Sylvie, the Parisian Who Brought Tigers Back to Cambodia with Calvin Klein

A chronicle of a conservation expedition in northeastern Cambodia, where science occasionally gave way to olfactory marketing. A true story — names have been changed to protect the anonymity (and dignity) of those involved.

A free reconstruction of the scene, fifteen years on

About ten years ago, in northeastern Cambodia. An expedition — a real one, with biologists, guides, and members of a conservation NGO — asked me to film their journey. I accepted, for a rather nice fee: a big brand was sponsoring the whole thing behind the scenes, and when a multinational is footing the bill, you don't ask too many questions about how sensible the project actually is.

Among the members of the local NGO: Sylvie. Nicknamed, with all the cruel affection reserved for bush legends, "the Parisian of Ratanakiri." The nickname suited her perfectly: she had clearly spent more time matching the ochre of the region's dirt tracks to her Parisian bling than consulting a topographic map. A stylistic feat in its own right, and one that deserves a certain respect.

The first few days are pleasant. The mood is good, the wild spots we discover are stunning, and the contrast between Sylvie's Parisian chic and the ruggedness of the jungle has something genuinely funny about it — an improvised sitcom, free of charge, on top of the paycheck.

Then things start to sour, slowly, like milk left out of the fridge.

The Jungle: She Knows It "Like the Back of Her Hand"

Sylvie prides herself on knowing the terrain inside out. So she regularly reels off the list of species to avoid at all costs — top of the list, a caterpillar with "teeth" so sharp they could, according to her, sever a limb. We listen politely. We snicker behind her back. And we get a little more irritated with each new zoological theory, apparently pulled from a blend of bar gossip and pure intuition.

The trail is paved with anecdotes of varying futility — until one of them stops being futile at all: our Parisian friend, in charge of logistics, packed nothing into the supply bags but pre-cooked instant noodles and a few bottles of water. For a multi-day expedition through the forest. Logistical rigor was apparently not included in the chic Parisian package.

Fortunately, a few villages along the way take us in and offer meals that are considerably more substantial — much to Sylvie's dismay, as she picks at the local food with her fingertips, looking like she deeply regrets not having brought her food-testing kit. One can just picture it: a pocket spectrometer pulled out between the rice and the grilled fish, to make sure everything meets Parisian standards.

Camping, According to Sylvie: Options A, B, and C

For the campsite, she suggests, in turn, pitching the tent next to an anthill, then next to a dipterocarp tree swarming with aggressive midges. Two proposals that reek of field expertise.

But the evening's high point arrives when she announces she holds THE solution for spotting a tiger — a species officially extinct in the country for the past fifteen years, a detail we feel obliged to remind her of, to no visible effect.

Her method, brace yourself: spraying tree trunks with Calvin Klein, the famous pheromone-laced fragrance. Irrefutable scientific evidence: in Ibiza, in a nightclub, a young man wearing this cologne apparently monopolized the attention of every woman in the room all night long. The comparison between an Ibiza dance floor and a Cambodian primary forest is, let's say, a matter of personal methodology. But Sylvie is adamant: it simply cannot fail.

She then hands us the mission of buying an entire case of pheromone Calvin Klein and going back to spray the tree trunks, literally. We attempt a reasonable objection: the perfume is perhaps not the ideal choice, and even if some elderly, dying male tiger were somehow still out there in those mountains, it seems unlikely that a bottle of drugstore cologne would draw him out of hiding. A scene. Insistence. A raised voice. Followed by a long, dignified, offended pout — for quite a while.

The Real Question Nobody Dares Ask Out Loud

Careful not to say it too loudly, we find ourselves wondering how an NGO manages to raise a few hundred thousand dollars with this kind of management and these kinds of far-fetched ideas. It's not just about the ridiculous perfume: beyond the anecdote, the NGO helps local populations by supplying tools to build chicken coops and pig pens.

Except it overlooks one detail: the highland minorities already know perfectly well how to build this kind of structure, without any Western guidance whatsoever. The predictable result: the tools and materials go unused, and are instead resold to traveling merchants, who put them back up for sale at the Banlung market. The virtuous cycle of international cooperation, short-circuit edition.

A Few Thoughts That Have Stuck With Me Since

This story still makes me laugh, years later — but it also says something, unintentionally, that feels fairly universal about a certain kind of international cooperation:

●        The self-appointed expert syndrome. It often takes little more than an NGO badge and a vaguely scientific vocabulary to hold forth on ecology, survival logistics, or animal behavior with the same confidence as someone with fifteen years of fieldwork under their belt. That confidence isn't correlated with any verifiable competence — just with the conviction that the title alone is enough.

●        The high-tech savior fantasy. The reflex to bring "modern" tools and solutions to populations who have already mastered their environment for generations is a recurring feature of poorly thought-out development work. Nobody ever asks: "What do you actually need?" The answer arrives before the question does.

●        The Banlung market as a silent verdict. The fact that the equipment ends up resold rather than used is the most honest judgment a project can receive. Beneficiaries vote with their feet — or, in this case, with their hammers and their planks.

●        The comic power of the sartorial mismatch. There's something quite telling in the fact that we remember the Parisian chic before we remember any field competence. In humanitarian work, as elsewhere, appearance often comes first — and sometimes replaces substance altogether.

●        And the Calvin Klein perfume as the perfect metaphor. Trying to lure an extinct tiger with a nightclub fragrance sums up a certain approach to development rather well: reach for a Western solution, familiar and reassuring, even when it has strictly nothing to do with the problem at hand. We tend to prefer the method we know over the one that actually works.

Ten years on, I still don't know whether a tiger ever crossed paths with a Calvin Klein–scented tree trunk in Ratanakiri. But if it did, I sincerely hope it had the decency to run for its life.