Rangers and Strategies.
Cambodia and Hong Kong at 2011. The two ends of the differential, and the force that flows between. Placing my hope in Decision analysis. We need the right questions, not the right answers.
19/08/2023. Commune del Casalattico, Lazio, Italy.
Last night, in the restaurant across the valley I was talking to my cousin about why this stuff from 2011 was hard to write. I’m not really sure what the answer to that is. “I’m looking back at all the mistakes I made.” I said.
“Did you make the same mistake twice, though.”
“Yes. Repeatedly, not just twice.”
I haven’t got quite as far as I intended with this piece. I am using an AI to help transcribe some old recordings. There the recordings of a meeting which I thought of for a long time as ‘the one where it all went wrong.’
This is writing up what happened before that meeting and, as usual, I’m trying to write what I would have written at the time if I’d expanded my rambling, elliptical self-referential notes into something another person could follow. It’s important to say at the beginning that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with any particular part of this now. Important to say that and then not say it again.
27/3/11 Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, Mondulkiri, Cambodia.
Up to the plateau, through the dry forest, on the back of a motorbike. Nothing like the forests I'm used to. Nothing, I think in fact, like forest at all. It looks like savannah, like Africa. Once, in fact, the French thought to make this a big game destination to rival the Serengeti. WCS folks in Phnom Penh told me that, and there was dark laughter around that sentiment. But there are still big animals here; our motorbikes, Tom assures me, have a good chance of spooking a herd of banteng; or a gaur where the trees are thicker. We're outside the range of saola and this is far too dry of course - but I've given up hunting saola. What would I do if I found one? One isn't data and seeing it does nothing. I'm not a tourist.
I feel like a tourist on this road, though: just one red rut weaving between the tree roots. I'm behind a ranger because, even after five years in Vietnam, I do not trust a motorbike to go where I want it, and this road - this path - seems worse than Hanoi traffic. Perhaps I'm just not used to it, I tell myself. Lagerstroemia are the trees that stand out here; like silver birch do in an English woodland, or at least when you’re not used to it; when you're a child. These trees are far taller, cone-shaped, and their white is not silver but luteic and medical; pinkish in places. Their trunks are literally folded, like silk or cream. From a distance, the trunks look like huge ivory tablecloths being held up by a hand in the canopy. Close up, the texture of the bark is very unusual; it's pockmarked, like the surface of a gong. Their roots squid out all over the path. We bump off one and are almost thrown into a sapling of something, with thumb-thick thorns all the way up its trunk. We get back on. That's a tourist moment; I guess I am a tourist here; come to observe Rohit, Tom, Rattanak and the rangers at their work. I plague myself with thoughts that I don't need this trip, that I'm spending taxpayer's money on a jolly. That I’d convinced myself it was important because I wanted the chance to see some big animals for once. It’s not true; I’m not here to see the animals, I’m here to see what’s killing them.