Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Still, a bohemian, backpacker ethos has survived in some outposts. On Siem Reap's main tourist drag,
there's an eatery called Ecstatic Pizza. The logo is a crazed, swirly-eyed face. Our understanding is that if
we ask our waiter to bring us the “happy pizza,” the pie will arrive with marijuana baked into the cheese.
“Happy?” asks the waiter when we order. “Or happy happy?”
Happy happy happy,” I answer without hesitation.
The other tables are all young westerners, and there's a mischievous camaraderie in the air. It feels like
a den of thieves. Mellow, giggly thieves.
Cannabis is in fact a traditional element in Khmer cuisine (pizza, not so much) and our pie is deli-
cious—especially all those clumps of fibrous, green matter. We finish up, pay the bill, and walk swiftly to
our hotel. We're hoping to get home before the weed takes hold and scrambles our sense of direction. We'd
prefer we not end up lost and stoned in the jungle at night.
The sensation hits soon after we get back to our room. It is wonderful. Rebecca eventually gets drowsy
and drifts off to sleep, but I lie awake in bed with the warm night air wafting through the open window. My
hazy thoughts turn to home, for the first time in a long while.
I miss friends and family, and I'd love to chat with them. But if I dialed them right now from the hotel
phone on the nightstand, the conversation would be hopeless. My head space—heightened by the weed and
the floaty mood of the traveler—would surely be too far removed from theirs to find a common wavelength.
I ponder what else I've left behind. After all this time on the road, living out of a backpack and drifting
town to town, it occurs to me that I've begun to lose my attachments to things and places. The town I grew
up in, the town I supposedly live in: They are becoming just two more dots on the map. The clothes, fur-
niture, and mementos that we carefully placed in storage before we left D.C.: I wouldn't care one whit if
they all burned to ash and blew away. With equal parts pride and concern, I realize I'm transforming into a
juggernaut. I'm rumbling across the map, forever in transit. Motion is my new identity.
I don't remember falling asleep. Eventually, I dissolve into an almost comically symbolic dream. I'm in
a car, driving on a wide highway into Washington. We have made it all the way around the earth, and these
are the final few miles. But when I reach the city, I can't find a parking space. The lots are full, the meters
all taken. I keep circling the car, around and around, until I wake up with a start.
It's morning. I hear a rooster crowing. The tinny horn of an impatient motorbike. Foreign sounds—but
I can't for the life of me recall where I am. China? Vietnam? It's all beginning to pile up and blur. It's not
until I've limped into the shower and let the lukewarm water cascade over my skull that I manage to click
things back into place inside my brain.
WE hire a car and driver to take us to the border with Thailand. It's ninety miles, but it takes a full three
hours because of the road conditions. The highway is little more than a muddy blotch, ribboning its way
through flooded fields.
(The backpacker rumor holds that local airlines bribe the Cambodian government to keep this road in
disrepair. The airlines do a thriving business flying tourists in from Bangkok to see Angkor Wat. It's a rel-
atively short, 230-mile trip, so if the highway were safer and smoother more tourists might drive or take a
bus instead of boarding a plane.)
Our hired Camry sloshes back and forth between the ditches on either side of the road. There are people
trudging through the mud, holding their shoes in their hands. There are animals everywhere. We are in
grave danger of T-boning a cow.
When we come up too fast behind a stopped car, our driver slams the brakes. But we slide right into the
car's rear bumper with a thud. The car's driver gets out to complain, but our own driver laughs and honks
his horn. He chunks his shifter into reverse, disentangles us from the bumper, and then pulls around the
Search WWH ::




Custom Search