Siem Reap’s a ghost town while everyone’s on their New Year holidays – they’ve all gone to Sihanoukville, Phnom Kulen, Kabal Spien and various other holy spots and party spots. About twenty Cambodians arrived at the guest house last night and piled into two rooms between the lot of them – must have been playing sardines, but at least they had cable TV. If just one extra person stays in a barang’s room overnight there are questions and a request for additional money to cover, I don’t know, the extra oxygen they’ve been using.
Cambodian TV has been playing classic movies based on historical stories – think of that epic Indian TV series Mahabharat crossed with Monkey Magic. Yesterday there was a story of a girl who was in love with a king, and became pregnant with his child. Somehow they became separated and the king married a new woman. The girl wore a ring which made everyone think she was a boy, before getting a job in the royal court to be close to him. The king and the girl became close even though he thought she was a boy (think Blackadder and Bob), and spent a lot of time together. The queen, jealous of her husband’s new friend, set up a situation where it looked as if the girl was assaulting her, before calling for the king. He came in, saw it all, went crazy, and had the girl beheaded in a fit of rage. The girl prayed to the Buddha before having her head cut off for mercy on her unborn child. She got her head cut off anyway, then gave birth to the child through her severed neck (baby feet wiggling out and everything, it was freaky). The girl’s head ascended to heaven. The king found out it was the girl he’d had executed and went crazy. It all ended OK – the girl, her son and her love the king were reunited in the forest. All to the soundtrack from Dune.
I know all this about the programme because a) there were subtitles, b) it was actually really good and I watched the whole thing.
I used to like Mahabharat, that and ‘The Sword of Tippoo Sultan’