A Walker in the Suburbs

I’ve yet to write about the food in Cambodia, a topic worthy of several posts. But let me say a quick word about coconuts.

They were everywhere, at roadside stands, alongside Angkor Wat, in the city and in the country. Families served them to quench our thirst after a hot, dusty drive. And as long as the straws weren’t used (and I don’t think they were), they were the most hygienic drink of all.

The ones pictured above were served at the Vietnam border, where we sat for a few minutes to look nonchalant in our pursuit of photos. Maybe that was why their milk tasted all the sweeter.

Coverage of the president’s trip to Vietnam last night has me already nostalgic about my trip to Cambodia. There the newscaster was, standing in a Hanoi street while motorcycles and pedestrians buzzed around him.

When the plane took off from a steamy Phnom Penh runway, it was a few minutes after midnight, February 27. That was almost 35 hours ago — and it’s still February 27.

I have nothing against February 27. It’s a perfectly fine day. Nearing the end of winter, promise of spring to come.

But by the time I turn off the light tonight, I will have had about 40 hours worth of February 27, and that will be more than enough.

Fifty-six hours ago I was interviewing a trafficking survivor as the sun set behind a palm tree.

Now I’m back in Virginia, glad to be home — and waiting for February 27 to end!

We are leaving today, leaving the rice fields and the temples, the motorized rickshaws and the funny little plows, leaving a country that made me feel at home the second I arrived and hasn’t stopped since.

In a great irony of traveling, I feel like I’m just getting the hang of the place — able to pick up a few words from the jumble of foreign sounds, knowing what to order on the menu — when it’s time to leave.

But though my physical body will be whisked from this place at the end of the day, my mind will linger, will puzzle out the sights and sounds, will recall the gurgle of fountains in the Golden Temple Hotel and the generous hospitality of every home we entered, no matter how humble.

Today it is summer heat and warm breezes. Tomorrow will be damp, chill winter. But I’ll keep in mind, as I always do, that the world is large, and there are more worlds within it that we can possibly imagine.

It’s a smile of knowledge and kindness, of wisdom and mercy. It’s the smile of a bodhisattva, and it appears 216 times in the Bayon temple of Angkor Thom, the last stop on yesterday’s temple tour.

The smiles are both inscrutable and accessible, plain and adorned. They were hewn not in solid rock but in huge blocks of sandstone. The smiles were carved in pieces, and in this way they resemble real human smiles, which are often constructed of humor and rue, laughter and longing. 

                                                                                          
The faces of Bayon are a good memory to take home. A smile of compassion for the people I’ve met, for the lost and hopeless, for children playing marbles in a dry and dusty yard, for shop owners sweeping the dirt floor of their new business, for all the blurred scenery on the road, for life itself.

My day off was conveniently timed with our presence near one of Earth’s great World Heritage sites.

We began in the dark, walking across the moat on a floating bridge with only moonlight and phone light to guide us.  We ate a picnic breakfast as Angkor Wat emerged from the night.

A couple of hours exploring it …

then it was off by tuk-tuk to Ta Prohm, the ruined temple pictured at the top of this post.

Bayon with its great carved faces is still to come, but I’m thinking it will be hard to match the evocative world of Ta Prohm with its twisted trees and downed pillars, its roots and its riches.

“Look on me, ye mighty and despair,” Shelley’s lines, come to mind. But in this case there are no “lone and level sands” stretching far away.

Instead, there are piles of rock and lichened carvings and tree trunks still as stone.

An early walk yesterday morning along the Mekokng, my first solo stroll since arriving in Cambodia.

Eventually I found myself at the Bamboo Bridge, a rickety contraption that made me feel as if every step would be my last. It squeaked and it rustled and gave enough with each footfall that I almost turned around immediately.

But in the spirit of travel (which means doing things I don’t usually do), I made it almost a third of the way across before making my way back.

I read later that every year locals disassemble the bridge before the rainy season and rebuild it again in the dry. Which could mean they’ve very, very good at this — or that the bridge has all the stability of a carnival ride.

Yesterday began with an interview I’ll never forget. A woman who left home and family to work in a factory in Malaysia — but ended up in domestic servitude, beaten and abused. She finally returned to Cambodia but was paid not a penny of what she earned.

She exuded sadness and regret, but you could tell how much her children loved her. They knew what she had done for them, even though they couldn’t express it.

Luckily, we ended the day on a light note — at a chick farm that’s providing a good income for a father and his family.

Years ago, this man also left Cambodia in search of work. He wasn’t cheated as the woman was, but this successful business is guaranteed to keep him here. After the interview, I took a tour of the chick farm.

Is there anything cuter than a clutch of baby chicks?  I’ll let you decide!

It was dark when we arrived at Kompong Cham, and the bridge over the Mekong was ablaze with blue lights. We had driven a long and dusty road, so the two high-rise hotels (10 or 11 floors each!) and the bustle of restaurants and traffic had a mirage-like feel.

After dinner, we strolled back to the hotel along the river. There were street vendors and skateboarders and a group of school kids playing a game. There were open-air shops and music blaring. It was nothing like what the word Mekong means to me.

The Mekong flows through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. But it’s Vietnam that has colored it for me. Seeing the river now makes me feel like my mother did when we rode a train through Chateau Thierry and other World War I towns in France, names she remembered her father mentioning from his time in the signal corps during the Great War.

Hanoi, Gulf of Tonkin, the Mekong. These are not names I associate with ice cream carts and a warm summer evening. They are full of war and pain and death.

Or at least they were. I changed my mind about one of them last night.

Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid for this. Last evening was one of those times. We had spent much of the morning and early afternoon driving through the Cambodian countryside, past roadside stalls and newly harvested rice paddies, crossing the Mekong River shortly before noon.

About 2:30 we pulled up to a farmstead where I interviewed members of a savings and loan group. Every five minutes a large, loud truck would pull in and disgorge a load of rock and soil, revving its engine, grinding its gears and raising a cloud of dust. We could barely hear each other speak. An hour later we strolled to the next farm, where a family is raising hundreds of thousands of bats and selling the guano for fertilizer. “You should see them at 6 p.m. when they swarm out for the evening,” the farmer said.

A swarm of bats? Don’t worry, we told him, we’ll be back. We had just enough time to drive to the nearby border with Vietnam to take photographs, stopping at a little stand to sip coconut water through a plastic straw.

At 6 p.m. we were back at the bat houses, ready for action. The little guys weren’t cooperating though. It was 6:15, then 6:20. “I’m losing light fast,” Misty said.

But at 6:25 the bats began darting out of their nests, 20, 50 then a 100 or more at a time, swirling out of their palm-leaf homes and into the Cambodian night.  One of them was this little guy, who was none too happy to meet us when the farmer pulled him from his nest three hours earlier.

I like to think of him now, just ending his day (like most everyone else I know, on the other side of the world) while I’m just beginning mine.