‘Many of the quarry roads leading to the old train line down there are too steep and narrow to turn on’, Giovanni said. I could no longer see his arms but sensed he was waving them. ‘Even specially designed vehicles like these cannot turn,’ he added, ‘so the trucks go up or down one section of road in first gear, then they do the next section in reverse.’
Alison and I held hands and stared into the abyss like actors in some Absurdist drama. As the wind picked up, snatching at the fog and low clouds, we caught sight of a truck doing a mesmerising, heavyweight ballet towards the valley floor.
‘I don’t usually eat lunch,’ Giovanni remarked, rainwater streaming across his wrinkled brow, ‘but perhaps, given the meteorological conditions, we could retire to a local restaurant?’
‘Good idea’, I blurted. ‘Alison? Where are you?’
We bumped into each other on the way back to the car, our lips bloodless, our faces beginning to turn blue.
‘You will have heard of our famous lardo di Colonnata?’ Giovanni enquired hopefully, putting the Fiat into gear.
We had. New York restaurateur Mario Batali calls it ‘white prosciutto’ so that diners won’t be turned off by the prospect of eating pickled lard. Giovanni laughed when I mentioned that. ‘Very good, white prosciutto’, he said, repeating the words several times.
The rain was coming down harder than before, mixed with sleet. The wipers couldn’t cope. ‘Now we’re definitely coming to the end of this storm’, he said brightly. ‘White prosciutto! Ha, ha, ha…’
As we drove skyward in first gear, Giovanni kept up a running commentary. In the year 1570, he said, the Marquis Alberigo’s son, also conveniently named Alberigo, inaugurated the use of gunpowder in quarrying. It was thanks to him that some of the most spectacular avalanches of Carrara marble ‘snow’ had been created. ‘Honestly, I am glad it’s raining and foggy now, because when it clears and we’re up top it will be even more breathtaking for your article and photographs. White prosciutto – I love it!’
We darted across the village square to a restaurant whose simple exterior hid a luxurious and – thankfully – well-heated interior. It was hung with vintage photos of marble quarries and workers from the bad old days.
Giovanni and the proprietor embraced and confabulated about the menu, and within minutes a procession of blubbery delicacies began to arrive. Smiling from lobe to lobe, the owner leaned over and sang a snatch from an aria, his index finger counting the beat. ‘I see you’ve brought the rain with you’, he joked. ‘No matter, it will stop soon. In the meantime, enjoy your lunch, then we will visit the lard works.’
‘Ah, the lard works’, Giovanni repeated. ‘Amazing…’
Ten thousand calories and several bottles of local Vermentino Nero later, we waddled on webbed feet to a stone building 500 metres away. The temperature had dropped close to freezing and the continuing downpour had caused a power outage in the factory. Inside the dark building it was even colder than outside. Half a dozen giant sarcophaguses lurked against the walls. Bumping into one, I put out my hand instinctively and felt it subside into something clammy.
‘Colonnata lard is salt-cured in these vats of Carrara marble’, the proprietor’s voice explained in the darkness. ‘Usually the vats are made of a greyish or slightly swirled variety – never the white statuary marble prized for making sculptures, which is not porous enough.’
‘The marble, it is said, maintains the perfect temperature for curing and also imparts a peculiar, inimitable marble-powder taste’, added Giovanni.
Alison tried to get a photo or two using her flash, but we knew they wouldn’t come out – the interior was black. Back outside I plunged my right hand into the rushing rainwater to get rid of the cold salty brine. My hand was numb as we said farewell to the lard-maker.
By now the river flowing down Colonnata’s main road was up to mid-calf level, but the Fiat started at the flick of a key. Giovanni beamed. As we descended into another soggy valley, he delved further into the past. ‘Here, all around us, are dozens of sleigh paths first used by the Romans to slide marble down from the mountains…’
‘So it does snow here’, Alison observed. ‘I thought so…’
‘No, not that kind of sleigh’, Giovanni laughed. ‘No, no, no.’
The Romans did not, as might seem logical, quarry the most accessible stones, Giovanni insisted. They followed the best veins of marble, even if that meant making their slaves climb a 1500-metre mountain. ‘In ancient times,’ he said, pointing at the mist beyond the window, ‘marble was the stone of the emperors.’ As the ultimate status symbol, no price – in money or human lives – was too high to pay for it. ‘Once the marble was loaded onto the sleighs,’ he continued, ‘they were dragged by men with teams of oxen. The sleigh routes were very, very steep.’ Slippery logs, coated with soap, were laid in front of the advancing sleigh, a juggernaut whose progress could never be fully halted. ‘Like the big trucks now – sometimes they cannot stop’, Giovanni remarked, his right hand doing somersaults.
Before arriving at the celebrated Carbonera quarry, he explained that the primitive and dangerous sleigh technique was still in use in 1926. Benito Mussolini’s marble monolith at the Foro Italico stadium in Rome came from Carbonera.
We parked and, no longer bothering to use an umbrella, squelched across the quarry. ‘The monolith was dragged by sixty oxen from here to a ship at Marina di Carrara. Look – you can still see the spot from which it was detached, there, there!’
Somehow, despite our best efforts, Alison and I could not make out the gash in the sodden hillside Giovanni indicated. ‘I’ll take your word for it’, I said.
‘Lovely, really’, Alison added, convulsed by the cold.
‘The 300-tonne block is still the largest ever quarried’, Giovanni continued once we were back in the car. He turned the heat up to full blast and swept at the windshield. ‘The sleighs and oxen only disappeared from here in the 1960s – I remember them. Now we have trucks.’
‘I see’, I said, blanching. A very large specimen of truck was hurtling at us, its lights blazing. Giovanni popped the clutch and the car bucked through the mud out of harm’s way.
‘Fantastico!’ he enthused, turning to admire the quarry vehicle. Its wheels were taller than the Fiat. ‘That’s efficiency!’ Giovanni exclaimed as we surged toward another quarry road. ‘Gone are the days when hillsides were dynamited’, he explained, denouncing the destructive extraction process used until World War II. ‘Nowadays, with diamond-wire cutting machines and high-tech equipment like that earth-mover, there is no waste. None! Marble discards are crushed to make gravel or composite paving stones’, he sang. ‘Marble dust goes into glossy magazine paper and cosmetics, and is used as a filtering agent in anti-pollution scrubbers for smokestacks.’
‘You must be very proud that the great sculptures of the world are carved from Carrara marble’, I said, holding onto the armrest as we swerved up another curlicue road that had been transformed into a river. I rolled down my window to look out. The water was above the seams of the car’s doors. I could feel the tyres spinning to get a grip.
‘Sculpture?’ Giovanni asked. ‘Oh yes, very prestigious. But artwork represents only a tiny fraction of marble’s uses’, he added, gunning the engine and swerving. ‘Sculpture is to marble what Ferrari is to cars. The construction industry is the Fiat of marble – the real thing.’ He pounded the dashboard.
‘What would happen if a truck like that big one we saw were to come down this road right now?’ Alison asked.
‘A truck? Here? Now? Oh no, I doubt it, highly unlikely. Well, it might happen but… Ah, here we are at the summit at last and you see it’s no longer raining.’ We paused by a large road sign that read ‘panoramic piazza’. ‘I know it’s here somewhere…’
Dizzy and only partly thawed, we got out of the car. ‘Giovanni, where are you?’ I called.
‘Here, don’t you see me?’ he asked, then began to point and explain.
�
��This is snow’, Alison said, interrupting. ‘This is definitely snow.’
‘We call it a white-out’, I added.
Giovanni frowned. His moustache twitched. ‘Mmmm, it does appear to be snow of the non-marble kind’, he conceded. ‘But that’s excellent. At my office, I have many photographs and brochures. And now you have a reason to return!’
THE BOAT FROM BATTAMBANG
CHRISTOPHER R COX
Christopher R Cox is a feature reporter on the staff of the Boston Herald. He has survived Cambodia’s transport system on six trips for his newspaper and such magazines as Men’s Journal, Travel & Leisure and Reader’s Digest. He is the author of the adventure travel book Chasing the Dragon: Into the Heart of the Golden Triangle, about Burma’s narco-warlords, and can order cold beer in more than half a dozen languages. When not experiencing Third World gastro-intestinal distress, Christopher lives in Acton, Massachusetts.
The route from Battambang to Siem Reap makes a long sweep around the western shoreline of the Tonlé Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest lake, via kidney-rattling roads crowded with death-wish buses, overloaded lorries and plodding ox carts. In Cambodia, it’s an immutable fact that travel is 90 per cent perspiration and 10 per cent sheer terror. So it seemed a miracle when the Angkor Express Boat Company promised to whisk me from Battambang down the Sangke River and across the Tonlé Sap to Angkor’s doorstep in just five hours – half the time I’d spend on a sweltering, crowded bus fretting about an impending head-on collision.
Even the firm’s ticket had the look of pure ‘20,000 Leagues’ porn: a colour picture of a sleek, modern vessel knifing through placid waters in front of Angkor Wat. Never mind that the moated temple is miles from the lake. I plunked down my fifteen dollars for passage at seven the next morning. This was the way to travel, I thought, as I confirmed my boutique-hotel reservation and several appointments in Siem Reap. Safe, smooth, scenic.
It was March, the hottest time of the year in Cambodia, and the dawn brought enervating heat and humidity to Battambang. It had rained briefly but intensely overnight and puddles filled the potholed streets of the sleepy provincial capital. The dry-season downpour, however, had not been enough to raise the Sangke to navigable depth for our boat. ‘River’ seemed a bit of a misnomer for the waterway I now regarded ten metres down a sandy, rubbish-strewn bank. There trickled a latte-brown stream that would barely float a bathtub toy.
Where was the speeding boat that was pictured on my ticket?
‘Don’t worry’, Bounhet, an Angkor Express employee, said brightly. He pointed to a battered, fifteen-passenger Ford van. ‘We drive to Bak Prea. Maybe one hour. The river is still deep in Bak Prea. There we meet the boat from Siem Reap.’
I consulted my maps. There was no sign of Bak Prea on anything a tourist might buy, but on a detailed, 1:100,000-scale Cambodian map of greater Battambang I found a thin black line (a fair-weather ‘cart track’, according to the key) meandering through open country until it fizzled out at a small cluster of riverside huts thirty kilometres northeast of the city. This was Bak Prea; literally the end of the road, the dry-season relay point for other travellers equally petrified by bus travel or locals who lived in the villages along the great lake and its tributaries.
A half-hour beyond our scheduled departure, but still well within Cambodian parameters for on-time performance, we set off. I shared the van with an elderly Khmer woman and a trio of Euros: Ales, a forty-eight-year-old Czech train engineer, and two twenty-something backpackers called Ben and Remy, who hailed from England and Holland, respectively. Ben wore a Red Bull Tshirt and a dazed expression; Remy sported a nasty purplish laceration running halfway around his neck.
‘Did it surfing the train up from Phnom Penh’, he shrugged. ‘I was standing on top of one of the coaches. Someone had tapped the power and run a line over the tracks to their village. Almost lost my head.’
Luckily for Remy the condition of the nation’s railways was so appalling that trains barely moved above a trot. This time, he’d decided to ride inside.
For a while we rolled along a decent sealed road shadowing the left bank of the Sangke, passing fruit orchards and sturdy wooden homes. From somewhere in the back of the van rose the distinctive, urinal-cake bouquet of a durian fruit. Bounhet ignored the stench, cranking the van’s radio and fielding incessant calls on a mobile phone that had a jaunty ‘Jingle Bells’ ring tone.
Beyond Wat Ek, the site of tenth-century Angkor ruins and a Khmer Rouge killing field holding at least five thousand victims, the villages receded and the tarmac faded, leaving only a stark floodplain. This was Cambodia’s rice bowl, which owed its productivity to a remarkable annual phenomenon. During the monsoon season, the rain-swollen Mekong River overflowed into the Tonlé Sap River, actually reversing the current of the hundred-kilometre waterway that connected the lake to the Mekong. By September, floodwaters would extend almost fifty kilometres inland from the great lake’s dry-season shoreline, quadrupling the size of the Tonlé Sap.
This inundation deposited fertile silt and nurtured one of the world’s richest freshwater fisheries. It also made for terrible roads. Less than an hour from Battambang, Bounhet gingerly entered a small wash without the momentum necessary to send the hulking van up the opposite slope. Too late, he desperately gunned the engine; the tyres only sank further into the slick muck. We were stuck.
Luckily, a nearby farmer had a tractor and cheerfully extricated the road rubes. While we thanked him, a convoy of mud-covered Chinese trucks rolled up from Bak Prea. Forget a one-hour drive: the lead driver said they’d left yesterday and spent the night in their vehicles when the rains struck and the track became a metre-deep quagmire. The route was impassable in our vehicle.
Bounhet ruminated on this, then announced, ‘We go to Bak Prea another way.’
His optimism proved short-lived. Less than a kilometre down a faint trail through squash fields, he once again had us mired in a small gully. Eventually a passing four-wheel drive pulled us out. Bounhet pushed on – for all of two hundred metres. Then another muddy patch; another bog-down. After half an hour of fruitlessly spinning our wheels, another Good Samaritan with a Toyota Hi-Lux gave us a tow.
Bounhet decided a break was in order. By now it was almost eleven o’clock. At this pace, Bak Prea was days, if not months, away. A half-dozen Cambodian travellers in another underpowered car joined us in the meagre shade of a solitary, desiccated tree.
‘You will make it to Siem Reap today’, Bounhet said.
‘Tonight’, I corrected him.
Ben butchered the durian, then recoiled. He thought he had bought a jackfruit in the Battambang market. The undaunted locals fell on the reeking delicacy with gusto. After another hour of putrid, ninety-five-in-the-shade limbo and a few ‘Jingle Bells’ ring tones, Bounhet made an executive decision: we would bash on to Bak Prea.
By trial and repeated error, Bounhet had finally grasped the concept of off-road driving. While we shouted and goaded, he powered the van through the dips and puddles and ruts. But after another half-hour scramble, our exhausted driver suddenly stopped and pointed at the thorny underbrush enveloping our path.
‘Steng’, he uttered. River.
The Sangke was nearby. Our speedboat? No one knew.
We bushwhacked through fifty metres of thickets to the river, which hadn’t changed much since Battambang: still brown, still slow, and perhaps six metres across. A wide-beamed cargo boat wallowed against the left bank. For a dollar apiece the captain was only too happy to take on passengers.
‘One hour to Bak Prea’, he said brightly. I’d heard that one before.
For the next two and a half hours the skipper spent more time in the river than at the tiller, dragging his boat through the shallows and over mudflats. In the stupefying midday heat, even the birds – swallows, a black trogon, a piebald kingfisher – seemed to fly at half-speed. Whenever the Sangke deepened, the boatman was content to punt like a Venetian gondolier rather than run his engine.
It was after three o’clock when we poled serenely into Bak Prea, a collection of slapdash bamboo-and-thatch huts and a few tired concrete-block homes at the confluence of the Sangke and Mongkol Borei Rivers. The entire place reeked of raw sewage, dried fish and hard labour. A durian would have smelt like sweet relief.
Incredibly, the Angkor Express boat for Siem Reap was there, tied up at a ramshackle dock that ran from a hut listing above the shallows. The boat, of course, looked nothing like the ticket illustration. Rather, it resembled a large, covered dugout filled with wooden benches fit for galley slaves.
We gathered our packs and leaped from the cargo boat into a scrum of backpackers at the abject marina.
‘Is this the boat for Battambang?’ one sunburned man asked desperately. ‘We’ve been waiting since ten this morning.’
‘I don’t think there will be a boat’, I replied.
He took the news as well as a terminal-cancer prognosis. I approached a teenaged boy who looked like he could be a deckhand on the Siem Reap vessel.
‘Where is the captain?’
Not here, to judge from his reaction. I gestured at my watch and the sun. We needed to get under way soon if we hoped to make it across the Tonlé Sap before nightfall. The boy smiled at the sweaty, addled barang, hopped from the boat and disappeared up the gangway to Bak Prea. I would not see him again for hours.
A policeman in plainclothes appeared. ‘The driver has gone to Battambang’, he said in soft English. ‘He will return tonight. Then we will go to Siem Reap.’
How the captain had got himself to Battambang was a mystery. There was nothing to do now but wait. Remy and Ben pitched their bags onto the dock and wandered into Bak Prea. I bought a litre of bottled water at the marina’s shack, then gagged on its diesel-fuel taste. It took two shots of travel-stash rum to cleanse my palate.
When the policeman, Mr Kousou, eventually reappeared he didn’t look too happy. ‘You must stay tonight in Bak Prea’, he said. ‘There is no guesthouse or hotel here.’
By the Seat of My Pants Page 4
