Forever a Foreigner

I stood outside my one-room apartment. It was nearly 4 AM. I had padlocked my front door and gone outside the gate with my one suitcase and a plastic basket for my cat. Said cat was on my shoulder, because I had already discovered that he hated the basket and would meow as loudly as he could until I let him out. This did not bode well for the journey ahead.

The sky was full of stars, and the street was dark and dead silent. There were dogs about. They had barked when I first came out, but now they had settled down. One was lying in the middle of the street a few doors down. I could see his black shape in the starlight.

I waited. I found Orion. Something hit the back of my head. Probably a bat. Once in a while a vehicle or a moto would turn down the street and drive by. I turned my head away so that my foreign face wouldn’t show in the headlights. I didn’t want to attract unnecessary curiosity.

Yesterday I had called the van driver on the number my landlady had given me.

“Yes?”

I could hear loud noises on the other end. “Hello, Uncle. Are you driving people to Phnom Penh tomorrow morning?”

“Yes, yes! How many?”

“One. How much is it for one person?”

“15,000. We leave at 4 at night.” Fifteen hundred riel was $3.50. ‘At night’ meant before sunrise.

He hung up.

I had stared at the phone, perplexed. He didn’t know where I lived. This was my first time traveling across Cambodia solo, and I fretted about the details. But the van driver must have saved my number, because he had called me around 3:30 to ask me for my location. In the province, Cambodian houses don’t have addresses.

“I’m by the high school,” I had said.

“Which high school?”

Which high school? Wasn’t the driver from town? “Um, Hun Sen High School.”

The driver tsked, and I remembered that every other high school in Cambodia is named Hun Sen High School, since Hun Sen is the prime minister. “In Ov Reang Ou,” I added.

“With the highway arch?” Schools (and Buddhist temples) that are off a main road usually have a decorative arch with the institution’s name over the road entrance.

“Yes,” I said, and gave him my landlady’s name. “I’m renting a room from Teacher ____.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” he said, and hung up.

I waited. He called twice more. I told him I was waiting down the road.

Finally, a van swung down my street. I dropped my cat, Tip, into his basket and waited. Headlights blinded me, and the van driver hopped out.

I had expected more of a reaction to my foreign features, but probably my clumsy directions had given me away. He took my luggage, put it in the trunk, and opened the door for me. I scooted to the far side of the middle seat. Then I took Tip out and put him on my lap to keep him quiet.

Uncle Van Driver got in, and we started off. Nobody else was in the van, but he told me we were going to pick up so-and-so. With fatherly admonishment, he told me what the name of this district was. “Next time, say that,” he said. I had no way to write it down and forgot it immediately. Great.

“I went to this high school when I was a boy,” Uncle Van Driver went on, and told me about it. He expounded on his travels throughout Cambodia and about how long he had been doing this job. I was tired from getting up at 3 AM and did not catch it all. I explained that I was a teacher and what I was doing in the area.

We stopped to pick up his friend. The two men chatted, and Uncle Van Driver informed the man about the Miss Foreigner Teacher. I sat back and petted Tip, who wanted very much to explore the van. I wasn’t sure that Uncle Van Driver knew that there was a cat in the vehicle.

We stopped at the market. There were lights here, and the early morning sellers who dealt in breakfast foods were up. Uncle asked me if I wanted any coffee.

“No, that’s ok,” I said.

He and his friend disappeared for a while. When they came back we embarked on a long, convoluted journey to pick people up. Uncle was constantly calling people and getting calls. He hunted down his passengers all around town and in the next. Halfway through he remembered that COVID-19 was an issue and told us to put masks on. Then he drove up and down the main road, hammering on the horn (which made a very distinct sound) to see if there were any last minute passengers who wanted to get a ride. There were.

We were now just about as filled up as we could get. Many of the passengers had done a double take as they got in. A young foreign woman was probably the last thing they expected to see in a provincial van at 5 in the morning.

Now at last, a little after 5 AM, we rocketed to Phnom Penh. Why did we have to leave so early? To avoid the police, of course. The police of the eastern provinces were notoriously corrupt and would stop vehicles at the slightest excuse and “fine” them. If you can’t dodge the police, get up earlier than them!

It was two hours to the capital, and as we went along I saw the police coming out to set up their check points. But they weren’t ready for business yet, so we slipped on by.

Weeks later I would take his van in the other direction, after the police were out. Turns out that Uncle Van Driver was a pro. You never saw a more efficient police-dodger.

At the very first police checkpoint he didn’t even wait to get pulled over. He just hopped out without saying a word to anybody and stuck some money in a box. Next, as we headed down the road, he called his buddies, “Hey, where are the police at? Any stops?” He was constantly on the phone, getting tips and giving them.

A few minutes later he told one of the people in the front to squeeze into the middle seat for a few minutes until we passed another police checkpoint.

(I had more luggage coming back, so we had arranged to reserve a full seat. This was pricey. $20. This reservation did not daunt Uncle Van Driver. He could still fit plenty of passengers. You just had to get creative. There were three people in the front two seats, six people, two totes, and a suitcase in the middle seat, and more people crammed in the back.)

Then we were squeezing down an extremely narrow alley in order to dodge more police. Back roads were Uncle Van Driver’s best friend.

Anyway, back to the current trip:

When we were almost to the capital, Uncle Van Driver began taking payments. People handed the money up, and I helped pass it to him. He began asking where people wanted to be let off.

“Where are you stopping, Miss Teacher?”

“Orussey Market bus stop,” I said.

When we arrived I got out, and he handed me my luggage and his business card for the future. Then off he went.

The drive had been rather chaotic, but I had never felt so safe on public transportation. In Cambodia, little is stronger than relationships, and Uncle Van Driver definitely took his role as caretaker of his passengers seriously.

Now moto and tuk-tuk drivers came up to me, offering in English to take my luggage and take me anywhere.

“No, no,” I said, “I’m taking a bus.”

“Oh, she’s taking a bus,” they repeated, delighted at being answered in their own language.

I picked up my suitcase and my cat basket, crossed the road to the bus station, and bought a ticket for a bus that was leaving at 8 AM.

Around six hours later I would arrive at my final destination.