Feeling
Safe In Cambodia
Talking
To The Nerves ~ by Peter O’Dowd
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| There’s
too much fear involved with traveling, so allow me to run down the laundry
list of horrors a traveler to Cambodia faces before he crosses the boarder
and braves the undiscovered country.
· Malaria,
Typhoid, Hepatitis C, Japanese Encephalitis, AIDS
· Armed
bandits, pedophilia, genocide, kidnapping
· Landmines,
poverty, prostitution
· The
Vietnam War, fresh memories of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot
I promise,
I’m not a feeble man. I’ve traveled through Kenya, studied in Europe, just
finished a year working in Japan, but there is a reaction I encounter whenever
I cross a border into a strange country for the first time; it’s a nervous
feeling of impending tragedy and Cambodia brought that out of me unlike
any country I had ever approached before. Our mission was to travel overland
from Bangkok to Hanoi via Cambodia, and I almost turned around before I
got there because everything I read and everyone I loved said, “No. Don’t
do it. The place is too dangerous.” By all accounts, they were right. |
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I had skimmed
every damn book on the country and visited every web site. Only two days
earlier I trembled, no joke, as my 747 descended toward the airport in
Thailand. Perhaps it was the reputation, a reflection of the bullet points
listed above. Whatever the reason, my anxiety was growing.
Truthfully,
the trip had gone smoothly so far, so what did I have to worry about other
than my own phobia of crossing imaginary lines? Booking our transportation
over the border was surprisingly easy. A hundred little hole-in-the-wall
travel agents lined the streets in Bangkok and all of them wanted a share
of our money. We paid nearly nothing—less than $20—and we were on our way
to Siem Reap.
Waiting as
immigration drew us closer to the line where Thailand disappeared into
Cambodia, I remained confident that nothing had gone wrong until Shravan,
my former college roommate, referred to his guidebook that delivered the
bad news: the road from Poipet to Siem Reap was very likely the worst on
the planet. The pressure built up; I stood at the border afraid to take
another step toward Cambodia. Then Shravan laughed when he pointed to the
next sentence in his book. “During the monsoon season the road is impassable
and the potholes on the unpaved artery become pockets of miniature lakes
just dying to mire the unprepared traveler.” I laughed too, but only a
little because it was August and the rain had started to come down in sheets
as if on cue. Inside, I secretly wept. Shravan, ol’ pal, let the massacre
begin.
By the time
the rain had become torrential our passports had been stamped and Shravan
had found the connecting bus. Once aboard the tiny, sweltering, unfit and
barely functional metallic coffin, we romped and splashed our way further
from the boarder. We pounded the potholes, spraying liquid earth in all
directions while moving away from a place where everything felt frightening
and toward the interior where everything waxed natural—not altogether safe
but comfortingly real. All the preconceived trepidations melted away, because
there I was in Cambodia, the most mysterious and under explored country
on the planet. The line had been crossed; I was still breathing.
Now, allow
me to run down the laundry list of celebrations the traveler to Cambodia
faces once he’s en route and has forgotten about the plagues and the landmines.
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·
Hospitality, Khmer food, dirt-cheap prices, French baguettes
· Angkor
Wat, floating villages, Phnom Penh
· Sunsets,
lakes, beaches, verdant jungle, shimmering rice paddies
· Kindness,
hope, hard work, industriousness
I feel a debt
of obligation to a few people we met along the way because they were the
ones responsible for revealing each of the positive situations we encountered
in the country. They were Cambodian men, my age, and would be just barely
out of college if they had the resources to even think about such a thing.
The three of them worked at our hotel where we paid them two dollars a
day for shelter and a few more for dinner, a handful of beers and a little
marijuana. If I could remember their names I would make them known to you,
but for the life of me I can’t. I do remember their candor as they sat
down and ate dinner with us every night under the hotel’s bamboo canopy.
The men were insatiably curious about our culture. In order to relate to
their guests they studied English and Japanese textbooks whenever they
had a free moment. Shravan and I shared with them every piece of slang
we could think of but they already knew it. “Easy Tiger!” they’d yell with
these massive grins on their faces because they knew it would throw us
into fits. “Just do it!” |
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For three
days they were our tour guides, yes, but would I be naïve enough to
also call them our friends? At the end of the day, they were just like
us - young and stupid - only with less of the world to play around with.
They were charming as hell and I don’t know how to explain that in way
that isn’t colonial or condescending. By they time we left the hotel they
had zoomed us around half the city of Siem Reap. We had dined together
in an “all-Cambodian restaurant” where any fears of typhoid had to simply
be brushed under the table. We drank together. We smoked together. We played
snooker together in a pool hall that barely stood. Shravan and I paid for
it all, and we were happy to do it because we thought these guys, our friends,
wanted to show us a glimpse of their life—a life that wasn’t sad or dangerous,
at least not at the surface. In the end, we wondered if they hadn’t just
been exceptionally skilled businessmen who earned every penny. Regardless,
the money mattered very little to me because the entire time I stood in
their presence I couldn’t help but feel that all the warnings I had read
were useless. Cambodia was not a scary place. I was comfortable.
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| Still
we never took our safety for granted except for a few times on the back
of motor scooters, I suppose. The food we ate was cooked, I guess, and
we took our malaria medicine…sometimes. Truthfully, the cities in Cambodia
actually were a little seedy once the sun went down, so I wore a money
belt, stayed away from ladies wanting a little something extra and took
a cab whenever night fell. But being careful and learning how to live are
two different things entirely. I traveled with company. We had a plan,
and we stuck it to. A million miles of land lie between home and this tiny
country and we hadn’t seen any of it yet. Every square inch remained to
be discovered. We were young, damn it. Very nearly invincible. And that’s
why we packed our backpacks and planned the trip in the first place. We
had been told a million times that we lived in a forbidding world, and
for the seven days we had in Cambodia it was time to see just what the
hell the people writing the books thought they were talking about. “Jesus,
Pete,” I’d hear Shravan say countless times, “traveling, if done right,
is never meant to be comfortable.” |
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So when he
brought home a bag of spiders from the market I did my best to remain optimistic,
and I tried not to vomit when the abdomen burst into a chalky puff against
my teeth. I smiled when the tiny women in Phnom Penh folded my laundry.
I took pictures of dazzling sunsets from the deck of our floating hostel,
baked horrendously under tropical sun, picked my chin off the ground at
the chaos of Cambodian traffic. Realizing my own place in the world, I
let the transportation scams run their course without arguing too much
because I have dollars to spare. And when things went wrong, as they
always do, I tried really hard not to panic. For the most part, I succeeded.
Because what else can a twenty-three year old traveler do? Once all the
precautions are observed and the warnings heeded, one can only continue
toward the interior and watch as the border slowly slips away.
To contact
Peter Click Here
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