Ryllis, Leonie, Ernie, Lyn and I went by local bus to visit and overnight at a village at Anlong Veng which is close to the Thai border. The trip took about 3 hours each way, the road was extremely good by Cambodian standards and the bus even reached 100 kms. Lyn is setting up an English school there so we went with her to check it out. We arrived early to the bus depot, made ourselves know and sat down to wait. We waited and waited and eventually Kim who is Lyn’s Cambodian friend and advisor went to find out what is happening with the bus and was informed that the bus had left and they had forgotten that we were waiting. Next thing, everyone was on the phone and about 5 minutes later the bus came back to pick us up. Don’t think the locals were happy!
It’s going to be real village living for the volunteers in a beautiful setting that enjoys the cool of the mountains. Everything is cheap as chips (dinner for 7 including 2 bottles of wine and many beers was $31) as it’s too far for tourists to have discovered which also meant that 5 tourists walking around town were quite a novelty. Because it’s near where Pol Pot was born, we were very careful about presuming any political views about him as apparently a lot of older people from that area are still fans.
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| Guest house the volunteers would stay in |
The local school is very large with over 9,000 students and the local Minister for Education has suggested to Lyn that she might like to start up a school there. She was given access to a meeting hall on the school property and found a guest house nearby for the volunteers to live and also a local house for the Khmer staff to live in. It looks like it has a lot of potential. There is a great breeze coming off the mountains across the manmade lake. It is nice and not that far from Siem Reap and close to the Thai border if you wanted to travel that way.
On the way home, we inadvertently ended up at the Thai border because our ‘taxi’ driver (actually a friend of Lyn’s local ‘business partner’) took us to the wrong mountain, we wanted to go to the mountain which was on the way home. Lines and lines of market stalls bordered the dust that was an excuse for a road and the people looked extremely poor.
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Another Saturday, all the teachers hired a bus and driver ($60 for the day) to go to Mount Kulen (2 hours away). Amanda, Leonie and Ernie had not been there and the other teachers wanted to see it again as we hadn’t seen the ‘lingars’ when we went there last time. When driving out to the mountain it was very noticeable how much of the area had dried up, no rice paddies and very little water lying around at all. The waterfall of course had reduced considerable but those who went in swimming said that it was very refreshing.
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| Lingas - usually under water |
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| Reclining budda |
I must admit I was disappointed when I eventually saw the lingas, I had read so much about them. Oh well, I have put in a picture for you to see also the reclining Budda which is carved out of a huge on top of the mountain. I didn’t walk up the stairs last time but guess I have got a lot fitter and used to climbing stairs.
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I went back with the others when Leonie, Ernie, Amanda and Ryllis went to have a dose of K&K (kooth and culcher) when they headed to the Cambodian Cultural Village one Sunday afternoon. I am so glad that I did so as I had only been in Cambodia a few weeks when Sandra, Lyn and I first went there and it was in the morning and we were very new to the country.
There are various stages where shows are performed during the day depicting different aspects of Cambodian life and/or dance with lots of humour, static displays of different periods throughout history and the wax figures were so real I truly expected some of them to stand up and follow us around; replicas e.g. floating village, a millionaire’s house, mosque, Surin village (Surin live along Cambodian and Thai border and look and dress quite differently), waterfall into the beautiful lake, early Christian church and lots, lots more including Miniatures – of famous historical buildings and structures which I have now seen in person.
I think it meant even more to all of us as we had the quiz afternoon the day before and we had included a large number of questions about Cambodia including the names of famous people, various Kings etc and for us to see wax figurines and recognise them made the trip even more interesting.
I was absolutely terrified at one stage. The last time I went, I walked through the dark and scary caves which depicted the Hindu version of hell and it was horrible to see and at one stage someone jumped out and grabbed me. Urk. Not to be selfish, I insisted that everyone had to come into the caves with me this time and I must admit that I found myself standing very close to Ryliss who had pulled out her torch so she could see. Well. We seemed to have missed placed the rest of our group, so Ryllis and I were crawling through this dark and ghastly cave being stored by men in masks and having a nervous breakdown when we were grabbed and dragged into another cave. In the cave was a large number of natives dressed as devils and they had a number of people tied up and were throwing them into a fiery pit and it seemed that we were also destined for the same fate. Man, was I terrified. Both Ryllis and I shouted and refused to move so they gave up on us and left us standing there to watch the show. Yes, that is what it was. We had stumbled across a demonstration of how the natives worshipped their God. Man was it ever real!
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Saturday 12 February was another group excursion by bus (air-conditioned thankfully) and this time the 6 teachers from here were joined by the 2 from the village and by Mel and a number of the local staff. We went to ABT (yeah, it can be if we’re not careful – another bloody temple) but this one –Beng Mealea was pretty amazing despite its being in a really dilapidated condition. It was built by the same Hindu king who later built Angkor Wat back in the 12th century – and this one was in homage to his ancestors (Angkor Wat – to himself). Beng Mealea is in a wonderful forested area so it was shady with a cool breeze – and there was something very light about the energy there too. Leonie noticed the lack of bird song and the guide mentioned that as the people are so poor, they eat all of the birds that they can catch. Sling shots are the weapons of choice. Because it’s about one and a half hours from Siem Reap, it doesn’t get the 2 million visitors a year of Angkor Wat and it was very quiet there and without the accompanying hawkers too.
As we walking around the grounds outside the building the lady who works around the area and who was walking with us showed us a hole in the ground, then tapped her wooden leg and told us that she had lost her leg from a landmine that was detonated making that hole we had just walked past. Seeing this, certainly brought the past a bit closer to home. She was fantastic, she was older than me and scrambled over the rock to help us up, needless to say she got a good tip when we left.
We’d taken a picnic lunch which was shared and while some napped, others played soccer or badmington, it was a lovely day.
Sunday after our usual meeting with Mel, we took to a tuk-tuk and headed out to the local silk farm. That was amazing. I’ve seem silk being woven by hand before BUT I’ve never seem the whole process from the growing of the mulberry trees for the leaves, the baby worms - through maturity, to the cocoon stage and then how the silk is extracted from the cocoon and made into the raw and the fine silk. The raw silk is quite yellow obviously because of the leaves’ being affected by something different in the soil; Thai and Vietnamese natural silk is more white. The mostly women we saw working in the display area, are specialists who are able to choose which job they do after extensive training, and they are paid the princely sum of $150 per month compared to someone working in a restaurant who earns about $50 per month (+tips of course). The great little guide at the silk farm said he earns $80 p/m plus some tips (hint, hint – he wasn’t stupid). And as you know, every tour ends in a shop and the garments etc in the silk shop were exquisite. I will return there before I fly home.
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After our creative burst, the same five took to tuk-tuks and headed out 25km to the Cambodia Landmine Museum. To add authenticity, the staff dress in Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese uniforms. The experience was a further education in “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless millions mourn” and was really worth the visit. As with life, there’s always another side. We learned about Aki Ra who set up the museum as a way to finance assistance/rehab/education to child victims of landmines. His story is amazing: watched the Khmer Rouge kill all of his family, was forced to be a soldier at 10 for the Khmer Rouge, skipped sides to fight with the Vietnamese and one day found himself in a gun battle with the Khmer Rouge, was just about to shoot one when he recognised his uncle. He pulled the shot excusing that with “I’m feeling dizzy” and writes that he and his uncle often discuss that time and laugh about the close call for himself and his uncle. Aki Ra has personally cleared thousands of landmines and the later events were well photographed. He was awarded the 2010 CNN Hero Award and from all accounts, it was well deserved. Sensibly, there are donation boxes around the museum and it would take a heartless non-person not to come away with a light wallet.
Some other sights we passed on the way were: villages with hand pumps for water near the front of the little houses with a sign showing a Cambodian flag and a foreign flag acknowledging the donation which made the well possible; stacks of wood near the fires where charcoal was being made (used by the street vendors for cooking); really heavily laden tray carts carrying the charcoal being pulled by very ancient motorbikes; fires near the road upon which sat the biggest woks I’ve ever seen. At each wok was a woman busily stirring whatever was in the wok. Curiosity got the better of us and we asked our drivers to stop so we could investigate. It turned out that a sugary substance was boiled so much that it turned into a quite-nice fudge which was shaped into little rounds and stacked into cylindrical leaves for sale. A young man with really good English explained the process to me. The long thin ‘male’ fruit of the palm tree is squeezed between a piece of split bamboo for the juice which is boiled. The round ‘female’ fruit is pulpy and makes rather pleasant eating, somewhat like a very immature coconut.
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