I was surprised she agreed quickly, but avoiding a fight worked for me. Nevertheless, our couple wasn’t doing great. I could feel it. She dreamed of a particular life; I didn’t want the same. At that moment, I wasn’t sure what I wanted anymore. We started to have disagreements about small insignificant matters. We spent days not talking, just giving each other space for better or worse. We only kept up our coffee routine at The Elephant Bar. That’s when I read the tiger article.
#
Lucille and I were slowly falling apart, but we agreed to try to make it through this trip—just a couple more weeks at the most. And I wanted to make one last stop before leaving Cambodia and moving on to a different country, probably Vietnam. I wanted to see Battambang, the second biggest city in Cambodia, located in the northeast of the country, not far from the Thai border. A place that tends to be ignored by travellers but was presented as a gem of French colonial architecture that kept mysterious sights hidden in its surroundings, all waiting to be discovered.
We were on a patio, and I shared my idea of visiting Battambang with Lucille. She didn’t know much about it. She even seemed surprised I was interested in such a place. Not glamorous enough for her. Not cool enough. The reality is that many digital nomads are fueled by a desire to compete, show off and compare themselves. They like to list all the places they have been to and tell you how awesome it was. I had just mentioned a place she clearly knew nothing about and wasn’t as trendy as it needed to be for her Instagram account. But as I told her about the potential adventures that could occur, she started to get more intrigued. She slowly realized how much admiration she could get in her online community if she explored this off-the-beaten-path destination. Lucille was now considering travel to be seen and noticed, not to explore another culture.
“What do you think then?” I asked.
She looked perplexed and was stuck on different ideas for our next destination. “I would prefer to make our way to Vietnam as soon as possible to check out that other big digital nomad community that is the coolest and hippest of the moment. I heard the parties are wild, and people make real business connections,” she said.
I tried to convince her for long minutes that we would go to Vietnam very soon, but we should spend a few days in Battambang and see what it was all about. I tried to speak her language by saying, “You can take some cool selfies, and who knows, maybe it is a hidden gem.”
After a beer and a bit of teasing each other, we agreed to go to Battambang.
#
Before falling asleep that night, I looked at that book of prayers and meditations, all in the Khmer script, that I had bought at the market earlier that day. It had beautiful illustrations, but my eyes were drawn to the Khmer characters. They all meant nothing to me and looked like drawings of dancing snakes. As I looked at them, I felt hypnotized by them; they made me feel uncomfortable, like I shouldn’t look at them. I decided to close the book and set it aside. I needed to sleep.
