Travels with Hayley

Out a bit later at 7.15 today as we had to prepare a ‘day pack’ for tonight as we’re at a homestay and can’t take our big suitcases in with us (they are in the mini bus parked directly out the front for the inevitable point we realise we’ve forgotten something vital…)

Went for a walk through town, it was like last night had been a dream, it was deserted all over again and looked a bit sad and woebegone, it had that slightly seedy feeling of fairgrounds in the daytime, when all the bright lights and glitz have disappeared and you’re left with the grubby reality. The only real signs of life were some homeless people camping out, one food stand with a dozen or so locals having breakfast and the one restaurant in town that was open heaving with every tourist group going, not a spare chair to be seen!

We needed a lighter for the mosquito coils tonight so I went into the market and started acting out what I wanted – much comedy ensued, I really should have tried harder at charades as a kid, but I ended up with what we needed for the princely sum of 20p. On the way back a gentleman ran out of the back of a closed restaurant to greet me loudly and enthusiastically with ‘bonjoir mademoiselle!’ So he obviously thought I was young enough to be a mademoiselle and chic enough to look French so I was feeling pretty good 😜 I passed the sign below at the next restaurant along so I felt that confirmed things too, it was a good day!

I’d checked out the hotel breakfast on the way out and wasn’t feeling it at all – and I decided what I was feeling was an ice cream, so that’s what I got! Because I’m a grown up and I can eat whatever I like for breakfast 😂 It was delicious and no odder than a bowl of fried rice in my opinion which was one of the hotel dishes on offer. I left the other snacks on offer though…

Walking back to the hotel, music was screaming out of a large white tent which was having gold chairs laid out inside. Depending on which member of hotel staff you asked it was preparation for a wedding or a funeral – let’s hope someone in charge has the facts on that one straight shall we!

We set off in the mini bus at 9.30 straight into a huge traffic jam – the reason for which is too bizarre not to share. So there’s this monk – I realise this sounds like the start of a joke but stay with me – who went into the forest for years, lived off the fruits of nature etc and who has recently come out and become a huge celebrity for his speeches on love thy neighbour, material possessions don’t matter, be pure of heart etc. To be honest, from Kom’s explanation it didn’t sound like anything that hasn’t been covered already but perhaps he was paraphrasing – anyway people are very excited about it! The monk was giving an address today on top of a hill and that’s what the traffic jam was about. Thousands and thousands of people were gathered in every town we passed, huge tents were set up for I think maybe the after parties?! It was incredible. Other huge tents were set up along the way too as it’s the time of year for the monk’s ceremony to get their annual new set of robes – if you’ve been a bad monk during the last year though, no new clothes for you! I wonder if they subtly change the design each year so each monk can see if his brother is wearing the new threads or not – subtle flex 😜

Kom told a few facts about Cambodian culture along the way (when he has something to tell us – logistics for the day, an anecdote, a history lesson he says ‘Ok. Small story’ Some of them are not so small! But he’s lovely with a very infectious giggle so it’s all fine.) He told us how in Cambodia it’s the groom’s family who has to provide the dowry, this is all because of a story/legend about a contest between men and women building a hill – I’ll spare you the details but essentially it revolves around woman being smart and sneaky and men being lazy and egomaniacs! The women won the hill building and thus, men must provide the wedding dowry forevermore. Other interesting stories include how inheritance goes to the youngest daughter, rather than the oldest son, his auntie’s forced marriage which was ordered by a Pol Pot soldier (turns out the husband was a nice man and they’ve ended up with 5 kids so it feels like a teachable moment went somewhat awry there…) and how women have to wash their husband’s feet at the wedding, not out of subservience but to tell men – don’t bring any of your filth into my house, leave that dirt behind and outside!

The journey was absolutley fascinating, I can’t describe how different everything is out here and there’s just not enough photos I can take to illustrate it. The road was full of a mix of shanty town style shacks selling everything you can think of – snacks, petrol, cars parts. Great tracts of land full of agricultural vehicles and houses ranging from unpainted, wooden boxes on stilts to the gaudiest houses I have literally ever seen. Hundreds of them, side by side with all of the shacks and dirt. They are like mini McMansions, gold and bling, full height windows etched with diamonds. I’ve attached a few pictures I managed to get out of the bus windows but I can’t explain just how bizarre the whole thing was.

We went past a village that is famous for stone masonry, every house had thousands of sculptures out of the front for sale, apparently in Cambodia if your neighbour starts a business and it’s going well, you start the same!

The road was filled with the usual mix of cars, bikes, lorries (with people travelling on the roof of the cab and napping in the flat bed, obviously) and absolutely lined with adverts for beer – by far the most prolific is Ganzberg in the bright orange whose marketing budget must be practically unlimited – there are adverts every 50 yards or so and half of the beach umbrellas that stand outside every street stall are sponsored by them too. Coming in a close second is the somewhat unfortunately named ‘Krud’ beer in green – what a shame no one in branding checked the international meaning of that name…

We stopped for lunch at a roadside restaurant and got put in a room by ourselves out the back – pluses were air con but all the interesting things were happening out the front so I kept have to pop out to have a look around! I had fried fish pieces with coconut and vegetables (no picture sorry as my phone was charging – looked a bit like sweet and sour from the Chinese!) which was very nice and then bought some semi dried bananas and sugared tamarind pods from the stall out the front to share around the bus. Both were super tasty and much more successful than yesterday’s snack purchases!

Our next stop was to view some temples built between 616-637 AD in a UNESCO world heritage site. To get there we took some novelty local transport which is normally used to transport vegetables 😂 It’s essentially a guy on a saddle, driving an extended lawnmower engine pulling a wooden cart. Suspension left somewhat to be desired and it only went at about 10mph but it was so fun, as was watching the local’s faces as they watched the crazy tourists in the veggie cart – made even funnier as our very nice, air conditioned mini bus was crawling along following us directly behind!

We met a local guide, Teng, at the temples. He had an apparently inexhaustible supply of Christmas cracker style jokes – if you got separated from the group at any point you just had to follow the sounds of the groans from everyone when he produced another one! He also loved an English idiom and made sure we knew ‘what goes around comes around you know’!

The temples are incredible, for them to have been so created so intricately almost 1500 years is really amazing.

There was also a lot of talk about how amazing it was they had lasted this long – now, I’m not putting this down as such, but there’s a bit of the Trigger’s broom at work here! Loads of them were covered in scaffolding, you could see new bricks and new floors in a whole lot of them, fresh block lintels and door frames etc. I asked the guide how much was original and he suggested 95% so I guess they are just tweaking the edges to keep them looking at their best really…

My favourite was one where a tree had grown completely over it, it was so beautiful and other worldy.

The whole place had the feel of an enchanted forest where non humans had been at work creating these amazing buildings. Another couple of them had a hole in the centre of the ceiling and an altar in the centre that would fill with water.

They are designed it so when there was a full moon in the month it would line up with the ceiling hole and ‘bless’ the water. We know all of this because there’s some of the first examples of Cambodian language carved into some of the stone and Sanskript too, that’s how they can date them so accurately.

As we left we saw a bunch of monkeys playing around on the temples – Kom bought some teak nuts for us all to try (not bad, powdery aftertaste) which the monkey was a bit too interested in so he threw them some to snack on and leave us alone! Also around was a monk just patiently waiting for his sugarcane juice so I feel like my drink of choice is being blessed from the highest levels!

Back on the cattle truck to head off to our homestay, every house, motorcycle and bicycle we passed seemed to have beautiful small children who just wanted to wave and say hello to you, their faces absolutely lit up when you waved and hello’d back 😍.

We passed a cart like ours piled up precariously high with thousands of beautiful pink dragonfruits and a bunch of teenagers playing volleyball on a court made of super tall, swaying bamboo poles draped in netting. The roads are dirt here but it’s very deep terracotta/red clay earth, much more what I would associate with Africa than what I was expecting here.

We went straight out for a walk around the village – it was a bizarre mix of very rural and then an atm and 2 banks cropped up out of nowhere! Lots of tiny shops selling various foodstuffs, cleaning products and fruit and veg and then deep countryside with lots of cows all around.

We visited a tiny smallholding where the local cows are brought to be serviced by the resident bull – there was a little calf there too and a lovely lady looking after them who didn’t stop smiling and laughing the whole time we were there – quite likely thinking weird white people, why do you keep taking pictures of a cow?!

Our homestay was a traditional house built on stilts, their kitchen is outdoors underneath. There was a bunch of kids running around out the front ‘free range kids’ as Teng called them, so that took are of the rest of the tamarind and banana snacks I couldn’t fit in my bag – or tummy!

After dropping our stuff off and greeting the family, first port of call was to let down our mozzie nets in preparation for bedtime.

I went for a little walk in the dusk on my own, found a stall selling sugarcane juice – the owner had to go and get her young son to translate because we just could not work out how to communicate the price (around 80p in case you were wondering) and then meandered around, making friends with a lovely grandma and her beautiful baby who was very happy to see the camera!

Back in time for a home cooked buffet dinner. On offer was spicy soup and non spicy soup with chicken and mushrooms, rice (no meal here is complete without rice, when you welcome people to your home the greeting translates to ‘have you had rice?’) fried catfish (too boney to manage more than one bite), pumpkin with egg which was nice, deep fried mushrooms and then papaya for dessert.

It was all fine but the bugs were insane, they were literally falling onto the table in their hundreds, into the food and onto us. Despite me brushing them off as soon as they landed I just couldn’t keep up with the deluge of them arriving.

I was getting more and more stressed but felt obliged to stay and chat and it wasn’t even quite 7pm at this point. My politeness breaking point came however when I felt a crawling sensation in my knickers, put my hand on the front of my trousers and pinched and felt the crack and squish of a large bug being crushed! At that point I said out loud ‘nope, I’m a grown up, I have nothing to prove!’ Stood up, said goodnight and got upstairs and under my mosquito net. Funnily enough it appeared many others had been in the same dilemma as after I broke, there was a mass exodus up the stairs within the next few minutes 😂 I’ve since recovered but I might have to burn those knickers…

I was in a side room with 3 of the other ladies and we chatted and laughed while laying on our sleeping mats under our respective mosquito nets. After we all got up the courage to leave the safety of our nets for a final wee (I mean, obviously not a final one for me, I got up 3 other times in the night – I’m drinking a lot of water here you know!) we were lights out by 8.30pm 😂. I don’t believe I’ve ever been so disgustingly dirty going to bed before, I was a sticky mass of sun cream, sweat and about 6 layers of mosquito repellant – look at the state of my feet 😬

I’ll leave you on a joke one of the group told me today that really tickled me.

A goose was standing by the side of the road, waiting to cross. As he began to put his foot out to take the first step a chicken rushed up to him – “mate, mate, don’t do it, they’ll never let you forget it!”

Lots of love always xxxx