Life on the Banana Pancake Trail

Our time in Cambodia sums it up. But it started back in Thailand, where our guest house crowds us into a minivan to the next guest house in the next town. All of them serve banana pancakes. All of them subsidize their cheap rooms by selling beer, transportation, tours, and banana pancakes. The guidebook corroborates. If it isn't on the banana pancake trail, it's not in the guidebook. It might as well not exist. Or else it lives on some other trail for those with more money and less time than your typical southeast Asian backpacker. Perhaps their trail is creme brulee. Once you are on the banana pancake trail, it is hard to get off.

So, we took a guesthouse-booked boat to a guesthouse-booked bus from Si Phan Don, the southernmost point on Laos' banana pancake (and happy pizza) trail. Despite promises that we wouldn't switch buses at the border, we soon found ourselves waiting four hours with a busload of British and Australian college students content to alternate drinking beers from two countries at the border while bantering about their sex lives and how many milligrams of valium they took this morning. Finally, Annette and I move our backpacks to sit with the two older French couples under the shade of a half-complete new border post. The tollhouses are there, but children splash in a mud puddle where the road, perhaps, will eventually be. There we wait next to our bus, which sits inexplicably empty and driverless with us outside for more than three hours. The bus ride that was supposed to be fourteen hours with one stop and one bus ends up taking eighteen hours with four stops and three different buses.

At the bus station in Siem Reap at 1 a.m., Annette asks a tuk tuk driver if he knows the location of the guest house we picked from the guidebook. Yes, he answers her, before taking us to a completely different guest house. But, it is 1:30 a.m., the rooms are nice, wth cable TV and A/C and a swimming pool for ten dollars. So, we don't bother protesting.

We wake to find our tuk tuk driver working behind the hotel front desk, trying to sell us a tour of the temples. Siem Reap is the home of Angkor Wat, the eighth wonder of the world. People come here to see the temples, just like they go to the 4,000 Islands to see the irawaddy freshwater dolphins, Vang Vieng to go tubing, Kung Lor for the caves. On the banana pancake trail, one can't help byt feel like our lives have been pre-determined. Somebody has already charted where we will go, what we will do, how we will travel, what we will eat, how we will spend our precious dollars.

We decline the tuk tuk and allow ourselves to wander around Siem Reap's French Quarter. It's main strip is Pub Street instead of Bourbon Street. We shop around tuk tuk prices. When we show up at the hotel in a tuk tuk for a change of shoes before a trip to see a temple, last night's tuk tuk driver (and this morning's hotel receptionist) raises his voice in expressing his dissatisfaction. Our tuk tuk driver balked at the originally-negotiated price. Possibly a misunderstanding in a world of limited English twenty consistently has three syllables. The extra syllable is squeezed between the N and the T. Possibly part of the hustle. But, alas, we agree to three days of temples in a tuk tuk with last night's driver. After fighting to be our tuk tuk driver for our time in Siem Reap, he passes us off to a 22-year-old for our 75 km journey to Beng Melea--a temple of ruins overcome by forest. The day is great as we ride through rural Cambodian life at 30 km/hour to a temple in the woods that is off the main tourist circuit.

The hotel makes a good metaphor for our time. We didn't ask for it, but it was nice enough for us to stay. Really nice at first impression. But then we notice the little things. The wireless only works in the lobby. The bathroom is moldy. The drain doesn't work. And the first step on the second flight of stairs is markedly higher than the others. It wasn't until my third time tripping on it that I noticed. And it wasn't until our second time passing the Pink Paradise next door that we noticed it was a strip club. It feels like the whole four-storey hotel was constructed to make a quick buck off the Angkor Wat tourist boom. And that the whole thing will crumble in fifteen years. On the banana pancake trail, they promise you whatever you ask for and trust they will never see you again, and that the wellspring of backpackers will keep pouring forth new suckers. Our eight-hour semi-sleeper bus from Siem Reap to Sihanoukville turns out to be thirteen hours and two buses, neither of which is a semi-sleeper. But I take comfort in knowing it is all infinitely more comfortable than our travel through most of Africa. And Koh Rung Island that awaits, is paradise, with only four hours of electricity a day.