Hello from Cambodia 2

Saturday 15th September.
Suarsadei

Here we are in the real Cambodia. We have left Phnom Phen and travelled 3 hours by bus to the town of Kompong Cham. On the journey we passed through some beautiful scenery of rice paddy fields, palm trees and banana groves. It is a very rural country with stuff being grown on every inch. The one thing there appears no shortage of is food. The markets are full of every type of exotic, fruit, fowl, fish and things we cant work out yet. When the bus stopped mid journey, we were besieged by hoards of little girls selling giant roasted spiders on trays. Thankfully we have yet to meet their living sisters.

Kompong Cham is apparently Cambodia’s third town but is smaller than St Albans. It used to be a major port during the days of French imperialism and some of the architecture still reflects its former glory. Nowadays however it is rather jaded, its main point of interest is a huge bridge which the Japanese have built over the Mekong. The river itself is very wide and grey with surprisingly little traffic on it although rather beautiful at sunset. We have also been told that the sunrise is spectacular but seeing as this takes place at 5.30 am we have yet to confirm this.

The VSO have a big villa here where volunteers are put up while they are doing their in country training. Unfortunately there is not enough room for all of us so we, and the American couple have been put up in the Hotel Mekong. This is a huge place overlooking the river which, although initially impressive, has seen better days. There are huge marble lined corridors, which are slightly scary if you have ever seen The Shining, but the rooms are a little shabby. We have our own miniature zoo including hot and cold running geckos who sing to each other at night. The main asset is the cable telly which has BBC world, CNN and HBO films. So we are able to follow England’s sports successes, and watch truly awful films.

We spend from 8 till 12 every morning learning Khmer form the lovely Mr Khamdey in the local FE college. Jon is finding this less of a challenge than Chris although when we try out our new found vocabulary in the local restaurants and markets we find that they don’t understand a word and burst out laughing at us. Hopefully our language skills will improve before we go to our placement or we’re going to have a very non communicative two years.

The word for bottle is Dob and the word for 10 is Dob can’t wait to learn the word for green!

Our first impressions of Cambodia:

Everyone and everything is very young and very small. No one seems over 20 and there are tiny children playing and laughing everywhere. Even the ants are tiny, we have a column of them marching up our bathroom wall.

No one walks anywhere, mainly because the pavements are flooded, inhabited or nonexistent. Everyone travels by either motorbike or pushbike, usually multi occupied. We are now used to seeing entire families of mum, dad and four children on one bike. However it’s a little unnerving to realise that it’s the 3 year old up front who’s driving. We have been issued with VSO pushbikes the riding of which has proved a very interesting experience; some of them even have brakes. The golden rules while driving in Cambodia are a) never look back, like skiing assume the people behind will avoid you and b) never stop for anyone or anything.

One word to sum up Cambodia so far is DAMP! The high temperatures and humidity mean that we are continually melting. We have to shower at least twice a day and a shirt will only last a few hours before it has to be changed. This gives clothes a very short life and is going to prove rather labour intensive when we don’t have the benefit of the VSO washing machine. Also it rains very heavily every afternoon which means that exploring the local environs has become an even wetter experience. Thank goodness for English Simon and the Lazy Mekong Daze bar by the riverside.

Tomorrow is Sunday and we have the day off. As it is Anna’s birthday we are all going on a boat trip up the river to a wooden pagoda and silk weavers’ village. We’ll be listening out for strains of the Ride of the Valkyries and looking out for Hueys on the horizon (Francis Ford Copolla joke).

We have not yet taken many photos and we’re not sure the local computer technology is up to loading them in less than 5 hours so wait till we get back to PP for illustrations of the above. We are about to brave the deluge to send this out, hope it gets to you.

Love and miss you all very much but still no regrets, how is 9EH by the way?
Hee hee.

Chris and Jon.