Writing in a cyber cafe

Posted on 11 June 2009
Tags: Travel Tales

By Michael McCarthy

I cannot conceive of my life without a computer. I get very strange if I can’t sit down and write, or communicate, or work, on a regular basis. On my last trip to Asia - 6 weeks, including Nepal, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Cambodia - carrying no laptop of my own I tried to write my stories “on the go,” using any cybercafes I came upon. Not such a good idea, as it turned out.

On a previous trip I had been able to easily access cybershops, and even write some decent material using a Sony Walkman with some soft music to drown out the background drivel. Times sure change fast. On my last trip I found cybershops everywhere I went jammed with loud Australians, noisy Americans and rude Brits who felt they had the right to shout across the room: “Eh Rupert, Liverpool beat Arsenal last night two-nil. Whaddya fink, eh?” It also appears that anyone and everyone who has become quasi-cyber-literate spends a great deal of their time on the road reading FaceBook, surfing porno, writing useless emails home to friends who don’t give a damn because those same friends wish they were the ones on the road and are therefore jealous, and generally wasting their life at 50 cents an hour when they could be doing something more useful, like googling my wonderful travel website and reading my terrific travel stories. Take, for instance, an incident that happened to me in a cybershop in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I spent a few weeks in that lovely, noisy, crazy, city, and every day I would try to write notes and stories, emailing them forward to myself so I could continue my stories the next day or in the next town, in some other cybershop. I actually wrote much of an entire book that way. If you have a pair of earmuff-sized headphones, and perhaps a new age tape of coma-inducing Loreena McKinnitt music to put your mind into a special trance, you can actually write in a café despite the relentless vehicle noise outside - HONK HONK HONK - and mindless chatter and drunken Aussies – “Eh Rupert!” - shouting to each other.

But there I was in Phnom Penh - trying to write despite the fact that the keyboard was in Khmer and half the letters had been rubbed off by overuse and the damned computer was held together by masking tape and the table on which the computer was resting was totally off-kilter and rocked back and forth endlessly, and the guy at the next work station was using his feet as a percussion device - when I hear this strange humming. I look around the room to see from whence this strange humming is emanating, but all I can see is a Buddhist monk with his eyes closed in prayer, and the usual riff raff of wretchedly dressed backpackers skyping away in Dutch or Lithuanian, and a Cambodian businessman trying to type a document using one finger (the other up his nose) and so I forget about the humming and get back to work.

But the humming gets so loud I can’t concentrate, and I pull off my headphones to look around and see what the hell is going on. Amazingly, it appears to be the Buddhist monk, reading prayers and mantras from his computer screen, out loud. Very loud. I give him an unholy glare, trying to get my point across that he is bothering everyone in the room with his stupid chanting. He glances back at me back for a moment, and then completely ignores me. So I glance over at the 12-year old girl who sits at the counter collecting the pitiful 50 cents an hour that it costs to use a computer here, but she has been on her cellphone for an hour chatting non-stop and raises her eyebrows to me as if to say: “What can I do?” Likely she would rather throw herself in front of a bus than interrupt a Buddhist monk in his daily prayers. However, after my second savage glance at the monk, he glares back at me and - deciding to up the ante - raises his voice up several notches. He is no longer chanting; he is now singing as loud as he can. It becomes literally impossible to work, so I take off my headphones and cross the room and stand right next to the idiot, bending over and staring him straight in the face. He raises his face to stare back at me, and I point to my ears, using sign language to indicate the obvious; why, dear sir, are you singing your head off in a cybecafe? It should be obvious that you are being very obnoxious and disturbing everyone in the room. Yessir.

Assuming that my little visit will rectify the situation, I go back to my off-kilter work station and attempt to get back into the mood of describing the women’s prison in Kathmandu, which I have just visited and where I have attempted to help a Russian woman sentenced to life in prison find a way to get out of jail but no one seemed to know why she was incarcerated. But it’s no use trying to work any more; the noise is intolerable. The Buddhist monk is now wailing away like Bob Marley stoned on right righteous weed, a demented werewolf howling at the moon lost in total rapture, perhaps not so much from the state of exaltation into which he has entered from chanting his stupid mantras but from the utter glee gained from the understanding that he is irritating a rich westerner to the point where the contemptible farang is losing his temper.

In Asia, you are better off pulling down your pants in public than losing your temper. Public displays of anger are non-existent in this part of the world. It is a major loss of “face,” and in this culture saving face is a very big deal indeed. I am a big loser in this irritating interaction, and the mad monk - and everybody else in the room - is well aware of it, and they are all ashamed of me. But, of course, they are curious about what will happen next. Face or not, there is no denying that I have lost my concentration on my story. I am not surfing pornography, I am not checking last night’s football scores; in fact I am writing a profound piece of amazing travel literature, and by gosh I am also paying by the hour to rent this tacky keyboard on which somebody long ago spilled their imitation Coca Cola and where pictures of big-breasted blondes keep popping up in the middle of my writing paragraphs (and ruder things than that, some involving small boys and goats) and I would like to finish what I am writing before I storm out on the street and go look for a beer to calm my nerves.

So I get up again and walk over to the monk’s workstation to remonstrate with the goof and suddenly realize - to my own horror - I am ready, willing and able to punch the dork right in the head. Losing one’s temper is one thing; hammering a Buddhist monk in the chops is quite another and can lead to worse consequences than merely losing face. There’s also the possibility of jail, maybe one of Pol Pot’s leftovers from the good old genocide days. I remembered that time in northern Nepal where, after a 30-day trek over the Himalayas I was stuck with a Tibetan lama and 4 Nepalese porters in a chicken shed overnight waiting at a tiny airstrip at 7,000 feet for a bush plane to escape back to the world, and a soldier based at the airstrip staggered into the tiny hut so intoxicated on rotgut whiskey that it was amazing he was still alive, and threw his arms around me in a state of advanced exaltation and attempted to slither his tongue down my throat in a gesture of love and camaraderie. I was suitably moved by his show of affection to the point that I threw him face first down the hillside, a reciprocal gesture of camaraderie that so impressed my porters they were motivated to share with me, in their very limited English, such quaint phrases as “army very bad” and “soldiers angry” and “very bad prison here,” a sobering reminder of the jails in a country as grotty as Nepal. I immediately regretted my unmanly deed and was very happy to get on the bush plane when it arrived before the army showed up. But that was then, and this was now. I leaned over the work station where my tormentor was now in full bellow, and as I did so he also leapt to his feet and proceeded to give me the Complete Caruso, the veins standing out of his neck and eyeballs popping as he did so, arms flailing away like a windmill as he self-conducted his personal symphony. I was so shocked with this show of bravado that I switched off his computer and pulled the wires out of the back of th machine to boot. Gathering up my notebooks, I stalked out of the cybershop, glaring at the 12-year old girl at the counter, not bothering to pay my bill, and as I walked down the riverside promenade looking for a cold beer I could still hear the caterwauling continuing behind me. It seems he knew all the mantras by memory and really didn’t need the computer after all. Next trip, however, I plan to bring a laptop.

Journey to Dolpo; Following the Snow Leopard Trail

Tracking Jack; Following Keroauc to Desolation Peak

Cambodia: From Angkor Wat to Phnom Penh

Sunrise over Nepal; From Kathmandu to Pokhara

Taiwan, the ‘other China’

Somewhere Down the Lazy River; Yangshuo, China

The Karma Diaries: A Season in the Himalayas

A Quiet Day in Mad Kowloon and other Tales of Intentional Travel

In Search of the Ancient Ones; The Anasazi of Old New Mexico

Deep Into Denali; The Serengeti of the North

In Search of the Spirit Bear; The Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia

Street Children of Phnom Penh

What is Intentional Travel?

Project Kindness

By Michael McCarthy

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