When the bus had crossed the Cambodian border we stopped for lunch. The air stank of festering meat and dogs worked the tables for scraps. Insects had descended in such number that it was impossible to swat them all away.

The moment I got off the bus I was swamped by hot breath and grasping hands. A mother shoved a sick child into my face; a boy helped a blind man to beg; an amputee jabbed his stump into my chest. I climbed back onto the bus — breathless and shocked.

A Hungarian offered a grim nod, “Welcome to the real Asia.”

In and around Phnom Penh

The hostel receptionist talked with a disjointed drawl. “Ya mate. We av stick-e skunk. Y’know, reeel stick-e man. Blow ya mind. Y’all like it ha, you want smoke? Ya let me no.” On the nearby decking, a South African recounted his experience at a local shooting range. He’d decided firing AK-47s wasn’t enough for him — so he’d bought a wrecked car, took it to the range and fired a rocket launcher at it. A window opened behind him and a sickly British man appeared. He had a leather strap wrapped around his arm — ready for the next injection. The South African didn’t even blink at the interruption. He lit another joint and talked about whether he should buy a cow and blast that to bits, too.

On the dusty streets, kids played in the trash and bounced bicycle tyres along the roads. The older ones patrolled the area like little adults — all of them were hustling.

A teenage boy approached with a salesman smile. I picked up one of the photocopied books he was selling.

“It’s about Pol Pot! Interesting! You buy?”

“I think I will,” I replied.

“Lovely jubbly!”

I could’t find my lighter, so I approached a bunch of moped tax drivers who were standing at an intersection smoking. One of them told me about his friend who always loses his lighter. A few months ago this friend had been drinking with his father-in-law.

“Where’s my lighter!” he exclaimed.

“I haven’t got it,” replied his father-in-law.

“But there’s only two of us here!”

“Who are you accusing?”

Remembering who he was talking to, the son-in-law gestured around the empty room.

“Oh I blame anyone… anyone who steals my lighter.”

The driver introduced himself as Arun and told me he sometimes earned $15 per day and sometimes nothing at all. He used the money to support his brother (who can now longer walk).

“I am lucky,” he said. “For Cambodian drivers who can’t speak English, getting a customer is nearly impossible.”

Why was Arun’s English so good? After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the United Nations oversaw Cambodia’s first free elections. A call went out for English speaking drivers; Arun couldn’t speak English very well but he applied and got the job. His American boss taught English — and he remembers those two years as the best of his life. 

Before he became a taxi driver, Arun spent three years in the army. Army recruiters came to the school, and shortly after they learned to fire handguns, machine guns and rocket launchers. Arun fought against the Khmer Rouge, but the enemy always put their hands up when they saw him: they wanted to fight the Vietnamese not kill their own people.

After leaving the army, Arun got engaged. His fiancée went to visit her parents who lived in the United States. They didn’t want her to marry Arun because he was poor, so she never came back.

“We love foreigners coming here,” he said, “because it means Cambodia will become rich again.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that tourists have money and most Cambodians don’t?”

He shook his head. “No… that is just the way it is.”

After this he convinced me I should visit a Cambodian village, so I hired him to take me to one.

A Cambodian village

The journey to the village took a long time because of the traffic. A road sign explained a six lane plan to increase traffic flow.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “There are already six lanes here.”

“The sign is old,” Arun told me. “They’ve already built the lanes.”

“But we’ve been waiting here for an hour!”

“Yes,” he laughed. “But before it would have been two.”

When the traffic finally started moving, we turned off the main road, and several minutes later we were in the countryside. 

We pulled up at a small house, where Arun introduced me to his ex in-laws. (His first wife died). They explained that in the rainy season the whole area floods — including their back garden.  

“At that time of year, motorbikes are no good,” Arun added. “If you want to get to the fields, you need a canoe.”

We then visited the village Pagoda, where I met “the most important monk.” He didn’t speak much English, but he blessed me with “a long life.”

I’m glad he had, as shortly afterward, I was ruining my body with a long drinking session. I sat with several villagers in the garden. Here, we filled our glasses with ice and then took turns to top them up with beer.

After the second crate of beer, the Cambodian countryside disappeared into the black night. Everyone at the party slept in the house — which consisted of one room that was completely bare— apart from the mosquito nets and sleeping mats on the floor.

The next morning I stumbled down the wooden steps. My tongue was soaked with alcohol and dust clung to my body.  Arun took me to a street market to buy food for the night’s meal. Animal organs hung from the metal roof, and people hacked pieces of them away. It was hot, there were flies everywhere, and the place stank of death. Not the best place to be when you are hungover.

In the afternoon, another party began. The scene was similar to the evening before, only this time we washed the beer down with beef-mouth. If you want to know what this tastes like, just think back to the last time you bit your lip.

At the party, nothing was wasted and nothing was bought in advance. Even when there were 10 of us in the circle, a new crate of beer was only bought when the last drop had gone.

After the third crate I was invited to a wedding. I had planned to return to Phnom Penh the next day — but I was drunk, so I accepted the invitation.

A Cambodian wedding

I didn’t know who the bride and groom were, so with everyone a suspect I shook hands with them all.

The men wore the same clothes they had been wearing in the fields all days, while the women wore long dresses and decorated their hair with golden flowers.

Waiters constantly brought more cans of beer. Guests were generous with these cans — filling their friends’ glasses as if they had paid for the alcohol themselves.

The food came in fits and spurts. First there was shrimp, then crab and then chicken wings, fried rice and, finally, vegetables noodles.

Leap, a friend of Arun’s, had eaten so much he looked sick.

“Everyone likes to eat and drink a lot at Cambodian weddings,” he burped. “We paid for all the food at our own weddings, so it’s time to make our money back. In Cambodia, each guest gives the newlyweds $10 — which is a lot of money. So make sure you eat as much as you can!”

As the sun went down, the party moved inside and the guests danced around a set of huge speakers. Elderly relatives watched from the sidelines; eating, snorting and laughing. Often, the lights slammed off — and we stood in the dark until the generator recovered.

At 11 p.m., Arun and the others decided to leave.

“The party might go on all night,” he told me. “But we don’t know these people that well. And also, it’s a very cheap wedding.”

“Cheap?”

“Yes, they only have a stereo. At my wedding we had a live band.”

A party by the river

The next morning I met a man with no teeth who went by the name of “James Bond.” I asked why but everyone just shrugged. It only was 8 a.m., and Bond was drinking Cambodian whiskey. I showed a tiny amount of interest in the whiskey, and the next thing I knew we were visiting the local brewery.

The brewer led us into his workshop and showed us how he makes rice whiskey.  He uses any leftover rice to feed the pigs — when there is no rice left he sells the pigs, buys rice and the cycle starts again.

After the tour, we sat in the garden and drank a lot of the whisky. One man was given a brief but accurate introduction: “This man is a lawyer. He has a car.”

He spent the next hour explaining the difficulties of practising law in a lawless country. Soon he was so drunk he had to be carried to his car. His friends propped him up in the driver’s seat, at which point he opened his eyes, looked around — and drove away.

In the evening, Leap wanted invited me to his house which was situated at the other side of the marshlands — to get there, we had to row across.

A man at the back of the boat placed a bucket between his knees and began to drum.

“Happy happy!” he sang, as we drifted across the swamp.

At the other side, we plodded through golden cornfields until a small settlement appeared. Only 15 families lived there — and most had set up temporary tent-like houses on the river bank.

Leap grabbed a chicken from the yard and took it out back. Ten minutes later it was stuffed into a pot and cooking on a fire.

We sat in his garden, drinking beer and eating chicken. The women looked on from a distance, occasionally disputing something their husband had said.

One of them decided we ought to eat some corn and cycled off by torch-light. She returned 10 minutes later with a huge stack of corn — which we cooked over a fire.

“Life was very tough under the Khmer Rouge,” said Arun. “There was hardly any food. Corn has a special place for me because I ate a lot of it — to be honest, the corn saved my life.”

The men nodded their agreement and raised a toast to the corn.

I woke up the next morning to find six men huddled around an old Coke bottle filled with herbal wine. Leap sang, swayed and looked like he hadn’t slept for a month.

“There is no work now” Arun told me. “Everyone is waiting for the rainy season so they can start farming again. Now the parties start early.”

“Stay here all day,” Leap said to me. “I have brandy, three bottles of palm wine and three litres of Cambodian whisky.”

After three days in the countryside, my chest was covered in mosquito bites and my back in red bumps. My eyes were bleary, and my nails and nostrils were engrained with dirt. More worryingly; I had started to sweat when I ate. My body was telling me to decline.

On the bike ride back to Phnom Penh, I remembered some backpackers I’d met who said the poor in South East Asia were happier than the rich in the West. I don’t buy into this theory. Cambodians like Arun and Leap have very tough lives. That being said, they do have something that many of us have lost — an aliveness that comes from living so close to the land and an ability to drop stress and celebrate life.