A Walker in the Suburbs

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.

The work trips I take are often battles between mind and body. The mind, freed of routine, takes in hundreds of sights, sounds and smells. It thrills to foreign tongues and customs. The tang of chili pepper and crispy noodles, the roar of traffic in a Phnom Penh alleyway.

The body does its best to keep up. Sleep-deprived, stomach-jostled, it does its best to stay awake and alert and well. There are practical steps to take, of course — getting rest, eating sensibly, drinking bottled water — but there is only so much you can do. At a certain point, the mind just prays that the body will be up to the task.

Luckily, there are plenty of prayer opportunities in Cambodia, little shrines like this one in the front yard-driveway of a family we interviewed Monday. And they’re ready for you, rain or shine.

We had three meetings yesterday, which kept us zipping through Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. Zipping is perhaps an exaggeration, since we traveled in an SUV, complete with five people and a load of camera equipment.

I’ve seen very little of the country so far. An airport, a baggage claim, the visa and immigration counters and then, Phnom Penh at night seen from the back of a car taking us to the hotel.

It was after 11 p.m. and we’d been traveling for more than 24 hours by the time we saw the lights of the city. Though it was only from the car windows, it was a start, a taste of what is to come.

To the left a square,  a long square, a pagoda, trees all lit up. To the right, small cafes with outdoor seating.

Old colonial buildings in the shadows, some with modern stores on the ground floors.

I have a lot to learn and a lot to see … and my first meeting is in two hours. It will be more than 12 hours until I can see Phnom Penh at night again.

My bags are packed and my pre-trip to-do list is almost all checked off (“write blog post” being one of the final items), and now comes that part of travel which both unnerves and restores — that would be putting my fate almost entirely in the hands of others.

This is probably something human beings need to do from time to time, and travelers do it whenever they board a plane or choose a lodge. The kind of travel I’m about to experience — bopping around the countryside to small villages to interview survivors of human trafficking — does it more than most.

The itinerary is drawn up to showcase the work we do, and I’m there to capture as much of it as I can. The pace can be frantic, the days long.

But the rewards are great, these glimpses of lives that others live. Not just passing glances, either, but actual conversations with people I would never otherwise meet. These trips always broaden my perspective, and I’m so grateful I get to take them.

So it’s off to Cambodia, to its rice paddies and temples, its mountains and lakes, to a world I can only begin to imagine but will, God willing, soon see.

(Photo: Wikipedia)