by Mira Allen
I’d been too busy eyeing the mounds of mysterious food being sold beneath my window to notice her initially. Boarding passengers were exchanging piles of riel for piles of meat and fruit and bread and rice. At that moment, all I really wanted to do was tear ravenously into a huge ball of sticky rice and a mountain of the spiciest snack they had.
I, along with my decidedly western digestion, had been in Cambodia less than 24 hours. A bus ride of undetermined length was probably not the best place to be introducing foreign food to my stomach, iron clad or not. Breakfast was a handful of wickedly sweet candy that I’d procured somewhere in Bangkok. I’d just have to leave it at that.
Somewhere in the midst of my inner lamentation on paltry breakfasts, I felt a little twitch. It was a subtle awareness that someone was staring at me. A dozen of my fellow passengers were busy cramming themselves and various packages into their respective seats. No one seemed to notice me, even though I was by far the palest person onboard.
When I turned around, I locked eyes with the woman who I assume had been looking at the back of my head. Her shoulder length gray hair framed an aging and kind face. We exchanged smiles.
A minute later, the woman and a small boy were climbing over my lap to settle in to the window seat. The two person bench was now being occupied by two and a half people. I put away my minor annoyance at this by reminding myself I’d only paid $5 for the seat.
“Suasadei,” I said. It was the first Khmer word I had ever uttered to anyone. It was probably obvious in the timid way it had stumbled from my mouth.
The woman looked surprised. Perhaps she wasn’t expecting me to know any Khmer? She returned the greeting, and followed it with what sounded like a question. Unfortunately, I had already used up all my vocabulary in the single previous word. I gave her a confused smile and said nothing.
She smiled, shook her head, and patted me on the hand. The boy, who looked to be about 7, was completely silent and decidedly well behaved. He had long since lost interest in me and was staring out the window at the food outside.
The time between my deciding to go to Cambodia and actually going to Cambodia was about 90 minutes. It had been two days since I had packed my bag and walked out of that yoga ashram in Koh Phangan, Thailand. Originally I’d been planning on making my way south through Malaysia and on to Sumatra for a bit.
Because of my hasty change of plans, I arrived at the border woefully under informed about the country, language, and customs. I hadn’t had the time to do the requisite research. There was historical stuff I’d learned in school and stories handed to me from Cambodian-American friends. I also pored over the Cambodia chapter of my Lonely Planet: Southeast Asia on a Shoestring book. ‘Loser Planet’ once again proved itself to be an apt moniker for the guidebook. The information I was able to glean from the pages was about as paltry as my breakfast had been.
The bus driver finally made his way into the front and made an announcement. Of course, I understood exactly one word of it. I shot one last longing glance at the food purveyors, and we were off.
Outside of Battambang, the road opened up and the bus gained ground by weaving through crowds of motorbikes and trucks and other busses. We faced high speed, head-on collisions about once a minute. I relaxed and enjoyed the scenery.
It was green rice paddies and towering Buddhas and thatched roofs. Motorbikes with entire families stacked aboard. A woman in a straw hat leading a bony cow down the highway. Kids running in all directions. Mountains of rice laid out on huge blue tarps.
I broke my ‘no eating on the bus’ rule in early afternoon when the woman offered me some of her rice. It was perfect. I gave them some of my candy. I found myself wishing I could ask her all of the questions that had been piling up in my mind. The language barrier was probably for the best, at least on her end. The journalist in me would have gone overboard with queries.
It was the first time in forever that I had absolutely no idea what was going on, and most likely no way to figure it out. Foreign country, foreign language, foreign ideas. I was completely baffled and dumbstruck. I had arrived at both an inner and outer terrain far beyond any that bore the label of ‘comfort zone’.
It was exactly what I’d been looking for.