Mr Kousou gestured towards an abandoned-looking structure on the far shore. ‘You can sleep across the river, in the schoolhouse’, he added. ‘The boat will leave tomorrow morning at seven.’
‘Is there a phone? I need to make some calls.’
‘There is no phone in Bak Prea.’
‘Do you have a mobile?’
‘There is no coverage in Bak Prea.’
So much for the on-time performance of the Wanker Express Boat Company. My drinking water was gone, I’d run out of food, and the mosquitoes had begun their evening strafing. Well, duty-free Captain Morgan rum and cheap paperback novels were made for magic times like these.
Just after 7pm, I had to rub my groggy eyes when another boat rumbled through the gloom and tied up alongside us. A dozen Khmer passengers flung themselves, their suitcases and fifty-kilogram sacks of rice onto the dock.
‘From Battambang’, Mr Kousou said. ‘Now it goes back.’
The waiting backpackers boarded with the urgency of refugees; they wanted to escape Bak Prea come hell or low water. Overcome with pity, I thrust my fifth of Captain Morgan into the hands of the nearest passenger.
‘Drink it wherever you end up tonight’, I said.
In a moment the travellers had vanished, and only the fading throb of the engine broke the silence of the night.
During this flurry of activity Ales, our captain and the deckhand miraculously materialised and prepared to get under way.
‘Now we go to Siem Reap’, Mr Kousou said.
As our boat’s engine sputtered to life, Ales seemed disappointed. ‘I don’t want to leave tonight’, the Czech told me. ‘I want to leave tomorrow morning, so I can photograph the river. Now it is impossible.’
‘Look around’, I replied. ‘There is no other boat to Siem Reap. The next boat is this boat, and it has to make it to Siem Reap first. It might come back here tomorrow, or it might not. If you wait, there’s a good chance you’ll spend tomorrow night here, too.’
I intended to be on the next, and only, thing smoking from Bak Prea. Any forward progress was a small victory. Ales considered his grim options: flee now or possibly spend an eternity photographing this dismal hamlet. He dropped his pack into the boat.
Remy and Ben were still nowhere to be found. While I stalled for time, Mr Kousou sent a boy off in a pirogue to search for two barang in a karaoke bar across the river. It was eight o’clock before the pair strolled back to the dock with an Angkor Beer glow.
‘You been waiting for us?’ Remy asked.
As they boarded, a sense of dumbfounded panic overtook Ben.
‘Where’s my pack?’ he asked.
We shifted around the rice sacks, to no avail. In the backpacker chaos of loading the earlier boat for Battambang, someone had tossed Ben’s luggage aboard. He sank glumly onto a hard seat. At best, Angkor Express might find his bag and hold it in Battambang. I thought of a line from Apocalypse Now, an even worse river voyage through Cambodia: never get off the fucking boat.
I kept the moral to myself. We set off downriver with no life jackets, a single, naked hundred-watt light bulb for a running light, and the young deckhand on the prow with a flashlight. Our boat blundered along the Sangke for hours, ploughing over fish traps and through islands of water hyacinth, occasionally backing off sandbars or swerving to avoid tiny, unlit sampans. There were other maritime hazards as well: floating pigsties, gardens, homes – even billiard halls and saloons.
Every few kilometres the captain nosed the bow ashore and deposited a Cambodian passenger and an enormous sack of rice. Around midnight we arrived in Prek Toal, a large floating village where the Sangke emptied into the Tonlé Sap. Thankfully, our captain now had no appetite for crossing the pitch-black lake.
‘You stay with me’, Mr Kousou announced. ‘Here.’
The boat tied up to a barge along the left bank of the river. Above the doorway of the bobbing building, I could make out a Cambodian flag hanging limply in the heat. We would spend the night in Prek Toal’s floating police post. Mr Kousou intended to make damn sure nothing untoward happened to four foreigners on his beat.
Reed mats were quickly unrolled on the hardwood planks, mosquito nets were strung up from the rafters, and in a few minutes I had succumbed to flat-line sleep. I’d never imagined a Third World jail would feel so good.
The next morning passed as if in a fever-ridden dream: up at five-thirty; a dash through fishing weirs and across the placid Tonlé Sap at sunrise to Chong Khneas, the port of Siem Reap; then a five-dollar taxi ride (an outrageous price) to my hotel. I stumbled into the chic, art-filled lobby of the Shinta Mani a day overdue and immediately dispatched my filthy clothes to the laundry. The five-hour trip had taken more than a full day.
My travelling companions were still back at Chong Khneas, haggling over the cost of motorcycle taxis to Siem Reap. The Angkor Express Boat Company had promised free transfers into town, and they refused to pay the dollar fare the moto drivers demanded. It was their principles versus local poverty – a long, unwinnable argument.
As I soaked in a warm bath the size and – thanks to my dirt-encrusted condition – colour of a buffalo wallow, I thought of Mr Kousou. Earlier that morning, I’d given the dutiful policeman a few thousand riel for his hospitality, as well as a small bottle I’d been given from a drink cart on my flight to Bangkok. He had cradled the screw-top container in his hands with a wonder beyond that of any economy-class passenger, then summoned an English word rarely heard along the brown, greasy banks of the Sangke River.
‘Wine!’ Mr Kousou said delightedly.
I didn’t have a durian. The Burgundy had to do.
ON SAFARI, ONLY THE ANIMALS SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT
KELLY WATTON
Kelly Watton has been chased by wild horses on Georgia’s Cumberland Island, stalked by a hyena in Botswana and jumped on by a monkey in the Peruvian Amazon. She has travelled near and far to see animals in the wild, but she’s starting to get the impression they’re not so happy to see her. When she’s not daydreaming about Africa, Kelly writes travel stories for newspapers in the US. She lives in Atlanta.
When I woke up it was cold and black inside the tent. It felt like I’d been asleep for hours. The sweet, charred smell of citronella incense hung in the crisp air. At first, I didn’t know whether I had heard a noise or caught the tail end of a dream. I lay still, holding my breath and listening for anything.
Before long, the sharp crack of breaking wood punctured the silence. Only this time, it didn’t stop. Limbs snapped repeatedly, as if something was walking over the fallen branches outside. I had every reason to believe that something was a lion.
Yesterday after arriving in Botswana, my husband, West, and I had flown into the Okavango Delta, where southern Africa’s Okavango River empties into the flat sands of the Kalahari Desert. Supplying much-needed nourishment, the Delta draws Africa’s magnificent wildlife into this untamed and unfenced region. We were visiting during the dry season, when the streams that spill out from the river would be dried up, and those animals would stay close to the few remaining waterholes.
When our plane touched down on the parched, dirt airstrip, a game ranger named Phinley greeted us and took us by Land Rover to our safari camp. As we approached it, I noticed charred wood lying all around. Phinley explained that last year lightning had struck a tree and started a fire. In the blaze, the entire camp had burned to the ground.
The rebuilt Chitabe Trails was now a fairly primitive place with just five tents sitting directly on the uneven earth. Phinley showed us to the common area, a couple of wooden decks and another tent with the sides rolled up, where Kenny, the camp manager, waited for us.
Kenny explained that for now West and I were the only guests. As we sat on wooden stools under the canvas roof, he went over our schedule for the next few days. While Kenny was talking, Phinley walked out onto a platform ahead of us. Peering across a sea of golden grass, he turned back and waved an arm wildly. ‘Lions’, he
called in a tempered shout.
We rushed along the deck to where Phinley stood. About fifty metres away, three female lions were walking on the other side of a small waterhole. A cub wandered along behind them, barely visible in the knee-high grass.
After two weeks in Africa, West and I had seen lions regularly, but we had always been sitting in a Land Rover, a game ranger ready at the wheel to drive away in the event of a problem. Standing in the warm sun, I looked around for a place to retreat to, and that’s when I realised – here, canvas tents were our only option.
‘Wow, they’re right there’, I said, feeling more than a little exposed. ‘But it’s safe to be out here on the deck, right?’
‘Sure’, Phinley replied.
As we watched, the lions plopped down for a nap. I kept one eye trained in their direction as Kenny walked with us down the sand path to our tent. A quiet man with a habit of whistling under his breath, Kenny explained that, since we were spending our anniversary in the camp, the staff had given us the tent with the best view. Admittedly, I should have been grateful, but I had noticed that it was also the tent closest to the waterhole. I told him it wasn’t a special anniversary, so there really was no need to give us such a tent, but Kenny insisted.
Our army-green home for the next few days sat to the left of the common area and away from the other tents. A large sausage tree shaded one corner of it. Beneath the tree, the grey mud of a termite mound rose two metres into the air.
Once inside the tent, Kenny turned to us and said, ‘The animals really like this camp. It’s probably because we don’t have the raised walkways that other camps have, so it’s easier for them to walk around. They come into camp all the time.’ Then he picked up a red metal canister that sat on a rattan shelf between the bed and the toilet. Kenny explained that if we had an emergency in the middle of the night, we should sound the air horn, adding, ‘An emergency is not a lion rubbing up against your tent. An emergency is a lion trying to get into your tent.’
That night, as I lay in the dark listening to the snapping of branches outside, it occurred to me that I should have asked Kenny what a lion trying to get into a tent would sound like. And what did he mean by ‘trying’? What would it take for the king of beasts to get through canvas? Wouldn’t one swipe of a clawed paw be enough?
‘Do you think it’s a lion?’ I whispered.
‘Probably’, West replied.
With that, I tried to remember what our time in Africa had taught me about lions, and this is what I came up with. Lions hunt at night. They need only one-seventh the light that humans need to see. If you come across a lion on foot, stop and don’t move. Like all cats, they will chase you if you move. There wasn’t one encouraging fact among them.
And then, having awakened in the middle of the night, I realised that I had to go to the toilet. I looked towards the flaps on the front of the tent. They were nothing more than mesh screens. In the silver moonlight, I could see the faint shadows of tree limbs outside blowing in the breeze. I knew that whatever was out there could surely see us inside the tent.
‘West’, I whispered, ‘I have to pee.’
‘Then go’, he said.
‘I’m not getting out of this bed. What if it sees me moving?’
‘Can you wait?’ he asked.
‘Maybe.’
As we whispered, the cracking of wood outside grew louder and louder, until finally it sounded as if the animal was right behind our bed. West and I were silent, and then suddenly there was a dry whoosh as the animal brushed against the canvas. I began to shake uncontrollably.
‘Are you cold?’ West whispered.
‘Terrified’, I squeaked.
I reached through the tangled mosquito net and slowly moved my hand through the dark until I felt the cold metal of the air horn. I grabbed it, pulled it through the netting and hugged it to my chest.
‘What are you doing?’ West asked.
‘I want to blow the horn’, I whispered.
‘Don’t you dare.’
‘It rubbed against the tent’, I pleaded.
‘What do you think it’s going to do if you blow that horn? Put it down.’
‘No.’
While we bickered, we began to hear crunching. It sounded as if the animal outside was eating.
‘Great. There’s no way I’m going to the toilet now.’
‘It’s probably fine’, West insisted.
‘Probably?’ I asked. ‘Will you go with me?’
‘No, it’s right there’, he argued. ‘Just go.’
‘I’m not getting out of this bed’, I said.
‘Well, you’re certainly not going in the bed.’
I tried to summon the courage to get up, but each time I imagined I could see a lion lying in the pale moonlight, gnawing on a bloody bone. If it saw my shadowy figure moving inside the tent, it would surely burst through the canvas. My pyjama pants would dangle around my ankles as it dragged me off the toilet and my husband finally decided it was time to sound the horn.
As I imagined all the painful ways a lion could kill us, the animal began to make a deep, guttural noise that sounded vaguely like a purr. Or maybe it was a growl, I couldn’t be certain. All I knew was at that moment the only thing that separated West and me from a 225-kilo, man-eating cat was a sheet of canvas. I began to pray. I knew we’d tempted fate on this trip: first a cage dive with great white sharks, then a microlight flight over Victoria Falls and now a remote camp in the Okavango Delta with a hungry animal outside. I vowed to reform my daredevil ways, if only we were spared from the jaws of a lion.
I don’t know how long the purring lasted, but it felt like hours. All the while, West and I lay still, listening for the sound of ripping canvas, and I prayed that the pain that was spreading into my ribcage wouldn’t cause my bladder to burst. When the guttural noise finally stopped, it wasn’t long before we again heard the rhythmic snapping of branches.
‘It’s leaving’, West whispered.
I waited until I could no longer hear a sound before racing to the toilet. When I returned to bed, there was, of course, no point in trying to sleep. I knew the company that owned this camp had thirteen other camps in the Delta, and I resolved that first thing in the morning I would beg Kenny to move us to a place with raised walkways. For good measure, I rehearsed my request until it had just the right mix of reason and unabashed hysteria.
I was still practising my plea when the blue light of dawn crawled across the Delta and a member of the camp staff came to wake us for breakfast. As West and I sat in the cool morning air having coffee and muffins with the staff, West explained our rough night. At first, Kenny looked amused. But when he heard that I was ready to sound the horn, the look on his face changed to something resembling dread.
From the far end of the wooden table, Moss, one of the guides, had been listening to the conversation. ‘Did it sound like this?’ she asked, making a rasping sound in the back of her throat.
‘That was it. Was it a lion?’ West asked.
‘You heard an elephant’, Moss laughed.
‘An elephant?’ I said.
‘Yeah. They like to sleep propped up against the termite mounds. I used to have one outside my tent every night. It would snore something terrible.’
Maybe I should have been relieved to learn that West and I had not spent the night about to be devoured by a lion. But I was too busy imagining what a sleeping elephant might do if it were suddenly awakened by an air horn.
SOMETHING APPROACHING ENLIGHTENMENT
ROLF POTTS
Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. His travel writing has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Adventure, Salon.com, The Best American Travel Writing 2000 and numerous Lonely Planet anthologies. Though he keeps no permanent address, he tends to linger in Thailand, Argentina, rural Kansas and France, where he is the summertime writer-in-residence at the Paris American Academy. His online home is w
ww.rolfpotts.com.
For weeks after returning from my ill-fated journey to the Indian Himalayan village of Kaza, I had difficulty explaining to people why I’d wanted to go there in the first place. Sometimes I’d claim it had something to do with the Dalai Lama – though someone would always point out, correctly, that the Dalai Lama lived in the Tibetan exile capital at Dharamsala, not in some obscure mountain outpost several days in the other direction.
I had no easy answer to this seeming discrepancy. Granted, the Dalai Lama was reputed to travel to Kaza once each summer – but I’d gone there in the winter. And while rumour had it that the Dalai Lama planned to spend his twilight years in a monastery just up the valley from Kaza, the famous Tibetan holy man was nowhere near retirement at the time of my visit. In the end, I suppose my decision to gain an understanding of the Dalai Lama by going where he didn’t live was grounded in a vague fear of disappointment – a fear that (as with other religious destinations I’d visited in India, such as Varanasi and Rishikesh) Dharamsala had become so popular with other Western travellers that any spiritual epiphanies I found there would feel forced and generic.
By contrast, the Indo-Tibetan village of Kaza was the most remote Himalayan destination I could reach by road in late winter. There, in the cobbled alleyways of an ancient and windswept Buddhist village, I imagined I might find a more authentic vision of what the Dalai Lama represented. Far from the well-worn lanes of Dharamsala, I hoped I might better be able to discover something approaching enlightenment.
Thus, from the northern Indian hub city of Shimla, I’d walked to the far end of the bus terminal – past the backpack-toting crowds of Westerners headed to Dharamsala – and boarded the first in a series of buses that would take me to my far-flung Himalayan Shangri-La.
While still within the fog of my initial inspiration, it was fairly easy to rationalise a three-day bus ride through the remote Himalayas. Once I was actually en route to Kaza, however, I immediately realised that my whimsical pilgrimage could very well get me killed. The copy of the Hindustan Times that I’d bought in Shimla, for instance, devoted an entire front-page story to grisly mountain bus crashes. ‘At least forty people were killed when a bus plunged into a tributary of the Ravi River yesterday evening’, the article read. ‘Earlier in the day, eight people died and thirteen were injured when a truck carrying them fell into a gorge thirty-five kilometres from Manali.’
By the Seat of My Pants Page 5