Jungle roads...

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Today its all about recovery on the jungle road along the river, both for the soul and the bruised from the previous day's cramping muscles. We are finally running the Mekong proper and at times the scenery is nothing short of breath taking which can be a bit of an issue when running, so we stop and gaze and wonder if the people who inhabit its banks ever stare at the familiar scene with the same wonder anymore. Of course he who speaks Mekong speaks water and therefore water buffalo, Nat's absolute favorite beast in the world (not)! However, its a bit after the breeding season and the baby buffalo have got the cutest little squeal when calling mama... homely babies have to have some form of appeal. So Nat now runs past the beasts pretending she is a train and they are merely cows watching her go by, hey the sun beats pretty hard and we cope any way we can 😊. Then later in the afternoon, we met a kid who made the neatest scooter today, eat your heart out Tonka toy! (see picture)

The afternoon is spent running in the back country, battling then making our peace with the heat, Endurolytes are a new form of salvation! We arrive in the village of Tbong Klah escorted by local kids and Bunna who decides to sprint Nat to the finish, guess who won...

The kids are everywhere, it's like being fish in a bowl with no possible escape. All we want to do is get into the shade and have something cool to drink, preferably something not tasting like Gatorade.

Since we are not going to get any sort of privacy, Nathalie breaks out the stickers and occupies the kids. It works perfectly and they are all running around giggling and screaming with laughter, stickers covering their face and arms. Next are the thank you to Terri and her father who is visiting from another province. Soaps for her and a team shirt for him.

Finally we give in and take the offer for a bath. The choice is 'river' water or 'rain' water. Both are collected but since this is the dry season and the next rain is several months away, river water is the choice. Wrong, Miss Terri won't have it and off comes the cover for the rain barrel. Jeff's shoes are not proper bathing shoes so 'Mr Terri' insists that his are used instead, then he wanders off in some flowery looking sandals, with Jeff contemplating a bath in front of the village. 'Nathalie is not going to enjoy this!' What a bath though! Cool water and soap can do wonders after a long hot day. Finally done, Nat's turn in for public bathing 101. All in, it sounded worse than the experience proved to be and besides, clean or at least something resembling less dirty, won in the end.

We'd been carting around a bottle of wine and decided today was the day! After pouring ourselves and Bunna a glass (plastic water bottles cut in half to be exact) we headed to the police station on the hill over looking the river to 'watch the dolphins'. Honestly, we expected to see anything but the Irrawady dolphin. Most are reported to be farther south near Kratie, a full day's run away, but we went along with all the 'sticker' kids in tow....
The spot was really very nice and to our surprise we spotted no less than a dozen dolphin (or one very fast one!) at various distances from the banks. One very close, making the kids all scream and laugh.

The sun starting to set, we walked back to Terri's to see if Mombo really was cooking BBQ for supper. Not the bird BBQ who has become our feathered team member but real, honest beef satay and pork spare ribs.....satisfied with that we went to the bluff to watch the sunset and get some quiet time....Bunna decided that we'd had enough of that an came to offer us some special BBQ. The first question was 'what is it' and the second was 'wow, what is that amazing sauce?' The sauce was an amazing peppercorn sauce and well the meat was, er, um, well it was monkey. Honestly, after getting past the thought, it was really good and none of it went to waste!

We were called to dinner, which we were sharing with Terri and her father Mr. Terri, with fabulous marinated beef and veggie skewers, pork riblets made by our team member Mombo who is proving to be quite the chef and a lemongrass chicken soup made by Terri and a mountain of white fragrant rice. We have, based on its success last year, brought the game “Jenga” with us and set out to teach and play by camp light with our dinner companions. Can we spell INSTANT HIT? So much so that they kept playing it for hours after we begged off and retire for the night in the next “room” if you can call it that, a half partition wall being the only separation between gamers and “can we please get to sleep” wishers. That was just the start to a night of late generator powered karaoke across the road, chicken fights, dog fights, who stepped on the cat noise, god knows what crawling on the roof, old and not so old men snoring and the the three, four, four fifteen and every fifteen minute thereafter moto driving by, and Jeff waking the entire road by setting off the Cambodian dog alerting system while trying to discreetly sneak out to go answer the call of nature. Noise 1, sleep 0. Home stays are experience rich but light on rest if you're of the fully sober, light sleeper category.

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