Cambodia: learning to run a hostel

I landed in Siem Reap with no real plan beyond seeing Angkor Wat, and left a month later having learned how to actually run a hostel — from another Deaf traveler.

The Blue Lizard Backpacker Hostel — the "Happy Gate," pictured at the top of this page — had been running for years under a Deaf American who'd been on the road himself for something like six years by the time I showed up. I hadn't gone looking for that specifically. Meeting another Deaf person out here, doing exactly the kind of extended, self-directed travel I was in the middle of, running a business on top of it — that wasn't something I'd let myself imagine as a real option before I saw it in front of me. He took me in, showed me the actual mechanics of it: bookings, staff, the hundred small daily decisions nobody puts in a travel brochure. I walked through that gate as a guest and left knowing how the other side of the counter actually works.

Representation is a word that gets thrown around a lot, usually about screens — seeing someone like you on TV, in a movie. Nobody talks as much about what it does to see it in person, standing in front of you, having built an actual life out of the thing you're only just now finding the nerve to attempt. I didn't leave Cambodia with a business plan. I left with proof that the life I was already living wasn't a fluke, wasn't a phase, and wasn't something I'd have to give up eventually because nobody Deaf actually does this long-term. Someone already had.

The people you end up sharing a table with, a few thousand miles from home.

A month in, I moved on toward India. I didn't know it yet, but the next stretch was going to take me higher — literally — than I'd ever been in my life.