KGB and CIA (even though they'd probably never heard of either entity), they were blindfolded and removed in a truck. We'll follow the path of those trucks later. First, a light lunch! Yeah, who scheduled this?

We don't think we're going to want to eat anything, but we do. I guess it's a way to confirm that we're alive and healthy. "So what do you think, Aviatrix?" asks someone. There's more than one thing to think about this? We're a nasty species.

The bus ride takes us out to a more rural area and then stops in front of a gate where we pay a small admission fee and break into groups for another guided tour. A sign requests that we remove our shoes at the memorial, and observe five minutes of silence out of respect for the dead. The area inside the gate is an uneven field with grass growing on it, a few small buildings, and an ornate tower at one side. This is a Killing Field. No euphemism or hyperbole here. It's a field, and it was used for killing. The guide shows us where the trucks parked and unloaded the prisoners after S21 was done with them. He says that the prisoners didn't do any work here, were simply led to the edge of a hole, killed and buried. I suspect that it wasn't the guards who dug the holes, though.

The tower is called a stupa, and is a traditional style of memorial to revered people. This one is constructed in multiple levels, with victims' clothing displayed on the lowest, several layers of skulls, then other bones on higher levels. The guide details the types of bones on each level, no doubt translating a solemn catalogue of bone names from Khmer, and he probably deliberately chose colloquial over latin names for most of them, but it does sound like the song about what bone is connected to what bone. There are over 8900 skulls in the stupa, along with a roughly corresponding number of other disconnected bones. He takes us up to the stupa and I take off my hat and shoes to walk around the interior in silence. The skulls are catalogued in sets: "juvenile males under 15" "mature females 41-60" "senile male over 60." The letters L, R and N at the end of a word in the local accent is pronounced very subtly. "Senile" and "senior" probably sound identical. When I have completed the five minute silence, my tour group is nowhere in sight. I wander off in search of them, picking up on the periphery of other tours, people not in my group, and some in languages I don't know. I linger, pretending to read a sign while listening to other people's guides. They're mostly talking about the ways prisoners were executed. You'd think they'd have it down to an assembly line procedure but this guy is pointing out the sharpness of a particular kind of palm frond, which can be used to slit people's throats, and that guy is talking about smashing heads, while the other guy is describing the versatility of DDT. It's a lethal agent and a deodorizer. They didn't shoot prisoners because bullets are expensive and noisy, compared to naturally sharpened palm fronds and shovels. I find my tour group coming back the other way, at a pit where they recovered I think it was 66 headless corpses wearing Khmer Rouge uniforms. Maybe it was 166. Sufficient to make it clear that no one was safe. This blog entry includes enough photos to give you a virtual walkthrough of the site. Don't miss the baby head-smashing tree.

There's a film inside another building, another hats off, shoes off site. I notice female Muslim visitors who do not remove their headgear. It's interesting how one culture's respect is another's disrespect. You probably would be frowned on for entering the Washington Monument barefoot, and I've been cautioned to wear a hat to attend a religious ceremony before. Even in religions as close as Judaism and Christianity men have opposite requirements for head coverings in a place of worship. I'm guessing any conflict between hat removal and headscarf wearing has been resolved during a thousand years of a Muslim minority in Khmer territory. The movie interviews someone who lived near here, and who came back home in 1979 to see new buildings and tools at what used to be a Chinese graveyard, and didn't know why. There were nine foreigners killed here. European foreigners, I think they mean. They were journalists. I wonder how long they held onto hope of filing a story about this place. The museum refers to a "sealed" tower, but as you can see the walls have been slid open in places so you could reach out and touch the skulls if curiosity outweighed respect. I asked about what became of the Chinese people who had once been buried here. The guide said that a few bodies were found who had died of natural causes, but didn't say if there had been an official relocation.

Here we see the garb of people inspired by a charismatic young communist revolutionary about whom they knew little. And on the left, the uniform of the Khmer Rouge.

I have two consolations today. The first is that the stupa is dedicated as a measure of proper respect to all those killed by the regime, soothing my concern for the effect of casually handled skulls on the eternal souls of the dead. The second is that only seven people had to live very long with memories of this place.

Back on the bus, there are kids outside the windows. Someone realizes that they are asking for empty water bottles, and tosses them one. It's on the other side of the bus, so I can't see the kids, just the people tossing them out the window. Someone cheers that the littlest girl got a bottle. "That's sadly like feeding ducks," I say. You know how you always try to get a big piece to the shy duck at the back? And how the mean duck always chases it down and takes it away. Apparently one of the girls knocked down the girl and took her bottle. Later the bottle throwers will be chastised for disobeying the "give nothing to anyone" rule. I suppose the kids fighting over the bottles were demonstrated proof that it just leads to strife. And I'm told one kid had a big wad of dollar bills from begging, too. The kids were playing and dancing until they saw the tourists, then they all put on their sad faces to come and beg. They should be in school, learning a real trade.

We go home and have supper. As I watch people in the street and in the café I see them, and I also see their little skulls. Human skulls are quite small, really. A lot of the face is flesh, the back of the head hair and neck muscle.

The makeshift patient transport above was recorded by a photographer who was in Cambodia in 2008. There's no Cambodian who has worked in hospitals for forty years, and no one who has been locally trained by someone who was. They had nothing and had to make it all up from scratch, because almost every doctor in the country was killed in the Khmer Rouge purge. Last night there must have been a terrible feeling of helplessness among emergency workers, and everyone involved. I understand that many of the dead were removed from the bridge alive, but that the hospital infrastructure was so overwhelmed by all the casualties, they were releasing bodies directly to families without them being registered as deaths.

Pork Bellies

This posting is utterly off the regular topic of this blog. It was inspired by the fact that I had bacon from a free range pig for breakfast, and it was extremely delicious.

Pork bellies are an economic commodity traded on the stock market. People essentially gamble on the accuracy of their predictions about the future demand, supply and thus price of pork. The traders never actually take delivery of the pork, because during the time they are trading it like a hot potato, the pigs haven't been slaughtered yet, or maybe even haven't been born yet.

That made me think about enormous pig factory farms. By keeping pigs in extremely confined conditions, they're creating inhumane conditions for the pigs, the human workers, and the people who have to live near the effluent. In some places they may also be doing environmental damage to fisheries and drinking water, but are they also devaluing the currency? Would changing the laws so that "standard industry practice" like no longer provides an exemption from prosecution for animal cruelty laws merely address animal welfare issues, or would it constitute tinkering with the economic system itself? Is this the real reason why we as a society don't demand that animals that are made of delicious, delicious bacon are not treated at least as well as convicted rapists? If you treated a single dog the way factory farmed pigs are treated, the dog would be taken away and you would not be allowed to own another animal.

And then I wondered, can people who are forbidden by religion to eat pork or handle pig leather ethically make money in commodities trading if they hold pork belly futures? Is contact with the animal itself unclean, or does that extend to its effects. Pigs aren't soft and furry, and they're very robust, but they're also intelligent and sociable. If I buy factory-farmed bacon, I'm paying someone to abuse an animal for my breakfast pleasure. I don't think I'll do that anymore.

If you haven't had your daily dose of bleeding heart liberal hopelessness yet, see this blog on the myriad ways the planet is doomed.

Local News

Welcome to a Cockpit Conversation recurring feature: "Aviatrix mocks your town by reading your local newspaper." Today we look at the Regina Leader- Post. I'm not actually in Regina, but, as two readers promptly figured out when I asked, in Estevan, Saskatchewan. This is the complimentary newspaper at the hotel.

Front page news here relates the intriguing tale that "Members of several religions took part [...] to celebrate Good Friday and Easter in Regina." Shouldn't that be "to celebrate Passover, Easter, Songkran, the Feast of Ridvan and the coming of spring?" I suspect that the 'multiple religions' involved in this ceremony were all flavours of the same one. The directory of religious services inside the paper supports that theory: there are forty churches listed under fifteen categories, but every one is Christian. But just when I think I have this community pegged, I see the leftover space on the same page is filled by an open-minded article on Buddhism. Perhaps the multifaith celebrations of other spring festivals were held on other days. The other front page story involves one politician giving another the finger.

Inside the paper we focus mainly on arrests, sentencing, and manhunts. One man who received the minimum sentence for possession of child pornography says he downloaded it because he was curious about whether it really existed. Police are looking for someone who cut across a field in the middle of the night, leaving tire ruts, and for a guy with lots of tattoos who has violated his parole curfew. I wonder if the latter has a tractor. A police spokesman said, regarding other incidents, "There's lots of collisions ... and the people who die, we don't really know what's in their heads." The paper also notes that, "Police say Thursday night and Friday morning were extremely busy, with domestic disputes, fights, and alcohol-fulled incidents." There's a photo of a man in a baseball cap riding his bicycle by sitting backwards on the handlebars and pedalling. He says he was hit by a vehicle once and rides this way to keep an eye on oncoming traffic. I suspect his cycling is alcohol- fuelled, and that if he has a domestic partner, they have had disputes about the wisdom of riding this way.

Last week's paper had a surprising number of reports of unidentified dead bodies. I think all the people that get lost or murdered over the winter here turn up in the same week of spring.

The most interesting news is a wire story on a Canadian named Julia Gaffield who found the Haïtian declaration of independence. No it wasn't lost in the earthquake. It seems that when they originally declared it, they printed up a whole bunch of copies and handed them all out, forgetting to keep one in a safe place. Eventually, as with most ephemera, everyone who had had one had moved or spring cleaned enough times that no one was known to have one anymore. They knew what it says, as they had lots of handwritten copies, just not the original item. Julia found it in the British Library because someone had sent a copy to someone important enough to have had his correspondence archived. Nice timing, and I hope it inspires Haïti during its rebuilding.

There's sports (ice skating, curling, bowling, running, baseball. lacrosse, and hockey, of course), movies (3D everything), homes ($250-600k), and classifieds. The announcements sections has four birthdays, a birth, a graduation, an anniversary and a congratulations to the girl who scored the most points in the playoffs, helping her team win the SFMHL hockey championships.

My favourite part was this cartoon, mostly because I looked at the picture, thought "okay, airliner" and then looked for the joke in the caption, before realizing that the picture is the joke, and the name of the airliner just echoes it.

Oh and the AME at the FBO calls to confirm receipt of the airplane and the work order, and to ask if I happened to notice if the NDB antenna was standing when I arrived. Apparently it blew down. So I guess it was windy enough to be worth tying down the plane.

Also, not local, but way too bizarre not to post, is this story of two eagles crashing into a snowbank while engaged in an aerial mating dance. The male was killed and the female may have a head injury and permanent ligament damage. These birds need to practise safer sex.

Booted Indeed

I successfully fended off the cries of the Easter eggs last night, and am looking at NOTAMs after a healthy breakfast. I hate stuff like this:

100022 CYQR REGINA INTL
OBST STATIONARY VERTICAL GREEN LASER LGT BEAM PROJECTION 0.125 NM RADIUS 501214N 1044247W (APRX 14 NM S AD). LASER LGT BEAM MAY BE INJURIOUS TO EYES WITHIN 5200 FT VERTICALLY OF THE LGT SOURCE. FLASH BLINDNESS OR COCKPIT ILLUMINATION MAY OCCUR BEYOND THESE DIST. LASER BEAM WILL BE ACT PERIODICALLY IN NON PRECIPITATION CONDS ONLY
TIL APRX 1004291800

Not the block of all caps text. I'm not super fond of that, but it's normal for NOTAM. I hate the information about a hazard that I can't do a lot about. Am I just supposed to close my eyes and hope for the best as I go in and out of Regina? (And yes, I phrased like that for all you people who think Saskatchewan's capital city is the funniest thing since Dildo, NL). Also most pilots hate lasers being fired into our workplace, so that's double hate.

The job here is over and I was told at breakfast that I would be released (I'm not actually shackled: that's the word for when they are done with me and I can fly the airplane away) in about an hour. That was two and a half hours ago. So I'm packed, including stuff from the fridge, which I once again forgot to check for proper temperature before putting my snacks in it, so I have a bag of baby carrotsicles. I have instructions from company on where to go next, am flight planned, and ready to go. But I can't go and do a workout, because when the client says "we'll take you to the airport now," that means now, not after I have showered, changed and packed away my workout gear. As it is, all I have to put on my boots, put my computer in my bag, and check out of the hotel.

Just as I wrote that. the phone rang and one of the guys asked "How soon can you leave?" I simply read him the sentence I had just typed, and then met him in the hotel lobby. "Do you have the box of spare parts?" I asked.

"Yes."

Okay, excellent. He helps me with my stuff, and folding the wing covers and things. All very unnecessary, but appreciated. I offer him some carrotsicles, but he declines. I explain that people always turn the fridge up to coldest to chill their beer faster and I forget to turn it down before putting my vegetables in it. He points out that he hears a lot more people complaining about warm beer than frozen carrots, so the temperature is correct.

The fueller happens to be at the field. I guess someone else called him out on Sunday morning. There's a $50 callout fee though, and I think the fueller gets most if not all of that, so he's made some money off us this weekend. He asks me if I need anything, but I'm good on fuel. His daughter is with him so I ask her if the Easter Bunny came to her house. Turns out that that renowned rabbit brought her a bicycle. How awesome is that? The weather is perfect for a new bike, and I think she's the right age to learn.

With my bags all loaded and the preflight inspection complete I fly northwest along a highway. I think every paved road that goes somewhere in this province is designated a highway. The highway parallels a railway and little priarie towns are spaced along it at perfectly regular intervals. Someone told me recently that the spacing of the towns is equivalent to the distance a steam engine could travel before it needed its boiler topped up with water.

I'm ashamed of my reliance on GPS these days. I used to confidently fly all over the continent without one. I never had one during training. Sometimes I'd rent a plane with one in and I'd let the passenger play with it for entertainment. I remember doing time building at night with a student pilot passenger. She had just bought a really fancy tablet GPS; this was years ago, it must have cost a mint. I asked her to keep it hidden from me and periodically quiz me on where I was, how long it would take me to get to the next destination and so on. And I knew. I flew to the southern US in a rented C172 and locals came over to check me out. One guy looked in the airplane and said, "Where's your GPS?" When I told him I didn't have one, he looked at me in awe, "You came all the way from Canada without a GPS?" I remember looking confused, and telling him I had maps. Why would I need a GPS?

Now I'm looking at the GPS all the time, to plan cooling, to stay clear of airspace, to plan my descent. To verify that I have correctly identified the lake on the chart. I try not to look for a while, but I keep slipping up. I can't turn it off, because it's my comm radio now too.

I concentrate on the landmarks. Another highway will intercept the one I'm following and there will be a double set of powerlines five miles back from my destination. I must stay north of the highway to avoid military airspace. I call traffic, slow the airplane gradually as I cool the engine, and find the runway. I add approach flaps, then gear, and on final I double check my GPS groundspeed with the TAS--that's a really useful trick--to make sure I don't have a tailwind. I have four knots of headwind at 1000' agl, but I think none at all at ground level. The windsock is straight across the runway. Windsocks are kind of two-state devices in the prairies. Either the wind is light and variable, or the windsock is straight out. I guess that's because a windsock straight out indicates fifteen knots or more, and fourteen knots of wind is light in the prairies. I touchdown, pull power idle, brake brake brake on the short runway and do a 180 back to the centre taxiway.

I taxi off and look for a place to park. I'm getting an oil change at the FBO here, but they won't be here today because it's Sunday. I would park on the apron in front of their hangar, but a pressurized Skymaster with a November registration has already claimed that spot, and I don't want to park close beside it in case the wind changes and one of the airplanes blows around. All the tiedown spaces that I would fit into on the apron are taken, and I don't want to block anyone in or out of their spot. And I kind of would like to tie down. Maybe it's overkill as this is a pretty heavy airplane and I don't think the wind is too much over 15 kts, but better safe than sorry. There are two spray planes tied one behind the other, and a space with painted tires on either side in sequence behind them. In this context tires like that are usually filled with concrete for tying an airplane to. I know there's not a third spray plane due back any minute, because no one would spray in this wind: the product wouldn't go where you wanted it. I pull into that spot and shut down.

Years ago in another century, the first time there was a big overnight windstorm at the airport where I had my first job, I couldn't sleep after the wind woke me up. I got up and went out to the airport at about five in the morning to check on my airplane. It was fine, but some other airplanes were loose. I called an emergency number posted outside a flying school, because one of the airplanes was theirs and the person on call called a few other people so we became an airplane capturing team. I discovered that it's almost impossible to manhandle an airplane against the wind. They really have been designed to point into the wind. I also saw that the worst damage was from airplanes crashing into one another. And I saw the way the majority of airplanes had come loose from their tie downs. They hadn't broken their ropes. As long as the rope was long enough for a knot to pull tight before it pulled through it wasn't poor knot tying by the pilots that allowed the airplanes to escape. It was almost always the rope coming untied from the tiedown point on the ground. Since then I have disciplined myself when tying down an airplane to always look at what it is tied down to and I have found a surprising number of really solid tie-down points, such as doubled over rebar embedded in a buried concrete anchor, with a rope tied in a thumb knot with only five centimetres of loose end left over. That will pull through quite easily if you wiggle it back and forth.

Like this.

I retie the anchor knot into a bowline, which results in my boots becoming filthy with mud. It's some kind of especially sticky unwipeoffable prairie mud. I think it's made out of cow pee and manure or something. You can follow everything I did after that by the footprints, going to the nose locker to get the chocks, placing them, then back to the boarding door, then crawling in on my knees trying not very successfully not to get mud on the floor while I retrieve my bags, then checking the tie downs one more time, then running after my bag which blew over, then writing a note for the maintenance guys. I haul the bags into the lee of the hangar and call a cab. While I wait for the cab (yeah I thought of calling it while I finished up, but you can never predict how long that will take) hangar cats meow soundlessly at me through the window of the FBO.

At the hotel I turn on my computer and it makes all the right noises, but nothing comes on the screen and I realize there is no hard drive activity at all. I turn it on and off forlornly a few times, then flip it over and pull out the battery. There is a tiny bit of water on the bottom of the computer, but it's not inside the battery compartment. It doesn't work without the battery either. I remove and reseat the hard drive. No joy. Damn. It must have hit the ground harder than I thought when everything blew over. I thought the case would protect it. I open some more things that probably contain no user-serviceable parts, but nothing seems to be loose or wet. Still doesn't work. I guess I'll have to fax the paperwork.

And then I go to another compartment in the same bag that has the paperwork and it's sopping wet, as is a brand new book on GPS that someone gave me. A waterbottle with a not-quite-screwed-on lid has flooded the bag. I don't know which aperture the water entered my computer through, but it's not happy about it. I wrap the books in towels and upend some of the hotel furniture on them to keep them flat and squeeze out the water. I prop the opened laptop up on one side and leave it there to dry while I go and do a workout in the gym.

A few hours later I try the computer again. It works. Resurrection! It is Easter Sunday after all.