Cambodia

Cambodia

Cullinary Adventure and Excitement... 

Our adventure into Cambodia started first with a ride in a disco van from Bangkok. Yes A disco van. There is no other way to describe it. There was lights and huge speakers all over the inside of it. Thankfully as it was 6 am when we left. None of this was turned on. Cambodia was an interesting country. A lot of it was swamp land. This means a lot of it floods all the time. The people here seemed to have dealt with this by trying to put houses on stilts and make the most of it by growing rice. Lots and lots of rice. They also harvested crickets in the big swampy fields. Mmm crickets… yes I did try one. No I did not go back for seconds.  

Aside from the bug eating Cambodia had a few other very prevalent quirks. The first of which is that for a very poor country things seemed expensive. The reason for this is most likely that they did not have their own currency. Well they did but nobody used it. The American dollar is what they use in all the transactions. This created a problem because they only used the paper money and had none of the change. The local currency could sometimes be used as change but for the most part things were just rounded to the dollar. So things that in Thailand would have cost you .30$ were now 1$... this made it seem very expensive. However you could still get a massage or a manicure for about 3$ which made things feel cheep. The second really notable occurrence was the Tuk Tuk’s. yes they had some in Thailand… but they didn’t have them like Cambodia. In Cambodia you cant walk 5m without somebody coming up to you and saying ”Tuk Tuk!” and that’s it. Just people in your face yelling tuk tuk… really weird. Even if you just got out of a Tuk Tuk you will walk a few meters and be asked if you want another one. No! There were times when I wanted to just throw my hands in the air and go running down the screed yelling. I just want to walk!!!  Apart from the tuk tuk the most common way to travel seemed to be by karaoke bus. Yes karaoke. For reasons I can not explain and really don’t want to know most of the busses seemed to advertise for karaoke on board. We managed to avoid much of this but there was one particular bus that had very loud music in a language I really couldn’t understand. This may have been the over hyped karaoke. In all this however I have to say the strangest thing I witnessed in Cambodia was at a bus station. In many countries we have witnessed people carrying liquids in plastic bags. Drinks tied up in a bag with a straw like how you bring home a goldfish. But this was different. This man was walking past me with a shopping bag full to the top with water. It was not tied. He had no smaller bags. There was no discernible reason for him to be holding it. What are you going to do with that? How far are you going with it? How do you plan to put that down? What do you need that for? How are you going to drink that? Go to your kitchen and fill a plastic shopping bag with water and see if you can answer any of these questions for me… I cant figure it out. As the man sloshed past us I pointed it out to Erin needing conformation that I had just seen this. It was true, I have no explanation.

The first major activity was visiting the Angkor temples at Seim Reap. The day started really a lot earlier then anybody would have liked. But we all wanted to see the sunrise…. So we trucked out of the hotel at about 4 in the morning to wait around and be eaten by bugs beside a swamp waiting for the sun to rise above the temple of Angkor Wat.  We had front row seats but the view was disappointing. The weather chose not to cooperate and the clouds prevented a really nice sunrise.  We spent the next 10 ish hours exploring the temple complex. We made it through about 4 large sized temples. After the first 2 Erin was at here temple max but did her best to get through the rest of them. The architecture was beautiful as were the stories that surrounded the buildings. A lot of the carvings depicted seens from Hindu mythologies.  the most interesting of the temples was one that they had not fully restored. In this one they had left the trees growing though the buildings. In most of the temples these had been removed but they wanted to show what the temples had looked like before restoration had begun. I think it would have been much neater if they left them all like that. The roots growing through the stonework created a very interesting combination. I spent much of the day taking pictures of everything. After all was said and done I took nearly 300. It was a bit excessive yes but I was having a good time. It was a long and exhausting day that found us watching the sunset from a large hill overlooking the temple complex.

The other side of Cambodia is not quite so friendly. As a result of years of fighting and oppressive leadership Cambodia has the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily land mined country in the world.  We went to the war museum and the killing fields to see more closely the kinds of things you usually read about in a text book.  The stories we heard about families thrown out of their homes and forced to work in farm camps were heart breaking. The faces of the victims and child soldiers looking at us from the walls of the museum are the kinds of things that don’t go down easy. many years of slaughter and fighting have left Cambodia with a population that has just had to forget and move on. With many of the leaders responsible for the slaughter granted amnesty they have no choice but to leave the past behind.  So much of the population was killed that more then 50% are under the age of 18 with less then 4% over the age of 60.

Erin and I were fortunate enough to spend Christmas in Cambodia. We found ourselves in a beach town called soukomvill. Christmas eve we had a BBQ dinner on the beach and I had a chance to play with fire for the first and what looks like only time on this trip. Erin went with some people on our tour to an all night beach dance party on a private island.  We celebrated on Christmas morning with hot chocolate and amarula then headed out to another reclusive island for a day of lying in the sand.  The water was beautiful and clear and warm. It was a fantastic way to spend our Christmas. The next morning we got up early to call home on everybody elses Christmas and set sail towards Vietnam… once again in a bus with Karaoke on it.