Life & Near-Death in Cambodia

Half my life ago, when I was twice the idiot I am now, I flew to Cambodia to meet up with two friends who were riding tandem bicycles around the world. This was my first trip to a country without a sanitation department so naturally I was pretty excited.

The plan was for me to ride on the back of one of their bikes as we pedaled from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap and out to the temples of Angkor. When I say the plan I really mean my plan. The plan, according to my friends, was not only to cycle across Cambodia and the rest of the world but to live to tell about it.

My plans tend to lack such detail.

Pure Water, Pure Hell

Our first day in the saddle we pedaled just shy of a hundred kilometers, along undulating dirt roads cutting across dusty plains dotted with trees like hairy lollipops baking in the heat. The relentless sun and the utter lack of shade was impressive. The occasional village kept us, barely, on the more pleasurable side of dehydration.

At breakfast (plates of rice and mystery on a wobbly table at a roadside shack) and again at lunch (same thing except with chicken) my cycling buddies poured small packets of orange powder into their bottles of purified water. ‘Electrolytes,’ one of them said in response to my inquiry.

Pixie dust, I told myself.

But okay. These guys were biking around the world, they needed stuff like electrolytes. I was only there for a week. Besides I was no hotshot cyclist. I was a hotshot backseat rider on a budget. Plain water was good enough for me.

It was late afternoon when we rolled from the silence of the countryside into the silence of an empty town. We pedaled down a deserted street, passing tired two-story cement buildings that may well have been abandoned. Along a dirt road I gazed upon homes of wood and glassless windows, set back into the woods. Finally, in front of one house on stilts I saw a person. And some kind of buffalo cow hanging out underneath.

I had one thought in my head as we rolled up to our guest house. It was the same thought I had walking around in Phnom Penh. This town was nothing like any place I’d ever seen before.

My round-the-world cycling buddies had probably seen plenty of places like this before, and just wanted to chill on the garden patio. So I struck out on my own to explore.

Happy Hour at the Local Bamboo Bar

Later that evening, curled up on a hammock on that garden patio, I had one thought in my head. It was the same thought I had on a psychotic moped ride through Phnom Penh three days earlier.

I’m going to die here.

That purified water I’d been drinking in all day had, through some process I was probably supposed to have learned about in high school biology, sucked the very life forces from my system. My head was floating. My gut was committing suicide. Unable to keep down so much as a leaf of Cambodian lettuce, I begged the hammock to stop spinning and wondered how I might ask for electrolytes at a drug store in Cambodia – assuming I lived long enough to find one.

She clearly wears a hammock better than me.

But time heals all gastrointestinal debilities, and by morning I was back to my no-thoughts, no-plans self. We cycled more silent dirt roads, lined with forest dotted with primitive homes. Then someone flipped a switch and we were rolling along the Tonle Sap River, along a street crowded with hundreds of people, all of them very busy doing nothing.

Our mission... Okay my friends’ mission was to find out where to catch the boat to Siem Reap. My personal mission was to find some pixie dust.

Fire on the Water

The boat, we found out, would be roaring along any moment. We pushed the bikes across fifty feet of mud and trash to the river’s edge where we (okay, okay, my buddies) had figured out we should hire someone with a long skinny boat to take us out to the middle of the river and wait for the big boat to show up. We could only hope that the big boat would slow down long enough for us to throw ourselves and the bikes on board.

This was going to be great. We’d be spending the rest of what I mindlessly assumed would be a perfectly cool morning relaxing on the deck, putting back a few cold ones, watching the Cambodian countryside slip easily by.

We spent the next six sun-baked hours squatting on the roof of a floating, roaring, black-smoke-belching George Foreman frying skillet.

Fortunately I didn't spend the evening curled up clutching my stomach. Instead I spent it standing naked in the middle of my room so nothing would touch my sunburned skin and set my entire pitiful existence on fire. Again.

"Hey hey! You pale folks enjoying your floating George Foreman frying skillet?"

Good thing I didn’t sleep as their plan was to head out at four in the morning to pedal through the darkness, down to a black void where, they were sure, Angor Wat was standing.

The cool night air felt like heaven as we cruised along, the glow from my smoldering skin lighting our way.

As the glint of dawn ate away at the black blanket of night, revealing the outlines of Angkor Wat’s iconic lotus-shaped turrets; as the lilies on the ponds fronting the temple appeared, turning from gray to dull pink to miraculous; as the grandeur of this immense 12th century wonder once again began presenting itself to the world, three college-age mouths sitting ten feet away carried on in loud self-importance and unending stupidity.

I wanted to set them on fire.

The Spirituality of Almost Dying

The sun floated up and away from the tips of those lotus towers. The loudmouths shuffled away, oblivious, it seemed, to what they were ostensibly there to see. Along with a few scattered others (very quiet, very un-American) we began making our quiet way toward the temple, on a raised path made of about a million pounds stone, transported by boat and by hand a thousand years ago, by people who probably didn’t have electrolytes.

At the foot of the temple we were greeted with a staircase so steep it would be illegal in any society with rules. I looked around. All the other sets of stairs were equally suicidal. There was no sane option for anyone wishing to see the interior of Angkor Wat.

"Why are the steps so steep?"

The question can be asked two ways: with the sarcasm of a guy from New Jersey who is on fire or in the manner of honest inquiry. I did both in rapid succession.

The answer, as I overheard someone else’s guide explain, was because this was a place of reverence, of spiritual reflection, and having to navigate a Staircase of Death (not his words) helped keep one’s mind focused on why one is here. 

Or, in the case of a pair of pamphlet-peddling Jehovah’s Witnesses, help them forget.

In other words, entering via a doorway or staircase of normal proportions would not require any focus or effort, and one’s thoughts would wander toward things physically and conceptually far from this place. Climbing these precarious stone steps demanded attention from anyone not wishing to fall off them and die, so any mental clutter had to be stripped from one's consciousness, leading to a more meaningful, more spiritual experience.

Or, for some, one final selfie for Instagram. Uploaded automatically, just in case.

Not Almost Dying is Not Memorable

This kind of sums up my first few days in Cambodia. First that white-knuckle taxi ride through Phnom Penh on the back of that kid’s moped. Then my near-death no-electrolyte episode, followed by a sunburn that made me wonder if my health insurance, if I had any, covered skin grafts. And finally, the inexpressible experience of watching the sun rise over the lotus-shaped towers of Angkor Wat and the subsequent fear of plunging to my death from those same beautiful spires. These are the kinds of things that make a bike ride truly memorable.

Without them I probably wouldn’t remember anything.

All right, maybe I remember a few non-death-related things.

Plus now I know how to ask for electrolytes in Khmer.

Click to get the full story on Cambodia (plus a bonus trip to Thailand) without having to risk your life.