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Published: April 17th 2007
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The hunting trainee...
He put his hand in the difficult holes to see if it was worth digging. I declined the role... I was bag man! Chai an administrator at Salarin Kampuchea, the school where my teaching career blossomed, was kind enough to invite to the countryside for a day to meet his friends and to enjoy a bit of good old fashioned traditional home-style cooking. A carton of Crownies $9 was the going rate for the day…an offer I gladly accepted.
8am sharp was the time Chai picked me up from my guest house..(he wanted 7 am but I talked him around!)I was bright eyed and bushy tailed after a solid 4hr sleep following the Friday night “end of working week” celebrations. “We’re off hunting” he informed on the way out to his friends village, “We have to catch lunch first”! This will be interesting I thought, going by my last 2 hunting expeditions (fishless charter boat fishing trips!) “Have we got a back up plan?” I optimistically asked him..
In my childhood I was brought up on a farm and hunting was one of the past times we used to fill in time.(no ladies around back in those days..they had girls germs…YUK!!) I was genuinely getting excited about going on the hunt again.. Images of big wild boars and deer with
The hunt begins...
Stick your hand in here boy! big horns went flashing through my mind so I ask Chai what are we hunting for? Little freshwater crabs was the target and if we’re lucky a frog or 2 and if we’re really lucky a snake!!! Hmmmm..
The men armed themselves with a stick and a small shovel while the women headed towards the kitchen..In Cambodia men are the providers and a women’s place is in the kitchen. I’ll reserve my own views on this subject for fear of maybe upsetting some readers. This wonderful efficient system appears to be working pretty well here....;-)
The process for the hunt involved finding a hole, digging it up and seeing what’s inside. Quite simple really, but the chance that you could be actually digging up a large Cobra’s nest made it all the more interesting!! 2hrs later and we had half a bag of crabs, 7 kermits and thankfully no snakes. .Smiles all round as we took our catch back to the ladies in the kitchen..
Beer o’clock was the cry when we got back to the village and Chai’s friends started to appear from no where. Most of them can’t afford to drink beer so word travels
Scull, scull, scull!!
Check out the woofers on the sub woofers.. fast when a foreigner with a carton shows up!! A hot carton of Crownies was thrown on the table and the sawing of the big block of ice had commenced. I for one would never indulge in such a sacrilegious crime of drinking beer with ice but if you’ve got 2 choices of hot beer or beer with ice, beer with ice it is! (just don’t let the boys back home find out!) They drink a little differently over here, in a way that me reminded of my Yr 10 graduation party. Before a drink is taken everybody has to “ching” glasses with everybody else first and then it’s like see how much of it you can drink. A can on average lasted about 2 swigs and after a couple of drinks I was starting to have big concerns on how the carton was going to last!!! …I cracked a funny when I asked the ladies in the kitchen if they’d like a beer, it was met with thunderous laughter from the men who thought it was the funniest joke they’d heard in years. The carton itself lasted approximately 38 minutes and 55 seconds..
Thankfully the ladies had finally
Hunting hazards
Kids who can't control their buffalo finished preparing lunch by that time and it was time to eat!
Chopped up frog and mashed up crab served with delicious salad made of fresh local vegetables and spicy herbs. All the time the ladies spend in the kitchen is defiantly not wasted that’s for sure. One the best meals I’ve had since I’ve been on the road.
After lunch it was time for some Khmer karaoke but we had one minor problem…we’d run out of beer!! Alby whipped out another $10 bill and problem was solved. So we’re off the karaoke house in the middle of a rice field while you guessed it…. the ladies headed back into the kitchen to prepare for the evening meal.
The karaoke idea seemed like a good idea at the time but after 2-3 hrs of listening to drunken Cambodians singing Khmer songs at dangerously loud levels, the novelty quickly wore off. All Cambodians for some reason aren’t happy unless their sounds systems are played at distorted levels, otherwise it’s simply not loud enough! I was in a small room with a wall to wall sound system, that had woofers on sub woofers and sub woofers on woofers. Not really
healthy for the ears (maybe I’m just showing my age!) The savior for the afternoon came from one of Chai’s friends turned up who is a professional singer. She had an terrific angelic voice which saved me from what only could be described as the noise pollution that I was hearing before…
With the carton gone and the idea of carton number 3 getting tossed around I suddenly remembered that I had to ring my cousins brothers uncle! So after shaking hands with my new best friends and popping my head in to thank the lovely ladies in kitchen I made my way back to the guest house for a nap.
It was a fantastic, exhausting day that just goes to show that people all over the world no matter how rich or how poor, love to laugh, take the piss out of each other, get drunk, make fools of themselves, sing and dance, exactly the same way we’d do it back home in Australia!!
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anonymous
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girl germs...
girl germs?????i don't remember them bothering you!!!!!