by Sue Perkins
My skin is itching. That’s a sub-dermal parasite. That’s probably bilharzia.
STEVE: Good day’s work today, Sue.
Is that the one where you get snails in your bloodstream? Yes. Oh, God, I’ve got snails in my veins …
STEVE: Sue?
ME: Oh, yes. Cheers, Steve.
My head hurts. That’ll be bacterial meningitis. Or, worse, a rare, local strain of viral encephalitis.
STEVE: Has Vicky told you what we’re doing tomorrow?
There’s a weird taste in my mouth. It’s obviously some kind of mouth fly. It burrows into your tongue and makes everything taste of metal. I’m not going to be here tomorrow, Steve – don’t you understand?
ME: Tell me tomorrow. I’m off to bed, guys.
ALL: Sleep tight!
Goodbye for ever. Tell my family I love them. Tell my parents they were right never to do ‘foreign’.
And yet against all the odds, I survived. Later that night, as I wandered out onto the porch again and stared out across the lake, desperate to find the location of that suffering animal, I noticed Olly, still hunched over his mics, screwdriver aloft, tweezering grains of rice into a receiver cavity.
He looked up at me. ‘It’s the hope that kills you, Sue,’ he said. ‘It’s the hope that kills you.’
8. Piggy In the Middle
I left the main branch of the river and headed to the homeland of the Bunong people, one of twelve remaining hill tribes in the highland forests of Mondulkiri on the far-eastern edge of the vast Mekong basin. This area is the second most bio-diverse place on earth after the Amazon – although the threat of deforestation looms large. In the last forty years, almost 40 per cent of Cambodia’s trees have been felled for timber or agriculture.
I was led deep into one of its most sacred areas, the Spirit Forest, by a guide with more than a passing resemblance to Gangnam Style’s Psy. As we wandered, he told me about the animists who have a profound connection with the natural world and believe their ancestors’ souls inhabit this place.
The Bunong are a deeply superstitious people. They believe if you cut down a tree, something wicked will happen: someone will get sick, suffer an accident, or even die. This must be an increasingly stressful belief to hold on to, living, as they do in the shadow of logging and mass-deforestation.
On certain feast days and festivals, the Bunong congregate in the forest by the river, and make an animal sacrifice to the ancestral spirits to appease them. We were lucky enough to be invited. After much discussion between the tribal elders and the production team, it was decided that the pig would be killed before I arrived. I am not particularly squeamish, but I do get intolerably sad at suffering, and, since the animal was not, obviously, going to be stunned before death, there would be a degree of awfulness involved. I was delighted this was one scene I wouldn’t have to witness.
I sat in a clearing nearby waiting for the signal for action. Finally, it came. I wandered down through the trees to where I could see the tribe had gathered. There was a huddle of frantic activity and chatter, so I headed towards its epicentre. There, in front of me as I walked into the group, was a pig, trussed by its hands and feet, its snout bound tightly with twine, very much alive and very, very frightened. So I burst into tears. I’m helpful like that.
‘Sorry,’ said Claire.fn1 ‘There’s been a bit of a mix-up.’
While everyone set up their pots and pans, took out their incense sticks and offerings, and lit the fires, I sat down next to the pig and stroked it for a while, in an effort to calm it. I knew that my sensitive Western feelings were incongruous and irrelevant here, but I wanted to be true to myself, so I retired into the forest until the sacrifice had been carried out and the pig was beyond suffering.
I returned a few minutes later, by which time the pig had been gutted, its innards floating downstream like a bloody cobweb. The cavity was bathed in river water and the carcass dragged back to the bank and placed on a mat of banana leaves. I don’t eat much meat, but I have always been, strangely, fascinated by butchery. When done well, it’s a compelling skill to behold. Two men set about the pig with cleavers, deftly removing every single piece of flesh. Each family in turn took receipt of chunks of meat, which they tipped into large metal pots, bubbling with river water and vegetables. Finally, once every last bit of the animal had been distributed, the cooking (and, more importantly, the drinking) began in earnest.
The village elder, Tom Yam, was stripping bamboo with a blade into delicate fronds. These he daubed with pig’s blood and placed either side of an ancestral shrine, which resembled a small dog kennel on stilts. Inside the shrine, a handful of incense sticks were burning in a rusty can. From the label, I could see it had been a tin of tomatoes in a previous life. Several men stood alongside him, chanting.
The atmosphere was fast changing from hushed reverence to open-air rave festival. Out came plastic jerry-cans full of homemade hooch and the celebrations began in earnest.
That’s when I first notice it. Hanging off the side of the shrine is a tangle of veins connected to what looks like a pig kidney. How strange, I think. It must have fallen in there by accident.
Then, as I look around, I notice that everything seems to have a chunk of raw pig on it – the rocks, the trees, even the kids. People are drunkenly embracing friends, then hanging bits of intestine over their ears as they pull away. Uncooked piggy is obviously a sign of good luck for the Bunong.
The man in front of me is swaying, a gobbet of raw pig’s liver hanging from his ear. Another man, to his left, has what looks like a piece of lung adorning his fringe. As I draw nearer, someone flicks a bit of kidney in my direction, which hits the white of my eye and bounces off again. Nearer still, and the tribesmen rush to adorn my shoulders with offal, a ventricle here, a pancreas there. I think I can make out a spleen on my shirt collar, but am not sure. I was never any good at biology.
A young man approaches me, holding out something that looks like a sliver of heart. ‘I wouldn’t have said that was hygienic!’ I mutter anxiously, as he grabs me in a headlock and starts grinding it into my quiff.
CLAIRE: Sue!
She is loitering behind the camera, safely out of range.
CLAIRE: Look! Go over there! There! They’re calling you over!
She points to Tom Yam and a gaggle of elders hunched over a vat with a clear hosepipe sticking out of the top – the sort of pipe you’d use to siphon petrol out of a car. Those who had already had a drink were red in the face and clutching their foreheads, like they’d just done a shit ton of poppers.
Tom Yam sucks on the hosepipe. He swallows, then coughs violently into the bottle. He beckons me over.
ME: (whispering desperately towards the crew) Shit! Where’s the Sanex?
CLAIRE: What do you mean? Sue, you can’t use Sanex – it’s a tribal ceremony!
ME: That’s raw pig on there. RAW PIG.
CLAIRE: It’ll be disrespectful. It’s rude!
ME: Do you KNOW what RAW PIG can do to you?
I have a sudden flashback to a YouTube video I’d seen of a Korean man in surgery, trichinella worms cascading out of his arse. What a wonderful resource the internet is.
It becomes clear that I have no choice. I need to step up. I need to embrace the Bunong’s unique hospitality, even if it kills me. And it might.
The crew are some distance away, shooting on a long lens. I look towards them. It is the look of a woman who is about to cross every health and safety threshold she once held dear, a woman about to be exposed to the full spectrum of gastro-intestinal diseases known to man, and a few hitherto unidentified by medical science. It is a look that simply says, Help me.
I steel myself. It is simply a case of mind over matter. I accept the blessings of the forest. I accept the glistening unknown in the vat beneath. I accept it all. Then, as I bend towards the liquid, breathing in its oily reek, someone leans over and pops a chunk of pig bowel on the end of the straw.
A few sips in, all
my fears vanish. In fact everything vanishes. The world goes dark. The last thing I remember thinking is that nothing – nothing, no parasite or bacteria – could ever survive in the presence of that much ethanol. So I raise my eyes to the heavens, toast the ancestral spirits and drink again with impunity.
9. Please Release Me
The next day we drove for five hours through clouds of red dust, jolted by the endless potholes and bombarded by car horns.
We were heading west, that was all I knew. It wasn’t safe for me to know any more than that. I was due to meet a man called Dean from the Wildlife Rapid Response Rescue Team – Cambodia’s most alliterative animal welfare unit – to witness a raid on a restaurant suspected of selling illegal bush meat.
Eventually we pulled up at a large roadside restaurant, packed with locals – the air thick with the smell of fried pork and garlic.
The guys went in, as they always did, to put a mic on the contributors and set up shots. I waited outside, my stiff bones warming in the midday heat.
There was a row of motorbikes parked outside the entrance, and as I walked past, I noticed a duck hanging upside down from one of the seats, its head dangling by the exhaust. We eat our meat, skinless and boneless, from a sealed plastic tray. Here, things are different. More often than not, you transport your dinner live and kicking home with you. Once, in rural Vietnam, I saw a man riding a pushbike with a pig on his lap. It might well be the cultural norm in South East Asia, but it never ceases to distress me. It was already nearly 40 degrees and the little thing was starting to pant, its chest heaving.
I knew what the boys would say: You have to get used to it. You have to look away. You can’t try to save everything, Sue. You’ll go mad.
And sometimes it felt like that. Like I was going mad. I’m too porous, that’s my problem. I start to inhabit someone’s or something’s reality so much that I can hear their thoughts running through my head – their skin becomes my skin. I can feel their pain and, before long, my body will start mimicking their physical symptoms.
Sometimes I think that’s the route to madness. Not knowing your own limits, the boundaries of your own flesh. Not putting out some line of defence between you and the world. If depression is the price you pay for seeing everything, then perhaps this anxiety is the price you pay for feeling it.
For me, empathy is a magnet whose polarity I can’t control. Everything, every sensation, flies at me. And it sticks. By God, it sticks.
I took out my water bottle and started gently splashing the duck to cool it down. And then, the strangest thing happened: I said a prayer.
I am not a religious person. I don’t go to church. I don’t pray. It’s a reflex – a buried, automated response. It’s always been like this. I used to bury everything when I was a kid – bluebottles, worms, earwigs. Every single dead creature I came across had a woodland burial complete with lollipop-stick cross and full Catholic rites. I was so busy with insect requiems, I barely had time for important kid stuff like snorting Tippex and practising kissing on the inside crook of your arm.
So here I am, a woman in her forties, in a dustbowl dead-end town in Cambodia, praying over an upside-down duck on a motorbike. If there was ever a sentence that better described me, I haven’t come across it yet.
The boys were heading back. I got up, quickly, so they wouldn’t see what I’d been doing. As I walked away, I gently brushed the bird’s wing and said sorry. I am sorry. I’m sorry for all of it. Then I tried to push it from my mind.fn1
Matt adjusted the lens. I pushed my hair from my face.
MATT: Camera speed …
That’s telly-speak for ‘The Camera is about to record your babble.’
I side-stepped a pregnant mutt, snuffling in the dust, and walked into the restaurant. The place was bustling, vast wooden tables and benches populated by chattering families, arguing over vast pots of noodles and rice.
‘Have you seen Dean?’ I asked random strangers. ‘Have you seen Dean?’ They stared at me as if I was mad. ‘Do you know a bloke called Dean?’
I don’t know why I was surprised at the lack of response. Imagine being in your local greasy spoon, when a Cambodian television crew bursts in. The presenter starts shouting in Khmer at the top of her lungs. You’d set your grandma on them, wouldn’t you?
Minutes went by – still no sign of anyone resembling a Dean. I noticed that the restaurant curved round to the side, to a makeshift lean-to with dirt floors. I walked through. There, in the middle of a group of uniformed men, sat a white guy with a chiselled face. The sort of face that said, See these lines on my brow? Each one represents a dhole, a langur, a pangolin that I’ve saved. So many animals … Sure, it came at a cost … friends, lovers, all gone. I live alone now. It’s for the best. I can concentrate on my work.
‘Excuse me. Are you Dean?’ The guys around him stiffened, drawing themselves up to their full height. Dean didn’t answer immediately: he simply sat there, sizing me up as I stood there, hanging.
That’s the measure of Dean. After a full briefing, an hour-long pre-interview with the researcher and countless emails listing in detail what the filming would entail, Dean was still suspicious of us. I was enthralled by him. I had a real-life Bryan Mills right here, a man whose trust had been broken by the countless horrors he had seen, a hard man, a man of steel, who guards his broken heart …
My wandering imagination was thankfully cut short by a response: ‘Yep, I’m Dean,’ he replied, in a gruff Aussie burr. He extended his hand. It was heavy and dry, like a baseball mitt, worn from all the years of handling those pangolins, I guess. Those critters have scales that can really exfoliate.
He introduced me to the rest of the group, to Saro, from the Forestry Commission, and to some silent heavies from the Military Police, who were there to provide the muscle. It began to dawn on me how serious this all was.
Dean drained his cup, and motioned to the others to leave. As we got up, I noticed Saro covering his uniform with a denim shirt.
DEAN: It’s so we don’t get spotted along the way. Everyone’s looking out for us, so we need to stay as anonymous as possible.
We drove, in convoy, for well over an hour, until the roads petered into tracks, and the tracks to paths. We came to a halt at the edge of dense woodland, next to a restaurant with a gaudy blue corrugated fascia. I would have thought it deserted, were it not for a teenager, newborn baby in her arms, sat outside on the porch, drinking soda and staring at us from her hammock. Saro got out of the car, removed his denim shirt to reveal his official uniform in all of its gold-threaded glory, and in they all rushed.
The girl didn’t so much as flinch as we swept on through – she just kept on staring. The guards knocked on doors, checked the kitchens. Nothing. The place had the feeling of an Asian Mary Celeste. The raised floorboards creaked in the wind, the rows of burnished metal pans chiming as they knocked against one another. There were no adults about so they questioned the girl, but still she remained silent, slurping through her straw and staring. If I had known better I’d have pegged that look as stone-cold hatred.
We headed to the rear of the restaurant. Often, those who sell illegal meat will keep it stored off-premises, so if it is discovered, the contraband can’t be pinned on them directly. The place backed onto a hill, dense with shrubs and trees. I followed the guards as they climbed the embankment, scrambling over rocks and thick tufts of grass. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I wanted to be of use. A cry went up. We went to investigate. One of the guards had found a large plastic cooler box buried in the ground. Inside were packets of bloody bush meat, mouse deer, monkeys, all hacked into quarters and wrapped in plastic.
Another cry went up. And another. More meat. More contraband. More death.
It was then it struck me. The wood was silent. Other than the men in uniform, cutting through the bush, there was no sign of life. No birdsong. No rustle of undergrowth as a douc or bamboo rat got spooked. Nothing. Nothing was living in that place – i
t was all gone, portioned up and stored in makeshift fridges. The forest had been asset-stripped. All that remained were the empty trees, waiting in vain to be colonized once more.
The economics are compelling: a Cambodian farmer can earn 250 times his monthly salary on the sale of a single dead tiger. Ivory from an elephant’s tusks can fetch upward of $15,000 on the black market. With incentives like these, it’s hard to think of an attractive alternative that would allow them to leave the wildlife alone. These people – the restaurant owners, the poachers – they aren’t the real villains. The real villains are the men hundreds of miles away, sitting at their banqueting tables demanding tiger penis so they can feel like the Big Dude.
An hour later and we were still finding hidden stores – under clumps of earth, in gaps between boulders, tucked underneath tree roots. Piles and piles of the stuff.
We finished up and wandered out front. The girl hadn’t moved. She didn’t even acknowledge us as we emerged, the guards laden with contraband.
‘What happens now?’ I asked.
Bureaucracy: that was what happened now. Forms were filled out. Ancient scales were produced and the carcasses weighed and measured. There were photographs taken, details logged – all accompanied by intermittent head-shaking and low-level conversation. Then, when the procedural stuff had been completed, the meat was lugged on a tarpaulin to the centre of the village and a path between two rows of makeshift houses.
The guards took shovels out of their jeep and began digging a trench. Once it was around two feet deep, they tossed the animal parts into the dirt and poured petrol over them.
