Mittwoch, 22. August 2012

Snippets from Abroad 009

Being off the maps:

It is dark when the bus reaches the elusive Sra Em. The town isn't big, although I don't dare to guess the population as it would wildly differ from a German town of the same area. It's all centered around a circular traffic where three paved roads come together. At said circle is where the bus drops me off, the driver using several attempts at gestures and saying "Sra Em" until he gets through my stupid foreign skull that I have arrived and gotta get off. I grab my backpack from the mud by the side of the road, where it has been unloaded from the bus' belly together with the wares people brought here to sell, presumably on the market I can see stretching along one of the three roads. A moto-driver comes for me and asks in very broken English if I want a guesthouse. I assume that I'm too far away from anything for there to be any designated tourist-traps around here and agree, being glad enough to have found someone who has at least five or six words worth of a language I know (my attempts on the bus after English-Speaking-Guy had gotten off - "English? Deutsch? Pasa Thai? Nihongo? Okay I'll spare you the Latin..." hat been fruitless). He basically just drives me across the road, as the guesthouse is at the start of the market. He translates that I want a room and it's five dollars per night. Then he gets to the main course, as he knows why I am here and wants to be my driver tomorrow. "Seven AM" I tell him. "Eight?" he asks. "No. Seven." I say, wanting an early start and knowing it gets light around six. The room is tiny, a bit dirty and there are cracks in the boards where things I don't want to think about can crawl through. I have a fan that runs on the sputtering generator I hear from the backyard and the bathroom consists of a seatless toilet in a wetroom with a big bowl that serves as flush, shower and basin. Welcome to Cambodia. It starts to rain.

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