THE ULTIMATE NOWHERE
TREKKING THROUGH THE CAMBODIAN OUTBACK IN SEARCH OF THE KOUPREY
By Steve Hendrix
Originally Published: December 19, 1999
Ratanikiri Province, Cambodia -
So, this is nowhere. And here I finally am, right in the middle of it.
After years of extreme, uncomfortable and downright unwise treks in search of
the world's most remote places, I finally made it to the rearmost of
backwaters, the most track-free of trackless wilderness. After countless
war-story swap meets with other hard-core travelers, I finally scored supreme
bragging rights by getting here -- a Godforsaken, deserted jungle in northeast
Cambodia.
This is the heart of darkness, no-man's-land, a recent sanctuary for
Cambodian guerrillas, the route of the old Ho Chi Minh Trail, ground zero of
Nixon's secret bombing campaign. For decades nobody has ventured into this
isolated jungle but tribal hunters and a few Khmer Rouge holdouts. Just
getting here took a numbing progression of prop planes, Russian Jeeps,
torturous roads, leaky dugout canoes and, finally, an elephant train -- all in
the company of a heavily armed security escort. But here I sit, happily
exhausted, reveling in the certainty that I will never be as untouched and
untouchable by the "real" world as I am at this instant.
"Guess what," says my campmate, walking over. "Michael Jordan just
announced his retirement. And it's snowing in Chicago. Anybody else want to
use the satellite phone?"
I stare up at my campmate. He's Bill Kurtis, the veteran CBS newsman, more
recently the mellifluous host of almost nightly documentaries on A&E. Right
now, Kurtis is just a dark silhouette before the unforgiving Asian sun. Behind
him a wisp of camp smoke rises where our Cambodian guides are killing our
morning chicken. And far overhead, in unseen orbits, the modern world is
standing by.
"Why not," I answer, getting to my feet. I call my wife in Washington, and
as she's telling me we're almost out of cat food, I watch one of our guides --
a former Khmer Rouge guerrilla -- assemble his Chinese B40 rocket launcher for
the day.
This odd trek started several months earlier with a phone call from Kurtis.
For his A&E series "Investigative Reports," I'd sent him an offbeat idea for a
documentary on the search for Cambodia's national animal, a massive wild ox
called the kouprey. In spite of some impressive derring-do by biologists,
journalists and general adventurers over the years, no one but local hunters
has seen a kouprey up close since the early 1960s. This is no snail darter --
the kouprey stands 6 feet tall, weighs a solid ton and sports a massive rack
of horns. But the unbroken play of war, genocide and general mayhem raging
through Southeast Asia has rendered the kouprey invisible to the eager eyes of
science.
But now a shaky peace has taken hold in Cambodia, and reports of kouprey
sightings have been trickling out of Cambodia's most isolated backcountry -- a
stretch of mysterious forest on the Cambodia-Vietnam border. This pristine dry
forest was sealed for 30 years, most recently as a sanctuary for Pol Pot's
Khmer Rouge guerrillas. It reportedly houses some of the rarest animals in the
world: wild elephants, tigers and -- just maybe -- kouprey. I sent Kurtis a
magazine article I'd written about the kouprey and suggested the time was
right to jump-start the search. He agreed.
"Let's go," he said simply that day on the phone. "You make the
arrangements."
You make the arrangements? I gulped a yes, hung up and wondered what travel
agent I could call for this one.
Miraculously, salvation arrived only a few days later via e-mail from
Cambodia. I had blanketed my few contacts in Asia's wildlife community with
pleas for advice. A response came back from someone I didn't know, an
expatriate American living in Phnom Penh named Hunter Weiler. A former big
game hunter and Department of Energy official, Weiler had taken early
retirement and relocated to Cambodia to pursue, of all things, the search for
the kouprey.
Over the next six months, Weiler and I and Kurtis' staff in Chicago
whittled away at a mountain of logistical details until a plausible itinerary
began to take shape. Elephant mahouts were recruited, officials bribed, boats
hired, bayonets sharpened, batteries charged, inoculations endured, embassies
alerted and guns loaded. And finally, on a sunny Thursday in January, I walked
out of the rarefied comfort of Thai Airways Business Class into the muggy
mystery of Cambodia and its signature ox.
I had 48 hours in Phnom Penh to finalize plans before Kurtis and crew
arrived from Chicago. From our base on the rooftop terrace of the Foreign
Correspondents Club -- where the city's jaded expatriate community takes its
gin with purified ice and a view of the Mekong -- Weiler and I honed our
plans. We picked our way repeatedly through the gantlet of legless veterans
and beseeching scooter drivers around the door of the club on our way to
glad-hand officials at the American embassy, tour the medical facilities at
the Western clinic and meet the helicopter pilot who would come fly us out if
things turned ugly.
Two days later, I go to the airport to meet Kurtis, his cameraman and two
sound guys. This is the first major hurdle. Having any our gear seized would
be a catastrophe, and lots of gratuities had already changed hands to ensure
that our small film crew could pass through unobtrusive and unaccosted. So
it's with mouth agape that I watch as case after case marked "Kurtis
Productions" tumbles through the baggage door -- scores of plastic crates
filled with high-end video cameras (five of them), camping gear, portable
computers, radios, navigation units, a generator, batteries all sizes, cords,
cables, adapters, blank tapes, medicine, expedition wear, business attire, bug
repellent , fuel tanks, water bottles, TV monitors, Palm Pilots, American
toilet paper and mountains of other goods, all of which is guaranteed to spark
a gleam in the eye of any customs officer.
Our two Cambodian liaisons take one look at the load, turn pale and head
straight to customs where they pass out more "gifts" to the nice officers. It
takes half an hour of muttered consultation, but suddenly we're rushed through
without opening a single case. In a caravan of six vans and taxis, we head
into the capital.
Two days later -- after a whirl of last-minute provisioning and one embassy
cocktail party -- we're back at the airport ready to go upcountry. Our crew is
bigger with the addition of Weiler, a trio of earnest young Cambodian wildlife
officers and every box of Thailand-made corn flakes I could find in the
markets. Now, it's on to an aging Royal Air Cambodia puddle jumper for the
jarring flight to Ban Lung, capital of the northeastern province of
Ratanikiri.
Ban Lung may be a weekly stop on the local airline, but it still falls way
off the edge of the country's limited tourist map. The runway is a red dirt
strip, the terminal an open-air hut, the whole town not much more than a
rustic hamlet. A crowd gathers to stare impassively at the six foreigners
busily overloading a line of hired Jeeps. We have about nine hours of bad
roads ahead over the next two days.
Slowly, I'm beginning to relax. So far, Weiler's local colleagues have come
through with every promised vehicle, interview and meal. For his part, Kurtis
-- with the career adventurist's perverse love of discomfort -- grows only
mellower as we make our way deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. As
our standards slip from basic to brutal, his mood rises from amiable to
downright joyful. That's good, because we're about to meet the boats.
"You want me to put $120,000 worth of video equipment in that?" says
cameraman Skip Brown. We're at the bottom of a steep bank on the Sre Pok,
surrounded by our stuff . . . and more is being schlepped down from the jeeps
by an ant line of local porters. The tower of cargo begs for a barge, but the
three boats tied up are more like hollowed out pencils -- long, low motor
canoes a yard wide and 30 feet long. Two of them are being vigorously bailed.
Some nervous muttering breaks out among the Americans, and it's only made
worse when Weiler comes over to fill us in.
"We'll hit our first rapids in about two hours," he says. "We should be
fine after that unless the river bandits are still about."
Rapids and bandits in a floating pencil? The Cambodians smile politely at
our concern. "No worry, no worry," they assure us (in fact, they routinely ply
these waters with much larger boatloads of fish). But at our request, they
send out the call for more boats. Within an hour, every boatman in the village
motors over, willing to sign on for a week's work. We hire all comers, and by
the time we load up and pull out, we're an impressive flotilla of eight
under-loaded canoes.
The day on the river is charming, if brutally hot. Our rigor mortis,
gunwale-clenching fear of overturning slowly gives way to languid repose. We
lean back and watch brilliant birds, tidy riverside farms, a lush corridor of
jungle. And then, as we pull into the last village before the frontier, our
placid mood evaporates as men with automatic rifles surround and cover us from
the bank. There's a mortar launcher trained our way. A machine gun is mounted
on a log. We smile wanly at the crowd staring down on us.
"We're from American TV."
More muttered consultations. Two hours later, they let us pass.
That night -- in complete, moonless darkness -- we reach our base camp
about 10 miles shy of the Vietnam border. We pitch our tents, eat a little
dried fish and call home.
For the next three days -- filthy, happy and armed to the teeth -- we
lumber about the forest on elephant back. We shoot hours of video, eat pounds
of rice, bathe in the river and drink foul Cambodian wine. We count stars,
read by flashlight and surprise soundman David Huizenga with his first
elephant-dung birthday cake. We have fun. And we make enough racket to scare
away every kouprey in Asia. Maybe that's why we didn't see one.
Yes, every rendezvous has been made, every plane has flown, every boat
launched and against all odds we've gotten the entire party here healthy and
ready to work -- a triumph of extreme travel planning. There's only one
problem: No one remembered to book the kouprey. We don't see the slightest
trace of one. In fact, we don't see any animals at all -- not a glimpse or a
whiff or a grunt of anything with fur and hooves. Tracks and scat, that's all.
A few birds and lots and lots and lots of bugs. Otherwise -- and this is
problematic for a wildlife documentary -- not a single example of living
wildlife.
The TV folks are concerned. The biologists, meanwhile, are ecstatic. The
terrain exceeds their fondest ecological dreams, mile after mile of unspoiled
dry forest, classic wild cattle country. "The animals are out here," says one,
"but they've been so overhunted that now it takes at least six weeks of
constant, quiet field presence to actually see one."
Six weeks? Alas, as they say on TV, we're out of time.
Our show will have a new ending, a frightening denouement -- even in this
most isolated of backwaters the animals are in big trouble. What was once
billed as one of Asia's richest wildlife habitats is now a ghost forest, home
to a few skittish critters being slowly picked off by hunters armed with the
weapons of modern war.
Three days later we're back in the hotel bubble in Phnom Penh. And we're
calling home. But you know something?
The connection was better out in the middle of nowhere.
----------
Steve Hendrix is a writer and producer who lives in Washington, D.C. His --
and Bill Kurtis' -- documentary, "In Search of the Kouprey," will air at 8
p.m. Dec. 22 on A&E.
NOTE: Prices, dates and other time-sensitive material may have changed since the original publication date.
|
|
