I vowed that at the next monastery I would quit riding for the day. I had broken this promise three times now, but the shadows were getting so long that soon they wouldn’t be shadows anymore, just an unbroken expanse of dusk.
I was nowhere near a town with a hotel. Earlier in the day I had attempted an illegal crossing into Vietnam. Rebuffed by border guards (perhaps the only border guards in the world uninterested in flashed American currency), I found myself in rural Cambodia with no hope of reaching the proper checkpoint before nightfall.
So I pressed on through the loveliest countryside I had yet seen. Bright green rice fields spiked with lone palm trees stretched toward an indistinct jumble of blue hills on the horizon. With no real destination in mind, I resolved to ride until my legs gave out. And with no hills to tax them, my legs settled into a manageable ache.
At last I pulled into a small food stand, collapsed into a chair, and made the international sign for sleepy time: palms pressed together, hands by the side of the head.
The food stand exploded with activity.
You need a place to stay? You can stay here, of course. No, not at the food stand, at the house behind the food stand. Do you need a bath? Where are you from? Please park your bike.
All this was communicated in a bewildering combination of Khmer, pantomime, and the odd English word.
A bath was far too much for me to hope for. After a day of riding, the only parts of me that weren’t caked with road dust were caked with dried sweat. I had already made peace with the fact that, in this village that had possibly never seen a Westerner, a bath was out of the question. Yes, I would very much like a bath.
Two boys were sent to pump well water into buckets, which were then balanced on the ends of a pole and hauled to a rough but clean concrete tub. I chased out the resident frog and cleaned myself off.
After a breathless tour of the village, I settled down in my new lodging for a dinner that had been prepared, apparently, just for me. I took in my surroundings. The family appeared to be comparatively wealthy. The main house had a rough concrete floor, walls made out of uneven planks rather than thatch, and a roof of corrugated iron. The property was really a compound, encompassing a second house, the miraculous bathroom, several animal pens, and a large barn. Inside the barn, a single cow lay peacefully next to one of the largest sets of speakers I had ever seen. More on these speakers later.
The family itself was correspondingly large, and related in ways that I was unable to grasp. It didn’t help that there were no obvious generational boundaries. The crowd of relatives gathered around me represented a smoothly graded spectrum of age, from the patriarch (50? 60?) down to the fat, pantless toddler that was dropped in my lap.
The patriarch of the family spoke no English, and so contented himself with pointing out everything in the village that belonged to him. He would jab my arm sharply, point at a barn, a house, a grandchild, and then thump himself on the chest. These demonstrations became so frequent — he had 10 children and they had innumerable offspring between them — that I was tempted to grab his bony fingers and shout, “I get it! Business is good! Your wife is fertile! Let’s move on!”
The task of conversation fell to one of the sons (at least, I think he was a son), who appeared to be roughly my age. His enthusiasm for this task was undiminished by the unbridgeable language gap. I was exhausted by the effort, but he kept at it, using that same perplexing mixture of signs and sounds.
At one point he loudly proclaimed: “I go NYUM NYUM!” Following this he gripped his right ankle, pointed down the road, vigorously thumped his chest, and looked at me expectantly. I weighed my response.
“Well you’ve put your finger right on it, old bean! Nyum nyum, indeed.”
“Any fool can talk about nyum nyum. The question is: what are you going to do about it?”
“I hear you, bro. I’d like to get me some of that!” (Followed by high fives.)
Rejecting these various alternatives, I settled on the failsafe strategy of smiling sheepishly and nodding.
Finally we managed to connect over the family picture album, a heap of humidity-ravaged photographs sent by relatives in America. The images were so familiar — postcards of Nashville, the inside of a TV room with linoleum floors, a tuxedo-clad American marrying a tulle-swaddled Cambodian bride — and so utterly incongruous spread out on this dining room table, in a house with three walls, illuminated by candlelight.
After dinner, we relocated to the barn to watch Japanese samurai dramas on videotape. It is a curious fact that isolated Cambodian villages are some of the loudest places on earth. The major upside, this privileged Westerner would have formerly thought, of rural proverty is the serenity: rising with dawn, living in tune with the seasons, observing timeless agrarian traditions, that sort of thing. Cambodians will tell you where to put your timeless agrarian traditions.
Tonight was a full moon, and the effect of the silver moonlight washing over the rice paddies surrounding the lightless village was stunning. Or rather, it would have been stunning to someone gazing appreciatively at the rice paddies. Me, I was in a barn having my cochleas blown out by Japanese samurai videos. The barn speakers were competing with, from one end of the village, ear-shattering religious music and, from the other end of the village, skull-splitting karaoke. I slipped out to go appreciate the moon.
With the addition of a mosquito netting — another small miracle — the dining table doubled as my bed. I lay awake for most of the night, listening to the sounds a Cambodian village makes while waiting for dawn. At 11:00, the PA systems cut out. At 1:00, a rooster started crowing. At 2:00, the matriarch of the house got up and inexplicably began sifting rice, tossing the grains rythmically in a flat, woven basket. At 3:00, a baby started crying. At 4:00, religious music once again blared from the far end of the village. And at 6:00 the day began.
The family turned out to watch me depart. One of the boys shimmied up a palm tree to fetch some coconuts for my ride, a well-meaning but impractical gift. I pedaled just out of sight, bored holes in the coconuts, drank the milk, and biked to Vietnam.
