A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [91]
A few moments later, I noticed that our boat had slowed almost to a standstill and that our new additions were arguing with the skipper, pointing in a direction decidedly opposite from where the river was taking us. I looked to Kry to translate, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. Not a peep. He stared off at some fixed point in space, apparently oblivious. When, at our uninvited guest’s instruction, the boat changed course, coughing and clanking up a narrow no-name creek perpendicular to the river, I barked to Kry, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’
‘We take shortcut,’ said Kry, quickly slipping back into what seemed to be a coma.
‘Shortcut.’ The word filled me with dread. When has a shortcut ever worked out as planned? The word – in a horror film at least – usually precedes disembowelment and death. A ‘shortcut’ almost never leads to good times. And in Cambodia, with our skipper suddenly piloting the boat up a shallow, twisting, foliage-choked, water-filled ditch, deep into who the fuck knows where, with two who the fuck knows who giving the orders, I was not feeling too secure. I consulted my Lonely Planet guide and was dismayed to find that this particular body of water did not appear on the map.
Upriver we went. For hours and hours, with no end in sight. The trip was supposed to take six hours. It had been nearly nine. The terrain grew roughter, then narrowed with each three-point turn. We pulled and pushed in waist-deep muck, tearing free of clinging vines, just barely clearing sandbars and mud flats. This trip was beginning to make the river journey in Apocalypse Now look like the Love Boat as the scenery got more primitive, the few signs of life becoming more backward and desperate-looking as we pushed farther and farther into the bush. The few sampans or boats coming in the opposite direction squeezed by without any of their passengers even acknowledging us. They eyed our olive drab-garbed passengers, then turned away, their faces showing what surely looked like fear. There were no longer greetings of ‘Hello’ or ‘Bye-Bye’ from the riverbanks, just glowers, stunned looks, silent hostility, indifference.
I saw nothing for hours but the occasional hut protruding from the water, or high atop stilts on the bank, men and women in rags, near naked in kromahs, squatting by the water’s edge, rubbing unguent into sick pigs, washing clothing in the brown water, sharpening machetes against stone. I was becoming concerned. I hadn’t seen a single house, not a single building with what could be called walls, not a TV aerial, not a power or phone line in hours. We could have been traveling up the same body of water a thousand years ago, with no discernible difference. What if our engine breaks down? What if our propeller fouls? What if one wing nut shears off, leaving us dead in the water? Whom could we call? Even if we had a cell phone? (Which we didn’t.) No one on this boat, I suspected, could even have described our location. Which of a thousand similar gullies, canals, streams, creeks, and ditches were we on? And how far up? My American Express representative was not waiting at the next stop. Where would we sleep if we had to spend the night out here? There was nothing but water, mud, flooded rice paddies, jungle, and the occasional construction of bare sticks and bamboo – like a child’s collapsed and forgotten tree house. And my mysterious fellow passengers, what about them? Who were they? Where were they going? What were their intentions? The scarier-looking of the two, who’d been smoking Alain Delon cigarettes, gave me something that looked like a smile when I offered him a Marlboro, but that’s all I had going for me.