Email from a tuk tuk in Phnom Penh

The other day I got an email from Phnom Penh (Cambodia). It was part of irregular correspondence I keep up with my favorite tuk tuk driver, Thet. We exchanged greetings, I sent him a photo of our house in snow and he let me know that his wife was back at work. She works in one of the clothing factories and the workers had been on strike for some time.

Naturally all that made me think of them, and the time in Cambodia. So you get to hear about it.

In this video I posted a while back he was taking us to the Russian Market. The tuk tuk is absolutely the best way to get around Phnom Penh in my book. In the video you'll see that a lot of people prefer the motodops (a ride on the back of a motorcycle) and that can be easier and cheaper, but I find the tuk tuk feels safer and is just as much fun. And still inexpensive.

Here he is on his tuk tuk texting on his cell phone while he waits for us to come out of the guest house, as usual.

It's lovely to stay in touch. We have so little in common, but always enjoyed each other's company. We bought him an ice cream on a stick from Sorya one day and learned he'd never eaten ice cream before. That became clear when he suggested he'd save it for later. The next day at the market I bought him a REAL snack from a vendor squatting on the floor cooking them next to the fish vendor. Those were good too.

The next time I go to Cambodia you can be sure I'll send Thet an email and make sure he's there to meet me at the airport. People like Thet and his wife made our life easy. Whenever we'd go to the city, he'd meet us at the bus station and be on our payroll for the entire time we were in town. In the photo below, we'd bought a screen at this store. Delivery isn't an option at most stores, and the clerks had no idea of how anyone would get anything large to a place outside of the city. We told Thet (on the right) and the same day he put us in touch with a friend (left) who had a van we could rent. They showed up that morning at the store, helped us load the screen (for a piece Dagny was making, of course) and we all drove to Kampot.

Travel in the modern age

Change comes to all things, and these days change comes at increasingly rapid rates. As a lifelong traveler, I have seen quite a shift in the entire travel experience over my lifetime. The most obvious shift, especially in terms of international travel, is that it has become far more efficient. Going from country A to country B, even changing continents, happens far more quickly. That is essentially an improvement. But it has a cost.

In making travel better for business travelers, saving them time and effort, we have lost the travel experience. When I first started globe trotting, the trip itself was a major part of the adventure. It wasn't always fun, but it always held surprises well beyond the miracle of your flight being on time. It could be wonderfully chaotic. You were thrown in with a mix of people, some of whom were interesting, for indeterminate periods of time. Now things are precise and calculated. The airlines tell you when to arrive and what you can bring and what you cannot. The sterile airports that they all travel to provide little social interaction (or even seldom anything more interesting than chain restaurant food). It is all predictable. And boring.

We've lost modes of travel as well. My early international travels were by steamship. I was fortunate enough to cross both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans by sea. Not in a cruise ship, with casinos and lounge acts, but in passenger ships that afforded nice food and a deck chair where you could sit and watch the sea or read a book. I loved the smells and sounds of being at sea. Even a typhoon in the Pacific and a winter storm in the Atlantic did nothing to dispel that joy.

It seems you can't do that anymore. You can book random trips, but regular passenger travel by sea isn't cost effective. Insurance companies don't like it. Government agencies apparently don't like passenger ships either. In preparing for our most recent move to Asia (Cambodia) I tried to book passage on a ship. I contacted every broker, every ship company that even sounded like they went in that direction. Two companies responded. The first offered me a week-long cruise around SE Asia. Of course you had to fly to Bangkok and catch the boat. When I mentioned that detail, they didn't understand why I would want to sail there. To get there, maybe?

 The second was more promising. It was a freighter company with a few cabins. Lovely. But they could get us from Seattle to Taiwan, but not further. Well, they could take us to Singapore, but we weren't going there. They suggested that we could find something in Taiwan. But to be allowed into Taiwan you have to have a return ticket or onward transportation booked. We were going one way. Besides, flying on from Taiwan defeated the point of taking a ship (one reason was to take more luggage than airlines allow, to be fair), especially since we could fly the entire route for almost as much as the Taiwan to Phnom Pehn flight.

Ultimately, I realized that I had to wave a sad goodbye to yet one more of my illusions of travel in the whirl of modernity, as it had gone the way of other dinosaurs, such as Cadillac convertibles with tail fins, TWA seaplanes and regional cooking along American highways.

I mourn them all, even though I never wanted a Cadillac.