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I left Bangkok's Hualamphong station at dawn as men, women and families too poor to pay for overnight accommodation stirred from the benches and station floors with nothing more than a rattan mat for a bed. From the window I could see a nation on the move: buffalo-drawn plows have been replaced by tractors; natural fertilizers by chemicals; free-range animals by the artificially inseminated, antibiotic version. Here, the latest technology has been harnessed to steal a march on productivity. Wealth has created uniformity and conformity.
In an open carriage with wooden bench seats, one area was reserved for monks and another for the military. I sat next to a forensic scientist, Lieut. Colonel Thanom Pumpuang of the Royal Thai Police. Like everyone I was to meet, neither science nor technology had replaced his faith: "When I perform an autopsy, even though they had to die or be murdered according to their cosmology, I still ask myself, 'Why?'" Thanom had been making this same journey from home to work since he left college, and the faces around him had grown reassuringly familiar: he has been buying prepacked meals from the same train vendor since she left elementary school. Another passenger—a monk who regularly travels to his monastery on the 05:50 to Aranyaprathet—had officiated over a ceremony to bless this train vendor's baby.
By the time I reached my destination most of the people had already disembarked. The passengers in the last compartment would gladly have joined them, but were under police escort. Rounded up in Bangkok, these hapless Cambodians were undocumented migrants who were being deported. Most likely, many of them would immediately try to get into Thailand again, and some would make it. The border between Thailand and Cambodia is pure chaos. Cars, trucks and tractor trailers were competing for room; men were pulling carts laden with smuggled goods, produce and people in both directions. In the narrow spaces left for pedestrians, everyone was shouting and paying off officials. I watched as a Thai border guard removed the padlock from a caged pickup. It disgorged more deportees. A Cambodian customs official screamed at a young smuggler for baksheesh, complaining, "I can't live off grass!"
Out of the mud and rubbish of discarded goods along the dirt road on the Cambodian side rose several air-conditioned casinos for Thai customers who are warned on the Thai side of the border of the dangers of gambling. There is no through train. Though a railway line exists between the two countries it has fallen into disrepair and been colonized by a squatters' camp. I left for the next railhead, squeezed into the back of a pickup with 16 other passengers.
I joined the train at the city of Battambang, not knowing whether to be reassured or disturbed by the presence of armed soldiers in each of the freight cars. Other passengers came with hammocks, which they tied wherever they could, or sat on the roof that threatened to implode under their weight. I shared the wagon with healthy-looking matrons who jealously guarded their sacks of litchis, mangosteens and jackfruit. Much of their time was spent fingering their calculators as they worked out their profits and tucked into their own produce.
Near Pursat, the train came under attack by illegal loggers looking to transport their purloined timber. Hundreds of men and women were waiting in ambush as we pulled in to the station. In finely orchestrated moves, some of the gang members jumped aboard while others hurled sawn planks and logs from the platform into the wagons. The ticket collectors tried to protest but were silenced by the leader of the gang, a spindly woman shouting orders to men built like the tree trunks they were hauling aboard. The forest surrounding the Cardamom Mountains from which the wood was being logged stood no chance against such profiteering. The baying horn of the locomotive signaled our departure; as the train pulled away, timber was still being thrown into the wagons.
Approaching the capital Phnom Penh, the train brushed past shacks, general stores, pharmacies and cafés; the shabby, dilapidated houses and buildings reaching up to the passing train like wooden passengers begging a ride. I watched the residents going about their business with no acknowledgment of our iron locomotive belching exhaust into their homes. Along the way, I spoke with a passenger named Ta Mea, a 44-year-old Cambodian whose bright smile and graceful gestures contrasted starkly with his eyes, which were dim with pain. He told me how each of his family members was murdered under Pol Pot's regime: "My father was killed because he wore spectacles. My eldest brother was an airline pilot who could have stayed out of the country; he was killed because he could speak English and French. My mother, because she was a teacher, and my two sisters were murdered, one with her husband and three children."
Ta Mea was angry, but he didn't seek revenge. Like several other men I met in Phnom Penh who had been robbed of their families, the justice he wanted was not much to ask: an acknowledgment of the perpetrators' guilt rather than punishment.
In today's Cambodia the rarest commodities are solidarity and compassion. A new generation is being sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The country is poor, yes, but no one is starving—and yet parents often sell their daughters into prostitution. Young and old are defenders of tradition—but for a few dollars these traditions are conveniently forgotten. Every time I walked, stood, or stepped out of a vehicle I found myself surrounded by young Cambodians hustling for handouts; few could be shaken off with a simple no. It was only when I reached Vietnam that I learned the trick of replying in Russian. Then I was left alone, as Russians are perceived as too poor to pay for anything.
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