'A Bad Trip' - Something from the Writing Workshop

I haven't shared any of my writing from the Writing Workshop here yet - it must be time! I have been posting some of what I've been doing as comments on the Workshop's blog, so generously provided by Sue Ann Bowling.

Tomorrow is the last day of the workshop, and I'm messing up in ways that are unlike me. I got ink on a book that a professor loaned me and am mortified. I posted the piece I'm posting below on the workshop blog without editing it and am even more mortified - I just don't do things like that!  It's ok that it's a draft, not a polished piece, but it's not ok with me to post with glaring infelicities! And the way the blog is structured, you can't go back and fix it either. But I thought some folks who read my blog might enjoy this little snippet of a traveler's tale about my explorations in Cambodia five years ago, with the glaring infelicities tidied up. We had a visiting speaker discuss travel writing, and the relationship between reading/writing/travel - great discussion and food for thought. This little piece is in response to the assignment to write about:

A Bad Trip

I squeezed out of the bus at what I hoped was the southeast corner of Phnom Penh and looked for the transit center from which vehicles left for villages on the coast, although I had no clear idea of what this would look like. It soon became apparent that the giant swap-meet-come-junkyard on the other side of the four-lane road, barely visible through the traffic, was it. Once I'd negotiated the crossing, waving away the moto chauffeurs who cried 'lady, motor-cy,' I allowed myself to be accosted by someone selling rides out of town. 

I paid what seemed a reasonable fare, and hoped that my minimal Khmer was sending me where I was hoping to go. My ride was a two-door Toyota Tercel. The trunk was already full - it seemed I was a good match, with nothing but a small daypack and massing barely 90lbs. I clambered over the tipped-up driver's seat to squeeze myself in with a family of four; a smoochy pair of newlyweds rode shotgun. 

When we set off, I wondered whether the driver's horn was rigged to his gas pedal - he drove the car, but he rode the horn, and it seemed that every other similarly-loaded vehicle in the dense procession was rigged the same way. It was a continuous blare.

Our trip was punctuated within ten minutes, when the traffic, which had been moving at a reasonable speed, slammed to a halt, and the hood of the car slammed open, cracking the windshield, and stayed open so that none of us could see anything ahead. Nobody said a word. The driver kept on driving, until I seriously thought he intended to drive clear to Kampot with the hood in the windshield like that, and was earnestly relieved when he relinquished his spot in the line of traffic, jumped out, slammed the hood back down, and took to the horn again.

Once out of the greater urban bottleneck, we lost the traffic and soon found dirt roads lined with rice paddies and pools of gray-brown water in which naked children swam. The driver scarcely seemed to slow as the road rutted increasingly.The car had no suspension anyway. I gritted my teeth at my aching tailbone and was relieved that the mother of the family smiled so reassuringly whenever I was slammed against her.

I wondered why banana and papaya plants were not ubiquitous as they were in Thailand, where they could be seen even on railroad sidings, and whether the absence of this profusion of potentially cheap food was an index of the deeper poverty that was palpable here.

Kampot was smaller than I'd anticipated, the roads all umber dirt. I was dropped by the dusty traffic circle at the south end of what appeared to be the main road. The other passengers were to be dropped to their doorsteps here and there in town. Suddenly, I was alone. 

It was noon, searingly hot, no clouds in the sky yet but a taste of afternoon thunder in the air. Anybody with any sense was out of the heat - after the incessant, milling press of humanity in Phnom Penh it felt like a ghost town, although I would later learn that here too, if you sat quietly watching the river, someone would be pestering you within a minute.

I fished in my pack for food and a map, and ate the last of my eggfruit from the Psar oRusay - 'the Russian Market' in Phnom Penh - a huge multistory confusion of booths and vendors housed in what looked like a decrepit soccer stadium, while I tried to get my bearings. (At this point, the only name I had for 'eggfruit' was the Khmer -  'sodaa' that the vendor had taught me, although the crumbly, yolk-yellow, dry-sweet dense fruit matched everything I'd read about eggfruit. It had gotten squashed on the journey and was turning translucent, the dryness cloying. )

None of the streets were signed - not even in Khmer - so I wasn't confident of my bearings when I went in search of the tourist information office, but I did find the place I was looking for, a little farther from the crossroads market than I'd expected. It seemed deserted, like everywhere else. I called out a 'hello' and studied the white poster board of tourist activities, peeling red letters on peeling whitewash. As I hesitated, there was a throaty roar. Four dogs rushed out from the building next door, and began biting my legs.