Kampong and up north…
Cambodia
The man at Lucky Lucky spoke good English and told us when we come to pick up the dirt bike not to come on a moto, or he will have to charge us extra for the commission they demand! Fair enough, no problem, Phnom Penh is small enough to walk, even if it is a capital city.
We got a Baja dirt bike that felt like riding a spirited steed that needed to bolt any time you lapsed your concentration. The ride to Kampot resembles a giant slalom but on wheels not skis, pot holes not poles. I wouldn’t have come in medal placing with my effort. Well shaken and saddle sore we arrived at Kampot, a sleepy town with not much going for it but the “Ghost Town” of Bokor Hill Station, the only reason to venture down here unless you are passing onto Sihanoukville, a seaside resort. (We’ve had enough of the seaside for a while…)
It takes an hour and a half to cover the pebble-strewn dirt road to the hill station, a rough and hazardous ride up a twisting track that only covers 32 kms! Near the bottom we passed a couple on an 110cc scooter that had stopped for a break. As we continued our climb, it became more and more obvious that they wouldn’t make it; the terrain was not compatible with their bike. Bokor is an old French colonial getaway, abandoned from the time of the Khmer Rouge and now is deserted and barren. There is an old Catholic church that stands alone in the mist, kind of spooky, completely empty and now has graffiti scratched all over the walls of the inside. A deserted altar stands alone amongst the rubble and debris of time, once obviously the centerpiece of a small thriving French community, now a shadow of a wealthy area that was once Bokor Hill.
The area is dotted with once occupied homes of the rich, and several old hotels that still bear the original names out front, but inside are shells. The most magnificent of which is the old casino, a proud and prominent feature of the surrounding countryside. Walking up the great steps to the enormous entrance takes you back in time, although completely bare inside you can imagine the place filled with porters, bell hops, and serving men waiting on your every need. It’s a magnificent place and we could picture each room as we passed through them, the great hall of the casino with great pillars and intricate tiled floors. The roulette over there, craps just beyond and maybe the blackjack tables on the other side, all looking out onto the magnificent views over the hillside. Large tiled kitchens below with little spiral stairs for the room service people to climb that gave access to each floor.
A myriad of sweeping staircases leading to standard rooms and then suites on the upper floors, balconies where the guests might sip cocktails and chat amicably, rooftop terraces that belong to the penthouse suites that sat right up on the highest floor looking out onto the forested hillside below. You could almost hear the parties and the sound of glasses clinking around you. But now you look around and it’s an old deserted building, decaying and empty, no sounds but the wind gusting through open orifices where windows once were. Nothing left of the decadent past that was once housed here. Now it only a ghost town up in the hills that hardly sees a living soul.
After a night of boozing at the “in place to be” (The Heart of Darkness, where all the drunken ex-pats and trendy travelers end up on a Saturday night) in Phnom Penh, a couple of days after Kampot, and a precarious trip home with Eddie and I balanced behind our moto driver (a trip Eddie still doesn’t remember), we boarded a bus from the central market area to Kampong Cham. Surprise surprise, the road was in excellent repair and the ride completely bearable.
We arrived in Kampong Cham, another of those sleepy towns with nothing to do but sip beer by the Mekong River and chat to locals, or just smile and be friendly if they don’t understand you… Our guidebook mentions if you kick back for long enough by this river in this town an old man call Vannat will eventually track you down. Sure enough, a little later he arrived, he’s a local guide that has an incredible grasp of the English language, he sat down and we passed the time awhile.
After finding out we were only in town a night so wouldn’t be able to take up his generous offer of a tour of the local countryside (we’re all Wat-ed out, thanks), he told us of a really cool place to eat in the evening, good local food, terrific atmosphere, all bundled up with a lively Karaoke show to dine by. Quite near here but just far enough to require a moto to get us there… very cheap price… (So that’s his game, eh?) Actually he was a nice guy, genuine and friendly. We chatted for an hour or so until he said he had to leave to go back home (without the promise of any work from us… ahhhhh). Meanwhile, another fairly average sunset was witnessed and we were feeling warm with beer and chilled from an easygoing evening.
Early night early start (-ish), the 07:30 boat to Kratie, pronounced “Krachie”, slipped away from the pier north up the Mekong, having relieved us of 40,000 reil. This is the way to travel Cambodia, no rough roads, water deep enough not to get grounded, and the morning sun feeling warm on your face like a whiskey flush. Sitting rooftop-style noshing fresh grilled chicken, sweet chilli sauce and sticky rice for breakfast amongst the locals and their wares. A group of local police joined us on top of the boat with their breakfast, a few cans of beer, why not? I like that idea…
The sun shone down from a blue glazed sky. Eddie snoozed, mouth open like a chick ready to be fed by its mother (or like a goldfish?). I watched the world pass by. Morning washer girls, kids playing, men fishing, small fields of crops planted on the bank side. Villages on stilts, like a community of giant spiders waiting for dinner, scatter the riverside, awaiting the monsoon rains that lift the water level by over 20 meters, sometimes rising so high that the waters flood the surrounding towns. It happened in Kampong Cham last year.
Locals board the vessel with market goods and snacks for the citizens on board with enough money to spend on delicacies like dried fish, assorted weird fruits and eggs with fetus inside. This is a local delicacy that will set you back about 700 reil. Plucked from under the mother hen, the egg complete with fully formed chick fetus inside ready to hatch is boiled and serves as a delicious protein filled snack by Tikalok vendors (fruit smoothie vendors that the locals adore). It doesn’t sound that appetizing to me but you see the locals spooning out this mushy brown interior with a spoon and great gusto! Hmmmm.
Star Guest House welcomes the boat each day with cute kids waving cards, no other place gave us such a reception so we stayed there. Here we met Mao Mao, one of the proprietor’s sons who taught us a local Khmer card game that I turned out quite good at. I liked Mao Mao, he’s a jokey funny lad with a broad smile and quick darting eyes, and at 21 he’s well educated and talks like Michael Caine. He knows the weird words and their meanings that nobody has use for, let alone use in everyday English language. He also collects US army memorabilia that he finds out and about and sells it to the local museum – now that’s what I call an entrepreneur! (He found a bit of metal that resembled a part of a US Army helicopter rotor blade, reckons it’s worth $10 to the museum.) On other days he goes and chips out crystals from a hill on a nearby island and sells them to a German buyer that passes through town regularly.
This is a guy that makes the most of his lot. He has a deformed and twisted foot that makes it difficult to walk and wears down his sandals into odd shapes, but it doesn’t get to him. Life goes on, he says. With that attitude he’s going far.
We eat sour mango’s dipped in chilli, salt and sugar after a swim in the rapids, lying and relaxing in the shade of the palm thatched roofs, while he practices his South London (Saff Landen, mate) accent on you, with a Cambodian cockney slant that sounds so funny we can’t help laughing! “Awl white geezer, ‘ow’s it goin’?”, “Dog an’ bone, brown bread innit”, “Two pintsa lager an’ a packa crisps plez mate” etc, etc….
What to do in Kratie, we hired a motor scooter and cheekily followed Mao Mao while he was showing these two English guys a tour of the area. Saw the rare Irrawaddy Dolphin (just), not close enough for anything else but a speck in a photo… The kind of thing that impresses you at the time but when you get the photos back and show them proudly to your friends, your amazing day with the endangered Irrawaddy Dolphins, they aren’t all that impressed. Try and find a microdot on the front of the Sunday Times! Even our new Cambodian bought (dodgy) camera with its super duper mega zoomy lens thingy crashed and burnt. But we saw them, honest guv’nor.
We ate venison that night on a table top BBQ with Mao Mao as we felt we had taken advantage of his tour that day. He drank too much free beer and after swaying through the night, fell asleep at the table. Oh well, we’ve all been there, well some of us anyway… I’m sure some of the meat here takes a lot of digesting, it seemed to take quite a few days to run through the ol’ body, I can’t of chewed it for long enough, but then again when lock jaw sets in you sometimes have to give up and just swallow.
Moving swiftly on…we had a lie in the next morning, the boat wasn’t due to leave till late morning. Actually it didn’t leave at all, didn’t even arrive from downstream! Apparently it broke down, or crashed, not sure which, and wouldn’t be back in service for 10 days or so. The promise of a relaxing rooftop ride up river was gone, replaced with a miserable, bumpy, sore etc, etc, etc trip in a taxi along a road so bad I might have called it the worst road in Cambodia. The thing is, it isn’t. Apparently there are far worse. I’m not going on them then…
$40 US later, Iain and Dean (the two Brits we followed with Mao Mao on their tour) arrived in Stung Treng. We forewent the cramped condition option of 7 in a car and paid a bit more for the driver just to take the four of us. It was worth it, leg space and all that. The driver wanted to stop to pick up two more on route, but we firmly said “No”, we weren’t giving up our space and comfort of this A/C cabin for anyone (apart from emergencies of course, life and death stuff maybe…). I did feel a little bad about leaving the mother and daughter roadside, but I knew that there was a pick-up following somewhere behind.
We had plans of eventually going all the way north to the unofficial border crossing into Laos, we knew it had been done in the past but could prove to be costly in bribes. Up to $40 US/person on the Cambodian side and a little less on the Laos side. The worst prospect was to be turned away completely and have to return to Phnom Penh and fly in, Noooooo!!!
As it was, a local moto driver in Stung Treng scooted us up to the local police station where he explained our intentions to the local immigration chief who willingly accepted a bribe of $15 US (Bargain!!!) in return for a written letter of passage over the Cambodian side. Just the Laos side left to deal with then…
Actually I think the Immigration Chief was pleased to have the chance to practice his English. He proudly showed us his certificate of recently passing an English course held by the United Kingdom Service for Immigration in Phnom Penh. He also said that my picture in my passport made me look handsome. Worrying? Don’t I look handsome in real life? (Eddie didn’t get a compliment, she was a bit sad… ha ha)
A weight off our shoulders, we met up with Iain and Dean again, raided a local store and relieved it of a case of beer and a couple of bottles of local spirits. We stopped at an ice seller and bought 1500 reils worth of ice in a big lump, who had never sold bulk ice to a foreigner before by the looks and smile I got from him and fellow customers, and commandeered a table by the good ol’ Mekong River at a spicy sausage and satay stall. We played the new game I was taught and gently got particularly inebriated with yet another sunset as backdrop over the Mekong in the quiet market town of Stung Treng in northern Cambodia. Could you ask for more?
Yes you probably could, but we didn’t, we were happy.
Banlung is our last destination in Cambodia. It’s way north, a dusty two road desert style town that reminds me of an old western movie, all you need is a few dry tumbleweeds rolling down the main street. Hill tribe villages, waterfalls, peaceful lakes and gem mines.
It took us almost two hours winding along forest paths and tracks, crossing rivers, bridging ditches on our little motor scooter we hired, to get to the gem mines deep in the forest. Gems were not known in this part till only three years ago, and a good road has still yet to be built. Meanwhile everything is biked in and out along the tracks that wind around the countryside. Small holdings that were once the only settled places out here are rapidly growing their land, slash and burn technique making way for more area to farm as the promise of a new road and new inhabitants loom on the horizon.
Already a makeshift village has sprung up to house and feed the miners who’s job it is to extract the rough stones the colour of cola from the ground. 12-15 meter holes are dug by hand in the loose, rich soil only 2-3 feet in circumference with foot holes on either side of the hole to get down. I climbed down one hole, the smell of the earth below the surface is rich and peaty and the air is thick with dry dust. These guys are down here for four hours at a go between breaks, working with a small pencil torch in cramped conditions. With the two of us down there, there was no room to move in the tiny, cramped, hollow ball of space. They just dig away at the face by torchlight, pocketing any stones they find and sending up the excavated dirt by a bucket on a winch.
Within a few minutes I was sweating and feeling dizzy, the air is polluted with carbon dioxide with no ventilation, made worse by me being there. It was incredibly claustrophobic down there so I left the black faced Cambodian to continue his work, only to find that on poking my head out of the hole it was obvious by Eddie’s smirk that my face was equally as black. The dust stuck to the sweat on my face.
Once the good stones are cut, if they are cooked at an extreme heat they turn a beautiful powder sky blue, completely transparent and clear like a coloured diamond. The not so good quality stones end up in an old can to be sold to passersby like us. A handful of stones, rough and unpolished, as they come from the ground are only worth about 10,000 reil, about US$1.50. But this is the mainstay of their work; very rarely do they catch a prime stone good enough to sell for cutting, polishing and cooking. Two men a hole, working all day long in dirt, in deep holes with bad air by torchlight, for a few thousand reil a day. But they do it, there’s always hope for that big strike I guess.
Half an hour down the road was a small but peaceful waterfall where we swam and I washed, removing the dirt from my face and arms, blowing the red dirt gunk from my nose in great blasts (nice, eh?) and relaxing in the cool shadows out of the coming to midday sun munching on a baguette with Vegemite and peanut butter filling we had bought.
We spent four nights in Banlung, visiting villages, tribal burial grounds with their weird phallic wooden statues with all the bits painted to accentuate them, more waterfalls and a peaceful clear lake where we read and sipped cold beer from a nearby vendor. The evenings were spent with the hotel owner, Mr. Leng, trying to encourage us to drink with him by bringing out 1� litre bottles of Chinese champagne that tasted like Scrumpy cider and had the colour of urine when you’re really dehydrated (we still drank it). Inevitably, the evenings turned into great piss ups, we all spent far too much cash on beer, and we all sat up on the roof gazing at the stars listening to Iain play classical Spanish guitar like a true pro. His Deer Hunter was quite good too.
We left Stung Treng the day after we arrived back from Banlung, on a flat boat powered by a 1300cc car engine supported on the back driving a long tail. We were heading now for the Cambodian-Laos border.
If you want to mail me, please do so on jakethestroud@hotmail.com.
