Kratie and back

Just for a change, we’ve had another holiday over here, but with any luck it should be the last for a while. The annual Water Festival normally means celebrations, fireworks, and most of all, dragon boat racing in Phnom Penh (on the Tonle Sap River, that is, not in the streets, although we nearly managed it this year). However, the normal festivities of Water Festival were cancelled this year, somewhat ironically, due to the over-abundance of water! The government announced that the money normally spent on the festival would be re-directed to assisting those displaced by the floods and repairing flood damage.

For us, the five-day weekend meant a chance to travel with Sisters Nirath and Sokhorn to their home in Kratie province, six or seven hours drive north from Phnom Penh. Nirath arranged the transport—our first experience at travelling by shared taxi-van (shared in the sense of sharing your seat, your legroom, and a good chunk of your personal space with a fair number of other people, both friends and strangers. We have seen these vans before, loaded with people at odd angles and luggage seemingly everywhere, but only ever from the outside. To the uninitiated, one might have thought that our party of six (Sister Vichhem came with us, as did a friend of Nirath’s), together with the driver and a couple of other passengers who had turned up early would have been a good start on filling the eleven-seater van. Not so! It was apparently necessary to wait (for over an hour) until we had eighteen on board before we could leave. Across the bridge, we pulled over to pick up a couple more passengers, but even that didn’t suffice. Eventually, with 24 bodies, their luggage, and an industrial air compressor in the van, we were packed and ready to go. We admired the varying landscape along the way, as well as the occasional breath of fresh air when we stopped, although it must be said that the process of disentangling 24 passengers and disembarking them through one door does eat quite substantially into the length of time spent at each stop.

Mother cleaning the debris out of freshly polished rice

Arriving mid-afternoon at the village, we were met by Nirath and Sokhorn's family, surrounded by a swarm of 20 or so young children: nephews, nieces, and some others possibly entirely unrelated, but happy to come for a gawk at the foreigners.

After the necessary introductions and the mandatory rest period were done, it was time for a swim in the river, just a hundred metres or so away, with a vast sandy bank, and warm, if somewhat murky, water. While Sokhorn entertained the kids, Anna sat in the water, still enough to have myriads of tiny fish crowd around for a taste — feet, knees, arms, or wherever they could find room for a little nibble of skin.

The sun sank behind the palm trees, and so we ambled back home for a shower before dinner. Anna’s first attempts at open-air showering made up in comic value what they lacked in co-ordination, but the girls were happy to assist with any misbehaving sarongs or errant cakes of soap. By the end of our stay she reckoned that she'd mastered the art of getting oneself clean while standing on muddy ground in full public view, and with the aid of only a sarong, a ladle and a cistern of water.

Slopping through the rice paddies, one eye on the leeches

During our first night in the village, sleep was not particularly forthcoming, due to our being unaccustomed to sleeping on the floor, the ever-present mongrels scrapping outside, and the habit of villagers to rise long before dawn and hold conversations at volumes that would normally be considered shouting, but our success improved a little each night until we slept more-or-less through our final night, which unfortunately lasted only 4 hours (due to the van leaving for Phnom Penh at some ridiculously early hour).

Each day Nirath made sure we had something to write home about:

Thursday’s highlight was a walk in the fields behind their house. Normally planted out with watermelons and beans, much of the ground was lying fallow due to the only-recently-receded floodwater. Even the lotus and water lilies had died from too great a depth of water. Only now was some ground beginning to be planted with rice or sweet potato. Nirath was determined that we should see all around, even when that meant trudging through knee-deep, muddy, leech-infested water.

Transplanting rice (or posing for the photo, at least)

Having been informed that the best method was to wait until the water was still and the leeches had all stopped swimming around, then walk as quickly as one could through the water, but despite our profoundly sluggish attempts at navigating our way through the mud/water combination, no leeches managed to sink their teeth into us.

While there we took the opportunity to learn how to transplant plant rice, again in leech territory where one doesn’t want to stand still for too long. While we enjoyed our experience slopping around the rice paddies for a couple of hours, we figured that neither of us would have lasted more than five minutes back in the days when the Khmer Rouge insisted that unmechanised
agriculture was the nearest thing to salvation.

Friday we took a trip across the Mekong, and made our way by moto to the site where the endangered Irrawaddy dolphins live. After paying what the sign described as the "unique fee" for foreigners (I assume it was intended to mean something like "one-off" or "all-inclusive"), we boarded a little wooden boat (which, remarkably, was well-equipped with lifejackets and a roof for shade, if not doing so well in the watertightness department), and puttered our way out into the river.

Anna's best shot of an Irrawaddy Dolphin

The dolphins tend to make themselves rather scarce at this time of year, because the high water level allows them to trek up and down the river at will, whereas later in the dry season they are confined to a single patch of deep water near the dock. Nonetheless we were able to see a few surface from time to time, perhaps four or five individuals in all. Arriving with a pre-conception in my mind of something resembling a bottlenose dolphin, I was most stunned at how ugly they were. Not having any nose to speak of, they actually look more like miniature whales than dolphins. They weren’t easy to photograph as they surfaced unpredictably and only very briefly, but Anna did manage to get a couple of shots of them all the same.

On our way back home we took a detour to Phnom Sam Bok, yet another pagoda-crowned hill. It was lovely to be in the quiet and the shade in amongst all the big trees there, despite the company of many dozens of near-identical life-sized statues of monks in single file all the way up the hill.

Justice according to Buddha

At the top of the first towering flight of steps (probably a hundred or so steps between landings) was a small shrine very graphically adorned with depictions of the after-life punishments owing to those who decline to heed Buddha’s moral precepts, which actually quite an uncanny resemblance to the paintings by survivors of Tuol Sleng depicting torture scenes during the Khmer Rouge regime. Beyond that we came across a trio of nuns (or maybe just devout old widows) who were pacing back and forth step-by-painfully-slow-step in unison, ostensibly as some form of meditation to disconnect oneself from the physical world, or as Nirath’s medical opinion put it: "one step from psychosis". Up the final daunting stairway to the top of the hill, and we came to the pagoda itself, but more spectacularly, some impressive views.

Back at the village that evening, someone put their fishing net to use and caught several hundred tiny fish which they proceeded one-by-tincy-little-one to detach from the net, behead, gut, fry, and eat. They were so small that they’re eaten bones and all!

Nirath's brother: captain of our gallant,
if somewhat leaky, little vessel

On our last day in the village, we were taken for a tour of the "forest" by ox-cart. At the stately pace that oxen tread, it didn’t exactly look like an adrenaline sport, but we soon found that riding on two wheels and eight hooves had more than enough excitement to go around, especially when traversing the ditches and mounds of rice paddies. The only suspension involved was what one’s backside could supply (which after several months in Asia is probably less than it used to be able to), and let’s be fair and say that the comfort of its passengers is not the top priority on a ox’s mind. On the way we pulled over when we stumbled across a family harvesting rice, and were shown how to make use of a sickle and how to bind a sheaf. Eventually we found ourselves at the squelchy edge of a pond, waiting while Nirath’s brother hastily fashioned a pair of paddles from sugar palm fronds, and before long underway across the lake in a wooden boat with disconcertingly little freeboard. Anna contented herself for most of the trip watching water trickling in between the boards. Remarkably, we made it back to shore with a smidgeon of freeboard still in place, despite the amount of water around our feet.

The audio array (rear view)

The village geared up for a dance in the evening. When they said they were hiring a CD player (forgive me for envisaging a portable stereo), I must confess that I was a little taken aback when it was delivered by truck, with portable generator in tow to power the whole setup. By the time all 10 subwoofers were in place, I was thinking we were just about set for a full-blown rock concert (and that we weren’t going to be getting much sleep, with all this apparatus barely 10m from our bedroom). As it turned out though, the dance came to a slightly premature end when a youth from another village (labelled in the aftermath with the classis Khmer epithet of ‘gangster’) took exception to Sokhorn’s nephew treading on his toes, and a small brawl broke out, with Sokhorn in the middle looking like a police officer directing traffic in a gridlocked intersection as she vainly insisted on them all laying down their arms (and fists). One intoxicated local youth walked into the path of a fist that must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back, and he went down cold. Eventually the local constable turned up and everyone vented their opinions as to who started it and what happened, and then we got to bed.

Our transport of delight

Next morning (if you can call it that) we were up at four to be ready for the van going back to Phnom Penh. We are told that the earlier they leave, the more customers they get, so the van drivers enter into a futile battle to be the first on the road in the morning, even though I for one, would happily give me patronage to any driver offering a post-dawn departure. This time our travelling companions consisted of 31 passengers, a wooden bed and luggage (mostly strapped onto the bed frame, itself strapped onto the outside of the tailgate), all transported by a 14-seater van. I don’t think I will ever again be able to look at four passengers in a car and consider that to be efficient use of transport. But regardless, we made it safely back to the BEC, thrilled to have had such an exciting and enjoyable time.