WOULD THE NEXT STEP BE YOUR LAST?!
A dusty dirt road. Windows all rolled down. Gotta keep on driving, or it’s a cloud of beige dust in your face, not to mention the dash, the Nikon camera, and the rucksack in the back. But sometimes you just have to stop. In this case, it was this semi-expressionist scene, as if taken by a 19thcentury Provencal painter, only this one is half-a-world away.
Summertime and the living’s easy
No matter if you’re a fan of Fitzgerald or Joplin, you know the truth couldn’t be further away – and so is living in rural Cambodia. Poor, struggling, and forgotten, the backroads of this small southeast Asian country are a place every explorer would dream of visiting. Visit, not live. This is the last place an explorer would like to call home. And that’s before we even started to mention landmines. Paradox redefined. We’ll get back to that touchy subject later on.
But now, back to the dry season
Like all the other southeastern countries of the region, Cambodia is mostly a rural society of farmers that live by the annual rhythm of the Monsoon. Right now there is none. Cambodia has cities too, some of them quite notorious, few – like Phnom Penh – manage to redefine the word “seedy” altogether. But these are no more than few isolated islands of insanity in a vast ocean of dry fields and parched countryside. This is the end of February – summertime in Cambodia and the land ain’t easy.
Water, water!
It has been three days since we left the Capital city, navigating our way through the backroads of Kampong Thom province towards Siem Reap. The banks of the great Mekong river are low, and the makeshift ferries run dangerously close to the sandy bottom. We pilot a rented Mitsubishi 4×4 through the parched fields. The owner equipped it with a host of Buddhist paraphernalia but apparently lost interest when it came to fixing its electrical system. Not that having working headlamps is essential here, but we could have certainly do with a working aircon. Well, it is, what it is. At least our hotel at the end of the day has an A/C, or at least a cold bucket of water…
The locals need neither. When life’s simple so are the solutions. In this case a simple plunge into the local Mekong tributary or a nearby irrigation canal – whichever came closer. At this minute both my associate and I seriously contemplate joining them. The murky waters and slimy banks suggest we should re-think the idea.
We then realize that the problem is not the car, the weather, the road, or the country. The problem is us, and our over-dependence on first-world creature comforts. We give in to the heat and dust, and start to appreciate the magnificent scenery around us.
It all looks pleasant and peaceful. Picture-perfect.
Only we know better.
When ISIS took over
If you think ISIS was terrible, think again. The Khmer Rouge – a murderous and fanatical Maoist gang – controlled Cambodia during the 70s. Their genocidal handling of the country during those days would make the loonies of the Califate look like the angles of mercy. They slaughtered about a fourth of Cambodia’s population (watch the Oscar-winning “The Killing Fields” to understand what went on under the psychopathic rule of the Khmer), and planted over 10 million landmines just about everywhere. To add insult to injury most of those improvised field mines were never charted and often the people who placed the mines, if they were still living, do not remember where they put them.
30 years after the fall of the last Khmer holdout, Cambodia is still the world’s largest unexplored minefield, and one of the most dangerous places to thread.
With more than 40,000 amputees, the highest rate in the world, an estimated 4-6 million mines still uncovered, a simple pastoral picture can tell a lot more than it does on a first glance.
What would happen on the next step?
Would it be the last?
Would you know if it did?
Scary!