To get back to Cambodia I flew into Phnom
Penh.
Spent another 2 days there. Always nice to come back to a known
place.
I didn't do much, watched the locals doing their evening-acrobatics
in the stadium, wandered around, mostly at the markets and said hello
to the bar-people I was hanging with in Pyhnom Penh with Camilla.
Then I took a bus to Ratanakiri, one of the eastern provinces. The
bus-ride took forever, but I passed through some small towns I had been
visiting before. That was nice. Remembering :)
Ratanakiri is different. On one hand it seems richer than many
other places in Cambodia, on the other hand there are a lot of
minority-villages around there, which are extremely poor. Lots of NGOs
and private people putting money and effort into the region though.
I mainly went to Ratanakiri for trekking. There is one of the
biggest national parks in Cambodia, very much undiscovered. But there
lies also the problem- I had to find some other people who would go on a
several-day-trek with me. And I couldn't.
So I ended up trekking for 2 days in the "community jungle", pretty
close to the town of Ban Lung. It was ok, but far from spectacular>
Most fun was actually the overnight-stay in a hammock, in the middle of
the "jungle". We saw a big cobra-snake and real big squirrels- black and
white. Nice.
I then spent a day bicycling around town to some pretty nice
waterfalls, one I could even swim in (great!!) and a crater-lake. I
almost got a feeling of "home" by spending some hours at this lake,
sunbathing and swimming :)
The roads around Ban Lung are very bad, in case there are no roads,
but kind of tracks, covered in a thick layer of red dust. Pretty
challenging to ride a motorbike, but I did.
I spent one day on the moto to a cemetery by the minority-people.
Very interesting, look at the pictures :)
The Trip from Ratanakiri to the south-eastern province of Mondulkiri was
most interesting.
There is no actual road, just a spiderweb of ox-cart-trails. I hired a
guy on a motorbike to drive me and my backpack south. Painful, but fun!
Mondulkiri was great. I spent 10 days in the town of Sean Monorom,
trekking in the jungle, driving the motorbike to all these waterfalls,
bicycling through the mountains.
The jungle felt like a real jungle with all the strange noises and
animals. We slept in hammocks, showered in the waterfall. What a life!!
Now I'm back in Phnom Penh, my last day in Cambodia. Tomorrow morning
I'm off to Bangkok.
It's a sad story, my trip getting to the end..
