Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [57]
Which is great news. But I'm still not budging.
Since the late 1970s, there have been almost sixty thousand land-mine or bomb casualties in Cambodia. Sixty thousand!! And 98 percent of the casualties are civilian. Which is why, before I'll walk anywhere, on-camera or off, Jay or Kevin or one of the others has to stride ahead of me, covering the same ground, while I stand far away with my fingers in my ears, cringing. Of course, I pay for this cowardly reluctance with another Crew Look, but so what? I don't care how many mines the CMAA has cleared, I don't even care if Angelina Jolie went out there personally with a chimpanzee and a big long stick and exploded them herself; there are still thousands more to be found, lying in wait to ambush the unwary.
On a brighter note, and all nightmares aside, Cambodia is as stable nowadays as any culture with a history of genocide, invasion, and protracted political turmoil could be. Stable enough at least to have become a popular stopping-off point for thousands of backpackers and other wandering souls as they go zigzagging through the backwoods of Southeast Asia and who come here to experience one place above all else: a monument just outside of Siem Reap whose staggering mystical grandeur will haunt them for a lifetime—Angkor Wat.
“Angkor Wat temple is one of the Seven Wonders of the World,” a young rice trader called Rith informed me yesterday in the p'saa, the market in Siem Reap, shocked that I'd not heard of it.
“So how do I get there? How do I reach Angkor Wat?”
“Sorry?”
“Fleuv naa teuv Angkor Wat?” (That's your actual Cambodian.) “Is there a bus?”
He shook his head. No bus. His best suggestion for reaching the temple complex was a tuk-tuk.
“What's a tuk-tuk?” I asked.
“It can take you to Angkor Wat, ten miles,” he replied in truncated English. “Is one of Seven Wonders of the World.”
“Yes, yes, I know. You told me that. But what is it?”
Running ahead of me, Tasha found about a dozen tuk-tuks lined up for hire at the roadside, their drivers chatting in a huddle, fanning themselves with newspapers.
Basically, a tuk-tuk is a motorized rickshaw. Take a seat from a disused Ferris wheel, glue it to the back of a moped, and hey presto!
Once we'd picked out a vehicle, its owner came running.
“Me want tuk-tuk,” I said. (Damn, I inadvertently slipped into Bislama there. Sorry. It's the jet-lag.) “I want to go to Angkor Wat.”
The driver watched as I took out my money3 All fares are negotiable, so you're encouraged to haggle, either in U.S. dollars or in their local currency, riel, it's up to you.
“Teuv Angkor Wat th'lay pohnmaan?”
That's your actual Cambodian for “So how much might the fare be?”
Without thinking, he said: “Muy lian”—one million riel. And of course I laughed in his face. In his face, I tell you! What am I, an idiot?
“Er, how about four?” I offered instead. “Buan.”
“Four?”
This standoff lasted … oh, all of three-tenths of a second.
“Okay, four,” he nodded, deciding to take it in dollars instead, which in this town is almost enough to retire on, and we set off.
Rrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Rrrrrrr.
My tuk-tuk ride, though brief, was packed with incident.
At one point, two motor scooters buzzed by, the drivers carrying a long bamboo pole between them balanced on their left shoulders. Dangling from the pole, roped by its feet, was a whole dead pig.
A man to my left staggered along the sidewalk with ten plastic chairs stacked on his head. Someone else had a gong.
An old woman carrying a baby stepped into the road, then scrammed back to the curb with a yelp, a millisecond before a bus roared