No office

"I love cooking. I love everything except going to an office. I hate offices, I would kill myself!"

- The woman working in the beautiful hotel in Kampot, Cambodia.

She was this tornado of energy and compassion, with a dash of happy craziness. Not your typical hotel director, and she told us that she was living in Africa with her boyfriend, but she came back to this hotel many times a year, to help and work. She knew the hotel director she said, and she called her "a helpful and nice woman who lets me stay here for free - as long as I work and help with the hotel".

We arrived there in our tuktuk, after a 10 hours bus ride which involved crossing the border from Vietnam to Cambodia, arriving in the capital Phnom Penh, and finding a minivan taking us 3 hours more south, to Kampot.

The young tuktuk-driver (was he even 18 years old yet?) clearly hadn't been this far away from the centre of Kampot (30 minutes drive in the black night). We were let in to the resort-area, after driving on a sandy, bumpy road for some minutes, and he drove nervously, heading straight towards the pool. 

"Stooooop - the cat!" someone yelled, and the tuktuk-breaks screamed. 

The woman came running, dressed in a summer dress, together with four employees at the hotel. She picked up a tiny cat, no bigger than a small coffee cup around its cat-waist.

"Sorry" she said, "but I just adopted this little cat, found him on the road."

"Come on inside, sweeties, can I get you something to drink on the house?" she said as the rest of the staff eagerly lifted our bags and backpacks out of the tuktuk and in to the reception.

This woman made us feel more like guests at a friend's summer house, than guests in a hotel by the coast in southern Cambodia. 

She was always running around in her cute summer outfits, giving directions to the staff on where to put the Christmas decoration, and when to serve us free lasagne. She would approach us in the evening, taking our dinner-order while we were sitting freshly tanned and sunburned in the eating room which was partly inside, partly outside under the palm trees. Suddenly she would share some intimate secrets about her life, hopes, dreams, plans, whatever, and then rush back to work. 

But the short stories she shared, involved passion and a wish to help young girls to have a better future than what was planned for them.. And she spoke a lot of happiness.

And that is the thing about traveling; when you find yourself in countries and cities where you have no acquaintances, you will be more open to new people around you. 

And because you are traveling and staying in a new place where people have different points of views  from the people you have grown up together with - they will challenge all your so-called facts about life and living. 

She could never see herself working in an office. She said she came to Cambodia to take pictures, cause she was really a photographer. This was 20 years ago. Now she lived in Africa, or did she really live here?

We never saw the female hotel director she kept talking about. We only saw her, running around, fixing and decorating and laughing and creating good vibes only.

"I do it for these girls" she said, and pointed at the girls working in the restaurant, "they are so lovely. And I want to help them to have a better life."

The majority of people I meet in my daily life, work in offices of some sort. And they are happy with it. Great. Perfect. But what works for some people, is not necessarily the best way to go for everyone. Just make sure you are happy doing what you're doing, being where you are.

Photos: KMG