My Cambodian moto-dup driver made the mistake of casually inviting me to his rural home for a night or two, and I quickly grabbed the opportunity to see a part of the country not on the tourist trail with what I’m sure he perceived as disconcerting enthusiasm.
Narun, an orphaned Khmer Rouge survivor who fought in the Cambodian Army before becoming a motodup driver, lives two hours from Phnom Penh in a place called Mekong Island – a massive, tropical sand spit in the middle of Asia’s largest river which is only accessible by ferry.
The travel time and petrol costs involved in a trip from there to the city centre where Narun makes his living means it isn’t practical for him to return home after work. So like hundreds of other drivers in the Cambodian capital, Narun works all day and then sleeps rough on the back of his bike for most nights of the week. When money and time permit, usually once or twice a week, he heads home to spend time with his family.
It was a dusty, uncomfortable drive across the city and through the slums on Phnom Penh’s outskirts on our way to the Mekong Island ferry – essentially a wooden shed nailed onto some floating barrels with a beat-up old motor strapped on the back.
My fellow travellers were highly amused by both the presence of a barang – who were nowhere to be seen since leaving the city – and the look of dread I imagine I was sporting.
So we skidded down the steep, muddy embankment and onto the hodge-podge of a craft just as it spluttered into life and began to move away from the shore. I tried to keep calm as smiling faces beamed all around me.
“Hullloooo!” said a small Khmer girl in a tattered red dress from behind her mother’s skirt. “Hello!” I answered with a smile. The rest of the group erupted into giggles and words of congratulations for the brave young girl who had dared to converse with the oddity in their midst.
Before I knew it the ‘ferry’ had beached itself on the other side, and I scrambled off to help Narun push his moto up the steep, gravelly bank.
“Remember Rob, we are very poor!” he warned me for the thousandth time.
The island itself was stunning. Trees heavy with mangoes, bananas, coconuts and a range of other unrecognisable fruits were partially concealed by beautifully constructed, if basic, stilted teak houses. The land occasionally opened up to reveal verdant fields dotted with lazily grazing livestock and bent figures in conical hats.
It was obvious that tourists were a rarity on Mekong Island, and necks craned as we sped towards Narun’s home. He was visibly brightening the closer we got to his house, and when we finally arrived it wasn’t difficult to see why. His two daughters ran up to us, giggling and screaming from under his stilted abode while his wife walked smiling from the house’s main room.
The poverty in the area was obvious in the absence of electricity or running water, but Narun and his family had found a way of living which made their happiness depend much less on such trivialities.
To be continued...
