A trip to Kep-sur-mer

Cambodia used to be a French colony but since so many people died during the 1970s, there aren't that many old people left who lived under French rule (ended in 1956). So now, French is only spoken by a few and whilst there may be slightly more French people here than would otherwise be, Cambodia does not feel French in any way. Except in Kep.

Fishing boats and seafront restaurants in Kep

We went to Kep for the New Year and it's a lovely small town on the coast and is also where people go from to the virtually uninhabited Rabbit Island for an idyllic escape. It also is a tri-lingual place with quite a few French people living there, and English being the conversant language for all non-French tourists.

As some of you may remember, I used to be completely fluent in French but alas when faced with the choice of speaking to the French husband or Khmer wife who owned the restaurant, it seems that we now find it easier to speak Khmer. Testament to our Khmer teacher, but doesn't say much for our combined 6 years of French at school.

Kep is famous for its crab market and fresh seafood, although it's a bit pricey. A main meal generally costs between $1.50 and $4 dollars depending on where you eat. But here, the shrimp is $5 and crab $7. Expensive considering there's not exactly any transportation costs.

Crabs for sale at the market

There are two strange things about the people who fish the crabs. Firstly, they are virtually all women and secondly they are fully clothed when they go into the sea to collect their baskets and nets. Although, most Khmer adults go into the sea fully clothed because it is the fashion here to be as pale as possible. They actually even use whitening in skin products such as sun tan lotion.

Who needs swimming trunks?

Kep also has some rather brave, inquisitive gibbons that came down and fed off the scraps of the holiday makers. One came right up to us, maybe only three feet away, but rather than take a picture, we jumped away from something a tenth of our size. These gibbons were also less timid than the monkeys in the national park for whom we stopped for aaaages to look for in trees. Unsuccessfully.

Not a totem pole but a road sign

So after hiking through the national park in mid to high 30s heat, what should you do next? Yep, get some rather powerful cocktails for $2 and look out at the sunset over the Gulf of Thailand. I'm not sure what our excuse was every other night mind you.

The sailing club where we had our cocktails and the national park behind it

We were actually at the sailing club for New Year and as we had our own little countdown we wondered what would happen as the clock struck 7:11. The only Khmer people there were staff mind you so we weren't expecting much. But there was actually nothing at all. There was no congratulations amongst the staff or semblance of celebration and when we asked Khmer people back at the hotel, they said there wasn't any kind of partying for New Year other than food and drink with family.   

Sunset over the Gulf of Thailand - so warm that even Claire swam in it

This is probably not much use for our readers outside of Cambodia, but if you go to Kep, do stay in The Boat House. Gorgeous little hotel close to the beach, crab market and national park. A little haven. And for the rest of you, do tell us via the poll or comments below what you would like to read more about, or if there any burning questions about Cambodia. 

Gordon

A New Year brings monks with gadgets

At 7:10pm on Friday 13th April, the clock ticked over to 7:11pm and the new year of 2556 was welcomed in Cambodia. 


Khmer New Year is a big deal, kind of like our Christmas. Everybody heads back to their family "homeland" and there are three or four days of celebrations. But before all of that, it's time to call in the monks for a blessing.


Before new year, it is traditional for monks to bless the office and staff. Claire was first to experience this and she came home with tales of fruit and sweets bouncing of the heads of the kneeled, bowed staff after being thrown as part of the blessing. The fruit is literally called rich and is meant to bestow wealth and the sweets represent sweetness of life.

Stole this from Google Images because we were far too respectful to take pics

So during the blessing in my office, I was sitting head bowed in a horribly awkward position comforted only at the prospect of fruit and sweets. Except it was water droplets that soon hit my head. I looked up to the ceiling only to realise that it was the monks flicking the water at us, quickly followed by flower buds.


I sat respectfully bowed and motionless with cramp setting in, whilst all around me staff were answering their mobile phones and throwing flower buds over other staff or in the gap down the back of people's trousers as they bent forward. I had become used to Khmer people answering their mobile phone no matter where they are when it rings, but I was shocked by what I saw next.


As one monk was chanting and blessing us, the other one was sitting beside him chatting on his mobile phone. Yep, not all monks are the propertyless, wizened old men that we mythologise. 

Some monks just chilling

In fact, rather than attainment of monk-hood being the result of lifelong study and sacrifice, any male of any age can just walk into a pagoda, shave their head, don some robes and hey presto you're a monk. And if you get a bit bored, you just change your clothes, walk out the pagoda and that's the end of your monk-hood. Until you maybe want to become a monk again.

I was asking him if that was the same robe Obi Wan Kenobi had

Some families send their sons to the pagoda to get educated; others go for shelter and food; and we've been told others go to avoid a jail sentence. The idea of not owning property is quaint and observed by some but others have laptops and motos etc, whilst the illusion of monks being pure was shattered on day 3 here when I saw one having a fag. Worse, vulnerable women who have gone to a pagoda for shelter have subsequently become pregnant. How this was achieved when monks are not allowed to touch women is particularly impressive. 


Despite this reality, monks still enjoy the highest reverence here. There is a special word to greet them and even the King (or God-King as he officially is) must bow down to the youngest monk. Restaurants give them free food and shops give them money. 

Monks getting a free lift

We met a monk in our first week who had survived the Khmer Rouge and walked hundreds of miles to reach Phnom Penh and a pagoda he wanted to join. He spoke passionately about Buddhism and explained its teachings. He was clearly committed and sincere about his beliefs, it just seems that there is the odd one or two that aren't how you imagined them to be.


Happy New Year
Gordon

care packages and finding a house - what more could you want!

Last week I received my first care package from home - so exciting! It only took two weeks to get here (which is quite impressive given the number of packages that we've heard about going missing forever / AWOL for up to six weeks) and arrived just in time for Easter, complete with Cadbury's mini eggs and creme egg splats. I literally could not have been happier.

When I was in Namibia (ten years ago this year!) I was very lucky to receive lots of letters every time I got back to basecamp. I spent a lot of time writing letters when I was there too as, back in the day, email and laptops just weren't the norm. (This was also before digital cameras got affordable too however, I digress...) It's lovely getting letters and I'm only sad the postal system is slow and expensive to send mail through otherwise I'd be sending postcards and airmail letters to everyone!

There were other practical things that I'd asked for too, such as stain removal liquid, some clothes that I thought would be useful to have and rubber gloves (I wasn't sure you'd get them here which is a bit ridiculous, but you never know!) Mum and dad also enclosed birthday cards from my family and some pics from home including some of my newly painted flat. They've been very busy since I left cleaning the flat and repainting everything (or just painting a lot of things given that I never quite got round to painting my bedroom or living room in the six years I was there...) It's looking fantastic (thanks again folks) and my lovely new tenant has moved in and is hopefully going to be very happy there!

and another of me with all my exciting things!

We've been house hunting ourselves here. As I mentioned in an earlier post it may be me being fussy but I just hadn't seen anywhere that felt like home. This is mostly because the apartments are all empty and therefore hard to imagine how they would look homely, generally quite dirty (you'd think sweeping up the dead cockroaches would be the least you'd do if you were trying to rent out your apartment!) and because some of them are just plain not nice. And also because we had seen fellow VSOer Clare's place and then stayed in it for a week while she was on holiday, and I sort of fell in love with it. There were two problems - Clare wasn't leaving until mid-end May and we didn't want to be in our tiny, cheap guesthouse for another six weeks, and Gordon wasn't sure he wanted to be in BKK1, the area the flat is in which is basically expat-land (or Barangville as it's commonly known, Barang being the catch all term for foreigners).

Before we moved to Cambodia we'd chatted quite a lot about how we could integrate into a Khmer community living in a city. Once we came here we kept having these discussions and slowly we've realised that it's just very difficult. We've heard lots of stories of volunteers with similar thoughts but who have just not managed to do it. It's not that Khmer people aren't friendly, far from it, but all I can assume is, they have their own lives and their own friends and they're not particularly fussed to make friends with foreigners. There are obviously exceptions but I've realised that any Khmer friends we make will take time, and where we live actually won't make the difference as the chances are it will be people we meet through work or mutual friends, not through chatting to them in our street.

Anyway, on Saturday, after looking round MORE apartments with a new agent, all of which I'd already seen with another agent, we finally decided that we would take Clare's. So, all going well, we have a house, with some really great (ex-pat) neighbours that we can move into sometime next month. In the meantime, after some panicked hunting, we have moved into the Cheeky Monkey for the meantime. It's like a posh hostel where we have our own room with bathroom and can use the kitchen and living room etc. It's lovely and we've got some good hostel-mates including a Korean girl who is interning at one of the Ministeries, and a French girl, who speaks five languages, and is working at one of the Ministeries and the UN! We really are the poor relations here.

It's Khmer New Year this weekend so we've decided to head to the beach. More of that next time! In the meantime, all this started with talk of a care package. Not that I'm fishing (much) but it is really exciting getting mail here, so if anyone fancies going old school and writing a letter our address is:
Claire and/or Gordon
VSO Cambodia Programme Office
PO Box 912
Phnom Penh
Cambodia

I can't promise I'll be able to post anything back as, bizarrely, sending seems to be even trickier (and way more expensive) than receiving (I think they take the money but don't actually put the stamps on for you...) but you will have our eternal gratitude!

Sua s'dey chinam t'mei! (literally hello year new)

Home life - Cambodia style

After my first full day in Cambodia, two VSO volunteers not based in Phnom Penh told me that I was doing VSO-light.

Phnom Penh is a city like most in the developed world – restaurants, shops, cars, electricity, modern housing and sanitation etc. But outside of Phnom Penh, life is a bit different and 80% of Cambodians live rurally.

Houses are traditional wooden houses on stilts, underneath which and around, any cow(s), pig(s) and chickens are kept for subsistence. Electricity is uncommon; squat French style toilets are a step up from the forest; and showers are taken using a bucket.

The life Claire and I will witness in Phnom Penh is not life for most Cambodians. So to introduce us to this life, VSO arranged for us to stay with a family in a village for a day and night. 

We ended up staying with the chief of the village so their house was rather nicer, larger and more modern than others in the village. The big challenge was that they spoke no English.

Our home for a day and night

On arrival, I was kept upstairs for serious talk with the man of the house, whilst Claire was taken away to meet his wife and various kids. The game for Claire was to work out what relation all the kids were to the adults and each other.

Sherlock Wilcock discovered that one boy and girl were grandkids looked after by grandparents because their parents were working in Phnom Penh. The parents could not afford for their kids to be in Phnom Penh meaning the kids see them very rarely in the year. It seems that there were other similar situations like this in the village. 

Can you guess which one isn't from Cambodia?

The problem for us came when Grandpa started to ask about our wedding, including how much it cost. Saying we weren’t married wasn’t an option.

So I explained to him that 120 of you lot were there and were very expensive to feed - £50 p/p no less!  Claire’s dress was a whopping £1000 and actually looked quite like the dress the granddaughter was making for her 18^th birthday, which was actually really pretty. 

However, there were two saving graces to keep the conversation flowing. Firstly, I had taken balloons which seemed to go down a hit with the kids. This has been a hit with some of the kids of the staff at our hotel in Kompong Cham so I'm taking them with me wherever I go now.

Lots of debate about how to write our names - they usually think I'm saying Golden or Garden

The second saving grace was that the Gran, who was a school teacher, and granddaughter decided to teach Claire how to write Khmai. Somehow, I was spared this.

However, I was not spared the agony of eating whilst sitting on the floor cross-legged. It was the ultimate torture for me because I was literally torn between sitting there longer to eat more of the wonderful food (I had 12 fish in 24 hours) or saying I was full so that I could stand up. 

In the end I kept eating but couldn't get up until Claire was up and the family were out of sight allowing me to struggle up like a bow-legged 90-year-old needing both hips replaced. Agony. Plus, Gran wouldn't allow either of us to uncross our legs while eating - despite her sitting with only one leg crossed. It was like a test of our willpower to survive in Cambodia (melodramatic?). 

Princess Claire in her mosquito net. We slept upstairs on the wooden floor.

At night we spend a bit of time watching kickboxing with Grandpa. The Khmai guy got beaten by the Thai guy in quite an explosive 5 rounder. I kept on wanting the guy to do 'The Crane' but evidently that's a different martial art...

Then it was up early, 6am, a bucket shower to wash away the cobwebs (or scorpions which we awoke next to outside our net), and a massive breakfast. As well as the fish there was rice, a kind of tamarind sauce and egg and pork mixed up which was also put into a packed lunch for us to take away together with five mangoes and some lamot fruit from their garden (see Claire's post about fruit, aka golden kiwi). Obviously a different breakfast to your average cereal but I guess encountering "strange" things was the point - I would love to read their blog about us!

Strangely yours

Gordon