Eastwards to Elephants

im the one at the back
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The next day Al and I embarked on separate adventures with a provisional rendez-vous for a week’s time - And I was headed to the wild east in search of hefalumps….

Another early start - on the road by 5:30 and 12 hours of it…a wonderful bike ride back to Tbeng menchey aka Preah Vihear, a shared taxi (ie 8 in a car again) to Kompong Thom, and a bus to Kampong Cham. Exhausted I managed to get myself some nosh – always a priority!- and then collapse in a tired and dirty heap. Another 12 hour journey lay ahead of me, so after a particularly lush breakfast of bai sait j’ruuk – fried/bbqed pork with rice I got on a bus bound for Sen Monorom, capital of Mondulkiri Province, arriving as sun was setting which was great as the light offset the reddish earth beautifully.

unforgettable

That I'll be a hefalump!
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A day of rain followed which was a delight - I sat in a hammock all day reading a wonderful Isabel Allende book from cover to cover. I needed the rest and a change of pace – Id been on the move for a while and the next couple of days would be spent discovering Mondulkiri…

Early start – they always are here – more aligned with when there is natural light – and off on the back of another bike with my trusty guide M’near to discover the countryside and visit a local waterfall. Most excitingly as we were riding along a large wild boar ran in front of the bike – brilliant! Then we went to visit a Phnom family, eat with them and stay the night. Wow. These are the original inhabitants of this area and their lives are very different from the ‘cambodian immigrants’. No electricity is pretty common in Cambodia, but the Phnom live very basically indeed. 1 hut, fire inside, sleeping and eating platforms, as well as storage platform for the rice – rice only really grows in the rainy season here so once its harvested they have to keep it for the rest of the year – also making rice wine, which is popular and monumentally strong…There were 6 members of the family in one hut/room, plus me and my guide making it 8 – but that’s pretty normal here – I don’t think there is a huge amount of nookie going on inside Khmer households!

Phnom house
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It was such a privilege to be welcomed into their family, and to eat with them by candlelight with the pigs and chickens running around. The food was yummy, even though it was only fried pig fat and rice, with some wild leaves. Then I smoked a homegrown cigarette – they roll the dried tobacco that they grow in a fresh green tobacco leaf. Id given up smoking in July, but this was an exception that I couldn’t resist! We were all in bed – or should I say on-mat-on-platform by 7.30pm having chatted via translation about life, love and marriage (one of the girls had just got married and her and her husband were talking about the wedding) Fortunately a couple of them spoke Khmer as well as Phnom language. A truly lovely evening. The women were gone by the time I awoke at 5am – they’d gone to market to try and sell some pieces of lemongrass and wild veg. We were gone by 6am, time to have some breakfast before the hefalump trek…

Phnom woman heading to market
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Had a brilliant day on my lovely, slightly old, but sterdy elephant, trekking through the jungle to a waterfall, where it rained and they washed the elephants in the river. Really great. But the most interesting thing was spending a whole day chatting to M’near about life in Cambodia. It was so great to understand a little about what it is to be a young person in Cambodia today. As a man, everyone is trying to make money to pull a nice girl to marry, and your transport if you have any and mobile phone are outward symbols of how wealthy you are. If you are from a poor family, you’d better work very hard and get yourself some good transport/phone otherwise you haven’t got a chance in hell of getting the girl you want, and if you go out on a date and don’t have a scooter, you’d better borrow one from a mate, a bicyle aint going to cut the mustard. As a woman, you have two choices, either you are the marrying kind or you are a prostitute – literally. Its normal for Cambodian men to go to karaoke then pay for a girl to take to bed – it’s the only nookie they are going to get – girls don’t go out for beers, they work and study and then they go home and there is STRICTLY no relations between young people other than chaperoned with family. It’s a different world to the one we know, although some familiar themes!!!

up close and personal
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That afternoon I spent a couple of hours in a beauty salon – a wooden hut in the market with mirrors on the walls – getting my nails done (very cheap and compensates for dirty feet) and watching 5 Khmer girls get made up over the course of 2 hours, in traditional Khmer makeup. It was amazing to see the transformation from giggly young dark-skinned girls to austere whiteted-out women-dolls. It was only afterwards that I found out that they were headed to the karaoke joint…should have guessed really but they just looked like teenagers dressing up for fun…l I had a beer with Mnear and his mate that night and we continued our conversations about life and love in Cambodia.

Elephant drivers
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Mondulkiri was wonderful, I spent a lot of time looking at the stars, they filled the gigantic clear night sky, and Id loved the ellies, but it was my conversations with Mnear and the time spent with the Phom family that made the whole experience unforgettable.