Biking along, I reflected on my fondness for rising early; here, as in other places I had traveled, it meant being swept into the inclusive — for those who are up — routine of morning. I passed groups of uniformed schoolchildren on bikes. Pedaling lightly, they looked like drifting ferns of white and blue as I passed. Many shouted, “Hello!” and some others, “Bonjour!” to which I responded with an equally unrestrained wave. I rode past a small market, vendors kneeling aside vegetables and fruit, toddlers playing with sticks, or dogs — in the case of both, often taunting the latter with the former.

I reached Kampi in 40 minutes. A sign directed me to the boats, and I parked and locked my bike alongside several motorbikes. Handing over $9 for a one-hour boat ride, I noted signboards publicizing efforts to protect the dolphin population, and wondered how much of my boat fee went to the cause. I descended a flight of concrete stairs toward the river, and climbed into a tailed wooden boat. It was shabby, the yellow paint having worn away to reveal the gray-brown of old wood. I had read that the Irrawaddy folk, unlike their saltwater relations, were shy and I wondered if the water — like the paint — would chip away and dissolve to reveal the dolphins. I readied my camera.

My driver and I shared the river with a small group of other boats. Each held no more than four people — if this was because of safety issues or just the sheer fact that no one was traveling in groups of more than five, I wasn’t sure. It seemed that researchers, most likely part of the conservation project I had seen publicized earlier, filled two of the boats; their photography equipment was extensive and looked complicated, and they held other complex instruments whose purposes I could not discern. I tried to read their faces; I wanted to know if their data was positive, if the efforts being made to save the dolphin population were successful, but I never got close enough.

In the photographs I took that day the dolphins look like gray blips above a blue-gray river. I saw quite a few, but they moved so quickly that it was hard to catch more than a passing glance. Every few minutes my boat driver shouted, “Hello!” or “Hey!” In response I exclaimed “Oh!” and snapped a photo in the direction of his finger. We were alone on the boat, and continued in this loop for the entire hour: a comedy sketch performed at sea.

After the boat had made its way back to shore, I climbed back up the concrete steps and onto land. The sun was high, and I knew it was best to begin the ride back to my guesthouse. I reviewed the map I had taken with me; the route back was a straight shot. But before returning the sheet to my bag, I noticed a blurb about kro lan, sweet sticky rice packed into bamboo — a snack packaged and sold in the village between Kampi and Kratie.

Unsure exactly what to look for, I pedaled, keeping my eyes open for tubes of bamboo for sale. I began to see armfuls of the light brown ware about halfway between the dolphins and the city of Kratie. Wiping the sweat from my forehead with the tail of my shirt, I directed my bike toward the nearest stand. It was untended, the perfect chance to examine kro lan at length. I dismounted my bicycle as a woman squealed.

She was squat. Her face was bright and consumed — the lower half by her smile, the upper half by her widening eyes. Her surprise turned to delight, and I took this as a sign to begin a set of bumbling pantomimes. I’m not the most talented actor; my miming worked as an antidote to the initial thrill she showed, and she quieted as I acted out my order: one bamboo tube of sticky rice for the road, one mango for here.

I sat in the chair she offered me, and I began to eat the small slices of mango, picking them out with my fingers. But I nearly threw it in surprise when she squealed again, running off to retrieve something. I continued watching the schoolchildren biking home for lunch when she returned with a fork.

After several tries at English, Thai and the little bit of French I know, I realized she only spoke Khmer. So we settled on grinning and giggling at one another, schoolgirls with a shared secret. At one point, when I turned to say hello to a neighboring seller, she startled me by touching my hair, tracing the design of my French braid. She continued this for another minute as I watched the road.

I finished the mango rather quickly. She wrote the amount I should pay her on a piece of paper, and I handed over the colorful bills, what amounted to a little over a dollar. Thanking her, I walked toward my bicycle. Her level of excitement rose again as she waved goodbye, her upper arm gyrating. I couldn’t help but return the wave, just as uninhibited.

Rounding a turn on Kratie’s main road, I came into view of my guesthouse. The return journey was a mirror of the first — schoolchildren were on break for lunch, and I passed groups of them, smaller but rowdier than the ones I saw that morning. In front of my guesthouse I slowed. I wanted to take a picture of the river as it followed the route to Kampi; swallowing a slight pang, I realized the image looked like beach scenes from family vacations in New Jersey.

I eased off the bike to get the picture — a move I had executed dozens of times in Siem Reap, leveraging my body against the bicycle in order to take a photograph of this or that temple. Though gorgeous in real time, the Angkor temples tended to appear on my camera as indiscriminate from one another: film upon film of archaic reds and browns.

The river appeared dull when I later reviewed my photos from that morning. It looked like an expanse of chilly blue, a clichéd image. Only in the instant had I been able to discern the wagging currents. They moved with immense energy, seeming to spiral out from a central point. Upon closer examination though, the point was not focal at all, or at least not central to the river. Rather the currents moved out from a focus within themselves, snaking a path, the starting point difficult to divine — and in photographic record, impossible to recognize.

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