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?