Last day in Cambodia

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Well, this is it for another country on our list and it has offered us a good variety.
We headed from Phnom Phen down to Sihounookville on a bus the day after our most unpleasant bus ride. This next bus was very high quality and we had seats in the back row which was elevated and I got the seat behind the isle so I could stretch my legs out as far as I liked... wonderful. Sihounookville is a rather touristy beach town but it was very nice. We stayed in a guesthouse that was a few hundred yards from the beach which was very convenient. The main area of beach is just lined with one bar/restaurant after another and they all have lounge chairs or those chairs which I don't know the name of - but they have a wooden frame and are basically the bottom 1/4 of a sphere with a futon cushion in them - in front of them on the beach. While in these chairs, locals are coming around offering you different sorts of food from shellfish to fresh fruit, beer, jewelry, sarongs, and massages on the beach so you really wouldn't have to move all day. This area is filled with a lot of overweight Europeans with too little clothing on though so during the day it was better to head down the beach a way to find a less crowded area. When the bars stop, the local's section of beach begins which is characterised by the presence of more Cambodians, but mainly the presence of an absurd amount of garbage. This I'm sure is due to nobody cleaning it as well as the Cambodian's habit of throwing all garbage on the ground. Past that stretch of beach, the beach was pretty open with one person every hundred yards or so. The first day I headed down to the open area, went running on the beach, went swimming and lay around for a good while. Then headed back to find a not-too-crowded section of comfortable beach seating to enjoy the sunset while drinking beer that cost $0.50 per glass - the biggest brewing company in Cambodia was located just outside of town so you could get Angkor beer on draft for very cheap there. A couple young local girls tried to sell me a bracelet which I didn't really want, but they stuck around and talked and joked with me for a while, then we played some tic-tac-toe so I finally gave in and bought a bracelet from them. It was good fun. Then the bars set up tables in front of small groups of those round chairs, place candles on them, and serve dinner on the beach about 10 feet from the water. Overall, it's a pretty damn nice setup, and I'm hoping it's just a teaser for what's to come on our tour of the islands in Thailand.

The second day there, we took a tour of nearby Ream National Park. This involved taking a longboat down a river for about an hour and a half through mangrove forests and fishing villiages (the only people allowed to live in the park are the fishermen who lived there before it was made a park). There were 25 people in total on this tour and we took 2 boats, we spent some time with some girls from Switzerland and a nice couple from New Zealand. We saw some cool stuff like the fishing net set-ups they use, their crab traps, and people trying by hand to collect shrimp and oysters. When we hit the ocean to curve around a piece of land that we were going to park on, we spotted a number of dolphins, but none jumped all the way out of the water. We stopped on a beach and spent a little over an hour swimming and wandering around the beach. The water is pretty nice but not very clear, from what I hear you can't find good visibility anywhere around Cambodia. The boats and a couple of the guides had taken off and driven around to the other side of this chunk of land so we then broke up into smaller groups and followed the other guides on hikes through the jungle to come out on a beach on the other side where lunch was being cooked. The jungle was pretty cool but being with a group like that meant we couldn't really stop to examine or explore anything and we couldn't really take many pictures so it wasn't quite the ideal jungle trek. We had lunch in a little shack at the end of a pier just off the beach of a local fishing village and lunch was very good. It was barbequed barracuda which was delicious and some bread and salad and lots of banana and pineapple. We boated our way back to land and got a ride back to our guesthouse in time to head to the beach for more super-cheap beer and another sunset followed by more candle-lit dinner by the water. This was starting to feel like vacation.

Today we took a boat from sihounookeville to Koh Krong, which is about 10 km from the border to Thailand. The boat was long and not very tall and the water was a little rough in some areas so we got a pretty rocky ride out of it (couldn't handle reading for most of the ride) and the windows were dirty and constantly being splashed so we didn't really have any views, plus again I sat straight up the entire ride with my knees digging into the seat in front of me so I'm thinking paying the few extra dollars for the ferry rather than the land route wasn't the best of ideas. It was still an interesting experience and mixed up our method of travel though, so I can't really complain. The town we're in now doesn't really have anything to offer except an early start for heading back to Bangkok tomorrow so we just wandered around looking for a beach but ending up in a maze-like local villiage which was full of children who loved to yell hello at us. We also met one kid who rushed back to his dad who teaches English in the town from 5-6 every day and the man asked if we would come and teach his class today. We jumped all over this opportunity and got to be English teachers for a day. He told us exactly what to do, but it was still fun to be able to interact with the kids and to see their eagerness to learn and enjoyment at having us there. We also all got to take turns pronouncing the sentence "I am a girl" so this made for some good laughter, much more from us than from the kids though.

Tomorrow we take a taxi to the border, cross over and take a bus ride back to Bangkok then it's 2 more nights at Lilly's and meeting up with Katie (Kam's girlfriend) who will be joining us for a week and half or so I think. Hopefully I'll find some fast internet in Bangkok and load some pictures there, but this place is quite slow so for now you'll still have to wait.

Overall impressions of Cambodia: Poverty plays a huge role in the lives of almost everyone - from what services the government cannot afford to provide, to health and living situations, to the way people push their products and services on tourists, or just beg from them. Many of the older Cambodians lived through the Khmer Rouge and knowing that they went through that and are still as strong-spirited and as peacefull as they are is pretty impressive. The country has been in a state of recovery for a long time and only seems to be getting on its feet in areas of tourism so I'm afraid that the tourist trade will be a crutch of the Cambodian economy for a long time to come. The economy is slowly picking up in other areas as well, but not at a pace that will make Cambodia catch up with some of the Asian "tigers" or make the quality of life drastically improve anytime soon. In general, the children under the age of 10 or so are amazingly friendly and happy to see foreigners - they love to wave and say hello and it makes them very happy to get a wave and a hello back. The older kids seem to be more aware and I'm not sure if it's jealousy or resentment, but we don't receive the same warmth from them. Some adults are open and friendly, but most adults in towns tend to give us looks that aren't hostile, but that say "I am not your friend and I will be watching you." I'm sure that once you spend a decent amount of time with a certain community, that feeling might change, but the culture here seems to be less immediately open or trusting to outsiders (unless money is involved) than some other places in the world.

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Comments

[Karen Motenko-Neal]

Socializing on the beach
I was there with you, Paul, when you were on the beach enjoying the sunset, playing tic-tac-toe with the girls. Sounds like you find satisfaction in your interactions. I do, too. And, I appreciate your bottom-line analysis of your experiences with the varying cultures you meet.