I’m still in Siem Reap. This early morning peculiarly martial music rattles out from the local Wat (temple), quite incongruous with the idea of a peaceful, placid country.
The roadworks, which have been heaping great mountains of red dirt onto roads and making pathways unpassable around Siem Reap, have ceased as it is Khmer New Year this week.
With the advent of these monster mounds of earth practically everywhere, there is little joy in a daily constitutional. Dust seems to permeate these thin blue, paper, masks to play havoc with my sinuses. Now I have become a Covid hermit, only going out to get the makings for meals, or milk and bread. Siem Reap is no longer a sight for sore eyes but has become a cause of sore eyes.
Covid 19, in all its deviltry, creeps astonishingly closer daily though, to be honest, it is nowhere as devastating here as it is in Europe, and especially the country of my birth, England. But more especially where I was living in Tendring, on England’s East Coast. Tendring is near the top of Covid’s deadly most wanted list and Siem Reap really does not compare, hence my dilemma.
There are equally good reasons for me to return to the country of my birth, and not to. How much longer will the Cambodian Government tolerate overstayers like myself? Will I, one day, be swooped up in some Immigration net and deported, like one Frenchman recently, or will I be allowed to continue to overstay until I am free to return to Malaysia? Ah!
Covid 19 is, quite possibly, at its worst in Cambodia right now, with its capital Phnom Penh locked down and travel between provinces not possible. This varies from week to week making it very difficult to makes plans to exit the country by plane. Land borders are closed too.
I had, idly, considered going back to England, but that possibility comes and goes like a woman’s love. So, undecided, I sit and type and am no closer to an answer to ’Should I stay or should I go?’
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