Prelude

How does one create a portrait of a place? What images are essential?  Whose stories must be told? 

Our place is Cambodia’s lost coast, the wild country between the Thai border and the touist boom town of Sihanoukville.  Our goal is to explore, to listen, to turn over rocks, and to fashion a document showing what we find, so that ten, twenty and one hundred years from now, when the lost coast has shifted and changed, there will be a record of what once was here, a sculpted collection of memories in a handful of photos and a few thousand words.

That the lost coast we describe will be different from the place experienced by others is inevitable.  Perhaps some will look at our portrayal and find it impossible to recognize.  We will try to tell the truth, but it can only be one truth among many, colored by our perceptions and constrained by our limitations. 

In all travel writing, the gap between 'Unspoiled Beach Paradise' and 'Hellish Wasteland Where I Almost Got Killed' is only as wide as a machete blade. We will try for honesty, not objectivity.
           
We call the coast lost, but this is not quite true.  Cambodians know it is there, although most have never visited.  The Khmer nation, which is far older than the country called Cambodia, was born from the fertile floodplains of the Mekong River.  These plains end abruptly at the foot of impassable mountains.  The mountains are borderlands, a refuge for bandits and Khmer Rouge exiles.  Even today, much of the dark forest remains untamed, newly scarred by logging, but still more hospitable to tigers and crocodiles than human beings. On the far side of this wilderness lies the lost coast.

While planning our expedition, we knew that the coast would not stay lost for long.  Change, we assumed, would happen in the context of tourism.  Wealthy foreigners are the lifeblood of Cambodia, by far the most important source of cash in this desperately poor country.  In high season, dozens of travelers pass by the coast on their way to Thailand.  Some, like us, remember what they see and contrive to return.  Development, we thought, could not be far away. 

Now, as we prepare to set out, deciding whether to pack things like malaria medicine (no) or rolling papers (yes), the lost coast is improbably in the news.  Headlines scream from papers in Bangkok and Beijing, pale men in suits pore over reports in Houston and Hong Kong, and in Phnom Penh, politicians open briefcases filled with crisp, new hundred dollar bills.  What the coast is actually like and how people live there are the two furthest things from anyone’s mind. 

Billions.  Trillions.  Gallons.  Barrels.  The numbers are meaningless.   The only word that matters is OIL.  Massive deposits.  Suddenly, the fitful attention of men and markets has snapped to focus on the Cambodian coast, and even our little expedition has taken on a sense of urgency.  Ryan and I have 2 laptops, 2 cameras, a pair of binoculars, $765 and 1 month. We leave tomorrow, Christmas Eve 2006.

Read Chapter One

Read Notes From the Road