| Feeling
Safe In Cambodia |
| Talking
To The Nerves |
| By Peter O’Dowd |
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.
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Malaria, Typhoid,
Hepatitis C, Japanese Encephalitis, AIDS
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Armed bandits,
pedophilia, genocide, kidnapping
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Landmines, poverty,
prostitution
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The Vietnam War,
fresh memories of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot
I promise, I’m
not a feeble man. |
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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.
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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.
I had skimmed
every damn book on the country and visited every web site. |
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| 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: |
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Offshore
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| 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. |
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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
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Angkor Wat, floating
villages, Phnom Penh
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Sunsets, lakes,
beaches, verdant jungle, shimmering rice paddies
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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. |
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| 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!”
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.
To contact
Peter Click Here |
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Article
Index ~ Cambodia
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