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| From Cambodia |
We finished up our time in Siem Reap with a walking tour of the countryside with 2 lovely girls as our guides. Transported first by Tuk-Tuk 20 or so kilometres out of the city we were deposited on one of the many endless stretches of very, very straight dusty red roads. The Cambodians must have had lessons from the Romans when it came to road building (did the Romans get this far???). Anyway, the roads were incredibly straight and we had entered a time warp, albeit for the mopeds. A land where time has stood still as families farm the land with rice and herbs, keeping cows and water buffalo. Transport is by buffalo drawn cart and everything is done at a very leisurely pace.
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| From Cambodia |
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| From Cambodia |
We walked around rice fields and through several small villages and sat for a while with some women weaving mats and bowls from dried palm leaves. There wasn't much conversation to be had, just plenty of smiles. The scenery was like a picture book. Flat as the eye can see, regimented into small squares that are mostly dry and brown because of the season; the odd palm tree breaking your line of sight. It is tranquil and so beautiful, such a relief from the hustle and bustle of the towns and cities. Breakfast of banana bread, fruit, and incredibly sweet coffee, was taken beneath the house of a friendly family and we discovered that the houses are not built on stilts due to immense flooding in the wet season, but because of their belief that bad spirits travel along the ground and so by raising their houses up the bad spirits will pass them by. I like that philosophy :-)
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| From Cambodia |
We were picked up by the Tuk-Tuk to be driven a few kilometres further to another village but made an impromptu stop, due to a flat tyre, at a little house-cum-store much to the amusement of the family living there whilst we waited for our driver to get the tyre fixed. The smaller children didn't know what to make of us and the teenage girl thought it was funny, affecting a little strut as she went about her chores. She let me go with her to the pig sty and I discovered that pigs really do eat slop. Brown slop. Geez they were loud, screaming for the food whilst she mixed it with water. All too soon our brief interlude at the country store was over, our driver returned with a new tyre and we went on our way.
Our guides were great and gave us a real insight into Cambodian life - the poverty, the customs etc. The essential key to all young Cambodians life is learning English: the magical language; the key to the door; the road to riches. At least that is the belief and I suppose in comparison to a life of subsistence farming working in tourism whether as a guide, in a restaurant, or in a hotel, it is a road to a richer life. The ones that do manage to learn English are then obligated (I'm not sure that is the right term as it seems to be done quite willingly) to support the rest of the family - c.10 siblings and parents, put the younger ones through school, pay for their English lessons etc. It explains why we see at every turn people in their late teens and twenties with their noses buried in exercise books and text books. Every spare moment is an opportunity to learn a little bit more English and it's humbling. Our walk was a refreshing glimpse into the real Cambodia, not the chocolate coated foreigner version.
It was time to leave Siem Reap and we travelled south to Battambang, supposedly the country's second city, but a bit of a backwater really. We engaged another friendly Tuk-Tuk driver to take us into the countryside where we visited a few temples, one of which was situated next to a cave where thousand's of people were murdered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. It was harrowing to come face to face with the mass genocide that has taken place in this country so recently, not least because we were told that some of the bones found in the cave have been put on display for foreigners to look at.
We spent the whole day, whilst being ferried in our Tuk-Tuk over truly awful roads, smiling and waving to all of the children along the way. All of them waved and some shouted 'Hello', some shouted 'Bye Bye' and my smile muscles were put under considerable strain! Our last stop was the bamboo train. A self assembly train that is essentially a base of woven bamboo sat on 2 axles, with a small engine and a make shift breaking system which consisted of a piece of wood on elastic bands that when stood on, presses against the rails and slows the train down. We sat on cushions and our very young driver (around 10 years old) started the engine and off we went on on what turned out to be a bit of a white knuckle ride. The train went quite fast on tracks that are bent and warped with gaps between the rails of up to 3 inches. These gaps make for a bumpy ride and the bent rails approaching very quickly made it all quite nerve wracking - in a fun sort of way!
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| From Cambodia |
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