The life of a tourist

After the seminars, time seemed to shoot forward and we didn’t get the chance to put up a final blog. In fact, I spent the final week or two walking around saying to everyone, “You have to write at least one blog to say goodbye”. I spent so much time telling everyone that they had to write a blog, that I didn’t even write one myself.
Now that the obligatory apology is out of the way, anyone who is still reading, can get into the news.

As you can see, then seminars went rather well and we said a sad goodbye to the Armes’, Kez and Esther. Thanks go to Keren and Esther who spent many hours on our new ‘photo board’, a rather nice little addition to the flat containing photos of our contacts and visitors.

Almost immediately after the seminars we zoomed off to Siem Reap, tourist Mecca of Cambodia. There was the required visit to Angkor Wat for the new people and another chance to see it for myself. I can probably skip a third visit. Sadly, our hope to meet up with a contact in SR was a non-event, although Jonny and Melinda got into a deep discussion with the manager of our hotel who also happened to be a former student of LCDI (it’s a small country J).

I am constantly amazed at the amount of work that goes into the remarkable religious structures around the world. Angkor Wat is a series of absolutely massive structures. It must have been a sight to behold in the time of Angkor ascendance.
On the downside, tourist pricing meant that for a spot of luxury in Siem Reap, we blew the equivalent of a month of Phnom Penh living in under a week. Doh!!!

We took the opportunity to visit Loy’s family who lived an hour out of Siem Reap. It was a nice family, in a small house by the side of the road. Loy’s father had been ill and he didn’t move around much when we arrived. Conversation was a bit stilted due to the language barrier but we enjoyed the quick stop at the farm. Loy had to leave us at this point to head back to Phnom Penh for an exam the next day. Her exams were meant to be well and truly over, but the teachers at her uni don’t take her subjects very seriously. As scholarship students, no-one seems to give them any time and if a teacher doesn’t show up, he’ll leave some work. In this case, the exam was pushed back into Loy’s holidays.

After our time in SR, we headed down to Battambang. Again, we were thwarted in our attempts to meet up with a contact. She was apparently somebody important in an organisation run by the AOG in Battambang, but the day before had left for a visit to Phnom Penh. I had tried to get her earlier in the preceding weeks, but to no avail. Instead we had a look around Battambang. It’s an interesting city at night. The atmosphere from the hotel rooftop was an abandoned city. We were reasonably close the district of Palin which was where the Khmer Rouge were resettled after a cease fire with the government and despite there being no danger even in visiting the area itself, it always made me feel a little uneasy. There has long been a question in my mind about how you put away your red and white checked scarf after being in the Khmer Rouge.
We visited another mountain temple the next day. This area, called the ‘killing caves’ was used by the Khmer Rouge to slaughter various people. It was a very peaceful and quiet place, in spite of the horrors that had taken place there, although the dark holes in the bottom of the cave seemed forbidding to me. We could see from the bottom of the mountain that there were a set of stairs cut into the rock face. We came back down via these stairs, pitying a poor Nordic tourist whose son was forcing him to climb up via the stairs. It was a long, hot walk up and down and when we got back to the van, we were glad of the rest.

Before we knew it, we were back in Phnom Penh ready to tie up our loose ends. It didn’t quite happen that way. The weekend we got back, Meng Him took us to the zoo. The were some interesting animals at the zoo like coconut eating sun bears, banana eating elks, but by far and away, the most interesting were the crazy gibbons. They have been an endless source of both amusement and impersonation material for me. If only I could swing around bars like a hyped up gibbon. Miranda got too close to one monkey and found herself grabbed and pulled towards the cage. It seems that monkey’s like long hair. Anyway, back to the gibbons. The gibbons like to hang around looking cool most of the time. Suddenly, a gibbon will start making an increasingly loud whooping sound before leaping around the cage with all their might. After this explosion of energy, they will just hang still, looking cool once again.
Our visit to the zoo was a bit rainy and overcast, which was a bit sad, but ‘there you go’.