Lonely Girl Travels

My mind is a land of contrasts. (How’s that for cliche?)

I love travel. I love the bag-and-purse of it, of having everything you need fit in a 18 kg bundle on your back. I love the not knowing, the pick-up-and-go of it, love arriving in a city dazed and cramp-legged, and I love walking new streets—the landscape of the unfamiliar. I even love the train-and-bus of it, the bump-of-the-road of it, looking out of a window at alien earth that sometimes seems a mirror to the alien earth inside myself, and thinking my nothing thoughts.

But I also love the notion of home—not a notion, really, but a feeling. I love running into people I know at the market. I love my favorite table at my favorite cafe. I love the comfort of routines, little rituals, the prayer inside the doing of everyday tasks. And I love the sense of having an anchor, somewhere deep inside you—that no matter where you go, there’s a place to go back to.

Which might be why I’ve never moved out of the US, or hell, even out of Oakland—some kind of magnetism that always pulls me back to my hometown, no matter how far I wander. Oh sure, I fantasize and I’ve plotted and planned, but when it’s come right down to it, I’ve never actually left.

I didn’t want to feel transient in Phnom Penh. I’ll be here for around six weeks of my 2+ months in Cambodia, and it’d be easy enough to just stay in a hotel. You can get a decent one for $10-13, with wifi and air-con and someone that comes to clean it everyday (an endlessly thrilling novelty for a budget traveler such as a myself). It would have been easier—everything pre-arranged, crisp corners and clean counters. It also would have been sterile.

I didn’t want to have to leave a key at reception every morning. I didn’t want the posse of motorbike drivers posted outside the door, waiting for Western customers. I didn’t really, when it came down to it, want someone else cleaning up after me everyday.

I wanted a room of my own.

I asked around about people looking to sublet, but didn’t come up with anything. So I just started walking around, looking for “For Rent” signs. I wanted to stay in the neighborhood my Couchsurfing host was in, slightly north of Center and a little mellower, where the pace is that of local folks living local life.

I found a place on Street 84. It’s not the nicest apartment—quite threadbare, actually, and it doesn’t have wifi. It’s not the cheapest either—not expensive, but if I’d spent longer searching, I’m sure I could have found a decent room for less. Once I pay for a month’s worth of electricity, it’ll end up only being slightly less than a midrange hotel.

But I have a room of my own.

I have a little vanity in the bedroom. It’s got small shelves and a mirror and a little drawer with a lock, a stool with a floral-patterned cushion that rolls out. I tenderly unpacked all my lady things—make-up and headbands and jewlery—arranged them on the shelves. I put my passport in the drawer. In the mornings I roll out the stool and open my jar of face powder and see my face in the mirror, looking back.

I have a small kitchen with a metal tub of a sink and a small tiled counter; I have a bathroom where the showderhead is beside the toilet and there’s no curtain to separate the two spaces, but it’s just enough room for one. Yesterday I went to the central market and bought toilet paper and dish soap and a sponge and a couple plastic plates and bowls, and I’ve placed them next to the handtowel the landlady supplied me with, which I folded into a neat rectangle.

There’s a fan in the other room that takes awhile to get going—I’ve got to pull the string cord four, five, six times to awaken it to its buzzing. There’s a metal table and a single chair and a TV set that I’ve left unplugged. There’s a refrigerator that must have come from some convenience store, a small, three-shelf thing covered in Pepsi logos. I’ve placed a container of Laughing Cow cheese inside, some yogurts, a mango the landlady gave me when I moved in. At night it beams like a fluorescent night-light, casting a glow throughout the apartment, and I hear it humming when I roll over in my sleep.

There’s big metal doors that I have to heave open and tug shut. Red contact paper has been placed over the thick glass, to make it opaque, and the light that shines through in the daytime makes the room look lurid. It’s got a big padlock that slides through the metal rings, and an old-fashioned skeleton-type key that was given to me on a shoestring and I keep it my purse, I carry it with me, all over this city—the key to my own room.

I love it. It’s barely furnished and virtually without windows and only mine for a month—but for that month it’s mine. My own room, my own sense of home, in Phnom Penh.