Every honest Cambodia border crossing story starts the same way — with a fantasy of a red-carpet welcome that gets replaced almost immediately by a haggling match.
Getting into Cambodia proved more difficult than I imagined. I had fantasized a Hollywood reception waving my navy blue passport and flashing my pearly whites as supplicants usher me in, whispering excitedly and picking up the coins I leave behind like a trail of slime, fawned upon like the heroine at the start of a sleazy romance or the captain at the end of an adventure in the South Seas, smiling in victory lap, however obscenely.
“Please! Come in! Welcome! Welcome! If there’s anything you need, anything at all, please let me know. All I have to do is call my friend. . .”
There’s always a friend, isn’t there? It’s places like these that run on the buddy-buddy system. Soon, I’m chuckling with the guard, lighting his cigarette, and slipping a couple more into his shirt pocket as we laugh and carry on, almost flirtatiously, and he spouts the dirt in exchange for a few petty compliments.
“Boy, you sure do have good teeth,” I tell him admiringly.
He looks down, beaming, feeling pleased with himself.
“You know where I can get me a square deal on a ride into town?”
The guard, still showing off his white enamel, points me to three guys hanging out in the shade beside their shiny motorbikes.
The guys eye me and smile, exchanging looks through hair hanging in eyes, smoke rising from their open mouths, looking suddenly like wolves. I look back at the guard, who’s still smiling, encouraging me to go on and talk to them. Something doesn’t feel right. I pull out more cigarettes, ready to ask the price and walk away, saying something like, “Well, nothing to see in Cambodia anyway. Thanks anyway, fellas.” Counting to three as they call after me, begging me to name my own price.
“FIFTY DOLLAR?”
There’s no question of talking them down. They all have their own cigarettes.
It looks like I’m out of moves. They know I’m desperate. What’s he going to do? Walk to the next town? HAHAHAHAHAHA!
“Now hold on just one minute. Let me get this straight, gentlemen,” I say, walking before the jury of wide-eyed children, puppies, and chicks. “Let me make sure I’m hearing you clearly. You mean to tell me the ride to the visa office is double the amount of the visa itself? Preposterous! Ludicrous! Absurd!”
I enunciate every syllable like a flamboyant court lawyer in the face of each driver, all who blandly watch me with smoke rising lazily from their lips.
“And you,” I say, now addressing Mr. Aviators. “It seems rather curious that you all just happen to be in the same place at the same time. Bringing people to the wrong gates and then SKYROCKETING THE PRICE!”
“Gentlemen,” I say, leaning in now, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’LL TELL YOU WHAT I’LL DO!”
(Rolling up my sleeves to show the children, puppies, and chicks a disappearing act.)
“I’m going to forget the insult of the initial asking price. I’ll pay you,” I say snapping old Ulysses into shape before their eyes, “fifteen dollars. That’s FIFTEEN, mind you. Drop the oh and make it a five and shave four off for me, sir!”
The three glance at each other in secret conference with their eyes.
“And I’ll buy that visa,” I say, nodding at the border patrol guard, who looks up gnawing from his tattered pant leg and growls, “even though I know it’d be much easier and more convenient for all of us if I just vanished on you, but it’s Christmas, fellas. I just want us to go home happy to our wives? Have we got a deal?”
I get on the back of Mr. Aviator’s flashy little doowop-mobile, and we go riding into the daylight. The scene feels almost heroic, like the rising smoke at the end of a war film. There’s just one part we need to edit out. We really have to get rid of that sign:
WELCOME TO CAMBODIA! IF YOU SEE ANY SIGNS OF SEX TRAFFICKING, CHILD ABUSE, OR HAVE REASON TO SUSPECT A FOREIGNER, PLEASE CALL 1-05. . .
I miss the important part where I remember the number to call.
This is the part of every backpacker fiction Southeast Asia story that’s easy to skip past too quickly — the sign nobody quite reads all the way through.
Mr. Aviators drives as far as a small street market in what I’m guessing to be some sort of town. He gives me a nod like top gun and lights up a cigarette while siphoning ethanol into his tank. The market sells bootleg clothing and a plastic array of riches and wonders you would likely find in a dollar store near the pits of hell. I’m so hungry I actually consider some barbecue in this ghost town, and watch a man cooking with dried leaves and stones just to have something to burn. There is no meat, only these sticks, which raise up a nice ambience for the warm beer and generic soda floating in coolers filled with dead flies and water.
There’s a guesthouse near the city square, if you can call it that. There’s an open entrance, and you can almost feel the silhouettes of soldiers in pieces of uniform marching through the town in victory, the celebration pouring out into the streets, people waving flags from the windows and pledging their lives and all that they own. Year Zero is when the great herds would be taken from the city to work and die in the killing fields. The plot to restart time from the beginning, to make a new world from scratch, to shape destiny, to be free and live as one! Brothers, sisters, you are slaves no more! Come with us, into paradise! There’s sunlight filtering in from the dusty street. Some dog-eared books. The whole country eaten by dogs.
No Cambodia border crossing story is complete without a guesthouse like this one — history and squalor sitting in the exact same room.
The guesthouse is a piece of shit. As far as pieces of shit go — and I’ve seen several by now — this room is definitely the creepiest. You ever feel like you can just feel the ghost of a dead prostitute on the bed? You don’t want to. The bed is a dingy creaky box of springs with speckled-white sheets, a (slightly cracked) mirror on the headboard so you can watch yourself have sex with invisible hookers — what the fuck are those rusty-brown stains? — oh god, telltale signs of blood coagulation — the remnants of someone’s head getting blown off while watching themselves have sex with invisible hookers. Hmm! Thoughtful! Thank you!
Before I wander back towards the street market for some distraction, I decide to sit at a wooden table in the shittier guesthouse next to mine just to feel like I’m doing something. The entire facade is missing, broken, eroded by time into a nice view of the river and the street. Around sunset, it’s actually kind of pleasant, despite the squalor. Men smoke and play their games. Children run freely in the streets. A motorbike passes slowly without aim. A dog licks the earth and passes on.
Every backpacker fiction Southeast Asia sunset seems to land somewhere between beautiful and unbearable, usually at the exact same table.
A menu is placed in front of you, and you remember that you originally came for something to eat. You don’t want to eat anymore. You just want to sit and watch the people drift by in the quiet rhythm of their lives, and all they seem to be is scenery. Time keeps going. You originally came for something to eat. You said that already. Now you’re not hungry. For some reason, you order roasted spiders. Great, now you have to leave.
This detour through hunger and dread is where a lot of Cambodia border crossing story writing tends to slow all the way down, right before the next thing happens.
As I wait for my roasted arachnids to arrive, I let my eye catch that sign again, a smaller version on a message board this time, of a little girl in gritty black and white with tears in her eyes, the grim announcement to beware of any signs of children being raped, abused, molested, starved, beaten, sold, or destroyed for sex. Here in this flat basin where one river runs from a desperate paradise with nothing left to offer the world but your back or a child — your back — or your child — your back for a child — a child you give and never get back. Here are the ones found in garbage dumps who never had a chance. So low are the stakes, so stingy the prizes. To live and believe your destiny to be a tissue to be thrown away. A Kleenex if she cries, if she can even still cry. Or does she sit still, joined with the others who sit silent and slack-jawed in endless shock of a universe torn, to live this moment after moment after moment in a memory her brain lives to erase, left with the violation that becomes her birthright and fate? She does not continue on; he does not remain still; he watches them, slack-jawed and silent, the cartoons, in the room taking pictures of himself as a child. The room grows darker and incense lights the room. An old woman prays to Buddha and the bodhisattvas for protection, for her family, the offering of a few flowers and some smoke.
I glance at a table on the other side of the room and see four middle-aged white men sitting by themselves, waiting for their food. I had seen them earlier when I first sat down, but hardly paid attention. Now I see through their facade. Something inside me sounds the alarm. It’s the pancakes that convince me. After they receive their food, I watch carefully, now holding up the “No Sex Trafficking” poster off the wall and moving silently towards them, watching as the bald one with glasses methodically slices and chews, drizzling the syrup in slow, perfect lines like a commercial, his knife pressing against the soft dough in perfect symmetrical triangles. Most pedophiles are neat-freaks. OCD, abusive childhood, beaten for being messy as children. They hate filth; they hate it! Love giving children baths, the sick fucks.
I watch him eating his pancakes slowly, chewing robotically, his eyes focused on the flavor of the maple syrup, the sick bastard. The rest of them carry on casually, thinking nothing of the abhorrent crimes they’ve committed and will soon commit again. Coming to this land specifically because of its corrupt system, its destitution, and the beauty of its children. Watching him eat pancakes, hoeing and humming, I feel so enraged that I want to scream. I want to feel him choke on his pancakes as I press slowly with my sandal upon his windpipe! I feel my superpowers rising! I have to do something!
I AM — THE DEPUTY!
Unable to stand another minute, I walk up to the table, ready to sweep the cutlery off the table. I imagine smashing the plates and feeding them the shards. I find myself in no time standing before their table, breathing heavily, my eyes glistening with a dark sense of justice, an eruption of righteous violence soon to come.
“Enjoying your dinner, gents? What kind of a grown man orders a meal like that at this time of the evening? You’d better get with your pal here with the fish sticks, although that’s still cutting it kind of close. You guys are just giving yourselves away, shouting for some violation to be done to you in prison. But you reap what you sow, as they say.”
I say all this while rounding the table, fingering their plates; dipping my fingers in the syrup, tasting it crudely in their faces.
“How are you guys enjoying your stay, hmm? Everything to your liking? These shitty bedrooms holding up for you?”
I deliberately land my palm onto the man’s pancakes allowing the syrup to make a sick squelching noise, making their blood freeze with horror.
“Watch yourself touch any little boys or little girls in that mirror today? Not before dinner, hmm? How nice,” I growl, my voice hitting a Batman-like register, my hands taking fistfuls of collar off their shoulders.
“I’ll give you guys a five-second head start before I take your child-touching, evil little fingers, and shove them-“
Before I can finish my righteous ultimatum, four middle-aged women enter the guesthouse and look at me quizzically, probably thinking I’m just a handsy waiter.
Man down! Man down! The Deputy has been shot! I repeat, the Deputy has been shot!
“I recommend the soup! It’s excellent!”
I vanish before my food arrives.
I can already hear the nightly news on Channel 5:
Vigilante crime-fighter turned diner and dasher? Looks like it’s hard times for Cambodia’s self-proclaimed superhero. Find out more on the news at 10.
And that’s how this leg of the Cambodia border crossing story ends — not with a rescue, but with an empty table and a very confused waitress, which is about as backpacker fiction Southeast Asia as an ending gets.
Further reading:
- Cambodia — Britannica — background on the country and the Khmer Rouge “Year Zero” history referenced in this chapter
- ECPAT International — an actual organization working to end the child sex trafficking this chapter’s signage refers to
Catch up on earlier chapters: I’m Sam, Sam Iam, Failure to Connect, and Damn You, Doogie, all part of the same Philosophy of Wandering series.