Holiday with Tess - Part IV - Kep and back to the Penh

First up let me say, Kep is the bomb. The beaches are nice but not great but the place is so laid back and the seafood divine. Sihanoukville is the beach town but its got too many stinky backpackers in it.

We stayed at this place called Verandah which is just stunning, like a giant treehouse. But it is pretty expensive so next time might stay somewhere else, unless you are shouting :)

We arrived and went straight there and unpacked in our bungalow and headed out almost immediately for Rabbit Island. Half an hour on the boat and we were there, hopped on the wooden platforms and ate crab, swam and read books. Nice J I attempted to do some snorkeling but didn’t find much. I had to at least the snorkeling gear I had lugged all the way from Oz in the water some time! The time went by, and by and by and we then realized it was 5:30pm (having organized to meet our Lon, our tuk tuk driver, at 5pm. After scrambling around the island looking for people we eventually found a boat and headed back. .

At our bungalow we had cheese and French champagne (not too expensive :) ) that we had smuggled in from Phnom Penh


The next day we met up with some Norwegians we had met the previous day and they convinced us to go visit some caves about an hour away at Kampong Tralach (totally to our plan of doing absolutely nothing) . About ten kids went with us an tour guided us around the caves. After visiting the main ones, they said they wanted to show us more so we went and did some hardcore (by my standard!) caving deep into the mountain. One particularly interesting bit was a cave deep in the mountain that had Vietnamese writing in it. Apparently, the KR came to power a Vietnamese family fled into the caves and wrote the date and some messages (but there were no Vietnamese speakers in the area so no-one knows what it says.)

After that, we decided to go over the mountain. This mountain was pretty steep and lots of jagged peaks, but we got to the top incident free which was quite amazing but a lot of precarious climbing and thank god the roots of the trees were strong enough to hoist ourselves upward ! Of course I decided that there was not enough drama in the day so I followed the leader of the group while everyone else went to the other peak. I quickly got myself stranded and went to jump from my jagged peak to what I thought was flat ground about 1 metre below. I quickly found out it was not flat ground, but leaves masquearing as flat ground and another jagged peak was below it. I fell through the leaves up to about my knees and rather sheepishly extracted myself to find I had cut my toe open. It wasn’t huge but there was tonnes of blood and the older guy felt really guilty and tore the collar from his shirt to tie it up…awww :) So the whole way down I had to endure every two minutes “are you ok?” It was lots of fun though.

Tess tried some of her Canberra coolness on the kids, not really sure how they felt about the whole thing :) [oooh i am a dead man now :) ]

We arrived back and counted the number of wounds to our feet, legs, knees and arms from various misadventures…there was a lot!

That night we went (I hobbled) down to the crab market and had a simply divine dinner of black pepper crab and a squid dish overlooking the ocean. The crab was so fresh we saw a guy swim out to the crab nets about twenty metres away to get it. Kep is Cambodia famous for its crabs! We then returned to the bungalow and watched a spectacular thunder storm from our balcony.

The next day we hopped on our bus (after Tess had decided to go swimming local style – fully dressed) and off to Phnom Penh.

Holiday with Tess Part III- Siem Reap and one million temples

Sorry - another mammoth post...but so much to tell!

So predictably we almost missed the bus to Siem Reap. We hopped in the van at Kampong Speu and the driver insisted on kicking everyone out of the front cab and putting us in there, which made Tess feel incredibly bad. I didn’t mind cos I was sure they would have put me in the back with everyone if it was just me J We arrived about fifteen minutes before the bus departed and went on fruitless search for some lunch because we were starving (We ended up with a tin of prawn crackers and some Pringles-esque chips – little did we know that if we had turned left instead of right we would have ended up at a bakery!).

6 hours later we were in Siem Reap. Siem Reap is a lovely town, has all the conveniences of Phnom Penh but less busy. That night we met Anna (my Australian volunteer counterpart in the WFP Siem Reap office and Brett (another volunteer) and had a great dinner and crashed someone’s African themed farewell and did lots of booty dancing.

The next day we slept in and explored the town including buying tonnes of touristy stuff at market, actually most of it was quite tasteful and I love my Hanuman and Ganesh statues J. That evening I had organized a sunset wine and cheese package at one of the temples (ok well Anna had organized it but I took the credit :)). After a belated start we arrived and it was lovely, but no real view of anything but nice. The air was also incredibly still and combined with the Cambodian sun beating down all day on a stone pyramid turned us into two sweaty barangs on an open air sauna.

It was also quite funny because we had our glasses of wine on the steps where we were sitting, which was in front of an ornamental stone door. About 5 older guys came up and had a look and were talking quite openly in front of us and called over some monks who were hanging around. Tess and I started getting very worried that we had offended someone but through my broken Khmer we chatted and discovered that they thought we were making some offering to temple and were quite perplexed. We chatted some more and once they found out I was volunteering they were all over us.

The next two days were a bevy of temple hopping so it might get a little blurry. I won’t go through each one but maybe the pictures will help. But you have to experience it yourself to do it justice. They are really interesting because the government was Hindu, then Buddhist, then Hindu then back to Buddhist so there is a whole mix of different ones.

The first day we grabbed a tuk tuk and did our own tour of the big temples, with Tess wielding the Rough Guide as my tour guide :)

Angkor Wat - The main attraction of course and simply stunning. We got to climb all the way to the top up some particularly precarious stairs that a few people have fallen off and died. Because we slept in we were there in the middle of the day and it was practically empty- they close the stairs when the big tour groups come. Sure we got heatstroke, but we beat the crowds :) We also chatted to a few of the sellers which was lots of fun and inevitably ended up buying a tonne more stuff (anyone want a silk bed sheet?).

Bayon- Hundreds of faces :) This temple is the best for exploring as there are tonnes of nooks, crannies and different levels.

It was here after about 6 or 7 offerings to Buddha statues (along with donation) that we began Buddha watch, spying round corners to see if there was another old woman waiting for us to bestow Buddha’s blessings. We thought seven blessings was enough.

Ta Prohm is especially nice as it has been preserved with the jungle growing inside it. Made famous in Tomb Raider I believe. Here we got sprung for Buddha's blessing again, but this time we got an orange piece of string for our wrists, which meant we would never have to pay again!

The next day we went on an organized tour that would take us a little further out than the main areas. The highlight was the river of 1000 lingas at Kbal Spean (linga is a phallic symbol). The trek through the forest was really nice and when we got there the place is covered in butterflies literally. There are lots of carvings in the rocks but as it had not rained for a while it was not as spectacular as it should be but still nice. And all the lingas were worn down to nubs from the river, snigger snigger.

We also visited Banteay Srei (the most intricately carved temple) and many others.

One particularly interesting one was the Bakong Temple. It has an attached Pagoda that they say 10,000 people were killed by the KR in and the bodies dumped in the moat. The monks refused to stay there because of the ghosts but they have apparently since been exorcised and it is being restored by a German group.

One night Anna cooked us dinner which was great and we made the world’s richest sticky date pudding, yum :)

After three days we hopped back on the bus bound for Phnom Penh to stay in the seedy cheap hotel before next day boarding the bus bound for Kep!

Holiday With Tess Part II- Matt ditches Tess in the Speu

Ok it wasn’t as bad as that, but I had to go to Takeo province to help organize a handover ceremony of government rice (the government donated 2000MT of rice to WFP). It was meant to also be a ceremony for a visit of Princess Haya (Junior Queen of Dubai and Nikki tells me a total hottie but that fell through) .It was held at one of the partners working with people living with HIV , Partners in Compassion, but I have raved about them in a previous post.

We arrived the evening before to make help set up working till about 8 then having dinner. The next morning we set off at 6 to work some more but most of the setting up had been done. We just turned event managers and strategically positioned logos around the place. The guest of honour was a guy named Nhim Vanda , the head of the National Committee for Disaster Management. As you may have gathered he has nothing to do with HIV but he is known as the PMs right hand man so they thought it might be prudent to have him along. We knew he arrived when the police motorcade came through and out he popped shaking hands with pretty much everyone (except me boo hoo).

Anyhoo, I got stuck as a seat filler to sit in the official area and I have now been immortalized on national tv as I was on the cross shot of the main speaker. Unfortunately it was so hot my shirt was practically see through from sweat. Very embarrassing. The speeches were in Khmer but I had the highlights translated for me, including Nhim Vanda telling the people that even though using a condom doesn’t feel as good, you should use one anyway.

I then returned back to Kampong Speu and got all grumpy cos we had no clean clothes and we had a half hearted handwashing session. Then the next day...off to Siem Reap!

[As you have probably gathered these posts are being written a few weeks after the events - On Monday (25 June) a plane crashed on Bokor Mountain, Kampot Province on its way to Sihanoukville from Siem Reap. The passengers were mainly South Korean tourists but some Czechs and 5 Khmer. Everyone here is talking about it, especicially as it took a few days to find. Yesterday at lunch we were watching the broadcast of the first pictures of the crash. It is very worrying what it will do to the tourist market here, so many people depend on it and South Koreans are the biggest group. The company that flies the planes PMT Air has a history of problems and UN staff are forbidden to fly with them.]

Holiday with Tess- Yaay! Part 1 – Phnom Penh and Kampong Speu

So for the last just over two weeks Tessie has been over visiting the wonderful land of Cambodia. Unfortunately it is all over now , but we can (okay I can) still live vicariously through this blog.

So arrival was no drama really, she arrived on the Sunday after I spent a weekend eating and lazing around in Phnom Penh (as I usually do). Everything went surprisingly smoothly, no delays or anything and the weather was quite mild which must have been nice coming from the ice chamber in oz.

The next day we launched into sightseeing and decided to go visit the Royal Palace (which I haven’t been to this time) and National Museum. Of course, we had slept in and the palace was closed so we wandered up to the National Museum and had a looksie. Lots of nice statues and stuff. Luckily this time I was prepared with a wad of hundred rial notes to placate the nice old women who implore you to make an offering to the Buddha statues (think a whole museum pretty much full of Buddha). Its really interesting to see how Hinduism and Buddhism intersect here though. We then headed off to the Royal Palace which was actually quite spectacular, having not been there for a few years. I think Tess felt rather vindicated in her long skirt in the heat when the skanky backpackers in front of us in the line had to buy sarongs and giant pants to get in.

We then retired to the pool , a luxury unheard of in the speu!

The next day we did the sad side of Cambodia, to the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. The Killing Fields were a bit outside town but were quite interesting and sad. There were ditches where bodies had been excavated and a few open ones (obviously no bodies in them and they were filled with water from the rain). It was quite surprising that the victims were sorted to go into different pits, like women in one, kids in another. There was quite a moving statement in broken English as well. Of course there was the ubiquitous dickhead wandering around with a hammer and sickle t-shirt quite unaware that this genocide was done by a self declared communist regime.

In the middle is a large stupa containing the remains of some of the victims sorted by gender and age. I know some of you think that this kind of tourism is kinda sick and I suppose it is. But I think seeing is believing that people can be so evil. And no-one here is asking for your bleeding heart, they just want you to know what happened here which goes a long way to explaining Cambodia today.

Next was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. I have been here a few times, but I discovered there was a whole half of it which I had never seen for some reason so it was new to me. This is a former high school in the middle of Phnom Penh that was turned into the interrogation centre for the Khmer Rouge. Of the 17,000 people that went thoruh (KR kept meticulous records including photographs of each victim and their ‘’confession’’ which are displayed), 7 people survived (all of whom were discovered by the Vietnamese soldiers when they liberated it). The cells are pretty much how they were and many of the torture implements are there as well. There are several rooms which have just a rusted bed in them and a picture on the wall of when the Vietnamese came (usually of a body having just been killed by the retreating KR).Very chilling.

The next day we headed to the Speu. We hopped into a more than usual crowded van (Tess in the cab with the driver and another girl and me in the back with about 20 other people). It was so hot and the car would not start so the guys kept pushing the van into oncoming traffic down the road hoping the engine would turn over. Thankfully it did. Not an auspicious welcome to the Speu!

I think Tess enjoyed the rustic charms of the Speu but it kind of has to be seen to be believed, especially the market. Tess did great, even going to market a few times to buy fruit and bread in Khmer!

Unfortunately I got called away to work the afternoon we arrived, then worked the next day and had to spend the night in Takeo province preparing for a rice handover ceremony which I helped with the next day. So Tess was definitely on her own in the Speu!

Rice Glorious Rice!

Sorry bout the delay in blogging as I have been preoccupied and if you dont know why, you will find out in a few posts :) Consequently this one is another long one!

It's such a beautiful time of year, the rice paddies are flooded, the cows are mooing and the rain is (sometimes) pounding down.

As far as work been a few places lately mainly to do with FFW like this pond in Takeo. The villagers have hit very hard rock so not much more excavation can be done. Its amazing that a month ago i saw this site and it was a rice field, now it is a massive pond!

as well as distributions of finished projects. This distribution was in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold and quite scrubby land. Consequently there seemed to be a lot of amputees there, including one guy with both hands gone, but that didnt stop them one bit. You don't really notice the ones with prosthetics for a bit. After a while you are looking at someone and you notice that their foot or hand was very small and then the penny drops that it is actually wooden!

Went on an exciting trip in Kampong Chnang the last week of June as well. The water levels have risen there so to monitor a TB food distribution we had to charter a boat. So Bora and I set out on the river which was very exciting. Our boatman I dont think was very experienced as we kept ramming other parked boats, he was smoking over the open engine and to top it all off ran out of petrol forcing us to wait to drift to the edge and climb out, just missing the incoming storm. Oh well all part of a days work :)
It was a really interesting area because there were many houses just floating in the middle of the river and all the houses were on very high stilts, the river routinely going up 3 or 4 metres in the wet season (which we are heading into).

We were meant to stay by the river in the school but our driver decided to gun it a couple of hours into Phnom Penh because he had a doctors appointment the next morning. He said we should stay at the same hotel so we can leave early so i told him we can go 'barang' (foreign) for dinner. He kinda laughed and then about twenty minutes later made an excuse that he could not come to dinner. Then as we approached I said I was tired and that I think I would go to the local Khmer place that was close, and at that his eyes lit up and we had dinner together. The Khmer palate is not known for its adventurousness :)

More Posts to come

Oh Avid Readers! Fear Not!

I have a backlog of posts to put up in coming days including my awesome holiday with Tess (first day back at work today after catching a 5:30am van from Phnom Penh this morning) and a monitoring visit by boat a few weeks ago. Stay Tuned!

Haven't had a weekend in Kampong Speu in almost 3 months now, so I think i am due (although have to go back to Phnom Penh this weekend grrr).