Lately I often dream of being thwarted in my efforts to get somewhere. You know, the dreams where you can’t read the map because the print is too small, you get on the wrong bus, you get on the right train but going the wrong direction, you miss your stop, you lost the scrap of paper with the address on it….It’s not so much that you’re lost, because you know where you are and where you want to go, but you can’t there from here, so to speak.
(I’ll skip the psychoanalysis of what those dreams are saying about me. You all just entertain yourselves for a few minutes with your own interpretations………Now, feel free to post them as comments.)
Today I seemed to be having this actual "can't get there" experience. It took me four tuktuks and almost two hours to get to the Angkor Market, when I could have ridden my bike there in 8 minutes. I will tell you this story – which is long and meandering and probably pretty boring – because it illustrates some of the daily challenges I still have with communication:
I rarely use a tuktuk, preferring to ride my bike even it means frequent small trips. (I think I may have already bragged a bit here about how much I can carry on my bike, so it doesn’t have to be THAT frequent.) But today it was 94 degrees, I’d already been sweating all day, and I knew it would take 2-3 trips on the bike, so I decided to indulge myself.
When I do need a tuktuk, I can almost always time it for when Sovann is available; when he’s not working, his tuktuk is sitting right here in our front yard. The challenge with that is whether or how much to pay him when I ask him to take me somewhere. When I ask him how much I owe, he always says, “Nothing, mum.” If I don’t ask and just try to give him money, he refuses to take it. I’m torn about this a few reasons. On the one hand, he lives here and therefore sometimes eats our food and drinks our beer (though he also buys food and beer for us on occasion.) If giving me an occasional ride makes him feel like he’s returning a favor, I don’t want to deny him the opportunity to feel he has evened things up in some way. And if I was truly his “mum” I wouldn’t be paying for rides, and I don’t want to insult him in some way by implying I don’t really think of him as “family.” On the other hand, not paying him makes me feel bad about asking him for a ride – he might prefer to wait around for a paying customer or just go play volleyball if he has free time, and I hate to make him miss out on either of those opportunities. Also, I know he can use the money a lot more than I can, so I feel cheap if I don’t pay him.
Today he was working all day, but just about the time I was thinking of going shopping, he made a brief stop at home. When he headed back out, I asked him for a ride (tuktuk #1) to Seven Candles, because there’s almost a tuktuk or two (or three) sitting there waiting for some work, and I know and like all the drivers. Today, there were no tuktuks there at all, so I called one of the regulars to see if he was somewhere nearby and available, and he came to pick me up. (Now I was on tuktuk #2.) I announced our itinerary: “Lucky Mall, then Angkor Market, then fruit stands.” He took me straight to the Lucky Mall so I could go into the Lucky Supermarket (such a lucky place!) but while I was inside checking things off my list, our friend Ponheary came running up behind me, calling my name and telling me “Lori hit her head and there’s a lot of blood! She hit her head in the van! There’s blood!” Her tone was urgent and I was a bit confused by this turn of events. I figured out pretty quickly that Lori was back at Seven Candles and was probably fine, but I promised Ponheary I would go and see her. “Right now?” “Yes, in five minutes, I promise.”
So with Panha (the driver) waiting for me at the checkout, I paid for my groceries and we loaded them into his tuktuk and headed to Seven Candles for me to check on Lori. While I was going in to see her, I asked Panha if he would take the groceries to our house and put them on the balcony, then come back and we could finish my shopping.
Thanks to my amazing nursing skills (ha!), I was able to determine that Lori was OK: I asked her if she was OK, and she said she was. Just for good measure, I looked at her scalp, which had a pretty impressive split right down the middle of the top of her head. No sign of serious head injury, and no more bleeding, so we both decided she would live without further medical attention.
Back I went to resume my shopping errands. Panha was right there in the driveway when I came out of the guesthouse, but he was loading two huge backpacks into the tuktuk while two young women were settling up their bill.
“Panha, are you going somewhere?”
“Yes, now I go to the airport.”
“Oh. OK…..No problem. I’ll get another tuktuk.”
“Oh! You still need tuktuk? Where you go now?” He had apparently forgotten the original itinerary, or hadn’t quite understood it. I reminded him I still had two more places to go, but assured him I would find someone else to take me. I tried to pay him for the earlier ride, but he refused to take any money, which left me torn. Was he feeling bad that he misunderstood and therefore wouldn’t let me pay him, or was it because he has enjoyed many beers on our balcony over the last few months and just wanted to return the favor? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t figure it out, and he wouldn’t take my money. He offered to come back for me in an hour, but I assured him that wasn’t necessary. He waved and took off for the airport, and I was left needing tuktuk #3.
It seems that most days when I walk down any given street in Siem Reap, I see dozens of tuktuks and drivers sitting idle and I am offered more rides than I can count, which I never need at the time. So I headed out into the road, planning to take the first tuktuk that came along. I walked for about 150 yards and not one tuktuk made me any offer. This made me wonder if all the tuktuk drivers on Wat Bo Road have seen me around for so long that now they know not to offer any more? Do I no longer walk like a tourist and they can tell the difference? Just as I was considering walking home and taking my bike after all, one of the other guest house drivers, Rani, went by headed back the way I had just come. He was grinning and waving at me and he stopped, so I asked if he was headed to Seven Candles and then was he available? The answer was yes, so I hopped on his tuktuk, only to realize that he already had a passenger: his mother, who I had met once before. As we both recognized each other, we smiled and patted each other’s arms and said nice things to each other, though neither of us knew what the other was saying. She doesn’t seem to speak any English and despite all my efforts to buckle down on my Khmer studies, I’m still trying to learn the damn alphabet, so after “Hello! How are you?” my Khmer rapidly fails me. I didn’t think she would be interested in hearing me recite the Khmer alphabet, so we just kept petting each other’s arms and smiling like idiots.
But now I was confused. Was he taking his mother to Seven Candles, and if so, why? We arrived there – now I was back almost where I started at the beginning of this tale – and I tried to figure out if Rani was really available to give me a ride or not. As he and I danced around trying to determine what I wanted and what he was doing next, it eventually became clear that he had intended to take his mother somewhere, but he offered to take me to Angkor Market instead. I insisted that he should take his mother where she needed to go. Did I want to come with them, he wanted to know. No thank you, I’ll just go to do my shopping, I told him. Now he was squirming, I think having realized that he misunderstood my original intention and now feeling bad. I assured him over and over that it was no problem, and he asked me to please wait for him to return so he could take me. I really didn’t want to wait that long, so I thanked him some more and said, “If I still need a ride when you come back, then you can take me, but maybe I’ll just go soon so I can finish.” Then I immediately felt bad because I didn’t want him to hurry back if I wasn’t going to be there, but it seemed it would somehow break his heart if I told him I couldn’t wait. To end the whole guilt-inducing interaction, I thanked him yet again and told him goodbye and went inside, thinking I would just hang out in the lobby until he left to make things easier for both of us.
Lori was in the lobby, still looking as though she was not suffering any traumatic brain injury, and wondering why I was back so fast. I gave her a run-down of my challenges thus far, and told her I was headed back out to find yet another tuktuk to go finish my errands. As I turned to go back outside, I realized Rani and his mother were still in the driveway packing some things onto his motorbike, so I stayed inside until he left. I was afraid that if I went out to grab another tuktuk while he was still there, it would start a whole new wave on angst on both of our parts.
With Rani safely out of the driveway, I ventured back out and retraced my steps of 20 minutes earlier, walking down the street once more hoping to find tuktuk #4. I got as far as the first intersection and found a driver sitting in his tuktuk, apparently daydreaming. In a completely unfamiliar role reversal, I had to call to him, "Tuktuk?" He snapped to attention and asked where I wanted to go. “Angkor Market.” (I was still trying to get to my second planned stop of the day.) For reasons I don't understand at all (though I know there is a reason), he called to a group of men sitting at a table across the street, and one of them came literally running, with a wide grin on his face. He seemed to think that Angkor Market was a perfectly delightful destination, so he hopped in the first guy’s tuktuk, and we were off.
I made it through the next two stops with no further confusion, and the driver brought me home and carried my groceries upstairs. All of my time with tuktuk #4 was completely uneventful.
It just occurred to me that one of the ironic twists of English here is that when you ask someone if they're available, the correct and commonly understood format for the question is, “Are you free?” (Sometimes expanded to, “Are you free or are you busy?”) In this context, “free” just means available – except, apparently, when I’m asking a tuktuk driver who I know personally. In those cases, they appear to take me literally. “Yes, I am completely free. I won’t cost you a cent.”
I don’t usually take four tuktuks in a whole month, but it was four today. Thank you, Sovann & Panha & Rani & guy whose name I don’t know. Now our kitchen is stocked and ready for guests – Alison, Julian, & Willa arrive around 10pm – that is, assuming they let Willa into the country, since they just discovered on the way here that her passport may be expiring too soon to get a visa. Poor Alison has been a wreck on the plane, worrying about it all the way. I choose to believe that Willa will squeak in through immigration, but I won’t really relax until I see all three of them walk out of the airport.
Whatever happens when they land, it ought to make for an exciting next installment on Alison’s blog and mine!
