I wear this white piece of string around my left wrist. I've had it for a month.
One night in Bangkok, Orion, Roxy and I ate dinner with Jasmina, our Thai/English friend who was our savior in the islands. Her family is wonderful. Her parents fed us fried fish and beer, told us some amazing stories about living in Southeast Asia and working for the UN. Later that night we sat on a couch with her sweet old grandmother as she blessed a little piece of string and tied it around our wrists.
"You are very wise, you will have long life." She said, after saying some words in Thai.
That white piece of string is now brown. It has accumulated a lot of dirt, and I swear it is one of the reasons I'm still alive after today's trip.
Cambodia is very different from Thailand. I woke up at 4am this morning in Bangkok, after two hours of sleep. Packed my bag, grabbed a taxi to the 5am train to the Thai/Cambodian border. Miserable ride. The train cars are old, with hardwood straight-backed seats that literally bruise your rear-end when you sit down for a half hour. 6 hour train ride, impossible to sleep more than five minutes at a time without being jostled awake by the violent screeching car. It woke me up for the sunrise and the fog, which was pretty, but still miserable.
Got off at Poi Pet, made my way to the Cambodian border and was greeted with utter chaos. I maintain that borders are the worst places with the worst people on earth. Piles of trash, kids living in trash, and kids peddling trash. It looked like everyone who wasn't aimlessly walking around completely confused was either a tout or a pickpocket preying on the confused. I saw another farang, waiting in an official looking line. Walked up, realized he was on crutches. Also realized his face was covered in welts and white cream, and looked horribly sad. He was also missing a leg.
I asked him where to get my passport stamped. He just looked at me, swallowed, and pointed off to a dirt-smeared building over the hordes of cart-pushing trash-laden people. He was standing in arrivals, coming back from Cambodia.
I will remember to be careful of landmines.
I began counting prosthetic legs while pushing my way through the crowd. I counted six before I made it across.
The tarmac pretty much ended after customs. There was just filth everywhere, people sleeping in the gutters, wearing rags, then this massive five-star casino/hotel with automatic doors and spotless bellhops. Then the tarmac ended again, and there were shacks and shacks and tuk-tuk's and dirty young men wearing thick clothes in the blazing heat.
They dragged me over to the "bus station" which is a corner where pickup trucks stop and blare their horns until they're full of people, then they drive east.
"200 baht outside, 300 baht inside cab!"
I paid 250 for the cab, and eventually was squashed in there with four other people.
After twenty minutes of loading people and sacks on the back, driver tells me "You very big! You pay for two!"
I argued, and eventually he left me alone, but I was stuck in 2x2 sq feet of space, kissing my kneecaps, while this tiny monk dressed in saffron robes and sunglasses comfortably sat in the front seat. He was nice and suave and smiled in a very smooth manner. Way too smooth to be a monk, I thought. At one point his cellphone rang, and he talked very fast while thumbing through a huge wad of cash from his pocket.
During the ride I counted 17 people in the back of the pickup, and six in the cab including me. Our driver was trying, desperately, to break Guinness world-records for land speed and overcrowding simultaneously.
The "highways" in Cambodia are mostly one-lane roads with big mounds of dirt and potholes that you could swim in. Our driver would speed up to 80mph, pass a semi and a motorbike then swerve back onto the shoulder (effectively another lane here), barely avoiding another oncoming truck full of people. He was insane, and I swear we almost died on 4 separate occasions. We hit a dog while speeding through this village. Just a sickening thud, arf, bump. We were going so fast it didn't have a chance, but psycho behind the wheel didn't even blink, he chuckled. Everyone else in the cab had this nervous worried look to them as well. Every third second we narrowly avoided a head-on collision.
I was thankful after 3 hours, when we changed cars and they put me on a different truck towards Siem Reap. I sat next to this old woman who knew a little Thai and fed me mangos with chili and kept patting me on the shoulder and smiling while I told her the vocab words I had learned in the orphanage.
"Dar!" I'd say, pointing at my eye.
She'd smile and nod and give me a piece of mango.
"Niew!" i'd say, pointing to my finger.
Smile, nod, mango.
After another two hours my knees were scuffed from the chair in front of me, my ass was numb, and my lower back was in extreme pain. We tall people do not fold very well. At a stop as the sun was setting I traded places with one of the old men sitting on the sacks of rice in the back of the truck. They looked at me funny, because farang always take the cab. It felt sooo nice. By far the best possible way to see the landscape around us. It was beautiful watching the colors and the cows and even getting pelted by little black bugs as I stretched out and held on for dear life, speeding through the dusk with those dear old men.
Anyhow, bugs and dirt aside, everything is completely fine, thanks to my brown blessed little string.
I just got in to my guesthouse. My room costs 2USD per night. The prefer dollars to Cambodian Rael here. The door of my room has some common-sense guesthouse rules:
"We are not responsible for gold and gems left in your room."
and also,
"Please keep your explosives with the management, thank you."
Quite different, this place.