I'm working hard on getting the Cambodia posts up and getting the blog back on real time (<- was it ever?)
Here's a running list of the posts that are up so far - I'll update this list of links as new ones are available:
Days 96 and 97 - Bokor Hill Station (<- very cool)
Days 98 to 102 - Kompong Cham
Pierre’s verdict:
The Glatt Kosher crackers and turkey spread = a hit.
The microwaved noodles-and-processed-turkey dish = gross
...and wonder who would buy them. We visit temples...
...museums and parks.
We arrive in Phnom Penh with a few vague plans – we don’t do anything in particular. The days are a mix of this and that.
The city is still hot, and after so many days elsewhere, we really notice the smells of the city, especially the sewers. I’m careful to breathe with my mouth closed, even in the middle of a conversation, so as not to inhale while talking. I hate getting a mouthful of hot sewer smell. It’s almost transcends smell and attains heft and texture.
We go to a blind massage clinic which is not located where the map suggests it will be and we circle the area for a while before finding it. Our masseuses speak impeccable English, mine with a curiously southern-US accent with just a hint of Russian. She's Cambodian, and switches easily back and forth between English and Khmer which, with its b’s and p’s and ng’s, always sounds to me like drops of water hitting a small drum.
Valentines Day comes and goes – on Day 104, CNN plays above the front desk and displays a list of Valentine’s Day top movie rentals. Number 1: The Notebook. Number 2: Sid and Nancy. No word as to how often those two are rented at the same time.
The city is the same, but the prices from just 3 weeks ago have gone up again – everywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent. As with everywhere else in the country, prices are in US dollars, small change is given in Cambodian riel. Every time we eat we get less and less back in return. We talk and walk and figure out our next move. We’ve enjoyed our time here, but we feel like it’s not right to leave without first trading our time or some part of ourselves. We decide that we can at least get organized enough to give blood before leaving.
A poster at the hostel offers a number to call for blood donations at a nearby hospital. On Day 105 the organizer, Isaac, meets us at our hostel around 9:30 am. He’s American, and has been working in Cambodia for several years.
We talk on the walk over to the hospital and he fills us in on blood donations and financial aid in Cambodia. Dengue is a hemorrhagic fever which is very common in Cambodia, with children being especially affected. The kids who catch dengue fever need blood transfusions. “At 3AM, you have 100 kids lined up at the hospital needing blood,” he says. “Their parents bring them from the provinces. Some don’t come to get better. Some fade and don’t make it.”
He works to increase the blood donations at the Kantha Bopha clinic and does various things to help the hospital. “I run a mobile clinic. We have doctors come in from abroad for a few weeks and do a bunch of surgeries,” he says and smiles. “Then they can go home and feel good about it.”
The things he says sound very cynical once they’re written down, but in person he comes across as matter of fact rather than bitter. He’s been in Cambodia for years and is very clear in his opinion on the situation. “Cambodia plays the “poor” angle. It’s not poor. It just got 10 billion dollars in aid. The country is not hurting for cash but the money isn’t going where it belongs.”
Cambodians are generally skeptical about the work he does. “You must be making a lot of money off of this,” they say to him a lot. He earns money through work but not from the tourists. “One guesthouse used to ask me ‘why are you doing this, what do you get out of it? You must be making money off of it.’ She didn’t like me coming and taking guests to donate blood, until one day her kid started hemorrhaging, bleeding from the nose. Then she finally got it.”
Kickbacks abound in Cambodia. Taxi drivers are often paid by tourists to take a tour of orphanages. The orphanage gives a tour, then shows the tourist where it’s possible buy food as a donation. The drivers get a cut - if someone donates six bags of rice, the driver gets to take home one. Drivers approach Isaac sometimes and offer to include the clinic on their tours.
“We could do a tour and start with the blood clinic,” they tell him. For this additional stop, the driver says they would raise the price to 15 dollars for a trip. Isaac says he turns down the offers. “They’re donating and you’re going to charge them twice the regular amount?”
When we arrive at the clinic, another girl is already there, resting up after her donation. Isaac checks to see if she feels queasy - it’s her first time donating blood. “I hate needles,” she says. “I only recently stopped crying at the sight of needles.”
In Canada, blood services checks your iron level by putting a drop or two of your blood into a solution – if it drops below a certain line, you can donate. Here, they take samples of our blood and put it into a kind of manual centrifuge. Pierre’s blood makes the cut, but mine doesn’t so only he’ll be donating today. Afterwards, he hands Pierre a small white bag and a t-shirt. He insists on giving me one as well, although I don’t donate.
Isaac personally invests a lot in getting tourists to help out. Each donation comes with a free t-shirt and free gift bag, as well as the offer of free tours or even free accommodation. “I have people come and crash on my couch – they’re welcome to stay as long as they like.”
True to form, the four of us hang out for a while after the clinic. We head to Evergreen – a coffee shop/clothes store located in an old colonial house a short ride from the clinic. There’s a small orange-tiled pool in the center of the yard, surrounded by lounge chairs.
He introduces us to his kids, which he mentioned to us briefly at the clinic. “I figured why not come to Cambodia, do some work, settle in, adopt a few kids. It’s all good.” His kids paddle in the pool with their yellow arm floaties. They love the water and are as comfortable treading around in it as they are sitting on the grass to play with toys. Love, the two year old boy, kicks around the pool in little circles and doesn’t get out until it’s time to leave, content to amuse himself. Hope, who looks to be around three, is much more active. She’s in and out of the pool, treading laps towards her dad as he talks to her, walking from one end of the pool to the other. They swim with Cambodian kavras (scarves) tied around them like sarongs. Their faces are very serious – they are friendly but don’t waste many smiles on strangers. They’re quiet – we don’t hear them say anything, but they laugh with their dad. Their gentle lopsided grins are the legacy of reconstructed palates.
When Isaac has to head off to rugby practice, we dress the kids and head our separate ways. We check our grab bag to see what we want to bring on the plane with us. Inside is:
- a bag of white sugar (about 1.5 cups)
- a can of condensed milk
- a ramen noodle package
- a box of veggie-flavoured crackers
- a bottle of water
- a set of vitamins and iron pills for Pierre to take for 3 days after his donation
We give the sugar, milk and noodles to a woman we pass along the way. When we get back to the hostel, our tuk tuk is waiting.
We drive past the royal palace...
...past the stores and markets...
..and the bicycles...
...and the pedicabs...
We spend a day in Kampot recovering from our hike, and then catch the bus to Kompong Cham, which is northeast of Phnom Penh. The ride is quieter than our trip on Day 94 for some reason - the bus stops in Skuon again so we take the opportunity to enjoy the spiders again. Every time we do this during our trip, several of the other tourists on the bus are curious what we're snacking on, and when they find out they're surprised and revolted. The latter seems insulting to Cambodians, especially since it's kind of a local delicacy and where we're standing is definitely "local." But their genuine surprise surprises me - do they not have guidebooks? Have they not read anything about Cambodia? I'm not saying we're brave or special - after all, we have decided not to eat the deep friend cockroaches and crickets - I just find it odd. Where exactly did they think they were coming when they bought their ticket?
Maybe the bus horn is getting to me.
We arrive early afternoon and settle into the Mekong Hotel, which has by far the widest hallways I have ever seen, at least seven metres across. Perhaps the architect was trying to echo the wide Mekong River, which flows in front of the hotel, but more likely, the hallway served another purpose at one point, but is now just left empty.
Kompong Cham is not much bigger than Kampot was, and is very relaxing. We walk around on Day 100 and then rent bikes on Day 101 to explore a bit further. The area is known for a long bamboo bridge that the locals build every dry season to connect the mainland to a nearby island. It's bouncy but sturdy, and we pay a toll of 1US$ to cross (I don't know what the locals pay).
We bike around the island for a few hours. The roads are mostly dirt...
...and the streets are busy with students and farmers travelling here and there. At one point, when we stop to put sunblock on Pierre, a small elderly man, wrapped in a sarong and holding a walking stick, crosses the street and stands right in front of us. He points at my travel-size container of sunblock, and says something in Khmer. He sounds angry, and from his gestures and tones seems to be saying something like "what are you punks up to now?" I point to the lotion, mimic putting it on Pierre's cheeks, point to the sun. He seems to understand, and finds it pretty funny. He's pretty tan himself, and sunblock probably sounds pretty silly. He laughs even harder when I put some on Pierre's face, patting it like I'm putting on aftershave. Pierre finds it less amusing, but he's a good sport. Sometimes the toll fee's in dollars, sometimes it's in jokes.
While we bike, Pierre chats for a while with a local high school student who joins us for awhile. He invites us home, but we're not sure if we're being touted or not (he started the conversation with "do you need a guide") so we decline. We work our way back way we came and then head over the real bridge across the Mekong...
...to check out the old French lighthouse across the river from our hotel:
The place is quiet except for a few kids playing near by and the occassional passing vehicle:
It's possible to climb up to the top - it's steep, but the ladders are well-tended and sturdy and the view is worth it:
We have breakfast several times at the Lazy Mekong Daze restaurant, which has excellent fruit shakes, generous servings of baguette and a lovely waitress named Thida. Our first morning she pulls up a chair and puts a handwritten vocabulary list in front of us. "How do you say this?" she asks. We go over the list (advice, capital city,...) and cover a few grammar points for good measure (what is either; what is the difference between to have and to have to). She works seven days a week; she's been here for three months and is teaching herself English. We talk a bit over the course of two mornings, and trade emails when we leave.
The town is small and off the tourist trail just enough so that the locals are really friendly. We run into one tuk-tuk driver several times a day. He always greets us with "Hello Canada." I call him Many Brothers: "I think you must have 3 or 4 brothers," I say to him. "We see you everywhere." As expected, he's one of the last people we see at the bus station on Day 102. Goodbye Canada.
photo credits: P, P, P, P, D, D, P, P, PWe're finally back in Huizhou as of yesterday afternoon and are getting settled in. I think we get to see our university-provided apartment today! It'll need a bit of cleaning, etc, so it will be a few days before we officially move in and we're crashing at Dre's place until then. Over the next few days I'll be working to get the blog up to date, though we've run into a small picture-resizing roadblock that we're currently trying to find a way past.
New posts soon!
Pierre and I spend a lot of time together. I affectionately refer to our weeks of backpacking as The Neverending Date. Except for the occasional afternoon where one of us is sick and stays behind in the room, we are together all day everyday while we're on the road. We're pretty considerate of each other, so being in such close quarters all the time hasn't been much of an issue. We take a vote from time to time to deal with things we find annoying. We agree that sleeping in is all right, but that cursing like sailors is unbecoming and so we're trying to curb that. We even try using a fake swear word ("shnutz") but so far it hasn't taken.
A few weeks ago, I voted a particular phrase off the island and out of our vocabulary: "sucks." It popped up far too often - for cold food, slow buses, biting mosquitoes and generally anything major or minor that got in Pierre's way. This sucks, this sucks, that sucks. Since then, he's been a good sport about working on synonyms. "This bites," he says when he stubs a toe. "That's not convenient," he says when I lose my bank card.
But on Day 95 when we discover that Bokor Hill Station - a ghost town that is the one place in Kampot that we want to see and our sole reason for bussing hours to reach the coast - is closed indefinitely for road repairs, I bend a little. Pierre's so disappointed. "I'm sorry," he says, "but this sucks."
Yes, it does.
It seems unlikely to us that the entire Bokor Hill National Park could be closed to visitors, so we continue to ask around just in case it's not true. Eventually, we come across one tourist office that seems to have "special permission" (paid a bribe?) to take tourists up on Feb 6 for an overnight trip. The road is truly closed for construction, but it's still possible to reach a hiking trail by bus and then walk up the side of the mountain. We pay up (40 US$ each) then go home to pack and charge the camera battery.
The next morning, on Day 96, we walk over to the tourist office and our small Canadian-Australian-English-and-French group piles into the van. At the trailhead, we divvy up the bottled water for the hike up and start out. The hike up the mountain is hot and long and about 1/3 of it is pretty steep - it takes about 5 hours of walking (and quite a few breaks) for us to reach the top. We follow our two guides - one is pretty silent for the entire two days and carries the bulk of the water supplies. Our main guide, Net, carries our lunches in his backpack (rice, chicken and egg in styrofoam containers) and between conversations serenades us with English pop songs (Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls") and Khmer hip hop. We stop at a waterfall for lunch and catch our breath/reydrate a few times near the graves of Vietnamese soldiers.
Pierre spots this wacky spider on the way up (the horned, crab-like thing on the second frond from the left) :
The trail at the top of the hill is white sand:
At the top we catch a truck which drives us the remaining seven or so kilometers to the Bokor Hill Station, where we'll be staying the night at hostel room in the ranger station. The road at the top is bumpy and washed out - it's a mix of water damage from the rainy season and damage from bombs exploded here over the last few decades. (Soldiers [Khmer/Vietnamese] holed up here in the 80s and 90s and lobbed gunfire, bombs, etc. at each other until the fighting finally ended in the late 90s.) We sit in the back of the flatbed truck, which is not comfortable at all. If we sat on a piece of plywood dragged behind the truck with a rope it would be only slightly more uncomfortable.
We're all pretty jostled by the end and glad to stretch our legs. Pierre and I drop off our bags, drink some water and head out to explore the town. Bokor was a French "hill station" with buildings originally built in the 1920s - it was a popular and swanky vacation spot complete with hotels, casinos, a church and even a post office. Except for soldiers and, now, forest rangers, the place has been abandoned since the early 70s, and all the buildings have been left to the elements.
There's an old, Jetsons-like water tower up on the hill...
Nearby is the casino - the path leading up to is has a concrete mushroom-shaped gazebo/umbrella. It's built like a tank and in the middle of a field of grass:
The old casino is covered in a vivid, red-orange moss that's soft and velvety to the touch...
The windows are all broken....
...and the walls inside are covered in moss and mottled with water damage, though structurally still sound. We walk around the four floors, check out the old ballroom:
The old hallways and stairs are still in decent shape...
...though most of the walls are covered up to eye level with grafitti (names carved by tourists into the plaster and moss) plus the occasional "renovation," possibly done by soldiers years ago:
The moss is fed by the fog that rolls in and out several times a day and swallows up the building, even during the dry season:
We check out the church:
...and the old post office:
At sunset, everyone heads back to the ranger station for dinner. Our guide, Net, talks to us a bit about the plans for Bokor Hill Station and about life in general. High school isn't free in Cambodia and he had to drop out of school for years to fish with his dad in their village. Now he's in Kampot and takes Chinese and English lessons, guiding tourists whenever there's work. "Not a lot of normal people can study," he says of university and college. "Only rich people. And also in Cambodia it is hard to loan the money from the bank. If you don't have land or job I think they don't allow us to loan money from the bank."He tells us that Sokimex is planning to develop Bokor Hill Station into a swanky tourist area again, and that fixing the road and making it a paved 2-lane road is the first step in their plan. "Right now it looks quiet but in 2 years I think it is not." He shows us a 2009 calendar that shows Sokimex's plans. We take pictures of the drawings - currently, the area looks like this (close up shot of casino on the hill plus the ranger station below):
Over the next 18 years, they plan to develop it to look like this :
The lake at the top will have some tourist sites. (Check out the fake volcano in the middle, complete with flames shooting out the top):
A cottage community will be built up around the artifical lake they plan to build on the top:
We wonder what will happen to all of the moody old abandoned buildings, which are currently the big draw for tourists. He thinks they'll be restored. "For Cambodia, I think it's for the best. But for you I don't think it's the best." He's right - the development will steal a lot of the place's charm for a certain kind of tourist. (The project is also not in the best interests of the national park it sits in.)
On February 18th there's supposed to be an inauguration for the project, at which point it may become even more difficult to visit the Bokor Hill Station area. Our group may be one of the last groups of tourists to enjoy the Bokor Hill Station this way. We enjoy the silence - we're the only tourists up top tonight and the road construction workers have finally wrapped up their workday.
After dinner, we sit around the table and visit. Emma from the UK has just started a two-year trip around Asia and Australia. Florent and Joanna are in from France for a few weeks. Pierre gets a chance to talk some more with Peter. Peter and Nicky, the Australian contingent of our group, are on a working vacation in Cambodia photographing the sites. We covet Peter's medium format digital camera (= HUGE files plus a hand grip as comfy as a mitten) and he generously shares a few photography tips with us.
One of the biggest lessons we take away from our conversation with Peter is that, when it comes to lighting, it's hard to go wrong at sunrise. Our group, as a whole, decides to get up before dawn with him and explore the casino. At 5:30am, we all start to suit up and straggle up the hill.
The morning starts out clear, and the morning light makes all the colours of the moss and grasses much warmer:
The fog rolls in shortly afterwards and swallows up the building:
The fog makes it hard to see very far...
...so we head inside to take some shots indoors. The fog blocks the view of anything beyond a few feet from the building:
The mist pushes in through the empty windows and wanders through to the other side.
We catch a few final photographs...
...before heading down to meet up with Net and hike down the mountain.
The route down involves another trip in the flatbed, longer this time since we're taking another route down. This time, five of us follow Peter's lead and stand up near the cab, bracing ourselves with a metal bar and keeping our knees loose to ride with the bumps. Joanna and Emma brave things out seated on a tire. Down the road, the driver picks up an elderly monk and two young boys and they join us in the back. They take the bumpy road in stride, and laugh at us laughing at them and how well they handle the jolts.
The walk down is a few hours shorter and mostly uneventful. On one steep bit towards the end of the trail, Pierre slips on a rock while jumping downwards and does a weird slide/tumble combo. He lands in a cloud of dust in an inverted pushup handstand manoeuver - his feet are on the trail, one hand is holding a tree trunk and the other is gripping a rock. He's fine, just dusty and grateful for his good reflexes (though his neck, which was already sore for some unknown reason, remains sore for the next few weeks.) He brushes himself off and keeps hiking.
At the next water break, the French couple, who were right behind Pierre when he fell, ask him if he's ok and say it looked pretty impressive from their angle.
"Dix!" I say, and hold up an imaginary score card.
Joanna smiles, then makes thoughtful face and a moues her lips. "Mmm... Neuf point huit."
In town, the group wraps things up with fruit shakes at an open air restaurant. Peter shows us the photos he's gotten so far on the trip before they head off to catch the sunset in the next town. (The photographs are gorgeous - you can see them here in the Cambodia section of his site, peterbellingham.com).
Pierre and I are exhausted and hungry. The food included in the cost of our hike was good but not nearly plentiful enough to make up for the calories we burnt up during the hike. We feel like we've been at fat camp. We celebrate our successful trip to Bokor (didn't suck!) with well-deserved showers, a field trip to the bookstore and an early dinner.
