Adventures in Cambodia: Ratanakiri

So the next day i boarded another bus and six hours later i was in Ban Lung , provincial capital of Ratankakiri Province, and to date the only provincial town shittier than Kampong Speu. The road was not bad, the section from Kratie to Stung Treng having only been finished last year by China (just in time for the national election). The rest of the road , National Road 78 to Vietnam, was very poor but by no means the worse road i have been on. Luckily i was only there for fifteen minutes as i was en route to a nature resort just outside town. The road is so dusty all the plants and trees that lie along its side are permanently brown from all the dust kicked up.

I had decided to have some time for solitude to have a reflection over the last two years, all that has been lost and all that has been found and to figure out where i am going. Its been very easy to hide from the stuff thats happened at home because i could always immerse myself in something else. I was, however, not prepared for quite this much solitude being the only guest at this small resort set in a forest as the Bangkok Airport closure had stopped a larger group from coming.

One thing i was not prepared for , well i guess i was because i had the fortitude to bring socks and a big jacket, was the cold. This area is much higher in elevation than the rest of Cambodia so at night especially it was freaking freezing!

Anyway the place was very nice and i was able to get some time to walk around the forest and gardens , natural beauty is very rare in cambodia due to rapid deforestation so the importance of nature and fresh air cannot be understated. And there were actually birds that hadn't been eaten!

That brown strip in the middle of this photo is National Road 78 to Vietnam~.

Most of the trees etc. were labelled and i found this one amusing for a variety of very very bad reasons.

I also walked down to Boeung Yaklom, a perfectly circular lake of fresh water said to be the peak of a volcanoe or the indent of a meteor, no one is really sure. Either way it has the cleanest water i have ever seen in Cambodia and it was really beautiful.

There was a cultural centre for the ethnic minority group that controlled that area and also a demosntration 'boy's house' and 'girl's house' although i have no idea what the meaning behind it is.

I went from a swim off this pier which was very refreshing but after a while, the water is so still i became convinced that something was gonna drag me under horror movie style so i got out and had a drink and chit chatted with the vendors.

The next day i had booked a trek which involved walking the first day, a village homestay and then an elephant ride back to town the next day. My guide was this guy called Put, an ethnic Krung working at the resort and in time i found out he was only 17 years old!

Now normally i am against hill tribe trekking and village homestays with wild and wacky cultures because it puts ethnic minorities in these living museums to be gazed at. But that said, this group is almost the same as Khmers in many respects and its not like there are hundreds of people going through like in Chang Mai or something.

Anyhoo we set out and started and the Katieng Waterfalls which was a nice but fairly average waterfall.

We walked up to the top to some quite fast flowing water, and as seems to be God's running joke on me, i had to cross yet another precarious bridge across the water, only to get to the other side and find we had gone the wrong way and had to cross over.

Initially the trek passed through rubber and cashew nut plantations

before hitting the farms of the Krung people. The Krung farm by just randomly planting various things they might want and need on the same patch of land i.e. one HA of land is not just rice, but cassava, papaya, herbs etc. and is not monoagricultural (just planting one crop type). So at the start of the day they wander over to their farm, which might be 4 or 5 hours away walk, to tend it and gather what they might need for dinner that day.

Anyhoo, the trail was quite nice through the farms and grazing areas and following a small stream and eventually we ended up at the village we were staying.

It turns out it was one of three small villages close to eachother, one of whom was his own. And Krung villages are pretty much like Khmer villages, except old woman get about with their tops off.

So no sooner had i arrived than the village witch arrived, a bit drunk, and had a chat. It turns out that Put had been very sick as a kid and she had saved him through some animal sacrafice. The rest of the arvo we poked around peoples houses, drank some sraa saw (white rice wine - similar taste to petrol) and ate sticky rice before heading down to the river to bath.

That night i had a taste of rural village life, going from house to house, using my shitty khmer for chit chat and drinking more sraa saw and what is called jar wine (basically this big jar with a communal straw which you sit at and drink, taste kind of like mead). We also passed by his mum's house who had cooked up a snake that night that they had caught at the farm so now i can tick that box. It tastes kind of like chicken and fish mixed together.

Anyway, the next morning i had some emergeny photo finish toilet breaks in the bushes when i woke up, maybe due to the food, maybe the communal drinking, maybe drinking the local water stored in gourds. Thankfully it didnt last long.

So as i was sitting around the fire, this elephant wanders through the house and no one but me bats an eyelid. This would be my ride back to Ban Lung. But to actually get on to the elephant, she backed up against the house and i had to walk along the elephants head from the second story involving an unheard of feat of balancing on my part, and another thought in my head 'how do i find myself in these situations, balancing on an elephants head!'.

The trek back was fun, not really through jungle but more grasslands and the poor elephant had to practically climb a mountain to get over. But she was always on the lookout for food.