I’ve been missing Cambodia a lot lately.
Obviously, I left a big part of me behind upon departure in 2015. But my early years in China were filled with positivity and endless excitement, as well as a significant amount of travel both domestic and international, so it’s not a loss that I dwelt upon for a long while. It’s only in the post-Covid era, and particularly since making a fateful decision to return to China instead of staying in Cambodia (where I was hiding out in early 2020), that the aching has become more palpable. Accentuating things recently is that on my way back from Mexico in April, I had a 24-hour layover in Vancouver, where I reconnected with an old pal from the wild, early days of Siem Reap. It was the first time we’d seen each other for fourteen (!) years. I loved catching up, reflecting, remembering.
So today I’ll look back at a quick weekend getaway to Battambang in 2011. This was about three months in to my stay in Cambodia, and though it’d been an incredible whirlwind where I’d made tonnes of new friends already, I did most of my travel around that time with my colleagues from school (overwhelmingly female, overwhelmingly awesome too) for scheduling reasons. My Vancouver buddy is the ‘other guy’ in these pics!
I don’t recall too much in the way of details here. Battambang at the time was Cambodia’s second-largest city (it’s been surpassed by Siem Reap since), though it was nonetheless an incredibly quiet place with little in the way of tourism infrastructure and amenities. There was one hotel in the centre of town – I think it was called the Royal? – which was pretty much the only decent place to stay. We’d befriended a Kiwi NGO worker who was based here during a random night out (all NGO workers stationed in the country would descend on either Siem Reap or Phnom Penh for their partying in this era!) and we decided to take a little trip that way to see both her and a little bit more of the country.
There wasn’t so much to do in the town itself back then – we had to convince restaurants and bars to stay open for us IIRC – so the highlights of the trip were two excursions that we did. One to Phnom Sampeau, a site of both historical trauma (the Khmer Rouge executed people in what’s subsequently become known as the ‘Killing Caves’ here) and natural beauty (thanks to the millions of bats that pour out from the caves during sunset, as pictured above). The second was to what was called the ‘Bamboo Train’, a delightfully-basic mode of ‘rail’ travel that functioned as a thrill ride for many a Cambo expat at the time. It no longer exists in its old form, so this really is a little time capsule I’m indulging in.
The day of the Bamboo Train was an especially beautiful one, and the pics we took then are some of my favourites from this point in life. I had one of them printed out and placed on my wall for the next four years. It encapsulated so much of what Cambodia was shaping up to be for me. The sunshine, the abandon, the opportunity to contort oneself into seemingly stupid shapes free from the judgment of the world that I’d grown up in. I loved the people I was meeting too. People from different backgrounds, nations, of different ages – united by a shared purpose in trying to do something positive for a country that had suffered so much. Of course, that whole ‘saviour complex’ is problematic to a certain extent and deserves to be scrutinised, but I don’t think I’ll ever find such a group of like-minded progressives again. I still naively believe that we – as in the ones I chose to befriend, of course – were all there due to our pure, unimpeachable love of our host nation. I’m sad that I’ve completely lost contact with a couple of the folks in these pics, although I’m also grateful that there are others who I maintain connections with to this day and who I’ve been lucky enough to see multiple times since.
It’s interesting looking back at these images on a personal level too. Clothes very much on – overdressed if anything! My confidence had been burgeoning following my relocation to Cambodia, but there were lingering body image issues. I’d considered myself grotesquely ugly growing up, and various experiences during adolescence seemingly reinforced that in my mind. I hated how skinny and misshapen I was, and was determined to hide the body that I loathed under as much outerwear as possible – something that requires real commitment when you’re living in a country with a tropical climate! Admittedly, Cambodia was quickly teaching me that the way that I saw myself was not how others saw me – I’d regularly get called ‘handsome’ by students, by passersby on the street, by other expats – but I hadn’t yet taken things to heart. Clothes were still protection; a defense mechanism that kept unwanted eyes at bay. It would take a couple of years, and a few more emotional wounds, before I’d flip completely and start taking clothes off as my defense mechanism instead! Young me, eh.
I don’t want to fetishise the past. I know it can never return. And I know that Battambang as it exists in these images can never come back either. I stayed with a close friend there a few years ago and it was already a very different town. Bars, restaurants, something vaguely resembling a nightlife, a small but noticeable expat community. But I miss the zest for life that I had at this time. And the wide-eyed wonder; the lens through which I viewed the world around me. I’ve been so so privileged to have travelled so much of the planet in the ensuing years, and it’s not something that I would ever complain about (how crass that would be!) – but perhaps that serial adaptability that I’ve developed, that ability to just throw things into a backpack and hit the ground running wherever I happen to be, has required the loss of something else. An innocence, an artless obliviousness to danger (not that Battambang was in any way dangerous). An unworldly appreciation for everything and everyone that surrounded me. The years have worn down the outpouring of love, and they’ve fine-tuned the awareness of my surroundings to superhuman levels. But right now, I don’t care for the ‘super’ anymore. I miss that perpetually-uncertain kid, still easing his way into this wild new chapter of life, but relishing every minute of it in a nation – and at a time – that’ll never be surpassed in my increasingly-battered old head.
Click here for more Battambang images.
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