Road weary

We are tired.  We have been traveling for almost six months,  over five months in SE Asia.  We are ready for a new adventure.  Or at least I am.  To be honest we are feeling a bit road weary, a slight fatigue.  In Cambodia it seems that we waffle between two extremes.  On the one hand experiencing the dusty developing world in full gear.  Then we enter the protected enclaves founded by expats that serve up swimming pools, billiards and hamburgers.  These two worlds remain segregated, apart.  We hop, leapfrogging from one of these lily pads of familiar comforts to another after long hot bus rides.  In a sense creating an escape from traveling.  Cambodia is the first SE Asian country where Westerners can own 100% of a business and there are restaurants and hotels that cater exclusively to travelers.  They are still budget conscious and we are not staying in glamour and glitz.  The owner of our hotel in Kamphot was Alaskan, our Texas barbecue place hosted by a Kansan and the Thai restaurant owned by guy from Alabama.  The staff is often Dutch or French, and the kitchen and cleaning staff is often Khmer, although not always.  Kep Coffee was owned by a guy from Seattle and his family.  I had a BLT there that would rival any sandwich in Portland.  It is an odd scene.

After Battambang, we explored the coast of Cambodia, Kamphot, Kep and then Rabbit Island.  These towns have wide empty roads and French colonial decay.  Kamphot province is large and 80% of Khmer live in rural areas, so the towns feel kind of empty.

In Kep, once an escape for Phnom Pen’s elite in the 1960s, the large villas stand burned and destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, the violent legacy remaining visible and unchanged over the last four decades.  Taken back by the jungle, these once grand estates are now empty and home to cows grazing.  There is no effort to rebuild, people lack the resources and maybe communal vision of moving forward.  Kep’s hollowed out villas are largely symbolic for me of where Cambodia is emotionally.  It appears that Cambodia cannot move forward simply because it does not have the tools or vocabulary to heal and rebuild either emotionally or physically.

We took the boat over to Rabbit Island.  An underated small island that is not developed and offers simple accommodation and food.  It only has electricity a few hours at night.  We enjoyed the hours reading and swimming.  Knowing that it was only for a couple of days we let ourselves turn to jello.  It was the perfect salve.

We are ending our travels in Cambodia with a quick two days in Phnom Pen before flying to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  Our long bus ride from Kep yesterday provided plenty of sights out our window.  We watched caravans of large open flatbed work trucks transporting women home from working at the garment factories.  The brain struggles with these odd images of human cargo, trucks full of women, dressed in bright colors, wearing hats and scarves, standing close together, an estimated fifty to a truck.

After some research, I found that these trucks carry about 100 women and are perilous, often overturning.  Over 8,000 garment workers were injured last year in traffic accidents, over 100 killed.

(There are some horrible photos of accidents on the internet and it is only too easy to imagine it)

I learned of these socioeconomic disparities regarding international manufacturing when I was in college.  Jack and Addie are able to see in real-time how others work and live and what role the Western consumer plays.  It is not an abstract lesson.  People ask us about school and how we teach our children while traveling and I reflect on these lessons that we experience and the discussions it leads to.  Now when we see a label on our T-shirt that says “Made in Cambodia” we will have the visceral memory of watching the many women return from their shifts at the factories.  The more we travel, the smaller the world becomes.

Below, photos of street art from Phnom Pen.