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another of Jim's and my house mates at Colorado College, Michael Taylor, offered to coach me in basic photography skills, about which I knew basically nothing. I bought an old second hand Japanese camera and a hand held light meter. I had my start as a photo journalist at the height of the Vietnam War. Or so I thought.
Through most of that trip in Cambodia and Laos, I traveled with a young British student named Julian Manyon. Though Prince Norodom Sihanouk didn't allow American journalists to work in the country, Manyon and I both had told his countrymen in Saigon that we were just students on vacation (which, from the look of us, was apparently believable). Julian did the talking for both of us, and we both left the British Consulate in Saigon with tourist visas to enter Cambodia.
We started on a large riverboat at Phnom Penh, and moved downstream on the Tonle Sap River. The deck was crowded with people who carried baskets of food and extra clothing and bedrolls. And children. Some were also peddlers who sold fruit and bread to other passengers. We slept on the deck, with whatever of our clothing we could fluff out to cover ourselves. Most of the Cambodians were better prepared, but it didn't matter much because the boat was long, and wide enough for several people to sleep abreast. Most of the deck was covered by a canopy of thatch. Besides, it was a warm night and didn't rain. I decided it sure as hell beat sleeping on the steel plate deck of the
USS Pickaway in the South China Sea three years before with a lot of smelly, snoring grunts. Like me. I rolled up in my military surplus poncho, and let the low growl of the riverboat's
engine lull me to sleep.
The Tonle Sap widened as it flowed downstream until it merged with the great Mekong. Some passengers walked down the wide plank and got off the riverboat. Others climbed aboard with a great rustling of baskets, bedrolls, and sleeping mats, all amidst a chorus of calls to children and other family. The time came for the river to diverge from the highway that runs north into Laos. We took buses where they were available; we hitched rides on trucks otherwise. This was where I started getting grumpy about Julian's physical weakness, when I had to hoist both our packs to the top of a bus or truck when there was no more space space for such things inside. I grumbled, but mostly kept my mouth shut. He was fluent in French, which we needed every day, whereas my college level Spanish and Russian were useless. I don't suppose either of us was ever completely at ease hitch-hiking through Cambodia (and later in Laos) in 1968 with the presence of the war around us every day, but we never found ourselves actually in a place where a firefight was in progress. I at least already had one war under my belt, so to speak, and his French was indispensable. We needed each other.
It was after dark when we pulled out of Stung Treng, the last town in northern Cambodia, and headed north towards Laos. Sometime around midnight of a night in June, Manyon and I caught a ride with
two Laotian rug merchants headed for the Laotian border with newly purchased rugs draped over the cabs of their Jeeps. I rode on the hood of one jeep; Manyon rode inside the other one with the driver.
The old Indo-Chinese colonial road was one lane of macadam through the jungle that arched over the ribbon of blacktop from both sides. Some sequential cacophony kept pace with us, again on both sides. I finally decided it was a wave of monkey calls undulating through the jungle abreast of us, sounding the alarm (or greeting) to their relatives ahead of us. But who knows? I'd never been there before.
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