Countryside Bike Tour and Kompong Phluk

---

Up even earlier our second full day in Cambodia, we decided to break up our temple tours with a morning guided countryside bike tour and afternoon guided lake tour. We caught a tuk tuk to our bike shop, met our guide, hopped on our bikes and set out. It was scary riding a bike through the crazy traffic but thankfully the bike shop was already near the edge of town so we didn't have to deal with it for very long before we hit dirt country roads. I was also grateful that we'd decided to do this tour in the morning considering how hot and humid Cambodia gets. The weather was actually pleasant. Also, it was some sort of holiday, so the temples were blasting music throughout the countryside- it was like listening to monks chant a background soundtrack for a Cambodian tour (it reminds me of watching any film on the Middle East, and you hear the chanting singing from mosques as the background music). Our first stop was probably my favorite- a local market. We'd already got a glimpse of this part of everyday local life the night before but now there was a much wider variety of foods to see. Our guide gave us all types of baked treats, many resembling fried donuts but also more of the tasty white coconut jelly balls and sticky rice with coconut. It was crazy walking through the market and seeing all the freshly butchered meat and fish just sitting out, waiting to be bought. We continued to ride through the countryside and stopped at a local villager's house next. Our guide described daily living and gardening. The owner of the house also owned a rice mill and our guide described that whole process, too. They try not to waste anything in the process so even the husks are reused and fed to animals like pigs. We rode our bikes down more dusty dirt roads, passing children waving and giving us high fives. The next stop was a mushroom farm. I guess I never put any thought into how mushrooms are grown. This process was truly fascinating, everything that gets mixed into the soil into bottles that are then stacked and cared for until beautiful white edible fungi pop out. The owners fried us up a plate full of mushrooms that we dipped in a lime pepper sauce while our guide shared a pile of fruit with us, showed us pictures of his family on his smart phone and answered our billion questions about daily life in Cambodia. The last big stop on 4.5 hour bike tour was a monastery. We learned about burial and cremation practices and Buddhism (the main religion but has lots of Hindu influence) to the backdrop of very loud monks chanting over a loudspeaker. It was almost like a loud buzzing chant. We learned that many boys join the monastery as a means of getting education before moving on to other vocations. We even saw nuns!

We headed back to the bike shop at the end of tour, ate lunch a few buildings down and then headed back to our hotel to shower, change and head out for our next tour to Kompong Phluk, a crazy village built on high stilts because of the crazy flooding of Tonle Sap Lake that occurs during monsoon season. Since we're at the beginning of dry season you can see the crazy difference in height. Most of this tour was spent driving to and from the lake, and the guide was my least favorite. He barely spoke, and we were the first to be picked up and the last to be dropped off on this tour. So it was a very long time sitting in vans. The guide did at least warn us what to expect with the women on the boats. When we got to the lake, we take a bigger boat through Kompong Phluk past all the houses until we got to the edge of the deeper part of the lake. There we got off the big boat onto a floating restaurant dock where dozens of colorfully dressed women (and a few men) waited in small boats to take tourists like us through a beautiful flooded mangrove forest. This is a way for the local women to earn money cause not only do you pay $5 to ride the little boat, they guide you right up to a floating market of sorts and hassle you until you buy stuff. I think I would have felt more scammed had our guide not warned us. I ended up buying a Cambodian version of a Sprite. After you buy yourself stuff, they ask you to buy stuff for the local kids or for your boat paddler. We asked what she wanted- literally the only time she said anything to us was to indicate she wanted a giant bag of cookies. Shrug- we bought her cookies. Our tour guide later explained that usually the items bought for the boat paddler are then sold BACK to vendor so that both make a profit off the tourists. The amount of money these locals make on a good day we could earn in three minutes back home so, whatever, we play along. But seriously, you could just sit there and ignore them and buy nothing- they can't force you no matter how awkward it gets. We saw a few people do that. It was a really surreal experience, though, floating through the beautiful flooded forest on a boat. I loved it.

And that was the bulk of our second day of being tourists. As we arrived back to the hotel that evening, we ran into the early arrivals on our medical mission trip. They came a day early to adjust to the time change. So they invited us out to a Hot Pot Dinner. It's very similar to hot pot we've had back home in the States. You get a boiling pot of broth, choose your meat, and then toss that in with veggies. Once it's cooked, you serve yourself hot bowls of soup. Also, beer in Cambodia has neat pull tabs.

---

Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

Cambodia
Now you are taking your life in your hands. Plenty of crazy drivers abound.