one quiet day
IT is monday morning and nothing at all planned for the day. Ralph and I had a great trip up to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. Flew up Saturday morning, came back Sunday afternooon. We stayed at the Auberge hotel near the old market, a hotel Graham Greene might well have stayed in....beautiful old courtyards full of tropical foliage, dark wood stairways and thick heavy doors, all overshellacked for a hundred years. The town was all a bustle getting ready for the major summer Buddhist festival on Tuesday, complete with a visit from the king himself. Banners stretched across every street every 50 feet and flags of all the southeast asia nations unfurled from every light post.
we had, of course, come there to connect with the kind of quiet strange experience Sean Flynn had on his visit in 1969, but that can never be. Angkor has become a major major tourist attraction, with more than a million visitors. Looking at the guide book, we thought the ruins at Ta Prohm, still in an overgrown state, would be a good place to start and it was. Roots and vines from huge banyan trees have wrapped around and strangled the ancient hindu gods and goddesses. And here and there still a few local shrines to the later buddhist images. One funny moment. We kept hearing what we thought must be an exotic bird, very faintly, and both of us said: we've got to have that sound....but as we climbed over yet another tumbled temple, we came on a young girl selling an odd kind of clapper. that was our bird! we bought two. one dollah.
The next morning, we got up at 4:30 to go see the sunrise, thinking now we might find some quiet away from the tourists. We should have known better. Hundreds of people were already in place, but nothing like the previous day. Ralph got some really good still and moving pictures as the dawn brok over the towers of the main Angkor temple. We had a wonderful tuk tuk driver who really looked after us. He took us around to the enormous Buddha faces carved into the Bayon ruins and there we found the peace and quiet we'd been looking for. I also found a delightful group of monks climbing about the ruin and posed for pictures with them.
The ritual with the king on Tuesday will involve a ceremony in which the king plows the first furrow in a field, thus assuring a bountiful crop for all his people. While we were there, there was a run-through rehearsal using three teams of royal oxen and a very primitive wooden plow. These were the healthiest cattle we'd seen anywhere in the country. most of them are emaciated. The royal gamelan [orchestra of xylophones] and the royal ballet were also there; they didn't do any dances, but we did get to hear a rehearsal of some of the music.
Back in town, our tuk tuk driver, Mr. Ban, took us on a wild ride through some of the older and poorer parts of town out to a lake--or at least it'll be a lake when the rainy season starts. The importance of this was being able to show Ralph a setting like Dong Palane, the section of Vientiane where Flynn and I once got so stoned on opium, described in the book and a key scene in our script. Thatched huts up on stilts, the kind of places where we'd go smoke opium in LAos and Vietnam.
Back here in Phnom Penh, we connected up with Tim Page and his young Aussie cameraman, Sean, who never says a word, but seems remarkable competent and adept at all the technical stuff none of us old hacks can understand, and George Hamilton who had had a frustrating day, and wished he'd gone to Angkor with us.
What a delightful new friend has Hamilton turned out to be. He tells one wickedly funny story after another. But, more important, he is wonderfully supportive of my book and speaks passionately about what a great film it's going to be. At this point, we have discussed every possible angle and possibility for it....and I am forever grateful for his interest.
A moment of high drama as friend Page described in detail how he got his last major wound and left a piece of his skull in Vietnam. What I'd never connected before was how close he was when he was wounded to where just two years later Flynn and Stone would be captured on the other side of the border in Cambodia.
The whole nasty episode with the two Aussie bounty hunters seems to have really gotten to him. He calls them Feral I and Feral II. Their claim that they had found Flynn's bones has now been totally dismissed by the official JPAC people who have examined the bones in Hawaii. They say the dental work is clearly not American, and the fragments belong to an indigenous person. The JPAC deputy director is a terrific old boy from Texas named Johnie [sic] Webb and we've spent a good deal of time with him. We recorded an interview with him which dispelled a dozen different myths about the search for the missing and dead correspondents.
Toward the end of the evening [midnight] Page told me how weary he was of this long long search for Flynn's remains. "Perry deane, I really think we're going to find them this year. And once we've found them, I think I am going to die." He said it without any sort of self pity, just this is what is going to happen.
Tomorrow we are renting a van and going down to the spot at Chi Pou on Highway 1 where Flynn and Stone were captured. After spending some time filming there, we'll go on over to the nearby VN border and catch a bus into saigon...what I know from last night's remembrances is that we will also be going with a Klick or two of the spot where Page was so horribly wounded in 1969.
I think the reunion in Saigon will be a lot more relaxed. I decided not to be a guest of the government, although I'll surely take in their victory parades and exhibitions. I am being interviewed by a local reporter and I'm actually looking forward to her questions. Last night page put a real damper on my expectations by running down a list of landmarks so important to us which have now been destroyed. Where our apt. was on Tu Do St., is now the location of a 35-story skyscraper....
Carl Robinson reports from Ho Chi Minh City that the government has gone all out for the celebration of the 35th anniversary of the liberation or fall of Saigon....all the 4road ways decorated with elaborate peace doves.....but, today, it's nice to have no plans at all; although I do miss having that air conditioned bus with the police escort.
we had, of course, come there to connect with the kind of quiet strange experience Sean Flynn had on his visit in 1969, but that can never be. Angkor has become a major major tourist attraction, with more than a million visitors. Looking at the guide book, we thought the ruins at Ta Prohm, still in an overgrown state, would be a good place to start and it was. Roots and vines from huge banyan trees have wrapped around and strangled the ancient hindu gods and goddesses. And here and there still a few local shrines to the later buddhist images. One funny moment. We kept hearing what we thought must be an exotic bird, very faintly, and both of us said: we've got to have that sound....but as we climbed over yet another tumbled temple, we came on a young girl selling an odd kind of clapper. that was our bird! we bought two. one dollah.
The next morning, we got up at 4:30 to go see the sunrise, thinking now we might find some quiet away from the tourists. We should have known better. Hundreds of people were already in place, but nothing like the previous day. Ralph got some really good still and moving pictures as the dawn brok over the towers of the main Angkor temple. We had a wonderful tuk tuk driver who really looked after us. He took us around to the enormous Buddha faces carved into the Bayon ruins and there we found the peace and quiet we'd been looking for. I also found a delightful group of monks climbing about the ruin and posed for pictures with them.
The ritual with the king on Tuesday will involve a ceremony in which the king plows the first furrow in a field, thus assuring a bountiful crop for all his people. While we were there, there was a run-through rehearsal using three teams of royal oxen and a very primitive wooden plow. These were the healthiest cattle we'd seen anywhere in the country. most of them are emaciated. The royal gamelan [orchestra of xylophones] and the royal ballet were also there; they didn't do any dances, but we did get to hear a rehearsal of some of the music.
Back in town, our tuk tuk driver, Mr. Ban, took us on a wild ride through some of the older and poorer parts of town out to a lake--or at least it'll be a lake when the rainy season starts. The importance of this was being able to show Ralph a setting like Dong Palane, the section of Vientiane where Flynn and I once got so stoned on opium, described in the book and a key scene in our script. Thatched huts up on stilts, the kind of places where we'd go smoke opium in LAos and Vietnam.
Back here in Phnom Penh, we connected up with Tim Page and his young Aussie cameraman, Sean, who never says a word, but seems remarkable competent and adept at all the technical stuff none of us old hacks can understand, and George Hamilton who had had a frustrating day, and wished he'd gone to Angkor with us.
What a delightful new friend has Hamilton turned out to be. He tells one wickedly funny story after another. But, more important, he is wonderfully supportive of my book and speaks passionately about what a great film it's going to be. At this point, we have discussed every possible angle and possibility for it....and I am forever grateful for his interest.
A moment of high drama as friend Page described in detail how he got his last major wound and left a piece of his skull in Vietnam. What I'd never connected before was how close he was when he was wounded to where just two years later Flynn and Stone would be captured on the other side of the border in Cambodia.
The whole nasty episode with the two Aussie bounty hunters seems to have really gotten to him. He calls them Feral I and Feral II. Their claim that they had found Flynn's bones has now been totally dismissed by the official JPAC people who have examined the bones in Hawaii. They say the dental work is clearly not American, and the fragments belong to an indigenous person. The JPAC deputy director is a terrific old boy from Texas named Johnie [sic] Webb and we've spent a good deal of time with him. We recorded an interview with him which dispelled a dozen different myths about the search for the missing and dead correspondents.
Toward the end of the evening [midnight] Page told me how weary he was of this long long search for Flynn's remains. "Perry deane, I really think we're going to find them this year. And once we've found them, I think I am going to die." He said it without any sort of self pity, just this is what is going to happen.
Tomorrow we are renting a van and going down to the spot at Chi Pou on Highway 1 where Flynn and Stone were captured. After spending some time filming there, we'll go on over to the nearby VN border and catch a bus into saigon...what I know from last night's remembrances is that we will also be going with a Klick or two of the spot where Page was so horribly wounded in 1969.
I think the reunion in Saigon will be a lot more relaxed. I decided not to be a guest of the government, although I'll surely take in their victory parades and exhibitions. I am being interviewed by a local reporter and I'm actually looking forward to her questions. Last night page put a real damper on my expectations by running down a list of landmarks so important to us which have now been destroyed. Where our apt. was on Tu Do St., is now the location of a 35-story skyscraper....
Carl Robinson reports from Ho Chi Minh City that the government has gone all out for the celebration of the 35th anniversary of the liberation or fall of Saigon....all the 4road ways decorated with elaborate peace doves.....but, today, it's nice to have no plans at all; although I do miss having that air conditioned bus with the police escort.
posted by Perry Deane Young at 5:18 PM
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