From Phnom Penh to Rabbit Island

PHNOM PENH
02.21.08

I sat, tired from walking in the afternoon heat, dusty from black truck exhaust and the storm clouds of red sand bellowing up from passing tires, and glowing pink from the unforgiving midday sun. In the shade of a tree I sat. In a rare patch of grass in front of the old stadium, just a few feet from the road and the hurry of coughing motobikes. I sat and read a book I considered immensely overrated, read for principle not joy, and I'm better for it likely as not. When I brought the book down from my eyes, I saw a truck before me. Stopped in the road, in the traffic not yet dense, and from the window of the truck on seated atop the boards in back I saw fourteen eyes watching and seven mouths smiling at me as I sat. I smiled back, and they, caught, laughed. Soon the boys dismounted the mountig in the bed. Boys no more the seventeen. Five of them leapt off and made for the shade of the tree beside me. And as boys are want to do they immediately set at teasing and horsing each other in such obscene ways that I could not restrain my laughter. They smiled at my amusement and continued, until they finally exhausted collapsed in the grass. The truck all the while, sat docilely in the street, till it was teaming with vehicles so sick with black cough they could no longer move, but mired in a cloud of toxic fumes. And I deemed it was time to get on.

* * *

From Phnom Penh, we fled. We fled the waste and filth, the children sitting in the irridescent oil puddles, the cripples and handless victims of mines waiting at the gates, the many long winding snakes of motobikes filling every nook in traffic just as water fills a vessel. The tuktuk drivers down the alley and their unebbing mantra 'weed? opium? herion? crack?' the sandle footed stoners watching reruns on old tvs on the patios of every guesthouse along the lake. we fled that undeniable bitter bile that swelled our cheeks the moment we stepped off the bus from Siem Reap. We climbed in a hot but not unbearably hot bus and fled to the nearly-coastal town of Kampot, where, if we judged correctly, nothing of note was happening.

* * *

KAMPOT

02.22.08

In a rice field, the children mocked my volleyball skills and beat us twice in a row though we were much older and much taller and much more serious.

* * *

RABBIT ISLAND

02.23.08

In hammocks rough like fishing twine, we hung our browning bodies. And with borrowed books before our eyes and a cool breeze from behind, we lay and passed the day away on the beach of Rabbit Island.