Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

When the bus started down the bumpy dirt road I thought, If the road is this bad so near this town, it must get much worse farther on. This proved to be the case. The next 150 miles, from the border to Siem Reap, took six hours. Locals said that in the wet season it could take twelve hours, the unpaved road turned to sludge by big tottering trucks, buses mired behind them, sometimes tumbling over the edge into the storm ditch. Today it was only dust and slowness and one blown-tire episode, near enough to a noodle shop to serve as a pit stop. On a wall of this shop was a poster that I was to see in fifty more places in Cambodia: a photo of an adult holding a child's hand, and in big black letters, Sex with Children Is a Crime.

Jouncing along the rutted road, looking out at the hard-pressed villages—poorly built huts, littered paths, rice harvesters working in flooded fields, ox carts blocking our way, men on old bikes—I had a vision of northern Malawi, in central Africa: the same bad roads and rusty bikes, the same sunshine, the same weariness. And something else: a creepy feeling that I put down to bad vibes.

African landscape, I scrawled in my pocket notebook. It's impossible to write on a bus, so that was about all I wrote until nightfall.

The negative vibrations I felt were not imaginary. They were the effect of the beat-up fields and broken huts, but most of all they were the effect of people's faces, a distinct derangement of features. Often, in a poor country the faces of old men, and especially their eyes, hold a look of terror. It can also be a look of fatigue and resignation, and underlying that, a tortured face, one that has seen horrors. Old women's faces too, but women in such places are stoical and resigned to violence; the men seem weaker and more deeply wounded.

This feeling wasn't hindsight, though I learned later that a half dozen of the 167 torture prisons and killing centers of the Khmer Rouge regime were located along this route. The book that gave me this and much more helpful information for understanding Cambodia was Philip Short's Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, which I bought and read after I got to Phnom Penh.

"The landscape ... and the life style [of rural Cambodia] were, and still are, closer to Africa than China," Short wrote in his book. Coincidentally, he had been a newspaper correspondent in Malawi for some years. I had worked in Malawi at about the same time.

"The resemblance to Africa is overwhelming," he went on. "Every village has its witch, or ap, and its k'ruu, or healer; each rural community its neak ta,

the ancestor figure ... who inhabits a stone or ancient tree and must be propitiated by offerings of incense and perfumed water. In the countryside, more murders are attributed to sorcery than to any other single cause."

As in remote parts of Africa, the carrying of a talisman was useful for protection in Cambodia. A so-called passport mask—a small beaded object, a dried monkey's paw, a lion's tooth, or an elephant-hair bracelet—might serve to defy the foul fiend in Africa. In Cambodia, the strongest talisman was a fetus that had been ripped whole from its mother's womb and then killed and mummified. Called a kun krak, a smoke child, this piece of ghoulishness was the most prized of the magic talismans, and had been used by Khmer Rouge soldiers as well as by villagers.

On this trip I saw the truth of Short's saying that "rural life in much of Cambodia is not essentially different from what it was five centuries ago." So traveling down this road was like banging through Africa, and then night came, and we were banging through the darkness.

"See those blue lights?" the young Cambodian man next to me asked. He pointed to bluish fluorescent tubes that dangled near the huts in the villages (not many) that had electricity. "Know what they're for?"

I said I couldn't guess.

"To catch cockroaches and crickets," he said.

"Good idea"

"Then they eat them," he said.

Sometime after the sequence of blue lights flickering in the jungle, we came to the junction of a good road.

"This is the road to the airport," the young man said.

Of course, the only paved road in this whole western province was the one that served the tourists who flew in, almost all of them foreigners; everyone else, the masses, bounced and rumbled on the bad roads, or sat in ox carts, or steered bikes around the potholes. And if I hadn't come this inconvenient but illuminating way, I wouldn't have known that.

Then—after the solemn and scarred countryside of weary farmers—bright lights, luxury hotels, casinos, girlie bars, strip clubs, fancy restaurants: Siem Reap and ancient Angkor.

The bus was still rolling. I asked the Cambodian man his name. He said, "Saty."

"Saty, I'm looking for a nice hotel that's not expensive."

He said, "I know one."