Luxury: The New Spirituality

Enjoy Nature Without Having to Deal With it

Our chosen route out of Phnom Penh.

A number of years ago I flew to Cambodia to meet up with two friends who were riding tandem bicycles around the world. This was to be my first trip to a country without any semblance of a sanitation department so naturally I was pretty excited.

I'd travel with them along a common route: Phnom Penh to Siem Reap and the venerable temples of Angkor. Our mode of travel would be something less than standard. On the first day we pedaled just shy of 100 kilometers, along undulating dirt roads cutting across tree-studded plains baking in the heat, with only an occasional village to keep us on the more pleasurable side of dehydration.

At breakfast (plates of rice and mystery on a wobbly table at a roadside shack) my cycling buddies poured small packets of oraange something into their bottles of purified water. ‘Electrolytes,’ one of them said in response to my inquiry. Pixie dust, I told myself. But okay. These guys were biking around the world, they needed a lot of electrolytes. I was only there for a week. And besides I was no hotshot cyclist, I was just a hotshot. Plain water was good enough for me.

At our guest house that evening, curled up and clutching my stomach, unable to keep down so much as a leaf of Cambodian lettuce, I pondered the real-life effects of cellular osmosis and how I might ask for electrolytes at a drug store in Cambodia.