 |
| [Watch out for the elephants!] So we were going through immigration, and the policeman instant-messaged my last name to a driver standing outside, so he had my name on a placard by the time we got there. (Note that there were no public pay phones at the Cambodian airport!) The policeman did not ask where we were staying, or even whether we had a place to stay -- all he said was that he would arrange a ride for us (he told us to pay our driver $1, no more). We got into the taxi, and the driver took us to the Pavillion Indochine, the guest house whose pictures are on the previous page. We did not ask him to take us there; he did not ask us where to go; he just took us there. As it turns out, this was one of the places we had sent email requesting a room for the night (we had tried to telephone Cambodia from Thailand to set up a room, but the phones would not connect us, for reasons we never figured out.), so we weren't that concerned. |
 |
| [The sunset from the hill overlooking Angkor Wat.] And the owner wasn't surprised to see us -- although he did say that he had only just received our email, and had not had a chance to reply. (None of the three guest houses we emailed in Cambodia ever replied to us.) So I guess it's possible that he (the Indochine Pavillion owner) contacted the policeman at the airport and asked him to send us to him. Or (what seems more likely, in retrospect) the policeman is paid some sort of commission for sending hopeless-looking American tourists to this guest house. We didn't have the guts to ask the Pavillion Indochine owner that night, and we didn't see him again for the duration of our stay. In Thailand, the term for this sort of behavior (being sent somewhere you aren't necessarily trying to go, by someone who is compensated for sending you) is called being "touted" (the sender is called a "tout"). In this case, it worked out great. But it felt really weird at the time. |