Coming back to Cambodia after a short stint home in Canada last September, the first thing I noticed when walking out of Pochentong Airport in Phnom Penh was the smell. It wasn't even the heat that struck me the most, after the pleasantly cool air of an Ontario autumn, because you get used to the heat, expect the heat, almost wait for the heat to begin its long and slow process of breaking you down, second by second.
The smell, though, is so strange and potent that its presence eventually, somehow, becomes an afterthought; its unique aura is in and of itself the very reason it sinks into those beautiful and hideous natural phenomenas that we take for granted, like sunsets, or rain, or Richard Simmons' hair.
This is the smell of life, intensified: gas and dust and roads and rice and grass and sweat and motos and people screaming and laughing, dirty and alive. It hovers in the air, this smell, following you around, clinging to your memories. It is not an altogether unpleasant smell, truth be told; after a few days, it simply is, a fact of life, a reality of Cambodia. It is earthy and real.
In Canada, there is a clean and freshly milked glow to the air, for lack of a better word. The air is good. The air is alive. The air, when you are in parts of nature that are pure and unspoiled, feels and smells and tastes like whatever air is supposed to be, in all its pristine glory, the apothesis of our hopes for our future selves, healthy beings at one with the world.
In Phnom Penh, the air is the way we actually are: unkempt, indifferent, intrusive, fundamentally the opposite of what we could and should be. It stinks of people and their efforts, mechanical and natural. It lays claim to our worst-kept secrets, and reveals them, constantly, effortlessly, as the day dies down to night. As we're left in the dust.
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