See the gallery December to July for photos from this post.
The last time I wrote a proper update on this blog was eight months ago, which seems to fit the haphazard pattern of chronicling my experiences and observations of the last 2 and a bit years and sharing them with whoever cares to read them...
As it happens, the last time I wrote I had just spent a week in Thailand, and it is from Thailand that I am writing these words now. I have come to Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai for a week of recuperation from those eight months that have lapsed without a return to fill these blank pages, while the hastily scribbled notes to remind me of the things I knew I would want to write about when I eventually got around to it have continued to multiply on random pages in my notebook.
So now, the question I have asked many times in writing this blog over the past two and a bit years, where do I begin? If I'm calling this a chronicle, and being a Virgo or whatever it is that makes me favor order, I suppose I'll stick with chronological order.
Shortly after my last post I saw a very cool performance by Tiny Toones; a local NGO that works with vulnerable kids in Phnom Penh using breakdancing, hip-hop music and other contemporary arts to achieve amazing things. I LOVE this organization and encourage anyone who has an opportunity to see them perform to do it! (I think they're planning some performance dates in Melbourne in October). Plenty of international hip-hop artists (music and dance) who pass through Phnom Penh spend some time with Tiny Toones teaching and improving the skills of the talented kids who have found some luck in their mostly unlucky lives, and become involved with TT. Also check out their Youtube channel
Cambodia observes twenty-six public holidays annually. Yep, five weeks. On one of them in October I went to the highly regarded seaside town of Kep, planning to cycle around the town, eat crab (famous from Kep), drink wine, read, swim in the guesthouse pool (Kep's beach isn't exactly on TripAdvisor's top ten list). Alas this was the start of the rainy season; it rained cats and dogs from the moment I arrived, was cold (COLD!), and generally quite disagreeable. The road from my guesthouse to the main road had been "widened" the day before, so this unsealed track became a river of red clay sludge, kiboshing the bike riding plans and pretty much relegating me to the guesthouse for the whole weekend. I did read a book. I did drink wine. I did get to the crab market once to eat crab, but I didn't see Kep's charm. Maybe it went on holiday for the long weekend. There is nothing, and I pretty much mean nothing to do there. Nothing to see. Maybe there is and I just couldn't see it through the rain... People rave about Kep, and so now whenever someone tells me that they love Kep, I press them; "what do you love about it?", I ask them. It always boils down to the guesthouse. The truth is, Kep is rubbish, but if you have a fabulous guesthouse and it isn't pouring with rain, and you can maybe take a leisurely cycle down to the crab market a couple of times, you'll probably say that you like Kep.
November to February I was kept busy with a stream of international guests, starting off with Caty then Andi visiting from Thailand, then Claire from Sydney over Christmas and (Western) New Year, then my mum and aunty made a return to Asia to check out this new place on my life itinerary. This was also a very busy time for me at work as I set about designing, researching, writing, laying out and putting together the annual report for the organization I'm working with. Short deadlines, competing priorities for my colleagues that kept them from keeping to their end of the annual report bargain, and shall we say "different creative approaches" between myself and my Director, all made for a rather challenging project which somehow I seemed to be the only one who was especially concerned about (deadlines and end product). High standards can be a pain in the arse. Anyway, the thing got done, people who care about me visited, I spent some time with them to see some parts of Cambodia that I hadn't been to yet, and I lived to tell the tale with an annual report under my belt.
The 5th of December every year is International Volunteer Day, so our country manager hatched a plan for us to celebrate our volunteerism by joining a 30km charity bike ride around the Angkor temples held annually to raise money for a Cambodian charity. There were about 15 of us in our gang, joining the group of 400 who assembled at Angkor Wat in the dark, and when the starter's pistol fired at 6:00am rode off into the sunrise through the trees surrounding the ancient and beautiful temples of Angkor. Here's a link to some video of our ride!
Unfortunately for me, the bed I slept in the night before the bike ride was home to a small colony of bed bugs; my first ever encounter with these nasty little creatures. Luckily (?) there must not have been many of them, because I had only a few bites on my face, and more than that on one arm, but JEEZ are they itchy little buggers! As soon as we got back from the bike ride I moved to a different room, but I was worried that I had moved bed bugs with me in my bag, and when I got back to Phnom Penh I boiled all the clothes I had taken with me (tricky when the biggest pot I have is a 2 litre saucepan...it was a slow and tedious process...) and threw my bag out. I was still paranoid for months afterwards that the little buggers had come home with me, and hidden in a power socket (they do that – I did the research!) just waiting for the time to infest my bed. It seems that they did not, and so my sleep is no longer hindered by thoughts of the gross little blood suckers feasting on me during the night.
About mid-way through December and just before Claire arrived, I joined the thirty-four people that I work with on a three-day staff retreat on the coast. This was mainly a lot of eating, some workshops and activities that I just watched (and sometimes someone translated so that I could understand what was going on, but often not), and at night; karaoke and dancing. As with most staff get-togethers, this was where the real work got done, and I made leaps and bounds with the bonding by giving everyone a good laugh at my attempts to follow the wrist twirling and forwards-backwards-sideways steps around a table with flowers on it that is traditional Cambodian dancing. I also got plenty of time to swim in the gloriously clear, calm ocean, and to stock up on some beach soul-nourishment to take back to the dusty concrete of Phnom Penh.
It was also around this time that some friends introduced me to their new secret addiction; shopping for ultra-cheap fabric at Orussey Market and then whisking it off to the tailor to get whipped up into whatever takes your fancy. They're quite good; you can take clothes to get copied, or pictures downloaded from the internet, or even photos sneakily snapped of someone on the street wearing something that you like, and the tailor can make all of it. Most things need a couple of fittings to get them right, but at around $6 for tops, $12 for dresses, $5 for a skirt, it can become a bit addictive. I've only had a few things made, mostly relatively successful, and it's probably only lack of time that's stopped me from getting as hooked on the whole thing as some of my friends, but I have spare time now, and think that there are a few trips to the tailor on the cards for me.
Claire was here for Christmas, which we spent at a fabulous restaurant with a pool, champagne, wine, great food, cards and friends, then cocktails and tapas on a rooftop terrace. I took the next week off work and went with Claire to Kampong Cham; a province next to Phnom Penh. We spent a night at a guesthouse in the town, and then two nights at a family homestay in a village outside of town, walked through the rice fields and rode bicycles through the village. The popular opinion in Cambodia seems to be that the best cotton kramas (traditional scarf) are made in Kampong Cham, so I was pretty keen to find a house somewhere with a loom and a lady weaving kramas to buy. We managed to track one down and although the woman was working on a big order that she had been commissioned to make, she agreed to sell us a few for peanuts (ok, not actual peanuts, but as I remember they were about 7,000 riel; less than $2 each). I also think that I remember her saying that it takes her about two days to make one. That sounds about right. About $1 per day. Kramas, by the way, are possibly the world's most versatile piece of cloth. They come in various sizes, but that's really just for tourists; the genuine article is about 60cm wide by about 150cm long, and are used for everything from a hammock for babies, to a towel, neck scarf, head scarf, keeps you warm, keeps you cool, you can bunch it up and use it as a neck pillow, men wear them as a sarong, you can spread one on the ground and use it as a picnic blanket, or as a tablecloth if you have a table, curtain, the list is apparently endless.
In January, a bout of suspected anaemia turned out to be a dose of intestinal parasites, my brother's house came to within about a hundred meters of succumbing to the swollen Brisbane river in the worst floods in forty years, my parents' house somehow survived the worst cyclone ever to hit Queensland, and my mum and aunty arrived in Cambodia.
With the annual report at the printer's, I took a week off and joined mum and Rusty in Battambang, a north-west province bordering Thailand, for a couple of days before we headed south to Kampot, a quiet riverside town famous for its pepper. We wanted to do the whole journey from Battambang to Kampot in one day, and the quickest way to do that is by taxi. We found a good driver to take us from Battambang to Phnom Penh, and then had arranged for another driver who had been recommended by a friend, to take us from Phnom Penh to Kampot.
We were some way into the second leg before I discovered that our driver wasn't the recommended driver, but a friend of his. The recommended driver couldn't make it so sent his proxy. This one as it turns out, was terrible. He spent most of the time on the wrong side of the road, one hand on the wheel while he repeatedly took his glasses OFF for many minutes at a a time, to wipe his sweaty face with a KFC towelette, with a degree of attention and fervor that was quite compelling to watch. Anyway, it beat watching the road; I thought we were done for on one of these glasses-off, face-wiping episodes, when the oncoming car (we were on the wrong side of the road and overtaking a truck) started flashing its lights at us to perhaps alert our driver that we would in all likelihood be colliding in a head-on kind of way in the very immediate future. He casually slipped the car across in front of the truck we had been passing, almost close enough to clip its front fender, put his glasses back on, and gave a merry little beep of his horn. Actually, throughout the three hour journey, he gave frequent, presumably perfunctionary, but perhaps jubilant blasts of the horn; for his own benefit or that of others, it was not clear. When he wasn't occupied with taking his glasses off to wipe his face, he was busy splintering his way through a handful of toothpicks as he gouged around in his false teeth, seeking out with gusto some unknown irritant or perhaps just passing the time.
We somehow arrived in Kampot in one piece, and after depositing our bags in our rooms, I very quickly deposited myself in the bar and made short work of a couple of happy hour drinks; very happy indeed to have arrived there at all. The fabulous Rikitikitavi is possibly the best place to stay in Kampot. I'll test this theory in September when I'm there again and will stay at the only contender for top spot, Les Manguiers. I LOVED Rikitikitavi; the rooms, the service, the food, the bar overlooking the wide, quiet river and the mountains beyond. And Kampot is so lovely; beats Kep with a big stick. While we were there (beginning of February) the mango trees were in flower, and I've never seen anything like it. The trees were so loaded with flowers that in some cases the leaves weren't even visible; just a halo of mango flower fuzz...
While we were there we took a day trip to Rabbit Island which was ok, but not up to the hype, and I got attacked by some incredibly nasty ants. Always with the ants.... I've had it with them. These ferocious little feckers left me with grape-sized welts on my legs that actually came up with a tiny blister on the top, and itched like I have never itched before. Even worse than the bed bugs. Anecdotally (well, technically this is all anecdotal, but semantics aside....) , these itchy welts kept flaming up for months afterwards, from the slightest irritation, like my skirt brushing against the skin while I walked somewhere.... the histamines went crazy. I think I've developed an ant allergy.
After Kampot we spent a couple of nights at the homestay in Takeo province that I stayed at in August last year with the other volunteers that I arrived in Phnom Penh with. Once again the family treated us to amazing hospitality, even though they were preparing for a family wedding which was to start on the day we were leaving. In fact, Cambodian wedding season was in full swing at that time, and the music blaring across the dry rice fields from one wedding was only briefly replaced with the music from a funeral nearby before the wedding of our hosts' niece began. Poor mum and Rusty didn't get much sleep (weddings last for three days and go full steam for all twenty-four hours of each of those days). Actually our hosts insisted that we participate in the wedding ceremonies, but we had only a couple of hours in the morning before our bus to Phnom Penh. This gave us just enough time to join the procession of guests (traditionally the groom's family) across the dry rice fields as we each carried a tokenistic gift (mostly beautifully arranged fruit on small pedestals) to the bride's family home. There was a bit of a hold up as we neared the house and the people at the front were handing over the gifts and finding a place to sit, which was when I discovered that of all the places to be stopped, I was standing on top of an ant nest. Great. More of the angry little nasties (ok, I get it, I was standing on their house) crawling over my feet and biting me as much as possible. I nearly dropped my fruit in the rice paddy, which would have been very bad luck for the wedding (we were warned at the start of the procession not to drop anything!), but I somehow managed to keep my tray balanced and the bad luck was contained to me and my encounter with the ants.
Back in Phnom Penh, mum discovered that a swarm of bees had decided to make the outdoor light on my balcony the centrepiece of their new hive. Great. Mum helpfully suggested that all I needed to do was to find someone in Phnom Penh who knows what to do with bees. Yes I said, that should be straightforward enough...(!) When my landlord next came around to collect the rent, I showed him the hive outside that was growing by the day, and not really making me want to open the balcony door. No problem, he says. Do you have a lighter? It turns out that during the Khmer Rouge years he was tasked with collecting honey, and knew all about what to do with bees. This is one of the unsolved mysteries of Phnom Penh; how is it that something that as far as I could tell was going to be quite the challenge to sort out, just gets fixed so easily?
There are innumerable unsolved mysteries here. Including why can I buy a Mars bar that is made in Australia at my corner shop in PP for 70c, when it costs around $2 in Australia? Why does no one in PP seem to own a house key? Instead, they sit outside and beep the horn of their car or motorbike until someone inside opens the gate to let them in. And why does it cost two to three times more for things in the PP airport duty free shop, than it does to buy the same things at the shops in town?
Mum and Rusty went home and after a week or two of not so hectic work, the beginning of March put me right back in it again. The organization I work with won its bid to host a fairly significant international conference on development effectiveness, so guess what I did for the next three and a half months? It was incredibly challenging; when I work on events in Australia, not only do I not have a language barrier to contend with, but my colleagues understand the concepts that are involved, the suppliers understand the concepts that are involved, the venue understands the concepts that are involved, but on this one I was at square one, with everyone and everything.
As if time wasn't an enemy from the get-go, Cambodia shut down for a week in April for the (Khmer) New Year, promptly followed by Belgium (where the client is based) taking a week off for Easter, and Cambodia had to have the last word with another five-day break for the King's birthday and something else in May. While I worked through most of the holidays, I did take off to the beach for a couple of days over Khmer New Year, A) because April is hot and Phnom Penh is deserted at new year, and B) because I needed some time out with just me and the ocean. Lesson re-learned because I didn't pay enough attention last year for the Pchum Ben holiday – the other one where everyone vacates the city and heads to the province – you HAVE TO BUY YOUR BUS TICKET MORE THAN ONE DAY IN ADVANCE. Or else you end up in the back seat of a poorly-airconditioned bus getting squashed by a fat barang who takes up half of your seat, severely limiting the amount of air circulation available between him, you, and (making wild assumptions) the sex worker you are sandwiched in between. But once I got to the beach, it was great.
Somewhere in there I was treated to my next close encounter with one of nature's beasts... One morning I was woken up by something landing on my leg, I looked down and saw in my blurry, awake-for-a-millisecond state what looked like a frog on my bed. I jumped and it jumped up and flew off. I yelped and ran out of the room, and it joined my in the hallway, tearing up and down and generally going ballistic. I found the key for my balcony door and yanked it open, and waited for the flying creature to get back outside where it belonged. I didn't see it for a minute or so, so I went back into my room to start thinking about getting ready for work, seeing as I was clearly up now. And there it was, hanging upside down from the top of the curtain; a bloody bat! Now that I was back it decided to go nuts again and started flying around and around the room like a, well a bat out of hell. After a bit of this it flew out into the hallway again and I promptly shut the door and wondered what to do next.
That was answered for me pretty quickly when the little missile snuck in through the holes in the decorative bricks at the top of the wall between the kitchen and my ensuite bathroom, straight back into my bedroom again. Ducking to avoid it kamikaze-ing into me again, I opened the door and it flew out and was not seen again. That night when I got home from work I crept into every room, gingerly opening doors and peering behind them to see if it was hiding somewhere, but I didn't see it so went to bed feeling relaxed about being bat-free. Until 1:00am when I was woken up by the friggin thing going nuts around my room again. Around my head, actually. I nearly had a heart attack, commando-rolled out of bed and pulled a pillow over my head, it was flying that closely to me... and then it was out in the hallway again, pulling laps up and down like something very fast on speed, or something faster than speed. Like some kind of moron I've got a pillow over my head and I'm crouched as low as I can get because it was alternating high laps with low ones and seemed like it was going to fly straight into me – I had a pretty good view of it as it came straight at me in the almost dark hallway lit only with a faint glow from the street light outside the window. I opened the balcony door and sat on the floor with the pillow still covering my head, while I tried to make myself as small as possible. The bloody thing's sonar must have been on the blink because it continued to terrorize me, flying very low around and around the room for quite a while longer, broken up with a few more sprints up and down the hallway before its whereabouts became unknown. I waited, with the pillow on my head for what seemed like hours (probably more like ten minutes) until I felt as sure as I was going to that it had gone.
I would like to report that that was the last of the bat, but alas, a week or so later it was up to its middle of the night terror antics again, and I repeated the whole commando role out of bed, pillow on the head routine, all the while desperately trying to work out how the hell it was getting into my apartment. I checked and re-checked for holes or open windows, but there were none. Eventually I came to the not that hard to reach conclusion that it is a crafty little opportunist, sneaking in through the balcony door during any short time the door was open, so now I'm ultra-wary of opening it, and especially vigilant about keeping it firmly shut after sunset. And have developed a strong aversion to bats.
My Director and I clashed many times during those couple of months of organizing the conference, while I fought to get him to understand where I was coming from, and he advocated for me to lower my standards... Mostly it wasn't any fun, and the week before the conference I was actually scared. I don't remember ever feeling scared before an event before, but this one was BIG and if anything wasn't done, it was because I hadn't done it.... So after many tests of my resolve and ability to describe things by metaphor, mental exhaustion, regular Friday night dinners with friends where I struggled to make any contribution to conversation (or demonstrate a reasonable command of the English language), a five-day trip to Australia for my brother's wedding squeezed in two weeks before the conference, and many new grey hairs and wrinkles later, everything came together and I think we can call it a success.
This is what has earned me a trip to Thailand for some R&R. The pancake-flat dusty concreteness of Phnom Penh has had me craving green and mountains for a while, so Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai seemed like the obvious place to take myself to dial back a few notches, so that is what I have done. And it has been wonderful. For two days I marvelled at how fancy Chiang Mai is, spent time with friends, and breathed deep restorative breaths while gawping like an idiot at the mountain that was practically at the end of my soi. And then the three hour bus journey through the mountains and green rice fields to Chiang Rai, where most things are as they were when I left there a year and a half ago, including friends who have stockpiles of great hugs. I slept and walked and ate and spent an afternoon in a Hmong cushion-making workshop, and drank Thai whiskey and updated my blog.
When I last updated this blog the rainy season was coming to an end, and now it is rainy season again; the fine layer of dust that for six months coated my feet on the five minute walk to my office each morning has transformed into a fine layer of mud, which is equally as efficient at getting into my shoes. Sudden, drenching downpours punctuate most afternoons, and Phnom Penh's streets become rivers for an hour or two until the water finds somewhere else to go. My contract is up in four weeks and my future beyond that is up in the air. My organization and I both want me to stay for another 12 months, and we are in the process of a second attempt to get that approved by my volunteer agency. Well, this is Cambodia, so I'm not worrying too much about the planning, and am going instead with the flexible approach.
