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| September
27th, 2003: HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA, by Carlo |
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I believe that travelling is often a good occasion for reflecting.
I never thought about a travel as an occasion of holiday -
better, I never perfectly related the concept of "holiday"
with the idea of emptying my head.
I mostly travel during my holidays because it's the only time
that I can dedicate to myself - and I dedicate it travelling.
Detaching from my everyday life is the antithesis to the equation
holiday=rest=no thoughts.
Holidays are the moment to "think". Yes, I need
to switch off my head, but only from the sleepiness of the
continuous cycle wake up - work - home - bed - times7 - less
the weekend.
On holiday I grow up, I observe, I learn, I gather new ideas.
Often I get really tired physically, but if it's true that
one should regenerate during holidays, then I need to come
back as a different person. My objective is actually to come
back slightly different from the way I was upon departure.
*****
Over two years have passed from our travel in Cambodia. It's
one of those travels from which I've come back really different.
Maybe not visibly, except some mosquito bite.
I believe that one can travel in Cambodia in several different
ways. We haven't chosen extreme means of transportation neither
had humanitarian purposes; we just traveled through a devastated
country, populated by devastated people. It's a country of moving
beauty and sticky melancholy, about the same way that the liquid
humidity envelops the air and suffocates everything, even during
the night.
I remember a famous Italian anchorman asking on TV "...why
tourism in countries like Cambodia, when Italy has so many beautiful
things; there must be some other purpose, surely sex tourism
or easy drugs". Not being able to send him there by kicking
his ass, and refusing by principle to write to newspapers, I
changed channel.
My possible reason for going to Cambodia sounds like "I
was in Saigon and had to go back to Bangkok; and I hate flying".
That's it, even though somebody could ask: "Why tourism
in Vietnam or Thailand, when Italy…"
We've crossed Cambodia as tourists, there's no other way to
put it. We slept in good hotels and, here and there, have been
accompanied by some local guide. Nothing adventuresome, nor
exceptional, nothing that anybody else could do, at the condition
of not being scared of travelling on the roof of a rusted and
overloaded boat, barely afloat, running upstream on a South-East
Asian river. But, I'm sure: none of the four of us has come
out of the western border of Cambodia in the same way we have
entered the eastern one.
It's been a holiday, yes. We were tired, dirty and crushed when
it was over. Maybe we even felt like small Indiana Jones'. Why
deny it?
I'm not sure if it's been for the subtle knowledge that, all
around us, everywhere, invisibile and therefore even more alarming,
we knew that thousands of landmines were hidden. At least, we'd
read so. The truth is that we haven't seen, felt, nothing. As
do-it-yourself tourists, but careful ones, the danger of mines
wasn't on our travel program. But this hasn't unluckily eliminated
the problem from our heads or our eyes. I'm being a provocateur
when writing "unluckily".
It's because of all those people around you. It's because of
the rehabilitation center in Phnom Penh. It's because, Indiana
Jones or not, you know that they're there for real. And it's
the sight of Japanese tourists in Angkor doesn't change things.
Angkor is beautiful. For how snobbish you are and for how you
can detest huge Japanese tourist groups, Angkor is beautiful.
But Cambodia, for me, is this:
© Thomas White © Reuters
I haven't felt struck when I found this picture on www.virgilio.it.
I haven't seen it as scandalous. For me this is, simply, a
piece of Cambodia, a travel from which I haven't come back
the same person as I was before. Does this picture let you
be the same person as before seeing it?
That's why this has been a travel that I loved, that allowed
me to make an unforgettable experience in an extraordinary
country. Because I've been "lucky" enough to have
my head wake up in front of real images like this one. Could
I have asked for more from a holiday?
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