Waste Not, Want Not

Distance Traveled:   14,510 kms (BNE-MEL-SYD-BKK-PKT-BKK-CNX-BKK-PP-SR-BB)

Flags Collected:   0
Time Difference: -3 hours (from Brisbane)

Soundtrack:  Nothing in particular

Currently Inspired by:  Sunset over Battambang :)

Stacks:   None which is incredible considering the weird places I've been walking / clambering.  Perhaps I'm becoming more sure footed!

Words written:   12,372 (being stuck inside is good for the book)

First things first – in a previous blog while talking about the waterfalls in Doi Inthanon, Thailand I called one of them by an incorrect name.  It is actually called Wacharithan, and you can click here to see a video of it.

I am typing this in Word and will copy across when I have internet.  I thought the connection sucked at some of the previous hotels I have been in, but this place takes the cake!  The power has gone off about six times in the last 12 hours (that I know of) also.  It’s a clear message to get outside. Unfortunately outside is roughly as hot as the surface of the sun and I’d like to keep my skin for a little longer.  So I’m sitting in my room with the air con on full bore, still sweating my arse off, waiting for an hour or so before I venture out on this afternoon’s temple and cave adventure!

I haven’t done a HUGE amount since last I wrote, because I spent days locked away from the humidity in my various rooms as a result of my ear infection, which despite two (very expensive) visits to the hospital, somehow managed to turn into infections, plural.  My right ear, the first to get infected, is slowly getting better but the left is slowly getting worse.  I’m sure there is a doctor somewhere in this one horse town but frankly I’d rather self medicate until I get somewhere less... err... rustic.  I do like Battambang though, very much.  It’s smaller and and more compact than anywhere I’ve been which means crossing the road is slightly less of a death defiance stunt.

Back to Siem Reap... As I mentioned in my previous blog, Angkor Wat was unfortunately the last item on my tour agenda that I was able to do, which was fairly annoying. In hindsight, I have to say... If someone had just plucked me out of Australia and plonked me down on the grounds I think my mind would have been blown.  As it was, I did really really like it, but I’d already done so many amazing things here that it really just did seem like another temple, albeit the most impressive one I’ve seen.  My favourite part was actually navigating our way through it with torches before the sun came up.  We came in the back way to avoid tourists so it really did feel like just us until we got to the viewing point on the other side of the lake.  So yes, Angkor Wat is definitely a "tick it off" experience that I recommend to anyone, but if you are coming to Cambodia, don't just tick stuff off.  See the countryside, the beaches, go where there aren't many tourists and meet the locals.  That's where the real beauty is in this country.

The final tour activity was on Tuesday night, and was dinner and a traditional Khmer dancing show down the road from where we were staying.  It was a nice evening, but I didn’t take any photos or videos because the entire thing was virtually undistinguishable from the Kantoke Palace dinner and show that I attended in Chiang Mai.  I mean, the way they were introduced, the whole set up of the night, the dancing.  There were some costume differences, but that’s all I really noticed.  They simply have to be run by the same company, I'm thinking.  The food selection was insane, a whole bunch of different Asian cuisines and western / European food also.  You can see a bunch of different bits and bobs here in my food album.  The next night was our last evening altogether.  It was a lovely night, but twas sad to say goodbye to Betty, Chris and Eve.  It was a fun 11 days!  Guys if you're reading this, we'll definitely have a beer when I'm in London!

The boat trip from Siem Reap to Battambang was damn fantastic.  I would like to now transcribe from my pen and paper notes from the boat, which upon reading back, sounds like  Wiki entry!  Sorry about that:

The Tonle Sap lake is an incredible body of water which is both a lake and river system.  You could call it the lifeblood of Cambodia.  Each year, as the monsoon season hits it breaks its banks and swells, completely flooding all the land under it, usually around some additional 14,000 square kilometres of forest and fields.  Ever adaptable, the Cambodians build 2 types of houses on the banks of the Tonle Sap: houses on stilts and houses on floating bamboo rafts.  The houses on the wooden rafts float along the edges of the lake no matter where it happens to be.  These people fish in the abundant waters all year round, in what is known to be one of the richest freshwater fishing grounds in the world, providing 75% of Cambodia's fish intake.  These floating houses collect in villages, along with floating shops etc.  Those in stilt houses weather the floods in a dry fashion, more or less (less, this year), and fish through the wet season.  During the dry season when the waters have receded, they plants crops in the nutrient rich soil left under and around their homes.  Hence both seasons are used to the best of their productive ability, without needing to cause headaches for the mailman.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Nothing is wasted here.  They eat or use every part of animals.  Their boats, cars, tuk-tuks and bikes are always loaded until they’re groaning.  Case in point: for the bus pickup to the Siem Reap docks there were 13 of us and our bags, crammed into a little 7 seater minibus.  You should have seen the driver stacking us all in, he would be awesome at Tetris.  The photo below is taken from the boat.  You can see some fairly dense vegetation and what looks like bushes next to those houses.  These are floating houses, that vegetation is floating vegetation and the bushes are the tops of trees.  The floating vegetation and houses tend to get caught around the tops of the trees, and the trees adapt to the excess water.  If you stood out on the middle of all that vegetation, you'd fall right through into the water.

The boat trip took about 6.5 hours, a relatively short trip, I’m given to understand, because the waters are quite high this year.  It was strange to think that the majority of the water we were boating on to get to Battambang just isn’t there for a chunk of the year.  The boat was overloaded and downstairs was full and noisy, so a stack of us went upstairs and sat on the roof with the bags.  As you can imagine, we all got completely cooked in the sun from above, and if you moved off your little patch, your butt and legs got cooked by the metal roof that had heated up around you.  There were Germans, Frenchies, Kiwis, Pommies, Polish folk and Israelis (and yours truly, representing Australia).  It was like a United Nations bake sale, and you know I never complain about the heat.  I was sitting next to a lovely French girl called, rather unfortunately, France.  Apparently her father is a mad rugby fan and there was some kind of grand final on the year she was born.  Child abuse!  She was very sweet though and I was very happy that I had the opportunity to use some of the tiny amount of French I knew to be able to exclaim “Il fait chaud!” (It is very hot!)  After the lake we ended up on the Tonle Sap river portion of the trip, which was an incredible experience.  Life just goes on here, I imagine in exactly the same way as it has for hundreds of years.  The people crouch there, balanced on the very tip of their long narrow boats, feeding out fishing nets or bringing them in.  Scores of the most gorgeous children you've ever seen, naked as the day they were born, jump straight from their thatched huts on the bank into the water to play in the waves made by our boat.  They frantically wave and call out "BAI BAI!!" to us.  Everyone smiles and waves, it's like the Asian Stepford.  Check it out below.

To see more photos from the lake and river trip, click here

Battambang is cuuuuuute.  A couple of people that I’ve spoken to since I’ve been here have found it dirty and uninspiring, but I can’t really see that.  The sunsets here are worth the trip.  Yesterday I watched one from the roof of my hotel, and today I watched one from the top of a mountain.

Sunset over Battambang from my hotel (left) and from the top of the mountain (right)

Today was bittersweet.  A fellow boat traveller and I hired a tuk tuk to take us to a ruined, pre-Angkorian temple (so over a thousand years old).  It was actually very cool.  I prefer ruins to actual functional temples, I suppose because with ruins, your imagination can fill in the gaps.  It was impressive at any rate, as were the stairs that led up to it.  I am not sure how many there were, but I’m going to guess somewhere in the vicinity of 400, and they were extremely high, crumbly steps and incredibly steep, almost vertical by the time you get to the top.  Several breaks were required to get there.  Below is what I saw from the bottom:

Steeling myself, I hauled my sorry butt up there in a few stages, and triumphantly hauled my screaming legs over the top step, only to be confronted with the below:

"Are you freaking kidding me??" would be a polite way to describe the thoughts that were going through my head at this point.

Once (finally) at the top I explored the ruins and was approached by some very young monks, probably in their late teens or early twenties.  I was quite excited about this because I’ve wanted to speak to the Buddhist monks or take photos with them and I’ve felt too embarrassed to do so, and here were three of them, basically swarming me and asking me all sorts of questions about Australia and what do I think of Cambodia etc.  Then they said “please can we take a photo with you?” and they took turns standing next to me while one of the others took photos.  Like I was the interesting one!  It made me laugh, and of course I had the presence of mind to get him to take photos with my camera too, so now I have the pictures that I wanted and I didn’t even have to ask!  Upon later reflection in the tuk tuk, I started feeling quite itchy and paranoid that there was something inappropriate about my appearance and perhaps they were taking photos to say “look at the tits on her!” to the other monks later. In active temples here you have to wear a shirt with sleeves and skirts or shorts below the knee or they won’t let you in (because women’s bodies are shameful and disgusting, didn’t you know).  However this was an inactive temple and technically you couldn’t even go “inside” so I felt perfectly comfortable wearing a tank top and shorts above the knee to it. Hmm.  It is entirely possible that I’m over-thinking the situation.  I guess they just study hard and don’t get out much to meet people.

That was one of the sweet parts.  The bitter came from a visit to the Killing Caves up in the mountain.  It’s just like a Killing Field and used for the same purpose, except it is a very high cave with a hole at the top, that the Khmer Rouge used to march people up to and throw them into.  The bones are still there, just as they are at Cheong Euk, the killing field that I visited.  This place was worse, somehow.  We all felt ill and upset at the killing fields, but in the dark of cave looking at the bones I felt seriously nauseated and claustrophobic, and got a bit panicky for a bit.  My brain wanted to stay and absorb the experience but my skeleton was trying to jump out of my skin and take off back up to the top.  The energy at these places is seriously awful.  I’m glad though, that I saw it.  I’m always glad that these poor people who never did anything to anyone, and were separated from their families and killed while frightened and alone, are acknowledged.  So many people have died through genocide while the world is completely oblivious to what’s going on.  How terrifying that this can happen to anyone.  Wouldn’t be constantly searching the skies for help to arrive?  Then you have genocide that people are aware of, such as in Rwanda, and no one does a damn thing about it, thanks very much United Nations.  Pack of useless fucking bureaucrats.  Wasn’t the UN formed predominantly to prevent genocide from ever happening again after WWII?  Let’s rate their effectiveness on a scale from one to ten, shall we?

After the caves we went right up to the summit of the mountain.  We each got driven up there by a motorbike a) because it was 1,200 steps to the top and b) we wouldn’t have made it by sunset.  There is a viewing platform surrounded by a variety of temple buildings and I watched the sun go down over the mountains near the border of Thailand.  It was truly stunning.  However Dan, my travel companion for the day, went elsewhere to watch it and I found out later that there were a bunch of monks watching it with him, as well as whole heap of wild MONKEYS, who came down and sat there near them just to watch it as well.  And one of the monkeys mugged a monk who was carrying a bag of mangoes and stole them off him, from under his robes!  I nearly died of jealousy.  Before I knew that, I was perfectly happy with my own experience.  Argh, it still stings a bit.  Down the bottom of the mountain we watched millions upon millions of tiny bats fly out of the mountain and into the night, no doubt to go off and feast on insects and the like.  It was pretty incredible.  There was strong, steady stream of them pouring out of the mountainside for maybe ten or fifteen minutes.  Seriously, millions.

For photos of Battambang and its surrounds, click here

The above was all very sweet. Some more bitter... very very unfortunately, on the road on the way back there had been a crash between a car and a motorbike with two people on it, and the two people on the bike died.  We were warned as we were leaving by one of the villagers that it had just happened and indeed we did pass the scene of the accident very quickly, before any emergency services were there, and saw one of the dead bodies face down on the ground, missing a leg.  There were people screaming and crying, and it was pretty horrific.  That was the first dead person I have seen so it was disturbing, and neither of us really spoke for a 45 minutes or so back to Battambang.

So it's been a very interesting week or so.  I have been reading a fairly comprehensive book regarding the politics of the Khmer Rouge.  I wanted a scholarly rather than sensational book but I've gone as little too far in my choice as it reads like a textbook and is full of names and places I have never heard of, heavily annotated and referenced, so I am finding it tough going.  Something I am prepared to say though is that Cambodia's political history is unbelievably complicated.  Learning about it raises more questions than it answers!  It seems everyone has had a crack at this place at some point: the French, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese.  How many people know that the US carpet bombed Cambodia during the Vietnam War ostensibly to "flush out" Vietnamese communists?  How successful do you think that campaign was?  It was certainly successful in murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent Cambodians who had no idea why they were being bombed.  Collateral damage, indeed.  It was partly this action by "the imperialists" that enabled Pol Pot's regime to flourish.  His propaganda machine promised an end to the bombings.  So when the Khmer Rouge took over and "liberated" the cities, the civilians lined the streets in welcome parades, cheering and supportive.  The next day they were mass evacuated from their homes, hospitals, schools, jobs and work, and sent on death marches out into communist co-operatives in the country, where over one fifth of Cambodian's population (1.7 million, est) died either through overwork, starvation, torture or plain old execution over the next four years.  One of the directives from Central was wherever possible to find alternatives to guns for killing, such as overwork and starvation, beating or using the sharp bark of palm trees to saw their heads off, because their lives were worth "less than a bullet".  When I say nothing is wasted here, it has negative connotations also.

I am leaving here tomorrow and have decided to head to a little town called Kampong Chnnag for a couple of days before heading to Phnom Penh and visiting the Somaly Mam shelter.  Last 7 days in Cambodia! I don't want to leave  :(  I am currently considering getting a boat down the Mekong into Vietnam, however I shall decide when I get there.

Til next we speak,
*LOVE*
N