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.

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.”

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. 

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