Smile

Living in Cambodia is very nice… I love lying in my hammock, I love the sunshine, I love finding out how things are different and yet the same… I love eating out… I love going swimming in an unheated outdoor pool and not freezing to death, I love having massages (ooooo I am addicted for sure!)
But I miss home too… I miss some lovely people, I miss not being able to drink out of a tap, I miss the smell of grass, I miss feeling cold (sometimes)… I miss not having an oven… I miss not being able to understand everything people are saying… I miss not having proper speakers so I can play my music loudloud… I miss the countryside… I miss recycling and I miss my bike (very much).

Living in another country seems to be finding a balance between what you miss and what you like about where you are… and being happy. Mostly I think I am happy… this morning 2 things made me smile.
I was cycling home from church and stopped along the way to distract myself in a supermarket… when I came outside it was raining… and raining very hard, Cambodia style. I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, I seem to always forget my raincoat… anyways I hopped on my bike and cycled… the streets clear a bit in the rain and so I cycled fast, very fast given my bike only has 1 gear… the air was cool, the rain soaked me, and I was laughing my head off (yes I am going mad)… it was exhilarating…
The other thing that made me smile was sitting in the internet café, and I looked up at the old lady opposite me. I’ve seen her before, she must work here… anyways she was just sitting there, smiling in a lovely way, at the email she was reading. She reminded me of my lovely grannie… and I smiled, because she was smiling. Nice.

Tomorrow is international Labour Day, and the Royal Government of Cambodia has put large banners up telling me I must ‘celebrate’ this. So I shall celebrate international labour day by not going to work… which seems ironic… surely you should have to go to work on ‘labour’ day? I have various plans which involve applying for jobs... acquiring a new swim card as I lost my old one… sourcing some pine nuts to make pesto… on that note I should add that I have been away 3 months and in all honesty, aside from porridge, smoothies, lollypops and sandwiches, have only cooked once, and that involved the difficult task boiling some asparagus. I actually really like cooking, but it is too easy to eat out. However this weekend so far I have made a Greek salad (ok, not really cooking… but it did involve lots of chopping)… hummus (yes you can buy tahhini imported from Macedonia… how exciting)… pumpkin soup… mmmm and would have involved making pesto if only the shops hadn’t run out of pine nuts… so I feel quite Delia like.

Currently I am lying in my hammock, listening to DJ Shadow, trying to drown the sound of jinglyjangly wailing from the temple at the end of the street… and pondering how to end this blog…

Kisses and love perhaps??? X x x x X

Battambang

I am sitting in Battambang... pronounced Battambong i think... we arrived today from Kampong Chhanang, and appear to have a free afternoon before working thursday and friday and then back to PP on Saturday. I think my collegues are going to take me on a moto ride round the sites later, but whilst they replicate their emails i have been wondering around the place, taking photos of slightly dilapidated french colonial arcitecture, probably getting sunburnt and finding the fastest internet connection in cambodia so far! This place reminds me of Siem Riep without the tourists... Siem Riep is the town that all the Angkor temples are close to, and really the centre is totally set up for tourists and isnt particulalrly cambodian at all... here it is so much more laid back... but there are a lack of nice restaurants selling fruit smoothies mmmmm. Mostly when traveling with work i am obliged to eat rice 3 x per day... my collegues were distressed this morning when i ate a mango for breakfast and not a huge bowl of rice and beef...
A final thought... whoever decided that hotel rooms with no windows were a good idea should be shot (well possibly not actually shot... i am fairly anti guns i suppose) ... i am staying in an airconditioned, but decidedly prison like room for the next 3 nights...

ta ra

23rd April 2006

Well I completed my swim across the Mekong, and came 50th out of about 111 people so I felt pretty pleased with myself… mostly because I didn’t panic about being way out of my depth, which is what tends to happen if I swim in the sea… I don’t think we actually swam that far… its probably only about 700m… however the bally organisers told us the current was going the opposite way from the direction it was actually going in and so most people tried to compensate for the current and then realised halfway across that they were heading miles down river… so we probably swam about a kilometre I would guess. The river was a bit choppy but otherwise it was fine.
Now in the last 12months I’ve run a half marathon, cycled the length of Wales and swum the Mekong. Tri-athlete telf I shall be. [not]

Other thoughts…
I am fairly rubbish at knowing my age, although after a few seconds rummaging in my brain I can usually get it right… however I always remember the age of my one and only cousin in the whole world - Jackjack… today he is 7 years old. Interestingly this makes me feel old, I can’t believe it is 7 years since he was born and I was studying for part of my modular geography A-level.
I think the reason it makes me feel old is that in another 7 years he will be 14 (nasty beard sprouting boy teenager I expect?) and I will be…. Ummmmm 31, its not that 31 is old… its just that I am speculating all the unknown things that could happen before I am 31… when Jack was born the immediate future was less hazy than it is now…finish college, go to uni… but now I have not the vaguest idea what I’ll be doing in 7 months let alone 7 years…
Although I want to cycle the length of both islands of New Zealand I don’t exactly have many long term goals…

Char I’m thinking to join you as a postman… it sounds like a seriously good plan… if anyone has any other suggestions for what I should do with my life dooooo let me know.

some photos now on FlickR

Ok, I think I have just uploaded some photos of my Kratchie/ Rattanakiri trip to flickr (link on the right hand side of this tool bar)… it was seriously sloooow, I don’t think there are any places with speedy internet in this country!
Anton a public request to pretty please upload a few nice photos of the Wat of Angkor?

Mucho gracias

X x X
Ps off to north west Cambodia with work this week, so will probably be quiet on the blog front until next weekend…

Fires and Rivers

Today we had fire practice. This involved the loudest alarm ever… actually I think it was so loud that probably half the office will suffer permanent damage to the ear drum. We then walked outside into the carpark… unlike in the UK there was no one waving a pink flag or taking a register, so who knows who stayed in the building… then most excitingly a big, square, red fire engine shows up… hmmm thinks I, perhaps this isn’t a practice… perhaps I should be more concerned about where Sophea and Lyna are… and then the little firemen (they were quite short) started running out the hose and being guided into the building by policemen… the hose reappeared about 5 minutes later from a 3rd floor window, where the firemen proceeded to squirt water on the flower beds… no one else seemed at all perturbed by all of this so I assume that this is standard practice in a fire drill, and that the drill is not just for staff but also the fire brigade? Obviously they don’t have enough real fires to fight if they need to water our flowerbeds…

Other excitements involve the discovery that the Mekong river race is this weekend… I have decided to enter… and hopefully come Saturday lunchtime I will have swum across the mighty Mekong… this could be a stupid idea (despite there being kayak canoes to rescue stragglers)… I haven’t been in training, I have never swum across any rivers, the river is probably reasonably polluted, and I have minor panic attacks at not being able to see the bottom of a swimming pool if its cloudy… cant imagine what a bally river is going to do to me… I know there are no sharks, but possibly there are some large hungry fish??? Hmmm well we shall see… more reports later.

The return of the swimsuit...

Hello blog reader(s)
For those of you like Katie, who were concerned about my lack of swimwear… fear not the costume hath been discovered (don’t ask me where) and returned to my room ironed (why?) and on a hanger… everyone can now breathe a collective sigh of relief… especially me as the weather is so so so sooooo hot… I know I keep saying this but it really really is… the average temperature of my room (with aircon off) is 35 degrees… and outside its considerably hotter, and the sun burns I tell you… it burns… one of my Khmer colleagues told me today I was going black… this has to be the biggest overstatement ever as from my assessment I am pasty pasty, but with a few more freckles… however here whiteness = beauty, and any slight darkening of the skin is not a good sign apparently, hence the wide availability of bleaching lotions, moisturisers etc

Dolphins, an elephant and a lost swimsuit

Well the last week has been a whirlwind tour of the north east of Cambodge. Hopefully I am attaching a map, so that all my millions of readers can become wise in the geography of the Cambodge.

I have seen so many different things it is hard to know where to start.
Hmmm… ok chronologically is probably the best way to arrange things.

First things first we caught the bus up to Kratchie (central cambodge). Catching the bus involved getting a moto to the bus station… dicing death on various forms of transport was a theme of the holiday and the first moto ride was no exception… don’t you just love cutting across 3 lanes of traffic without looking and then speeding the wrong way down a one way street facing piles of oncoming traffic… all to avoid some traffic lights? Great fun. I have decided that should I win the lottery (impossible as I don’t play) I will start a small NGO (non-governmental organisation) called ‘wing mirrors for the ‘bodge’… it will do what it says (on the tin) - provide wing mirrors for all the motos which don’t have them (probably about 90%).
Soooo we arrive at the bus station (we being my English friend Carol and Cambodian friend Sophea) and catch the bus ok. The bus ride was fairly uneventful, on time (7 hours), we had our own seats, aircon, Cambodian karaoke and exceedingly violent Chinese movies on the video… the road to Kratchie is paved and the buses cain it along, honking their horns incessantly for the moto drivers to get out of the way. Have I mentioned road traffic accidents are the number one cause of death in this country???

Kratchie is a beautiful beautiful town on the banks of the Mekong. It’s the dry season so the river was low and there were lots of long sandbanks which looked like tropical beaches! We stayed with Adam, Sopheas husband who works in Kratchie some of the time. The main thing to ‘do’ in Kratchie is get a moto 30km out of town to see the Irrawaddy river dolphins. This was more dicing with death, and this time we actually managed to kill (or perhaps seriously maim as it was still flapping when I last looked) a chicken. The dolphins were interesting, went out in a little boat and floated around watching their fins pop in and out of the water. They don’t jump around and do tricks so in that sense it isn’t really exciting, but they’re so so rare - an endangered species and I think there are only 100-150 in the world. The population is under serious threat from pollution, logging, dams etc. The people living near the river are so poor, that it is hard to get them to think about conservation – although this is what the project Adam is working on is addressing.
After we saw the dolphins we header up river to some floating cafes and lazed around eating eating and paddling in the river.

The next day we hired a car to bounce us 250km up the unpaved road to Ratanakiri. We spent 2 days in a hill lodge (after escaping from a prison cell style hotel in the town)… at the lodge we stayed in little wooden cabins in the jungle and woke up to birds and geckos and other assorted animal and insect noises. Lovely. We did all sorts of things… swimming in a beautifully clear volcanic lake, swimming in a not so clean river, visiting ethnic groups, boating on a river and best of all a really great trek to visit some of the different hill tribes that live in the area. The trek was 25km guided and we learnt so much… the guide was a bit Lofty Wiseman… I learnt that you could use just about every single leaf we went past… there are leaves for smoking, leaves for eating, leaves for cooking, leaves for healing, leaves to use as warning signs… the tribes don’t have a written language so they use different signs. We visited several villages and people wanted to talk and make us drink rice wine. It was Khmer new year, and even though the hill tribes are not ethnic khmer they have recently started celebrating Khmer new year. This seems to involve drinking lots of rice wine out of filthy dirty cups, or just sucking it from huge clay pots through a thick rubber straw… its lethal, and reminded me of Airag mongol people! The tribal groups live in houses made almost entirely from natural products from the forest. They weave these into roofs, floors etc. They’re incredibly isolated and poor, scraping a living from the forest. It was another world… it actually reminded me of going to the ‘Weald and Downland Open Air Museum’ near Arundel where you look round all these houses that people lived in hundreds of years ago… except this was real, not a museum demonstration, and people really lived like this… and seemed to be pretty happy. Although I am sure statistics such as incidences of Malaria, dengue fever, education rates and access to clean water are horrific. The tribes people didn’t wear traditional clothing anymore, however the women (especially the older ones) just wandered around topless… very surreal… some of the younger ones wore t-shirts or just a bra (also surreal)…
After we got back from the trek I went for an elephant ride in a rubber plantation which was so so sooooo peaceful, and considerably less commercial than the one Anton and I did at Angkor. I love elephants!

Evenings at the lodge were spent eating, watching the stars and having my friends try to convert me to whiskey… cant say they succeeded… gin and vodka win hands down every time… then it was off to bed before 9.30 as the electricity went off then… and we woke about 5am with the birds!

One of the themes of the trip (it seemed to me) was deforestation. Traditionally the tribal people practice small scale slash and burn where they cut down a small area of forest, plant some rice crops for a couple of years and then move on to another area, leaving the forest to recover. However now this is all changing, people are planting cash crops such as cashew and rubber, and large scale companies are bribing government officials and chopping down huge huge swathes of forest, often illegally stealing land from communities . The governor of Ratanakiri province was recently fired as it is claimed he is not doing enough to tackle deforestation and had received as much as $15million in bribe money from various sources… I reckon his sacking is just an opportunity for someone else to make some cash by selling this countries natural resources (cynic)… It is so sad grrr and it makes me angry. I’m not sure if I have said it before, but living here reinforces the fact that the world is so interdependent and that ok, the wood we buy in the UK may not necessarily be from Cambodia, but it is from somewhere, and unless the source is a ‘sustainable’ one, then somewhere someone is loosing out… and most likely it is someone who is incredibly poor and has nothing… not even land rights. It is so hard to know how to live an ‘ethical’ life… and impossible too… I am sure me staying in swanky hotels at Angkor Wat and eating imported cheese contravenes this… but somehow I think we all have to try somewhat to be more aware of the fact that many of our actions impact other people negatively – be that directly or indirectly.

Finally… this is a long blog I know… I was most distressed to arrive home and discover that my swimsuit that I put in the wash has disappeared. NIGHTMARE NIGHTMARE. Basically I need my swimsuit to go swimming… naked swimming would not be allowed in a school pool… and I am convinced my bikini would scare the children and fall off… so unless the bally cleaning lady can find it I am in a mong… swim wear is not readily available here and the stuff that there is, is designed for midget Cambodians whose waist is the size of my arm, possibly a slight exaggeration… but you know what I mean? It is so hot here that I neeeeeed to go swimming. Ho hum didlium.

Now I really should stop procrastinating on this blog and attempt to write my CV. Today has been designated official CV writing day… oh the joy.

PS Katie I have some photos of me babyhugging (I love Cambodian babies!) that I will try and upload for you sometime this week.
PS2 Anton are you going to upload some Angkor photos pretty please with a cherry ontop?

for hilary... mostly

Hilary,
i thought you would appreciate this photo of me looking very corporate... please note the corporate scarf (made by a women's income generation group) and the orange bike...
the helmet is also exciting...

x x x

traffic

Sometimes when I am cycling along the roads here in Phnom Penh I get really annoyed with the traffic, in particular the way people are constantly trying to kill me (or so it seems). Road rage on a bike is not a good thing… ultimately I will always loose out.

A couple of weeks ago I devised a way to quell my annoyance… it is absolutely perfect… I realised the reason I was annoyed was because I was taking the moral high ground, obviously I was a model cyclist obeying all traffic regulations… I came to the conclusion that the only solution was for me to break every single traffic rule and then I would have no grounds to be annoyed by other people… now I cant say I do this everyday as it might be marginally more unsafe than normal cycling… however every time I start to get annoyed I make sure I:

• Run a red light,
• Cycle on the wrong side of the road
• Cycle the wrong way down a one way street
• Cut up people on mopeds (it is actually possible to cut up a moped on a one gear grannie bike, I can be quite speedy)…
• If im making a right hand turn at a traffic lights and there is a petrol station on the corner, I just cut through it instead of staying on the road and waiting for the lights to change…All in all I am finding this method saves time… and significantly reduces annoyance with cambodgian driving… excellent…

I shall probably get into much trouble with the traffic police when I get home!

Rain and Carmen Electra

The other evening there was another huge storm. Fortunately this time it wasn’t when I was trying to sleep. All afternoon it was dark and windy and there was lightning, but no thunder or rain… I new it was going to rain, but I really wanted to get a swim in, so I went to the pool. After about 20min it started to rain. It was amazing amazing. The pool is outside, and the rain was so so so soooo heavy, it was churning up the pool, and then it got dark, it was almost as if I was in a storm in the sea. In the end I realised the rain wasn’t going to stop and I would have to cycle home in the rain… now I only live about 10 blocks from the pool, but my skirt was cream and my t-shirt was white, and it was raining hard… Marionanon will recall berating me in Vietnam for getting soaked and see-through on the back of a motorbike in a village, and I didn’t really want to repeat the experience, but there was no choice! However Marion I did manage to use my sarong as another layer, which significantly reduced see-throughness, and overall I don’t think I humiliated/exposed myself at all really… cycling home was fun… right down the middle of the road as all but the middle was flooded… I also noticed a couple of people washing their children in the run off from gutters. The rain was so heavy and warm… and yet I felt cooler than I had in days…

I’m sitting writing this at home, and the TV is on… most exciting it appears to be a show presented by Carmen Electra. Its called Manhunt: The search for Americas most gorgeous male model. Excellent. To be honest it is not as exciting as it sounds… but there are lots of topless men prancing around and taking themselves far too seriously…

Thoughts on massage

Last night I was feeling board and so I decided to go for a massage… there are several massage parlours in my street (I dislike the use of the parlour word as it springs to mind all sorts of dodgy things… however what other word can I use??)… in fact a new one opened only last week. It advertises ‘back scrabs’… tempting as a back scrab sounds I decided to go round the corner to a different ‘parlour’… here I was given a menu with all sorts of interesting massages… I went for the standard full body massage thinking it would be safer than a) chest massage b) skin peel c) full body wax (ouch)… as I am not at all wise in the ways of massage it was fairly entertaining, quite relaxing, and I emerged relatively unscathed… although to be honest the stomach part of the massage was very odd… I am now only 9 massages away from a free massage as I was presented with a loyalty type card… its so cheap I think I may go back… but I am starting to think that reacclimatizing to UK will be hard… here I am soooooooooo lazy… someone cleans my rooms, makes my bed, does my washing up, washes and irons my clothes… I never cook anything more than porridge or a fruit smoothie (although I did once boil some asparagus)… and now I am going to become a spa junkie or something… all that remains is for me to get some executive outfits and start having manicures and then I will be totally unrecognisable… actually I did notice on the massage menu you can pay $1 to have your hair washed and dried – includes free scalp massage (!!) perhaps I will go for that next time… hee hee hee
It is a hard life here in the Cambodge to be sure to be sure… in saying that I have just returned from 3 days working in the provinces, eating rice 3 times a day and sleeping in what seemed like a prison cell… the part of Phnom Penh that I live in isn’t real Cambodia that’s for sure…

fact of the day

the average cambodian man eats 18kg of rice per month... apparently
that seems like an awful lot of rice to me

Things to do or carry on a moto or cyclio in Cambodge

The following list are all things I have seen people doing or carrying on a motobike or cyclo rickshaw in Phnom Penh… sometimes the mind boggles…

• Carry an air-conditioning unit
• Carry 40 odd half alive chickens upside down hanging off the back
• Breast feed a small child
• Carry 4 or 5 members of your family all on one bike
• Wear a helmet… possibly… actually mostly not
• Carry a large TV, 50kg bag of rice and a sack of fruit whilst still managing to steer
• Sit side saddle (ladies only on that one)
• Carry a large slab of (ever melting) ice
• Carry several live pigs on the back (I am sure they must get sunburn)

Home Thoughts From Abroad

I remember my Dad sent me this poem when i was in Mongolia. I really like it and i guess it is now April so I can think about English spring and compare and contrast to the dusty humid heat here... a heat which impossibly keeps getting hotter and hotter... thank goodness for ice and gin and tonic and swimming pools... thats all i can say...

Home Thoughts From Abroad
Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England--now!

And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops--at the bent spray's edge--
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
--Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Robert Browning