I drop to my haunches and run my fingers over the design. After three days of living on the Indochinese outback without electricity or running water, I feel like my senses have been sharpened to the details of the landscape. I take a step back for perspective, and my mind suddenly goes blank.

The carving is a crude depiction of a skull and crossbones.

Were I anyplace else in the world, I might be able to write off the skull and crossbones as a morbid adolescent prank. Unfortunately, since I am in northwestern Cambodia, the ghoulish symbol can mean only one thing: land mines. Suddenly convinced that everything in my immediate vicinity is about to erupt into a fury of fire and shrapnel, I freeze.

My brain slowly starts to track again, but I can't pinpoint a plan of action. If this were a tornado, I'd prone myself in a low-lying area. Were this an earthquake, I'd run to an open space away from trees and buildings. Were this a hurricane, I'd pack up my worldly possessions and drive to South Dakota. But since I am in a manmade disaster zone, all I can think to do is nothing.

My thoughts drift to a random quote from a United Nations official a few years back, who was expressing his frustration in trying to clear the Cambodian countryside of hundreds of thousands of unmarked and unmapped mines. "Cambodia's mines will be cleared," he'd quipped fatalistically, "by people walking on them."

As gingerly as possible, I lower myself to the ground, resolved to sit here until I can formulate a course of action that won't result in blowing myself up.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

For the past decade, northwestern Cambodia has been home primarily to subsistence farmers, U.N. de-mining experts and holdout factions of the genocidal Khmer Rouge army. Except for adventure travelers headed overland from the Thai border to the monuments of Angkor Wat, nobody ever visits this part of the country.

If someone were to walk up right now and ask me why I'm here, who I'm staying with and how I got to this corner of the Cambodian boondocks, I could tell them truthfully that I do not exactly know.

Technically, I was invited to come here by Boon, a winsome Cambodian Keanu Reeves look-alike who shared a train seat with me from Bangkok to the border three days ago. Our third seatmate, a Thai guy who called himself Jay, knew enough English for the three of us to exchange a few pleasantries along the way. Our conversation never amounted to much, but as we got off the train at the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet, Boon asked through Jay if I was interested in staying with him and his family once we got to Cambodia. Eager to explore a part of Cambodia that was a notorious Khmer Rouge stronghold only six months ago, I accepted.

Jay parted ways with us at the train station, and that was the last time I had any real clue as to what was going on.

Perhaps if I hadn't forgotten my Southeast Asian phrasebook in Bangkok, I would have a better idea of what was happening. Unfortunately, due to a moment of hurried absent-mindedness shortly before my departure to Aranyaprathet, I left my phrasebook languishing on top of a toilet-paper dispenser in the Bangkok train station. Thus, my communication with Boon has been limited to a few words of Lao (which has many phrases in common with Thai, Boon's second language) that I still remember from my recent journey down the Mekong.

My Lonely Planet Southeast Asia guide also provides a handful of Khmer words; unfortunately, phrases like "I want a room with a bathtub" and "I'm allergic to penicillin" only go so far when your hosts live in a one-room house without running water.

As a result, trying to understand the events of the last three days has been like trying to appreciate a Bengali sitcom: I can figure out the basics of what's going on, but most everything else is lost in a haze of unfamiliar context and language. In a way, this is kind of nice, since I have no social expectations here. Whereas in an American home I would feel obligated to maintain a certain level of conversation and decorum, here I can wander off and flop into a hammock at any given moment, and my hosts will just laugh and go back to whatever it was they were doing. At times I feel more like a shipwrecked sailor than a personal guest.

The majority of my stay here in Cambodia has been at Boon's mother's house, in a country village called Opasat. Boon's wife and baby daughter also live here, as well as a half-dozen other people of varying age, whose relation to Boon I have not yet figured out.

My first morning in Opasat, Boon took me around and introduced me to almost everyone in his neighborhood. I don't remember a single name or nuance from the experience -- but everyone remembers me because I kept banging my head on the bottom of people's houses, which stand on stilts about six feet off the ground. Now I can't walk from Boon's house to the town center without someone seizing me by the arm and dragging me over to show some new relative how I'm tall enough to brain myself on their bungalow.

Next page | Old Lady Goodall licks the soft white flesh just above my hipbone