Cambodia

There's too much to say.

We'd heard again and again the roads were bad, but we remained optimistic. In Honduras we'd ridden ramshackle school buses down cowpaths, and so we thought we were up for anything. We never knew we were embarking on a gut-scrambling migration along a mountainous disaster, eight hours in a brokendown bus-van over a road like a field of boulders caked with mud.

I have never experienced anything like that overland journey, that sweatsopped rattling chaos. One traitorous knob of my spine jabbed into a hard spot, no matter how I shifted. It was too hot to close the window, but two hours in we were coated in fine red dust that became a paste when it mulled with our sweat. The hair around my face sprung loose from my ponytail and framed my face in a ticklish halo. The effort of keeping my body tense to lessen the impact seized my muscles with a constant, maddening ache. During the whole first third, I had to pee.

And there was nothing, nothing, nothing to do. Once I attempted to read, but the letters shook like agitated ants, and my brain scrambled crosswise. Every time we checked, there were hours and hours to go, and yet the minutes only strolled. There are only so many corners a mind can wander into before a treacherous buzz of madness begins. Nothing to do, nothing to do but look.

The entire stretch of country we crossed was soaking wet. Everything was water, in lilied pools spiky with pink flowers, or in still dim ponds, or in furred checkers, the golden-green rice paddies. Every hut was built beside or over a pond. Some were hiked up on stilts, with rickety staircases leading to higher ground. Beneath overhanging trees, children swam naked in the shady water, or stirred the bottom muck with crooked sticks.

Each hut we rambled by was a flash of lamplight among the trees, a fragment of indigent life. Women flocked by children held peaked hats to their heads against the wind. Seal-slick toddlers bathed in jugs. Older boys play-fought while small ones watched. Farmers hung exhaustedly in hammocks like sacks of grain, and among dangling bunches of bananas and cans of American soda, merchants patiently peddled their meager wares.

In the evening there were fireflies. There are no fireflies in Southern California, and we watched until they faded. Later there were bigger spots of light, flashlights, sway-dancing over the fields. The man beside us said they were looking for frogs, just another thing to sell.

By the time it was too dark to see, there were still two hours left. Two hours banging in the blackness. Purgatory must be like this, I thought to myself. Restless discomfort, a relentless twilight. A road with no end. A grey place in between somewhere and elsewhere, dotted with moonlit ponds, choked in dust.

There was one stop towards the end, a restaurant with open walls and overpriced beverages. As soon as I stepped inside two Cambodian girls ran towards us. The older one showed us a monkey they kept on a length of chain, and the younger caught a pugnacious praying mantis and brandished it with pride. Before we left, she tied a yellow string around my wrist.

"For free," she said, and the praying mantis flew away.

There's too much to say, but it's dinnertime. We went to Angkor Wat today, and it was a near-God experience (near-Gods?). So more tomorrow.