Big Orange Backpack

Last night was top ten worst nights of my life. Here's the backstory.

Jess has come here twice before with a human rights delegation teaching college students and older how to work in the human rights world. She stayed for a month each time at the Bodhi tree, a restaurant/guest house. She became tight with the manager, Nan, and we often go and visit and eat. A few weeks ago he invited us to his sister's wedding. Okay, that's not accurate. He invited her and I got myself tagged along on the invite. So it comes to yesterday and he has hired two mini buses to bring us to Takeo, a province an hour outside of Phnom Penh. The organisation that she came with the previous two years are here, and they came along too. The bus ride went from one hour to three hours, as the bus broke down multiple times in the middle of the countryside. They used Jessie's phone as a flashlight as they tried to fix it. We finally arrived, but we were too late for the food. We stayed from 8:30-11:30 and had a great time listening to music, watching ceremonies (the bride and groom feed their families, not each other), and dancing. I made a Khmer friend and we danced for about an hour and he taught me tons of Khmer dancing. It was super fun, but by 11:30 we were exhausted from the trip and the dancing, and I knew I had to wake up at 5:40 to teach.

We got back on the bus and within minutes it breaks down. They tied the two buses together with bamboo. Repeat. Bamboo. All of the guys that were doing it were drunk and stupid out of their minds. We spent about four hours trying to tie the buses together with either bamboo and a pair of silk pants or rope. Shockingly, it didn't work so well. By about 2:30 I started screaming, calling them brainless men and demanding to squeeze onto the other bus and drive back to Phnom Penh cramped, but moving. I was in the broken bus and breathing exhaust for the entire time. We would tie the bamboo or rope, which would take 20-30 minutes, then we would drive for at maximum 7 minutes. It was infuriating.

We all squeezed onto the front bus in a coup and said drive, we're not doing this anymore. So we all squeezed onto the next bus, but they insisted on towing the other bus anyway. Everytime the rope broke they'd tie it closer to our bus. By the end there were inches between the buses and the second bus driver kept falling asleep at the wheel. Jess was sitting in the way back and if anything had happened brake-wise, she would've lost her legs. For me, I was standing in the middle of the aisle face to face, two inches apart from an American guy named Mark (part of the delegation, I knew him beforehand thank G-d) from 3-5AM as we slowly bumped into Phnom Penh. We listened to my iPod and I tried to stay awake by dancing. We arrived back at the house and wrote a mellow-dramatic message on the white board on the wall that people would have to cover our morning classes and we promptly passed out till noon, but I'm still wicked exhausted. Oh, did I mention that Jess and I had peed all over our feet in the jungle in the middle of all of this? Sorry, that might be TMI (too much information), but I really need the world to grasp how absolutely miserable that entire experience, sans the wedding itself, was. Everyone keeps saying in a few days we'll laugh about it. I hope so.