Well this is an interesting place. As I've mentioned, we happen to be in Cambodia during the tourism low season. As a result, Otres Beach feels like a ghost town. We check in to our beachside resort to find that we are only two of perhaps four or five guests. It's sleepy around here, also because mostly everyone we meet is stoned. The perpetual haze of weed and stormy weather makes Otres a little creepy but also fun. People who flock here are typically in no hurry to leave, or do anything at all for that matter. Most of the bartenders are fellow travelers who decided to settle for a while. They like the chilled out vibe, and it's an easy place to live where nobody really expects much action. Evenings are spent in a flurry of alcohol and weed, and the mornings only differ in the sense that most people are nursing hangovers or comedowns.
Like anything, we enter the orbit of this place and quickly find ourselves entertaining the same debaucherous whims from our homes in California. We eat big meals and laze around to excess, even renting a private living room where we watch an entire season of Game of Thrones from midnight to 10am. This is not the sort of thing I expected to do at any point in my travels, but we rolled with it full tilt and it felt absurdly good. Being in that sort of coastal resort area, it seems that people flock here to indulge. There just isn't much else to do other than read, eat, and sleep, especially during the rainy season. So why fight it? We befriend the various kittens and dogs running around the resorts here and at Koh Rong, just living easy before our Vietnam road trip!
As I approach the end of Cambodia, I search back for any things I may have forgotten or am unable to put in order. Here are some tangentials and retrospectives:
Cambodia has many beggars, much like India. I watch as a man with crippled legs moves along on his arms, each hand holding a plastic flip-flop as he tries to sell necklaces to uninterested tourists (myself included). These are some of the harder things to see. You want to help, but also any money given is just a temporary solution. I dislike how insensitive I feel about it. I've learned to ignore the beggars like the tuktuk drivers. This feeling of turning off part of your empathy circuits is disheartening, but I don't know what to do about it.
Another example would be with the two boys who escorted us down some stairs near the killing caves in Cambodia. They simply walk with you and ask for a donation. When you don't offer anything they will drop an occasional, "Only if you feel like it!" However, this low pressure tactic is quickly abandoned when we head back up the steps. The boys start to pout and block our path, even turning surly. At this point we can hardly even do the sightseeing we came for, so we move on to the next spot. And meanwhile the parents just encourage the kids to do this. They don't need to go to school because the prospect of even a single donation is more alluring than education. They don't need to be literate as long as tourists give in to their pressure. Someone is teaching them, surely, but I can't imagine the parents know any better. They probably did the same as children and they're passing the torch to theirs. And the awful thing is that an education doesn't guarantee you a better life here. Or anywhere for that matter. There are no such guarantees, but at least it would give a kid some options.
But this was just one example of many. At another point I was pulled over by a policeman while riding a moto in Sihanouk Ville. He told me that I can't ride without mirrors and I need an international driver's license, but if I pay the ten dollar fine it's okay to go. I told him that I'll just return the bike (with his permission) because the owner who didn't add mirrors is at fault. He lowered the "fine" to five dollars and but insisted that I pay because I am in the wrong. I politely argue with him for ten minutes before succumbing to paying. It wasn't worth the chance of them taking the bike if they wanted, but of course they know that. It's really easy to get money this way, but I wonder why the police do this or why a government would allow it. Things like this really turned me off to Cambodia, but this place still has its redeeming qualities. Just not enough to ever want to come back.
It's kind of a funny thing when you feel the boredom set in. In the moment you feel trapped or stuck, craving something new but with no idea how to achieve it. Unfortunately these are also the moments that leave you feeling uninspired and bleak. Even books start to lose their appeal when you enter this slump. My desire to write about anything at all plummets. My mind goes numb and I enter the endless race of insipid, selfish, and fruitless thoughts. Each time we go to a new place we roll the dice, but you never know what you'll find stimulating next. Or something so overwhelmingly underwhelming. Sometimes you just detach for a while, but after long periods of intense novelty we forget how to change gears, to change expectations. It takes me a bit of time to pull myself out, but things do start to get their colors back. It's a relief, but the change is imperceptible.
Some days I think the boredom or discomfort will never end. But on other days, the moments of great pleasure and joy beyond words, I never pause to think that it will, for me, end.
I thought it would never end. I never thought it would end. There's something amusing about this distinction to me. When the days are trying, all I can think about is how difficult things are for me. I withdraw and think about all the things I want that I think would solve this "problem" I am facing.
But on the great days, I don't even know how amazing they are until they're over. You rarely get the stillness in life to appreciate them. We don't get ample time to analyze what it was that made us so content. And to echo some more clichés about our temporal faculties, we typically only remember the extremes which account for so little of our lives. The mediocrity feels the longest, but eventually pales. The countless hours of video games, books, grooming, chores, errands. They amount to so much in quantity, but we want the peaks. We want extremes to punctuate our life stories.
So I adapt this into my views on travel. I expect a lot out of myself, but just because I'm moving from country to country doesn't mean I'm cramming any more minutes into my life. When you move quickly you miss things. You see plenty, and some things will always stick out. But you can't possibly know what details will emerge after just one more day, or even another minute in any place. Maybe I'd have a drastically different opinion of Cambodia if one more of those peaks happened to coincide with my time here. All I can do is remind myself to persist in looking and doing and feeling and all the things we do at home.
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