I’ve been a bit slack on the blogging front lately, sorry…
We’ve been in the small riverside town of Kratie, on the Mekong River, and we had to pay a small fortune to go online so I didn’t want to blog till I didn’t have any time pressures. Now we’re back in Phnom Penh, the capital city, and I have some time to reflect on the past week or so.
It’s been a pretty heavy couple of days.
When we left Bangkok to go up to the North of Thailand, we discovered a magical land of trees, forest and mountains, a world away from the chaos of the city… So we were hoping something similar would happen when we left the chaos of Phnom Penh (an ugly, dirty, smelly city if ever there was one). But Kratie was just as dirty as the city, just as unkempt, and unfortunately without a whole lot of beauty. It was right on the Mekong River, which was cool, and there were parts of it that were really quite charming in a colonial kind of way, but it was violently run down and with piles of rubbish everywhere. It was quite troubling, actually, this attitude that many Cambodians seem to have about keeping their surroundings clean and habitable. Mark and I both remarked on it in this week’s video diary, which you can watch here.
Kratie was pretty wonderful for two reasons, though:
1. We got to watch the rare Irrawaddy dolphins playing in the Mekong River. There are only about 70 of them left in the world, and we were able to take a boat out into their habitat and sit quietly to one side as they frolicked around… Pretty incredible.
See how happy I look?
2. We found a kettle!! Oh happy day. It’s been such a mission getting hold of a cup of decent tea in Cambodia, I can’t even tell you. They serve hot tea either black or with condensed milk (yeeuch) and sometimes they don’t even have black tea, only green (I know it’s much better for you, but I simply don’t like it, sorry!) On the rare occassions I managed to get hold of a cup of tea, it was overpriced and tiny. I was not a happy tea drinker.
And then we found this beauty:
We spent four days in Kratie, catching up on work (writing and photography), sleeping in and learning a little about the local culture, which still largely confuses us. There was a big boat race on Sunday, our last day there, and honestly it just looked like a whole lot of people hanging out in the sun, playing screechingly loud discordant music, and watching a couple of boats ride up and down the river every half an hour or so. Not too dissimilar from a rugby match, I suppose!
On Monday morning we had booked our tickets back to Phnom Penh – a six hour ride in a 3rd class bus, which wasn’t toooo bad on the way up. Except that on Sunday night Mark felt a little funny, and on Monday morning I woke up with a screaming headache and nausea. I had hardly slept the night before and I had a whole rash of curious little red bites on my neck (could they have been bed bugs?) All of which resulted in me being sick on the bus in the first hour of a six hour ride with no air con, plenty of filth, and lots of people spitting food in the aisles, spitting out of the bus, hocking up phlegm into their hands and blowing their noses into their hands. It was truly disgusting. An interesting look at a different culture, but not too good for my tender stomach, especially when we were screaming around corners at high speed and dodging potholes, cows and water buffalos. I felt like a prissy Westernized princess. I suppose in many ways I still am…
We arrived in our lovely CLEAN guest house last night, and then first thing this morning we caught a tuktuk (check out a ride on one of these treasures here!) to the Killing Fields and the Genocide Museum. Phew.
I actually think I need a day or two to gather my thoughts about what we saw this morning. It depressed me so deeply that I felt as if someone was pushing down on my shoulders and weighing down my heart. So so heavy. I’ll write down some reflections on it soon, I promise…
Tell me, though, what are your perceptions of Cambodia? When you think of it, what springs to mind? I wonder if the perception and the reality fit together at all.
