Updated by: May 11, 2026
The Boat Ride
A few years ago, we were travelling from Phnom Penh to Battambang in Cambodia. Our transport of choice was a boat along the Tonle Sap River, an estimated eight-hour journey in the heat and humidity that Cambodia does so well.
Queuing to board, I noticed something. It was subtle but nagging. There seemed to be more people in the line than the boat could reasonably hold.
Then, our turn came.
The boat was packed and there was nowhere to go. The man from the boat company looked at us, then pointed upward. Not onto the boat but up a ladder, leading to the roof.
We were to spend eight hours on top of a tin boat in the glaring Cambodian sun!
What followed was genuinely one of the great travel experiences of my life — not despite the discomfort, but because of it. Up on that roof you saw everything. Villages built entirely on water, homes rising and falling with the river’s level, children swimming between houses and fishermen working in the shallows.
The people in those villages don’t do this for eight hours and then go home to a hotel. This is simply their life.
That realization was that our momentary hardship was in-fact, someone else’s every day and is the kind of thing that comfortable travel rarely delivers…
Sometimes a little hardship, opens your eyes.
Paul Mercuri
Wake Up Here Founder
