The mountaintops were shrouded in clouds and what could have been a view of the ocean was instead a sea of swirling white, misty moisture on our faces. There was an abundance of purple flowers stretching out from the back patio of what was once the king's summer home. Behind us the summer home itself was in a state of disarray, or, actually, disarray is too mild, ruin would be the proper word.
The clouds continued to blow up the valley at speeds that reminded me of scenes from Koyaanisqatsi, where sped up film makes clouds appear to break like waves over a mountain ridge. But this was no trick of cameras and film. These clouds were actually blowing up fast enough that it felt as if a misty white sea were breaking over us.
Between the seaside town of Kep and Sinoukville lies the hill station Bokor Hill. Once a thriving community and summer home of the king of Cambodia, it now lies entirely in ruins. The king's former house (which I would not call a palace for it was rather small and even in full splendor still too small to be called a palace) is on one side of the mountain and then across a bumpy dirt road on the other side is the actual town which now consists of an abandoned Catholic church and a once lavish hotel and casino, both rumored to be haunted. The town was built by the French and then abandoned presumably when the French decided to do what they do best—retreat.
We had arrived the night before in the coastal river town of Kampot and arranged a tour of Bokor Hill through a local guesthouse. We set out in the early morning with a few other tourists including an English couple named John and Linda who we ran into several times later in Sinoukville. Honest John was a used car salesman (and yes, Honest John's is the name of his lot) and he and his wife Linda were easily the sweetest people I've met on my trip. They were the sort of couple that have been together for forty years and still hold hands when they walk around. The kind of image Hallmark is trying to sell except that John and Linda were unaffectedly natural about it.
We all rode in the back of a truck on hard wooden benches over a rough bumpy road which ought to sound familiar by now and I won't bore you with the details except to say that I have learned to bear the misery with a kind of stoicism I didn't know I had in me.
One of the things travelers love to do is tell stories. eating dinner at night in a crowded restuarant is something akin to Masterpiece Theatre. And people have a natural tendency to retell a good story they've heard, but in the retelling they often put themselves at the center. Everyone does it, even me on occasion. I was sitting with our guide, waiting for the others to finish walking around the casino, half listening to what the guide was saying to another traveler, and half watching the fog blow in. At some point his words began to sound terribly familiar and I realized he was telling a different version of a story Matt had once overheard someone telling and retold to us (without putting himself at the center). In the version Matt heard the events happened to the traveler that told it. And it took place at a no name bar in a small Cambodian town, exactly the sort of embellishment your typical traveler would add. The guide's version took place at Chinese New Year at Bokor Hill Station among a crowd of thousands, not quite as glamorous but infinitely more likely. I have no idea who has the real version, but I suspect that whoever told the story to Matt heard it here first and then placed themselves at the center of it. Remember the telephone game you played as a child? Well stories among travelers often grow in the same way. The strange part was to actually get to hear the other version, usually you just suspect the made up parts, but I got to hear the actual difference between the first telling and the later. Kudos to Matt for not retelling the story with him at the center. So anyway, one night I was at this dumpy bar in this little backwater town in northeast Cambodia and these guys pull up in a Mercedes, windows all tinted, the cars looking hard you know what I mean? And bright, I mean interrogation room bright, fog lights shining right into the bar. So this one local guy who's at the bar gets up and says something in Cambodian and these guys get out of the car looking pretty heavy, Mafioso types you know? And then all the sudden….
After wandering around the church and the casino, which are both burned out abandoned stone buildings that do have an eerie quality to them that would certainly lend itself to visions of ghost and ghouls, we headed back down the mountain for a swim in the local river.With the kind of foresight that I demonstrate regularly I forgot to wear swim trunks and I already knew it takes days for my shorts to dry and they tend not to smell so good at the end of it. I skipped the swim. After a dunk in the water we took a half hour or so boat ride back to Kampot. I've seen sunsets over just about every possible terrain on this trip and sunsets from Southeast Asia rivers are still my favorite. I'm not sure what it is exactly but there is something so completely relaxing about cruising down a river on a boat as the sun sinks behind the hills. It just feels… natural, as if that is in fact what one ought to be doing as the sun disappears.
The next day we continued on to Sinoukville which is Cambodia's attempt at a seaside resort. Combining the essential elements of Goa and Thailand, Sinoukville is a pleasant, if somewhat hippy oriented, travelers haven. The town itself is lovely, but the travelers tend to head for the beachfront bungalows (remember what I have said before, there is a time to head for the hills and a time to embrace and get crazy with the the cheese whiz). We managed to find a decent room about fifty meters from the shore and kicked back for a few days. We rented Honda Dreams and cruised down the coast to deserted white sand beaches, thatched huts serving noodles and rice, where we watched sunsets and dodged rain storms. And yes ate hamburgers and chips and even went to a late night beach bonfire/micro rave sort of thing where plenty of hippies were twirling stick and fire and other things that hippies tend to do.
It was good fun, but for me there was the depressing thought that these were our last few days together. And while that didn't stop me from having a good time and cleaning up in a few hands of hold ‘em (I told you Rob, I'm no good at tournaments, but I can hold my own in limit and I'll take your salary in no limit), it did cast a sort of melancholy quality over the days. And strangely the weather seemed to feel the same way, continually providing sunsets that had a certain lingering sadness to them, something my friend Michael and I once termed "the happy sad," which I can't precisely explain; it's something about the right minor chord phrases and and big drums. If you've listened to enough Springsteen, you know what I mean.
And then there was that day. That day when everyone went there own way. We have reached the point where I have to say something, but I've lost the script, this was not in the original text, this was adlibbed. And now I have to capture some sort of meaning and summation, or at least I feel like I do, and yet I can't. I could talk about the bus station where Debi and Rob and Jules headed off back to Phnom Penh and on to Vietnam or Matt and I playing a few games of pool that last night after the others were gone. But none of that gets at what I mean. If they had words that could capture feelings there would be no need to write, I think here I'd go for verse, but I'm no good with it. I haven't got any minor chords on the laptop. Someone I was traveling with recently read me an article on the emotions of animals, and the author, in the course of making the point that animals most probably do have emotions but we will never understand them, used the example of human empathy. That is, I can try to understand how you may feel, but I can never actually feel what you feel nor you feel what I feel. It is therefore impossible to explain what it's like to spend nearly every waking minute of every day for three months with someone. Instead I'm having a DFW moment where the narrative thread breaks down and I have to step in and say that even now, writing this nearly a month later, I don't know what to say except… do you know, do you know what I mean…? Can you feel… no I can't do it. Jimmy, that bit just doesn't sound as good as when you said it. Anyway I'm going to give up and just cut and paste from an email from someone who's traveled more than I because this is better than I can do:
You meet the best people while traveling, get really close really quick, then the goodbyes come way too soon. Some of my best friends in the world are people I only spent a couple weeks with in some far flung country, haven't seen in years, but still keep in close contact with. Coming home is also a part of travel. People never want to hear all the stories ya have to tell. Life for them has been the same old shit and attention spans for tales of nasty bathrooms and chicken buses only last so long. It's the other travelers that want to hear your stories. It's kind of a club of sorts us travelers. You often have a very clear picture of where people have been before ya know their surnames or what they do back home. Home kind of fades. And yes, the goodbyes are tough, but paths once crossed have a funny way of doing so again.
So Jules and Rob, and especially Matt and Debi, wherever you are (oh yeah, I know where you are but forgive me while I go for a little drama) — cheers. I've never liked prolonged goodbyes so I will just go with the song. It was indeed right on and perhaps my friend is right, paths once crossed may cross again (the next rounds is on me). I miss you all.