Rielizations of wallet and of self

The currency situation here is somewhat unusual in that the country is 95% dollarized.  Most everything is quoted in dollars, not just the hotels and restaurants catering to tourists—everything from 600-acre plots of land to plates of curry are priced in USD.  The only things that really can’t be paid for in dollars are those that cost less than $1, in which case you’re looking at payment in riels.  To convolute things slightly further, the riel is still very much alive and in use in denominations up to 20,000 (the largest I’ve seen and the equivalent of $5), so it’s certainly possible to use it for amounts more than that; in the local marketplaces, some vendors even prefer seem to prefer riels.  Oh, and the cashpoints?  Most of them dispense USD, but the ANZ Bank ones will ask you which currency you’d like to withdraw.

It is entirely possible for tourists to spend their entire stay dealing in dollars, and I at least started out with a wallet full of American currency, which is definitely preferred for larger amounts like my 3-day pass to Angkor and horseback trek out to Wat Athvea.  Once I got into the heart of Siem Reap’s local marketplace, though, with its glistening sides of beef slapped on wooden tables down one side and rainbow of bagged spices down the other, it was riels all the way.  Same with the fruit vendors from whom I bought cut-up green mangos sprinkled with chili and lime, same with the kids using machetes to hack off the top of baby green coconuts and proffering straws, same with the little corner store where I bought a pack of tissues.  At the more local dining establishments, which tend to be my go-to, my change came half in dollars, half in riels, and at one point I became aware that my wallet had been substantially rielized.  By the time I got to Sihanoukville, I had enough to pay for my guesthouse completely in riels, though, to be fair, the bill came to 24,000, the equivalent of a whopping $6.

The evolution of my billfold has kind of mirrored the evolution of my entire trip, to be frank.  The place I stayed in Siem Reap was a luxury, a lush, calm, and quietly posh retreat, and having my own tuk-tuk driver for three days to show me around the ruins was a lovely convenience.  The private car to Phnom Penh, too, was a luxury, and my hotel in the city was also beautifully done and wouldn’t have looked out of place in Rome or Paris.

After Phnom Penh, though, there was a noticeable change, very much without my planning it that way.  The plan was to take a bus at 8am for the four-hour trip, which really isn’t that long, and I figured I would have more than enough of a time cushion to book my ticket at 1pm for a 2pm ferry out to the island of Koh Rong.  (I said I would do the long-distance bus thing again, didn’t I?)  The driver of said bus, unfortunately, seemed to have zero sense of urgency and was more concerned with taking frequent smoke breaks than getting us to Sihanoukville, so after leaving 20 minutes late we rolled into the station at 1.30.  I knew I was pushing it already, so when the first guy approached my backpack and me asking if I wanted to go somewhere, I said, “YES!  Koh Rong Dive Center, please.”  He pulled out a moto, which, given the weight and bulk of the pack, wouldn’t have been my first choice (a tuk-tuk seemed the more stable option), but whatever.  He hauled it up so it perched in front of him between the handlebars, swung aboard, and gave me a hand arranging myself on the back.  “Oh, and we need to go fast,” I told him.

Well, he took that to heart.  As we pelted down one of Sihanoukville’s many hills and whipped past cars and tuk-tuks, my inclination was that I would be much less likely to go flying off when we rounded the next corner if I grabbed the driver around the middle, like a chimpanzee, but I can only imagine how that would look to Cambodian onlookers and wasn’t particularly keen on embracing a stranger anyway.  Instead I gripped the side of the seat with one hand and steadied my handbag with the other, ensuring that at least my laptop wouldn’t make a flying exit (I did not fancy having to explain that to the company’s IT department).   I thought briefly of my smooth ride in the back of the car down to Phnom Penh, which, from the back of the mud-spattered moto, seemed a lifetime ago.

We skidded to a halt at the dive center at 1.45, where I relayed the story of my incompetent bus driver and made an impassioned plea to get on the 2pm boat to no avail.  “Do you know another place that runs ferries out, maybe later?” I asked my speed demon moto driver, who nodded, and we were back on the road.  After a loop of the Gold Lion traffic circle and a quick left turn, we were at another little travel shop, which, unfortunately, had also sent out its last ferry for the day.

An extremely tan and bony American woman came out to explain, “The waves are really high at this hour.  Like mountains.”  She widened her eyes and made mountain shapes with her hands as she said this.  She may or may not have been high.  “So the thing to do would be get the 8 o’ clock boat tomorrow morning.”  She gestured around at the basic but functional guesthouse behind her and shrugged.  “Just stay here for the night.  Do you want a beer?”

And I did stay, paying less than what I would for a trip on BART for a room of my own and cold running water.

(I declined the beer, though, in favor of a few pina coladas down on Otres Beach later that afternoon.  Another story for another time.)

From there, I’ve gone straight back down the dirty backpacker path.  I hopped an early ferry to Koh Rong, which makes the experience sound much quicker and easier than it actually was, as we were sailing straight into a morning storm (ah, rainy season rears its head).  The boat itself was functional and admittedly more comfortable than it looked, with its hard wooden benches on the bottom deck and its paint peeling off.  The top bit had plastic curtains that we were able to roll down to shield against the rain along with a mess of faded cushions on the floor, so I spent the ride supine, listening to music and rather enjoying the four-foot swells.  Luxurious, however, it was not.

Here on Koh Rong, I’m staying in a bungalow up in the trees, overlooking the village of Koh Tach and the wide crescent of white sand, just me, a mosquito net, a bucket shower, and electricity until 10pm (the entire island runs off a generator, which should give you some idea of how few people there are here).  If I look down I can see the jungle floor through the gaps in my floorboards and when I listen very carefully I can hear the footsteps of the geckos in the nooks of the palapa roof.  It is nothing more or less than I really need out here on this most storybook of islands.

Who needs maid service in a place like this?

In this way, I guess, I haven’t really changed that much since I was eighteen.  I’ve got my same backpack, which has made quite the tour with me at this point, same flip flops, same bikini even, and along with all that, my same fondness for unidentifiable street food and the rustic sort of lull that comes with traveling the developing world.  Sitting in the car from Siem Reap, I think that a small part of me was worried that I was getting too old to ever experience this, or rather, actually enjoy experiencing this, again.  But I’ve found myself here in my very unattractive but comfortable Indonesian fisherman pants, wandering the village barefoot without a stitch of makeup, hair tied up in an unkempt chignon and reasoning that a dip in the ocean is just as good as a shower.  Sure enough, I’ve accumulated the wristwear that seems to inevitably find its way onto your body when you backpack, in this case a lime-green woven bracelet from one of the incense women at Angkor (“long life,” remember) and a brown-checkered ropey thing that a little girl gave me when I bought a coconut from her family’s stand.

And so, as the dollars in my wallet have turned to riels, I’ve turned from a clean and somewhat respectable-looking traveler to the sort of bronzed but kind of grimy-looking douchebag backpacker that people don’t like standing next to in the airport.

Compared to a lot of the Westerners here, though, I’m not actually that grimy (I feel that this is important to point out), and I’ll confess that I booked the nicest resort in Sihanoukville for my last night in Cambodia (the five-star experiences comes pretty cheap here).  A hot shower, a massage, and a cup of coffee and I’ll look much less feral for my flight to Seoul.

Still, it’s nice to know that in this way, at least, I’m far from being “too old,” which is something that a lot of us twentysomethings seem to fear, probably irrationally.  I may not be able to throw back shots and stay out as late as I once did, and yes, I actually enjoy things like furniture shopping and Burgundian wine now, but I’ve got a few more years of chicken buses and bucket showers left yet.  Here’s to being a dirty backpacker.

For your viewing pleasure, see below for some photos of the dirty backpacking days of yore.

In Tunisia, instead of taking the bus from Douz to Djerba, we splurged and hired this guy and his car.

c

The buds on a long-distance coach ride up the west coast of Ireland.  This was the trip where at one point we got so cold and hungry that the three of us devoured a roast chicken on a bench in about two minutes.

Harem pants?  Check.  Dirty cloth bag?  Check.  Clearly unwashed hair?  Check.  Enthusiastic but not entirely appropriate adoption of local culture?  Check.  (In my defense, the bindi was a gift.)