Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
11
The President of the United States
T
The payoff was immediate, if temporary. Proceeding south from Ta Rut, for twenty or
so miles, I had the ride of a lifetime. The dirt road, packed solid enough for rapid pro-
gress, led me through a rolling jungle where people in the two or three tiny villages I
passed no longer returned my greetings but stared with incredulity at me—a helmeted,
six-foot-tall white person on a bicycle that must have seemed futuristic. In one village,
where a little girl stood by herself on a narrow path that led to a hut hidden in the brush,
I waved to her, and she burst into tears and ran away.
After a while, the road turned upward through the undergrowth for a long ascent
over a mountain pass. For nearly an hour I climbed, in and out of the sunlight as the
road switched back and forth against the mountainside. There were no people up there,
no chickens or cows or dogs, no water buffalo, no pigs; nor, surprisingly, was there any
wildlife in evidence, not even birds. Earlier, I had noticed the ratchety warble of crick-
ets, but now nothing. The silence was profound. It was a thrilling, terrifying experience
of solitude.
Over the pass, the roadbed turned abruptly and shockingly to smooth pavement and,
emerging from the jungle, I plunged into a magnificent broad valley. The road bent west
for a bit, and as the sun began to settle toward the horizon, I passed through cultivated
farmland—they were growing lettuce, or maybe cabbage—and then a pair of villages,
comfortingly larger and more populous than any I'd seen all day. In one, young men were
playing a game of volleyball. It was all very lovely and serene, an exhilarating stretch for
a cyclist.
I coasted briskly around a bend, turning south again, and was enjoying the sensation
of breaking through the cooling air, when suddenly, in front of me, three young men in
long-sleeved brown shirts and caps with gold stars pinned to the crowns appeared in the
center of the road, holding up their palms to flag me down. I stopped and dismounted
