With only three days left we realised we weren’t going to manage to see much of East Cambodia, so we sped off to Senmonorom with only a brief stop in Kampong Cham.
Oh, just a quick note on Kampong Cham.. We have a system when we get to a new hostel or guesthouse where one of us waits with the bags and the other checks to see if the room is any good. On this instance Ben went up and reported back all was good so we took the room and trudged upstairs with our bags. When Angie saw the bathroom she was less than impressed:
He’d missed the fact that there was no loo seat and the sink had been ripped out from the wall. In his defence he said he’d made sure there was a good shower head.
Anyway, Senmonorom is in the far east of Cambodia, quite high up in the mountains and with a bit of a different feel to the places we had visited. As soon as we got off the bus we found a couple of motorbike drivers (no taxis here) to take us to Nature Lodge, one of our favorite spots to sleep so far. One of our drivers ran a local café/bar type place and told us we could hire his bike while we were there.. He handed over the keys and sped away with his friend without taking a deposit or any details, very relaxed way of dealing with people round these parts.
Really wish we had more time to stay in this area as we really liked the rolling countryside, small villages and friendly locals, but sadly we only had two nights left. So, we decided to fill our remaining day with an elephant trek.
We’d had lots of chances to go on an elephant trek in other countries but glad we chose this one. It was through a small village of some sort of minority tribe, who spoke their own language and lived quite separate from the rest of the towns. We were a curiosity when we arrived to all apart from the toothless old men drinking rice wine in a dark shack (at 9.30 in the morning. Its never too early for a good rice wine). We had to wait a little while our mahout (elephant master) went to catch an elephant and bring it back.
Now, I say ‘elephant master’ but these things are massive, so we soon found that if old Nessy wanted to veer off the track and go and eat some juicy bamboo plant, there was little our mahout could do to persuade him otherwise. The scary thing is that they pay no attention to whether there is any path or decent route to the juicy bamboo, they just power through whatever is there. Stubborn beasts elephants.
So after an hours trek into the wilderness we stopped by a river and our silent mahout took us to see a local farmer and then relax in his hut for a bit. Then the highlight of Ben’s trip: washing the beast in the river. Sadly the river was pretty strong and a tad dangerous so Angie decided to take control of the camera instead, but Ben managed to get in and onto his neck (where the mahout sits). It’s a bizarre feeling sitting more or less on the head of an elephant, with its huge ears flapping on your legs and it’s trunk flinging gallons of water into the air. The elephant stood up and made his way to the river bank but sadly the camera stopped working, which is a shame, but we’ll try to upload a couple of pics off Angie’s iPhone.
So we dropped off Ness, biked over to the market where Angie picked up a sarong and headed home to the Nature Lodge, where we shared a bonfire with the farm animals and planned our sad departure from our most favorite country so far.
