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It’s midnight, I’m in a street full of bars surrounded by a hundred strangers screaming, clapping and cheering me on. My opponent is a teenage Khmer girl who can move like Beyonce. I, on the other hand, move like a new-born giraffe, tentatively taking it’s first wobbly steps on jelly legs. It would appear that my day has taken an unexpected twist. I’m in a dance off. My mind raced; tension, conflict, fear, but nothing like at the kind of levels this country has suffered. Unbelievable, horrific, recent, yet almost unremembered were it not for morbid museums and missing limbs. This is a country that was torn apart, marinated in salt and left to die. I’m so grateful Cambodia is slowly recovering from its attempted murder. My first steps into the land of the former Khmer Rouge had me feeling a little agitated. My shoes quickly stained from the red, dusty back roads of Siem Reap, where outstretched palms beg for small change desperate to feed hungry mouths. I spotted some official looking posters alerting tourists not to cough up, even though a couple of insignificant cents might mean the world to a family on the brink. Strange stance for a country in such need of benevolence. I found it hard to reconcile. I venture further, jet-lagged and starving, in search of something to feed my own hungry mouth. Somehow though I’m not yet adventurous enough to try the local delicacies of fried spiders and grubs being sold at the roadside stalls. That would come later. For now a familiar western dish would suffice. I wonder what time it will cool down now that the sun has departed for the evening, I hope it’s soon, my clothes are drenched and the Mekong flows unrelenting from my brow. As the evening evolves I lose myself into the ambience of this city at night, a strange hedonistic cocktail of mass tourism and abject poverty. I meet all kinds of weird and wonderful people along the way. A german guy who looks just like my brother, an English dude dressed as the Lone Ranger and a local prostitute with a face that reminded me of Christmas - all twinkly and expensive and yet, somewhat anti climax. My new best friends. I always found it odd how we share our most intimate stories with total strangers. Secrets we would never tell our families or friends. Tonight was no different as we laughed, drank and made commitments to stay in touch forever, even though deep down each of us knew tonight would be a one off. We move from bar to bar, empty glass to full, and profess our profound love for each other until it’s closing time and the party spills out of the bars and into the street. Music is everywhere. Bass driven thunder at a million decibels, the sort of volumes that would make the end of the world sound like a newborn’s breath. Unconsciously, my feet started tapping, my head started nodding and then my arms were at it too. I was dancing. I looked like a fool but I was loving it. Here I was, a world away from my life back home, dancing in the streets on the very first night of my adventure. If the naysayers could see me now they too would be ditching their jobs and taking a leap into the unknown just like I had. I don’t recall exactly how it happened, only that it did and there were suddenly scores of people now surrounding me. I was throwing shapes, cutting the rug, showing off all my best giraffe moves. I had lost my new best friends in the crowd and all I could hear was the wall of white noise radiating from the transient cheerleaders lining the street. I focused. It was just me against her, Beyonce, and she’s got me looking so crazy right now.