It’s a two hours car trip from Kep to Phnom Penh. I’d been staying in the hills near a quiet seaside town and the nights there had been empty of human noises. The first night a thunderstorm sent glittering sheets of lightening over the treetops and thunder grumbled. Crickets and frogs got excited and they sang froggy bass and cricket soprano until I was aurally hallucinating, hearing sentences and words repeated, my mind trying to make sense and find a pattern in the cacophony.

 

Evening comes early in the tropics a long sleep under a mozzie net meant I was up at dawn, writing, drawing mandalas and yogaring, stretching, sipping water, cutting Rambutans, the most delicious fruit known to mankind, the texture is smooth like lychees, smooth and sweet, hummm. The first bite on this fruit is manna. The critters silent, exhausted by their night time chorusing. I could hear distant power tools and hammering along with the voices of men rolling over the treetops.

 

On the trip back to Phnom Penh I tucked my earphones into my ears and listened to a new playlist. Ben Weaver brushed my ears with his emotional and ethereal song Glass Doe I got a lump in my throat as I remembered a long ago love like it was yesterday.