Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

I was not prepared for people so poor to look so beautiful. Maybe I was remembering the child prostitutes cooped up in the Singapore brothel. I had foolishly begun to associate poverty with ruin and bad health, and Cambodians were so hard-working it seemed outrageous that they were struggling just to eat.

And something else about their beauty. Even as beggars they had dignity. They weren't cringing or rapacious; they stared, they looked solemn, they hardly spoke. But most of all they were familiar. They looked like their own statues. The Cambodian face is also the face of a Khmer statue; their bodies are sculptural and finely made; they seem iconic, authentic, part of the culture, the slender boys like willowy Buddhas, the women like apsaras and angels.

Some of these apsaras and angels, these living sculptures, resided in the Old Market district on the east side of the Siem Reap River, where I idled in pajama bottoms under the trees in the mellow guesthouse for $10 a day, plus noodles. It wasn't lechery; the gentleness of the people made it easy for me to linger. It was a pleasant stroll in the perfumed air to the riverbank. And now and then, seeing me walking blithely, a tuk-tuk driver would ask, "You retired here?" because many grizzled men like me in faded T-shirts and pajamas had hunkered down in Cambodia. At these prices I could stay until my visa ran out, months from now. It is sometimes that way in travel, when travel becomes its opposite: you roll and roll and then dawdle to a halt in the middle of nowhere. Rather than making a conscious decision, you simply stop rolling.

It had happened before, and I knew why. "At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house," Henry T. wrote in Walden. For the traveler this season never ends. Yet I knew what I had to do.

THE BOAT SONTEPHEAP

TO PHNOM PENH

AT THE CENTER OF CAMBODIA, in its enormous floodplain, lies an inland sea, Tonle Sap Lake, so broad in the rainy season that when you're on it you might be in a great ocean, no shores visible. It is not a big blue ocean but a brown one, the frothy chop beaten by the brisk wind to resemble the foam on a latte. It is not deep. Even in the middle it is full of mud banks and shoals, and in the unlikeliest places there are fish weirs and perhaps a narrow sampan sitting low in the water, two or three men and boys on board wearing lampshade hats, the whole scene in profile like an image of graceful brushstrokes on a ancient pot.

I took a jeep about seven miles from Siem Reap to the low-lying and mucky north shore of the lake, a fishing village, Phnom Krom, where in the early morning one or two long and usually overloaded motorboats leave for Phnom Penh. They travel southeastward down the lake to where the Tonle Sap River begins its flow, and continue along the river to the jetties of Phnom Penh, about six hours, the water route to the capital.

The departure of the boats is an event in Phnom Krom and the nearby village of Chong Khneas, where the fishing families live in basketwork huts perched over the shore, the places busier at six in the morning than most other inland villages at noon. Apart from the outboard motors on a few of the sampans, the scene could not have changed in hundreds of years: naked children slapping at mud puddles, women selling bananas and rice, but most people mending nets, tending cooking fires, and sorting fish in baskets.

Snakehead fish are caught here. They are the key ingredient in amok, one of Cambodia's delicious national dishes, the snakehead simmered in coconut milk with spices. Because the snakehead has natural enemies here, the fish grow to only a few feet and are not the monsters they've become in some places in the United States where they've been introduced.

I found the gangplank to my boat and was about to climb into the cabin when a big man in a Hawaiian shirt—obviously American—said, "I wouldn't go in there if I were you."

I smiled at him because he'd said it so confidently. I stepped back and let other passengers stream into the cabin.

"Look. There's only one way out," he said. "This thing capsizes and it's all over. How would you escape? You read about ferries that sink in places like this, and you wonder why so many people die." He shook his head. "Now I know."

So we sat on the roof together and he introduced himself—Mark Lane, explaining that he was a mate on a ferry out of Homer, Alaska, making runs to the Aleutian Islands. He was taking a break from that cold work by spending a few weeks here in the sunshine.