Other Side of the World

Coverage of the president's trip to Vietnam last night has me already nostalgic about my trip to Cambodia. There the newscaster was, standing in a Hanoi street while motorcycles and pedestrians buzzed around him.

I was just there, I thought, I was just on other side of the world — because Cambodia is right next door, of course, and I did glimpse Vietnam when we visited the border region.  

These trips I've taken recently to Cambodia, Malawi, Nepal and other countries are for information-gathering and storytelling. They are, above all, business trips. But I have a personal mission for them, too. I'm hoping they keep the wonder alive, that they help me appreciate every scintilla of difference I see when I'm abroad, that they remind me always that we live in a big old world.  

Longest Day

When the plane took off from a steamy Phnom Penh runway, it was a few minutes after midnight, February 27. That was almost 35 hours ago — and it's still February 27.

I have nothing against February 27. It's a perfectly fine day. Nearing the end of winter, promise of spring to come.

But by the time I turn off the light tonight, I will have had about 40 hours worth of February 27, and that will be more than enough.

Fifty-six hours ago I was interviewing a trafficking survivor as the sun set behind a palm tree.

Now I'm back in Virginia, glad to be home — and waiting for February 27 to end!

Leaving Cambodia

We are leaving today, leaving the rice fields and the temples, the motorized rickshaws and the funny little plows, leaving a country that made me feel at home the second I arrived and hasn't stopped since.

In a great irony of traveling, I feel like I'm just getting the hang of the place — able to pick up a few words from the jumble of foreign sounds, knowing what to order on the menu — when it's time to leave.

But though my physical body will be whisked from this place at the end of the day, my mind will linger, will puzzle out the sights and sounds, will recall the gurgle of fountains in the Golden Temple Hotel and the generous hospitality of every home we entered, no matter how humble.

Today it is summer heat and warm breezes. Tomorrow will be damp, chill winter. But I'll keep in mind, as I always do, that the world is large, and there are more worlds within it that we can possibly imagine.

Smiling Faces

It's a smile of knowledge and kindness, of wisdom and mercy. It's the smile of a bodhisattva, and it appears 216 times in the Bayon temple of Angkor Thom, the last stop on yesterday's temple tour.

The smiles are both inscrutable and accessible, plain and adorned. They were hewn not in solid rock but in huge blocks of sandstone. The smiles were carved in pieces, and in this way they resemble real human smiles, which are often constructed of humor and rue, laughter and longing. 

                                                                                          
The faces of Bayon are a good memory to take home. A smile of compassion for the people I've met, for the lost and hopeless, for children playing marbles in a dry and dusty yard, for shop owners sweeping the dirt floor of their new business, for all the blurred scenery on the road, for life itself.

Temple Day

My day off was conveniently timed with our presence near one of Earth's great World Heritage sites.

We began in the dark, walking across the moat on a floating bridge with only moonlight and phone light to guide us.  We ate a picnic breakfast as Angkor Wat emerged from the night.

A couple of hours exploring it ...

then it was off by tuk-tuk to Ta Prohm, the ruined temple pictured at the top of this post.

Bayon with its great carved faces is still to come, but I'm thinking it will be hard to match the evocative world of Ta Prohm with its twisted trees and downed pillars, its roots and its riches.

"Look on me, ye mighty and despair," Shelley's lines, come to mind. But in this case there are no "lone and level sands" stretching far away.

Instead, there are piles of rock and lichened carvings and tree trunks still as stone.

Bamboo Bridge

An early walk yesterday morning along the Mekokng, my first solo stroll since arriving in Cambodia.

Eventually I found myself at the Bamboo Bridge, a rickety contraption that made me feel as if every step would be my last. It squeaked and it rustled and gave enough with each footfall that I almost turned around immediately.

But in the spirit of travel (which means doing things I don't usually do), I made it almost a third of the way across before making my way back.

I read later that every year locals disassemble the bridge before the rainy season and rebuild it again in the dry. Which could mean they've very, very good at this — or that the bridge has all the stability of a carnival ride.

Cheep Cheep!

Yesterday began with an interview I'll never forget. A woman who left home and family to work in a factory in Malaysia — but ended up in domestic servitude, beaten and abused. She finally returned to Cambodia but was paid not a penny of what she earned.

She exuded sadness and regret, but you could tell how much her children loved her. They knew what she had done for them, even though they couldn't express it.

Luckily, we ended the day on a light note — at a chick farm that's providing a good income for a father and his family.

Years ago, this man also left Cambodia in search of work. He wasn't cheated as the woman was, but this successful business is guaranteed to keep him here. After the interview, I took a tour of the chick farm.

Is there anything cuter than a clutch of baby chicks?  I'll let you decide!

Moon over the Mekong

It was dark when we arrived at Kompong Cham, and the bridge over the Mekong was ablaze with blue lights. We had driven a long and dusty road, so the two high-rise hotels (10 or 11 floors each!) and the bustle of restaurants and traffic had a mirage-like feel.

After dinner, we strolled back to the hotel along the river. There were street vendors and skateboarders and a group of school kids playing a game. There were open-air shops and music blaring. It was nothing like what the word Mekong means to me.

The Mekong flows through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. But it's Vietnam that has colored it for me. Seeing the river now makes me feel like my mother did when we rode a train through Chateau Thierry and other World War I towns in France, names she remembered her father mentioning from his time in the signal corps during the Great War.

Hanoi, Gulf of Tonkin, the Mekong. These are not names I associate with ice cream carts and a warm summer evening. They are full of war and pain and death.

Or at least they were. I changed my mind about one of them last night.

Going Batty

Sometimes I can't believe I get paid for this. Last evening was one of those times. We had spent much of the morning and early afternoon driving through the Cambodian countryside, past roadside stalls and newly harvested rice paddies, crossing the Mekong River shortly before noon.

About 2:30 we pulled up to a farmstead where I interviewed members of a savings and loan group. Every five minutes a large, loud truck would pull in and disgorge a load of rock and soil, revving its engine, grinding its gears and raising a cloud of dust. We could barely hear each other speak. An hour later we strolled to the next farm, where a family is raising hundreds of thousands of bats and selling the guano for fertilizer. "You should see them at 6 p.m. when they swarm out for the evening," the farmer said.

A swarm of bats? Don't worry, we told him, we'll be back. We had just enough time to drive to the nearby border with Vietnam to take photographs, stopping at a little stand to sip coconut water through a plastic straw.

At 6 p.m. we were back at the bat houses, ready for action. The little guys weren't cooperating though. It was 6:15, then 6:20. "I'm losing light fast," Misty said.

But at 6:25 the bats began darting out of their nests, 20, 50 then a 100 or more at a time, swirling out of their palm-leaf homes and into the Cambodian night.  One of them was this little guy, who was none too happy to meet us when the farmer pulled him from his nest three hours earlier.

I like to think of him now, just ending his day (like most everyone else I know, on the other side of the world) while I'm just beginning mine.

Still Life with Shrines

The work trips I take are often battles between mind and body. The mind, freed of routine, takes in hundreds of sights, sounds and smells. It thrills to foreign tongues and customs. The tang of chili pepper and crispy noodles, the roar of traffic in a Phnom Penh alleyway.

The body does its best to keep up. Sleep-deprived, stomach-jostled, it does its best to stay awake and alert and well. There are practical steps to take, of course — getting rest, eating sensibly, drinking bottled water — but there is only so much you can do. At a certain point, the mind just prays that the body will be up to the task.

Luckily, there are plenty of prayer opportunities in Cambodia, little shrines like this one in the front yard-driveway of a family we interviewed Monday. And they're ready for you, rain or shine.

Passsing Through Phnom Penh

We had three meetings yesterday, which kept us zipping through Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh. Zipping is perhaps an exaggeration, since we traveled in an SUV, complete with five people and a load of camera equipment.

But after hours my traveling companion, Misty, and I zipped out to a restaurant 15 minutes away to meet a work colleague. We were told to get Pass App, and so we did. Pass App is Uber for tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled mini-taxis that do plenty of zipping themselves. 

Slightly less terrifying than a motorcycle taxi, a tuk-tuk puts a modicum of metal between the passenger and the whirl of traffic. So I hung on and enjoyed the ride as we zoomed through the balmy night to a jewel of a Cambodian fusion restaurant. 

Today we shove off for the provinces, where internet connectivity may be iffy and posting may be difficult. But for now, here I am, on the other side of the world, passing through Phnom Penh with Pass App. 

Phnom Penh at Night

I've seen very little of the country so far. An airport, a baggage claim, the visa and immigration counters and then, Phnom Penh at night seen from the back of a car taking us to the hotel.

It was after 11 p.m. and we'd been traveling for more than 24 hours by the time we saw the lights of the city. Though it was only from the car windows, it was a start, a taste of what is to come.

To the left a square,  a long square, a pagoda, trees all lit up. To the right, small cafes with outdoor seating.

Old colonial buildings in the shadows, some with modern stores on the ground floors.

I have a lot to learn and a lot to see ... and my first meeting is in two hours. It will be more than 12 hours until I can see Phnom Penh at night again.

Off to Cambodia

My bags are packed and my pre-trip to-do list is almost all checked off ("write blog post" being one of the final items), and now comes that part of travel which both unnerves and restores — that would be putting my fate almost entirely in the hands of others.

This is probably something human beings need to do from time to time, and travelers do it whenever they board a plane or choose a lodge. The kind of travel I'm about to experience — bopping around the countryside to small villages to interview survivors of human trafficking — does it more than most.

The itinerary is drawn up to showcase the work we do, and I'm there to capture as much of it as I can. The pace can be frantic, the days long.

But the rewards are great, these glimpses of lives that others live. Not just passing glances, either, but actual conversations with people I would never otherwise meet. These trips always broaden my perspective, and I'm so grateful I get to take them.

So it's off to Cambodia, to its rice paddies and temples, its mountains and lakes, to a world I can only begin to imagine but will, God willing, soon see.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

On a Jet Plane

I was 20 years old the first time I went to Europe, my maiden overseas travel. I had saved money from a waitressing job and would spend it slowly over the next two months. I didn't eat many good meals on that trip, but I did see the great cathedrals and museums, took ferries and trains and buses, heard German and French and Italian. I learned, much to my delight, that Europe really did exist, and that it was just as romantic and wonderful as I had hoped.

After that, I was hooked. And that — and a host of other decisions — led to my current work, a job that lets me travel occasionally.

Tomorrow, I leave for Cambodia. It's a hastily-planned trip with an itinerary I just received this morning and a ticket booked just three days ago. I'm still figuring out exactly where we're going — and I'm hoping we have at least a half-day in Angkor Wat.

The people I'll meet, the places I'll see, the sights, smells and tastes I'll experience — those are still up for grabs. But of one thing I am certain. It will be an adventure. It always is.

A Day for Love

Since last Valentine's Day I've read several books that detail our human origins, books about homo sapiens' emergence from the muck and slime and ethereal dust, from the hunters and the gatherers. I read them and nod; I appreciate the science and the history.

But there's always a point where I diverge, take issue. You can call it Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed. Wonderful Counselor. Mighty Father. 

Or, you can call it love. 

Love is what the theories don't explain, what science has not yet mastered.

I don't think it ever will. 

Downton Sandwich

This winter I've continued my binge-watching spree, plunging back into Downton Abbey after catching up on Victoria. Time permitting, I head down to the basement beanbag chair after dinner for 45 to 60 minutes of immersion in another world.

Add in elliptical-machine morning-exercise sessions, which require that one watch something to make the minutes pass more quickly, and my days lately have become what I've come to think of as a "Downton sandwich": Twenty minutes of Lord and Lady Grantham in the morning and 50 minutes of Lord and Lady Grantham in the evening.

In between I must dress myself, drive my own car to Metro, commute on an overcrowded train with people of all classes, work a long day, then come home to make my own dinner. Oh, the indignity! I'm sure the Dowager Countess Violet Grantham (Dame Maggie Smith) would say something to buck me up, something like, "Don't be defeatist, dear. It is very middle-class," one of her many splendid zingers.

Still, my "Downton sandwich" makes me think about the modern world that was shaking the estates of the rich and titled in post World War I Britain. Makes me compare my life with those of the people upstairs (and downstairs, too, but upstairs is more fun): Where is the ladies maid to do my hair every morning? Where is the cook to prepare me a scrumptious breakfast that will be brought to me in bed? Where is the butler to open the door and dispatch all those horrid telephone sales calls?

These service personnel are scattered to the four winds, I guess. They've become engineers and baristas, doctors and teachers. They're living their own lives. Poor me: I'm left to fend for myself!

(Highclere Castle interior courtesy Culture Trip)

Tunneling

The thermometer read 32, just as it did yesterday. But yesterday it was sleeting and icing; today it's "only" raining. Dark, gray, cold and wet — but somehow precipitation that remains liquid.

And so, I put into place my own winter emergency plan. No riding the bus from Courthouse Metro. I took my chances on Metro all the way. Most of all, no outside walking from Metro to the office. Instead, I took the tunnel.

The tunnel is longer but ever so much more pleasant, especially on a day like today. It's a weird feature of this neighborhood, something about its spook-driven origins.

It's a warren of passages, steps up and down. I passed a barber shop, an optician, a branch library and an experimental theater. I walked down a hallway with art on the walls.

It was warm, it was dry. It was divine.

Wasted Days?

My reading day was only partially successful, but I did get well into Patricia Hampl's The Art of the Wasted Day. A telling title if ever there was one, because if a part of me didn't think reading days were "wasted" I'd probably have a lot more of them.

But if Hampl's title tips its hat to this prejudice, her content helps dispel it. She ponders leisure and daydreaming; she counters the belief that what matters in life is the checklist. The essential American word isn't happiness, but pursuit. How about giving up the struggle, she says, redefining happiness as "looking out the window and taking things in — not pursuing them."

The life of the mind is what Hampl is after here, and she succeeds well in pinning it down, following its application through the essays of Montaigne and the science of Mendel. She looks closely at notions of the self and how we often have to be knocked in the head (Montaigne and St. Paul both took falls) to see the world with fresh eyes.

Because this is where the "wasting" leads us — to a different set of beliefs and to "keeping a part of your mind always to yourself," which becomes a mantra to Hampl. It might be to more of us if we had the time to try.

Reading Day

I remember these from college. They were Cramming Days, more like it, days before exams when normal class schedules were paused so that intense studying could begin. The nomenclature perplexed me: It's the day before the exam and you're just now reading?

This is not the kind of reading day I'm envisioning for today. Instead, I'm dreaming of a healthy sick day, a day spent entirely in bed if that's what suits me. Or maybe on the couch or the beanbag chair or even while striding (gliding?) on the elliptical. The point is not the posture. The point is that I will spend the day reading.

In childhood I would think nothing of this. I could lie on my canopy bed with a book of fairytales, or in my aunt and uncle's attic with a Mary Stewart novel, and be lost for hours.

This is what I want for today. A no-guilt reading day. A day when I don't squeeze reading into Metro or bus rides or the last few minutes before sleep.

There are seasons in a reading life, and I have just pulled out of a fallow period into a gloriously abundant one. There are not one but two Patricia Hampl books, a memoir by Thomas Lynch, essays by Wendell Berry, Storm Lake by Art Cullen, subtitled A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper and, speaking of heartland, a book by that name subtitled A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. 

Most of these are library books, which gives my reading day some urgency. As does the pile on my bedside table, which has become precarious enough that drastic remedies are called for. All of which is to say that a Reading Day will be good for my health — in more ways than one.

A Walker Turns Nine

When I started this blog nine years ago today, I saw it as a chance to do my own work without the editor on my shoulder. It still is that — but much, much more.

Because when I started this blog, I was nine years younger, you see. I knew time was passing quickly, but not this quickly! I thought there would be plenty of years to write another book, pen dozens of essays, do all sorts of things. I hope there still is. I see no reason why there shouldn't be.

But if there's not ... there's this blog. It has become an oeuvre of sorts, a body of work, a folder into which I stuff random thoughts, ideas from books, the gleanings of a brain that works best when the feet are moving at three miles an hour.

As I said in the beginning and each walk confirms, writing and walking are boon companions. One informs the other.

So this walker plans to keep on walking and keep on writing until ... well, until she can't do either anymore.

I Walk Therefore I Am

The best books are not only satisfying in and of themselves but they also lead us to other great reads. Such is the case with The Old Ways, which I finished last night.

Edward Thomas, the British poet and nature writer who died in World War I, and Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain, are two authors now on my must-read list, courtesy of Robert McFarlane.

"A mountain has an inside," Shepherd wrote, describing the caves and cavities of her native Cairngorms, which she explored throughout her long life. Her prepositions are notable, McFarlane writes. She went not just up but "into the mountains searching not for the great outdoors but instead for profound 'interiors,' deep 'recesses'."

It's landscape as self-scape, not in a shallow way but in the most original of human ways, realizing that earth is our home and in nature we discover our best and truest selves.

Here's McFarlane on Shepherd:

'On the mountain,' she remarks in the closing sentences of The Living Mountain, 'I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy ... I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain.' This was her version of Descartes's cogito: I walk therefore I am. She celebrated the metaphysical rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the 'I am,' the beat of the placed and lifted foot.

Dark Corner

When I arrived at the office yesterday, I stopped first to chat with a colleague. "There was a guy here on Friday, and I had him turn off your lights," she said, pointing to my end of the office, where my desk sat, finally, in the dark.

Overhead lights are a pet peeve of mine, especially the fluorescent kind, and I've been on a mission to darken my workspace as long as I've been here. My colleague Brenda has become my partner-in-crime.

I've no problem with natural light streaming in the window, but the flickering overhead substitution, well, it is no substitution. Better to look at a screen from a dim and quiet place, which is what I'm doing now.

Ah ....

"Green Book" and More

Over the weekend, as Virginia's governor struggled for his political survival, I went to see a movie about race relations in 1962. It was difficult to watch "Green Book" and not understand the intense reactions to Gov. Northam's yearbook page, which contains a photograph he's now denying depicted him, with one person in a KKK hood and another in black face.

Northam has been a good governor so far, a rare Democratic moderate willing to work across the aisle. He's gotten excellent reviews from people of all races. Which is why we should not drive the man from office for this affront. We should judge him by the totality of his actions and not by one unfortunate offense, something which, if it occurred at all, would not have carried the same weight then that it does today.

What I took from "Green Book" was not just the necessity for change but also the need for forgiveness, for learning to see the world from another's perspective. Both men — the African-American pianist and the Italian-American driver — came to see the hollowness and futility of their positions. Both men changed.

What's happened now is that we have hardened into such rigid postures that we can't change; we can't see the world from other perspectives. There are certain boxes that, once ticked, result in total elimination.

If we keep this up, it will drive even the last good people from the pursuit of public office. We are reaping what we have sown.

(Photo: Wikipedia)

Guest Post

Mom would have been 93 today. In honor of her birthday, I'm letting her write the blog. This is A Walker in the Suburb's first guest post, and it's a posthumous one. Read it and know why I wanted to be a writer when I grew up — and why I miss her so. 

I was the third daughter born to parents who seemed desperately to want a son. All three of us girls were supposed to be Edward, named for each of my parent's oldest brothers. The son arrived three years after me, but wasn't named Edward after all. It seemed that my dad decided there might never be another boy and he thought tradition should be upheld. So my little brother was named Martin Joseph III.

Dad was right, of course. Our family of four was complete. Tradition had been upheld. Tradition had been upheld, too, when my older sisters were named. The first was named for my mother's mother, Margaret Donnelly, and the second for my father's mother, Mary Scott. When I arrived, another girl, there seemed to be quite a dilemma about what to call me. They had run out of grandmothers.

Dad suggested they call me Anne after my mother. But that didn't suit her. I have wondered why they didn't use Edwina, the feminine version of Edward. I'm certainly glad they didn't!

In the end, and in spite of Daddy's objections, Mother named me Suzanne for a nice lady who lived down the street, Suzanne Burk. I have often wished they had given me her full name, but they didn't. So I had no middle name until I could choose one when I was confirmed. I chose Rose and used it proudly whenever I could. I guess I thought it made me more complete.