I admit I was somewhat nervous about our intended visit to Cambodia – not that for one moment I thought I was in any imminent danger of being blown up by a mine. It was based on my age group and was more in the nature of … “what if I can’t find a toilet when I need one?” After waving goodbye to Jon and Maggie and little Elijah as they dropped us off to run the total and utter chaos of Hyderabad airport, our advent at Phnom Penh airport was a calming and pleasant surprise. Everything was so ordered and quiet and visas were processed conveyor belt style through a line of officials and paid for over the counter when your passport was held up for you to identify your own visage. Miriam and Michael met us and we were whisked away to their flat some 30 minutes drive away in a rattly van belonging to the guest house cum hotel in their street.The flat in which M&M and Toby live with James and Miranda is the first two floors of a building, typical of a certain style of city dwelling. It is tall and very narrow. Often you see this style of house stretching up sometimes four or five floors into the sky. They look as though they ought to have other constructions on either side supporting them in case they overbalance, but they don’t. On each floor at the front there are verandahs with pillared balustrades. Commonly these are stainless steel but on the flashier buildings they are painted decoratively. At street level the large steel gates protect a handy frontage which is used for moto parking for all the visitors as well as for the tables and chairs for the regular Sunday lunch which is provided to twenty-five or so school students and other contacts who come for Bible Class.
Inside the house it is rather like a continuous bathroom with tiles extending from floor up the walls to at least head height throughout the corridors and rooms which have 12 foot ceilings. The kitchen is on the ground floor, also the rooms mainly used for mission work. The sitting room and two bedrooms are on the second floor. James and Miranda’s room is on a kind of mezzanine floor between the two. The stairs (three flights) were, on first approach, rather daunting. Narrow, but fortunately equipped with the ubiquitous stainless steel rail, each step seemed to be about as far up as I could manage to lift my foot, and with still two flights to go to our room I was puffing and panting. Coming down was equally fraught with difficulty although one felt that perhaps the journey down might be distinctly quicker. It is amazing how many times one felt it necessary to move from down to up and vice versa. There were the normal times of ingress and egress but then there were the extras to fetch filtered water from the kitchen, to fetch people from up or downstairs, to carry dishes or clothes or babies or whatever the hundred and one things are which are normal between lounge and bedroom and kitchen. By the time our ten days came to an end I was bouncing merrily up those stairs so that had life depended on it I could have saved the family and their belongings from fire or destruction with the best firemen with or without the steel rail.
That does not mean that three flights equate to eight. Our short trip to Siem Reap to visit the Angkor remains was based in a hotel, which from the outside was just another replica of this same style of housing – four floors with beautifully painted balustrades. It promised a comfortable stay. The young fellow lounging at the front desk barely stirred himself enough to say your room is on the fourth floor. But where was the lift? None! Four days into our trip I was still working on the three flights of stairs in M&M’s place, but here eight flights climbed up to the top floor, sure the steps were a little shallower but I was close to hands and knees by the time I reached the top to find our room at the far end of the corridor. Luckily we were able to change our room to one on the first floor for the next night.
In Phnom Penh the view from the lounge room balcony was very interesting. You could immerse yourself in the day to day routine of the catering lady opposite – building the fire early in the morning, endless trips to the inside for water and other ingredients, backbreaking stirring of pots and so on. I never actually saw any finished product laid out but I’ve no doubt there was. An election parade took me to their hearts and waved and cheered from the back of their truck and there was intimate knowledge of how wedding festivities are conducted. A young lady from the house next to the catering lady was to be married. First red and gold decorations appeared around the balcony and doors, then at 5 a.m. the day before the wedding, work began on erecting the scaffolding for the marquee in the street. It took a day to set up the marquee which stretched from path to path and completely blocked the street. At 7.30 on the morning of the wedding the music began – a mixture of deafening pop music Cambodia style with traditional Chinese type falsetto screeching and whining. The guest parade began three streets down and filed down the main road, before turning into our street and coming to a stop at the marquee where the bride and groom were united to much gonging and screeching. Then gifts and plates of fruit were presented. From the balcony I had a great view of the two little street urchins who, trying to snatch a few delicacies from a table near the doorway, were set upon and chased up the street by a major domo with a large tin tray.
We tried it all. Once I found that a tuk tuk was not going to tip over when broached by my pension-age spread, I clambered in them with gay abandon and enjoyed the sense of festivity and the freedom of view that they give. Each day we walked to markets or restaurants without once feeling molested or threatened. In fact from the greetings along the streets that came our party’s way I felt in the company of VIPs. We even, without any difficulty at all, moved through a large school party of teenagers and claimed our shoes from under the hundreds they had stashed, when viewing the Silver Pagoda. No problems!! For a fun and interesting trip with the opportunity to join in the WORK I advocate a trip to Phnom Penh to any “Aged P” with a sense of adventure. Even toilets are surmountable (in a literal sense!) Miriam Hewitt Sr.
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