Up the river into a mined jungle

When you can't go by road, at least you can go by river. 8 hours on a longish motorised punt was admittedly a bit much, but seeing the life of villages built on the river was a great experience. Have you ever seen a floating church? Or a petrol station? The river is the source of life, but in the rainy season the water level rises by 3 metres. So everything is either floating or up on tall stilts...

In the morning we got up at five (and gladly), as it was already the aforementioned 31.4°C. We've got a fan in the room, but there's no screen in the window, so because of the malaria mosquitoes it has to stay shut. Another small problem is the bathroom door frame at a height of 165 – 170 cm, which has left me with bumps and fits of rage. Otherwise, though, for $5 it was luxury accommodation!
We got a bit uneasy when the ride to the boat, planned for 5:30, still wasn't there at 6:05. In the end it turned up, and after buying bananas and water from the pushy vendors at the port the boat left at exactly 7:00 as planned. It's a sort of home-made boat, about 7-8 m long and very narrow (roughly 1 m). At the back there's a truck seat bolted on and in front of it an engine and gearbox from the same truck screwed into the floor. The engine isn't covered by anything, so the gear stick just sticks out into the open. It's cooled by water from the river, which it sucks in on one side and on the other dribbles back into the river out of a hose. Behind the boat trails a shaft about 2.5 m long with a propeller on the end. That way it can be pulled out of the water when it's shallow or when it winds up a sack (we saw both). Since it's the end of the dry season, there's little water in the river (or canal) and it has the colour and consistency of what back home gets hauled off by the cesspit truck. The locals also use the river as a rubbish dump and a sewer, so the thought of tipping over in the very wobbly boat doesn't appeal to us barangs one bit. Also on board with us are a couple of young Yanks, 2 older, apparently Belgian couples and one Korean-looking American woman. The rest are locals of all ages, from a month-old baby to a seventy-year-old granny.

By the way, during the rule of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge army over 2 million people (20% of the population) were murdered on the basis of their education. Anyone who had a university degree, worked in politics or in the former army, or even just wore glasses or had previously lived in a town, was executed. Pol Pot wanted to establish a purely agricultural state without towns and the achievements of Western capitalism, and the first step was the forcible 100% clearing of all towns. I bought a book here about that period and I'm reading it as I go (the confession of a little girl who was 5 at the time of Pol Pot's revolution and lost most of her family). Given that we're moving right through the places described in the book, it's a pretty powerful experience. One of the consequences of Pol Pot's regime is also the fact that people under 15 make up 40% of the population. In the USA it's 12%! So there are loads of children everywhere, and especially in the poor floating villages along the river. That's something for my camera :-). The villages float because the river level in the dry season and in the monsoon can differ by several metres. So during the 7.5 hour trip we see hundreds of floating houses (from reed shacks to luxurious colourful multi-storey ones), floating schools, floating petrol stations, floating Buddhist temples and Christian churches, floating town halls, shops and many very grand buildings with the sign Cambodian people´s party (the Cambodian People's Party). In between there's the busy bustle of hundreds of little boats, from small rotting punts to long wobbly motorboats. Ours is among the biggest, and we meet few of those. For small boats overloaded with goods or people the wave we make is potentially lethal, so we have to slow down every other minute. Once the pilot did it too late and both women had to jump out of a little boat overloaded with vegetables in a hurry, because otherwise so much water poured in that we almost capsized them.

Almost the whole way it's one experience after another, so it costs me the last 350 photos I have on the card. Just below a duck farm (partly floating) and a pig farm (fully floating) there was a children's swimming spot. A netted-off bit of river by the bank where about six local kids were having a blast jumping, splashing, diving and throwing mud at each other. I reckon whoever survives a childhood like that is immune for the rest of their life :-)
What's interesting is that everyone here looks very happy. There are definitely far more people smiling here than, say, in the villa part of Vinohrady, let alone people on the metro. I wonder whether the causal link between the feeling of happiness and the amount of material goods isn't the other way round from what we all think.

The last two hours of the trip were pretty gruelling, my backside hurt and the villages were getting sparse. The fun started when the river began to bend very sharply and, because it narrowed, the current got very strong. Only at that moment did it dawn on me that we were actually sailing upstream. Until then it had been more like stagnant (and thoroughly murky) water or swamp. Now and then, though, I amused myself photographing the details of the cleavage of that very young, particularly well-endowed American girl. If she'd noticed and it had been in the USA, I'd be facing a sexual harassment lawsuit for sure :-)

The boat stopped many times along the way, whenever some local whistled furiously that he wanted to get on with his sack of rice, box of dishes or bundle of chickens (they really do it like that here, 5 chickens tied by the legs into a bundle :-) ). At the bigger stops it pulled up to a jetty, but mostly it just stopped in the middle of the river and waited for the local to be brought over by punt. Occasionally, loading yet another native caused a decent lurch of the already overloaded boat. But the locals were calm, so we pretended to be too.
Our destination town of Battambang welcomed us with a long wooden staircase by the bridge and a horde of pushy touts at the end of it. They were offering the services of local hotels and taxis. Our request for a trip to Koh Kong National Park took the wind out of their sails. Then they started outdoing each other with all sorts of offers of taxis, motorbikes, hotels and buses, all at once and completely uncoordinated. In the end, going by the map, we chose to hop on a bus to a town 100 km further south, from which a dirt road should lead over the mountains to the coast where the park is. Nobody could grasp that we didn't want to go via the capital Phnom Penh. As the crow flies it's about 200 km to our destination, via Phnom Penh about 3 times that, but several highways radiate out from the capital across the whole country, so the locals have got used to the fact that you always go via P.P. But we, on the contrary, want to go over the mountains and see the local villages and small towns off the main route and also drive through genuine tropical jungle. It'll take longer and on a worse road, but there'll be plenty of experiences.

When we got off in the little town of Pursat, it was the first time that as far as the eye can see and a barang can walk you wouldn't spot another barang. The locals' reaction is very funny. After a very brief hesitation they start laughing and slapping each other on the shoulders and shouting something cheerful. There's nothing bad in it, it's pure delight at seeing something so white and so tall, and 2 of them at once :) Right now we're lying in a hammock in the jungle and the first 24 hours have just gone by without us seeing a single barang!
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. In Pursat we went for an unbelievable splurge and instead of a Guest House for $3 we checked into the Than Sour Thmei Hotel for $15! Hopefully our family budgets will survive that 150 CZK a head! We were counting on getting at least one good night's sleep in that heat, because the room had air-con. Unfortunately that didn't happen, because I accidentally switched it off before going to bed :)
We walked around the town and at the market first had a fruit shake (by mistake) and then great rice with meat (on purpose). Prices here are roughly half of those in Siem Reap; there the basic barang unit of price was one $, here it's 2000 riel ($0.5)
At the hotel we tried to arrange transport to the mountains. It evidently shocked them and they didn't know what to advise, maybe just a taxi. When we suggested that we'd happily ride with the locals on the back of a truck, they looked at us absolutely, utterly baffled. I don't know whether they didn't understand because of the English or whether it just seemed so absurd coming from a barang. Anyway, in the end they arranged a taxi for us for $70 and, after a big struggle, helped us get hold of a map of Cambodia so we'd know where we're going. It's a school wall map, it has about as much detail as a globe and no contour lines. What is on it, moreover, doesn't match the map in the Lonely Planet guide, and the town names only roughly too :)

The taxi (a decently battered Toyota Camry, automatic, right-hand drive) was waiting in front of the hotel already at 7:30. First he wanted a 20$ deposit so he could go fill up. In the meantime we had noodle soup for breakfast (a bowl big enough for three, I ate half of it). The moment we left the city it was clear he'd earned those 70$. We were supposed to drive 170 km into the mountains and the asphalt ended after the first 300 m. After that just a dirt road full of potholes, mopeds, cyclists and cows. Both the Toyota and the driver proved pretty tough, after many of those potholes taken at 60-70 any European would head straight to the garage. As the altitude rose the density of settlement dropped, the density of vegetation grew, the only thing increasing was the number of wooden shacks at the expense of the few brick ones down below and – to my surprise – the density of luxury new off-road cars went way up. Toyota Land Cruiser 90 (2.5 million CZK), Nissan Patrol pickup (1.5 million CZK) or say a Lexus SUV (also around 2 million CZK). I had no idea where they all came from, but in the end we figured they must belong to the Chinese company that's building a road through the jungle here (dirt, sure, but passable). After 120 km we got to the little town of Pro Moui, which consisted of a handful of houses around a roundabout and a market. Our taxi driver is apparently from here, because he unloaded crates of vegetables here and, oddly enough, drove in under one of the houses (almost all the buildings here stand on two-metre stilts because of the floods in the rainy season) and swapped the car for another one (identical model, different colour). The last 50 km was first along a fast gravel road and then along washed-out, sharp and steep switchbacks, barely drivable in a normal car.

In the morning the hotel owner warned us that the taxi driver would drop us off about 600 m short of our destination (where the Guest House is) because from there the road is "bad".
When that moment came and the driver stopped, we were a bit in shock. He was pointing at a tank training ground heading off into the jungle and jabbering something in Khmer while unloading our packs onto the dirt road. We were standing by some kind of shelter with a few locals and our Khmer wasn't good enough to understand what he was telling us. Eventually we found a local who spoke a bit of human language. That it's 4 km to the town along that tank track and that they'd take us there for 2x5$ on motorbikes. In the end we found enough courage, sent the taxi driver back and stayed in the middle of that jungle with those bikers. Non-essential parts like fairings, footpegs or passenger grab handles had long since fallen off the bikes, plus they're mopeds originally intended for riding around town to do the shopping, not for carrying 2 adults, 1-2 backpacks (Patrik's camera gear backpack is heavier than the one with his stuff), and on top of that along a tank track I'd consider a decent blast even on a mountain bike. And to make sure there wasn't a shortage of adrenaline, it started raining!

Real adventure begins! Yippee! The ride through muddy terrain in rutted tracks, potholes full of mud up to the exhaust, over wooden little bridges was a masterclass in balance. I have to say I'd originally been thinking I'd feel better if I was driving myself, but I'd never have pulled off the bravura my rider did. In several places we had to get off, packs on our backs and go on foot, seriously an experience. Despite the rain I pulled out the camera a couple of times and photographed the road. I felt like a reporter for Koktejl, and that's a feeling I hadn't had in years and I'd forgotten what amazing experiences travelling can bring.

An even bigger experience was arriving at the place. Around a hellishly muddy road a few shacks scattered about and on one of them the sign Guest House. A very authentic wooden building, downstairs and in the adjacent walless buildings a joiner's workshop. Upstairs 6 little rooms with luxurious, probably mahogany beds and mosquito nets. One of the buildings is a great gazebo with a palm-leaf roof and an unbelievable table in the middle. The top of the round table, 2 m in diameter, is made of 15 cm thick wood. It's simply a slice cut off a 2 m thick trunk, with a thick leg underneath made of the same wood. Around it 8 gorgeous mahogany chairs. Given the utter poverty in the near and far surroundings it looks completely out of place. You take your shoes off to enter the gazebo, as you do with any other building in the village.
Walking around the village we also found the police station (a wooden shed with a sign and one dude in his underpants), the school (the biggest building in the village) and some sort of public-awareness station with picture instructions on when you need to take a child to the doctor (say childbirth, fever, convulsions etc.) and also instructions that you don't play with a bomb you find. In the eighties the Americans dropped a total of 519,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia and on top of that both the side backed by the British government and the Khmer Rouge laid, I think, 713,000 landmines between them. And we're right now in an area where they were especially plentiful. Although several international organisations have worked here on bomb clearance projects, it's still not advisable to walk off the beaten paths. Many farmers clearing new land have learned the hard and very expensive way that this is good advice. Unfortunately the soil after burning down tropical rainforest is very thin and after 2-3 years of cultivation and being washed away by the rain it's useless.
We've been lying here for a couple of hours now in hammocks (nets) in the gazebo, revelling in how great it is to finally get outside the tourist areas. They fed us a luxury version of rice-pork-cabbage. We declared it the best food of the trip so far. Maybe it was influenced by our enthusiasm for the genuineness of this village, but there was enough for half the village and it was so good that we scoffed the lot. So for dinner they brought us the same amount, and that time we left half of it.

Walking through the village we also saw a few interesting sights. They've got a volleyball court here! Tomorrow I hope we'll play with them :)
Since it's been raining for a few hours, everyone was holed up. But as most of the houses don't have a wall facing the street, or at least half of it, we can see what they're doing. The kids have gathered in one of the houses, the adults are boozing in another. It's the first time we've seen the locals drinking here. I honestly haven't seen anyone with a beer in their hand yet (and it's available everywhere). These frisky fellows, though, are boozing something clear out of a plastic bottle and cheerfully offering it to us. Patrik isn't much of a drinker, so we didn't get acquainted :) The kids are happy to be photographed, so I handed out a few muesli bars. I'd originally brought them as an emergency stash, but there's food on every corner here so they're not needed. After dinner the locals gathered in the gazebo, but there was no socialising, they put on some Thai soap opera on TV, episode 159. There's electricity here only after dark, since they fire up a petrol generator.
During the day it was a bit noisy, because in the joinery next to the Guest House they had the planers and saws running. For the first time I saw how you can cut a 5 m long plank off a beam just like that, with a STIHL chainsaw from West Germany :) Because we're in the mountains and it started raining, the temperature dropped to 23°C. The only thing that might disturb our sleep tonight are the malarial mosquitoes.

We've got a bit of a problem in that it's still 90 km of tank track to our destination and that probably won't be passable on a motorbike in the rain. Hopefully we'll find something really off-road that'll take us there. But today in the middle of the village we watched an off-road Toyota pick-up almost sink into a 70 cm deep puddle and then even the tractor had a bit of trouble. But at least it would be fun.