Week 5 - Pchum Ben holiday

So last week was a little different because the office was shut down the whole week. I set off on my little holiday within a holiday, still feeling the effects of flu and therefore suffering from nausea, coughing and no appetite. Which isn’t such a bad thing, I just pretended I was doing some kind of trendy western detox!

I started off last Tuesday with a six hour bus journey, along with half the country I think. It was the first of three public holidays and everyone who could was going back to their home region or province to stay with family for a few days celebrating Pchum Ben, (ancestors day), which is a family religious celebration that actually starts 15 day earlier.  Each day family take food to a pagoda, preferably a different one each day, up to seven different pagodas are supposed to be visited during the two week lead up to the actual remembrance day.

The food is usually rice balls and  soup and they leave it with the monks, praying for their deceased relatives in the hope that their souls will be fed and satisified. The younger people I work with went to the pagoda every morning with their mother or grandmother to leave the food, I’m not sure if the older, married men and women went to pagoda’s during those first 14 days, I don’t think so.

But when everyone went home to their relatives last weekend they are much more likely to have visited local pagodas with parents or grandparents.  As I have previously commented it seems that the generation from about 40 years and below is not very religious, or certainly not the more educated anyway. It will be interesting to see what happens here over the next couple of decades. I think they will end up much less religious than the United States for example. I think their Buddhism will be a cultural belief rather than a religious one and they will leave behind all the traditional beliefs and just hold onto the parts of the religion that they think are worthy to remain, ie, treating others with respect, kindness to those less fortunate, politeness, honesty etc. We shall see.

As I was travelling through the countryside on the bus on the first day, watching the towns and villages go past I couldn’t help but think about how this country seems like its in a state of continual flux. Everything is partly started, nearly finished, not quite there yet. Nothing is neat, complete, tidy around the edges, finished and done. Houses are half finished, roads are semi complete, advertising banners are half slung up, even rubbish is strewn about in a messy fashion, waiting to get picked up by a truck that may or may not arrive. Plastic chokes the grass and weeds alongside the road, concrete columns with reinforcing sticking out of the top of them wait to have the next level of concrete poured which may or may not ever happen. I think in Australia we would think it’s depressing, a feeling of nothing ever being neat or finished. But here the positive in all of it is that it feels kinetic,  tumbling messily forward. Sometimes I think that western countries feel very slow and cumbersome, afraid of change, happy to sit with what they have. Which is all well and good but sometimes change is a good thing is it not? There is a certain excited buzz in the air here, I felt it in Vietnam as well, it’s about looking forward, being hopeful, welcoming new and different things, embracing change. Probably how I imagine it felt across Australia during the post war era, so many changes in such a short time, everyone was excited for the capacity of the country to welcome the new and the different. People were becoming better educated, richer, more able to improve their own lives, it’s an infectious feeling and I think its draws a certain type of person to follow it, which may explain the number of expats living here.They find it a buzz as well, to be part of something that is moving forward so quickly with a constant air of anticipation.

On the trip I saw some very creative people trying to get as many people and as much gear to their families living out in the provinces  as possible in somewhat less than suitable vehicles. For example I saw a sedan with its boot completely open, packed full and both the stuff in the boot and the boot lid where strapped up with packing tape to hold everything in place. I also saw whole families on scooters with the mother holding bags in each arm with a kid in front of her and behind her, they were also holding onto bags of stuff. I saw little trucks packed so high with boxes and crates that it looked like it could tip over if it went around a sharp corner.

I also saw a van with a large timber table strapped precariously onto the rear drop down door, not sure if that was going to end in tears….

There were also lots of larger cars, utes with the family twin cab scenario going on. What that means in Australia is that you can fit in two people in the front and three in the back at a squeeze and then load your gear in the back of the ute. What it means here is two people in the front, four people squeezed in the back and then three kids and their mother lying down in the ute part at the back. So all up in one instance I saw ten people get out of one of those….I guess it seems like a waste of space otherwise right? I also saw a station wagon driving along with its back door up and full of boxes of stuff, along with an elderly  lady lying in the back with her feet sticking out over the back edge of the car, she was quite happy chewing on some kind of food as the car hurled along the road, beeping loudly as it swung out and around motorbikes and slower moving vehicles. It helps to shut your eyes sometimes trust me. What you don’t see you can’t be afraid of! 

This is a stock photo, most of the seats were full

The train trip the next day was more relaxing, and it was interesting getting out of the capital city, slowly moving through some heavily built up areas where very poor families seem to have been using the train line as a roadway and building make shift houses right up against it. I guess because the train was out of action for at least a decade, poor people moved into the areas alongside the train line using space that the government wasn’t using and therefore didn’t expel them immediately. What it means is that there are slum areas now all the way along the train line from the centre of the city to the outskirts that have their front door about 1.5m back from the train line. It was rather disconcerting to look out the window and see a guy lying in a hammock a metre from the edge of the train, or little kids running around just a few metres from us, or people setting up a little shop front facing the train line. The little movie below gives you a good idea of how close their houses are. You can hear a long whistle or horn in the background, it pretty much stayed on the whole way through the city to warm people to stay away from the tracks. There were lots of railway crossings and at each one was a man standing near a gate that he had lowered as the train approached, we must have passed maybe 20 men doing that at different places along the way. They only have to do it twice a day, I wonder what they do with the rest of their day? 

The countryside was lovely once we got out of the city itself, lots of rice paddies flooded with water with narrow little strips of land connecting them and the surrounding houses. Just wide enough for a person on a bike, no cars getting to some of these rural houses. 

The land is very flat for the most part, with just the odd hill every now and then, some of which are in their natural state, others have been slowly destroyed by companies grinding up the rock for use in construction works, like the one below. Considering how few hills the country has you would think someone might think it sensible to retain them?  

As with western church spires, Pagoda towers are often the first thing you see rising up in the distance so you know you are approaching a town. The towers are often gold in colour, shining up above the surrounding coconut palms. But the once dominating pagodas  are now being challenged by a new form of worship, mobile phone towers which rise even higher than the towers and are more prolific, every town and village has at least a couple. 

Pagoda and phone towers

 

Kampot train station

So half way through the trip we stopped at a place called Kampot and most of the people got off and raced over to a waiting line of people selling hot food. The train only usually operates three days per week so on those three days local women cook up rice and fish and vegetables and sell them to the punters. I guess its easy money as the people riding the train have no other food options. As you can see the women in front of me had some kind of whole grilled fish that they were picking at. Also, is the women putting her left or right foot up on the seat?? Strange shape hey, all the toes seem the same size! 

We eventually arrived at the one and only port in Cambodia and that’s the end of the line. I got a trip into town on the back of a motorbike as it was only $5 instead of $10 by tuk tuk taxi, but half way through when this young fella was charging along and I was hanging on for dear life I suddenly wished I had paid the extra money! But it was ok, I checked in to my hotel and wandered down to the famous Serendipity beach, which doesn’t live up to its name anymore, not by a long shot. 

Because it was a public holiday for the locals it was jam packed with Khmer families enjoying the sand and water. There were also loads of Chinese tourists and almost not one westerner in sight. Its not particularly clean, the surf isn’t great and you get hassled by locals trying to sell you stuff, all reasons to encourage westerners to find other beaches further away and less inundated with people. Thousands of Chinese tourists are going to Sihanoukville now as the airport has just recently started accepting international flights. Rich Chinese businessmen are buying up land, building big ugly hotels and casinos and running tour group specials, pushing locals out to the point where the government is requesting land back from the Khmer people given to them after the regime ended, so they can on-sell to the large, rich Chinese developers. It’s really sad actually and whilst its happening a little in Australia, we have enough checks and balances in place to restrict it, here money talks. Thankfully I wasn’t staying at the city itself just using it as a jumping off point to get over to the islands a few hours boat ride away. And so to Lazy Beach Resort where I spent three very relaxing nights in an idyllic location, a small, narrow beach with little individual timber and thatch huts stretched along its length with the main dining and lounge building right up one end. To get there you have to walk through the rainforest from the main and more busy side of the island 1.5km to the other side and once you get there the guests are the only people there. Too difficult for Chinese tourists, too expensive for Khmer locals, it was just so nice to be away from the madness that was Sihanoukville.

The place is owned, managed and run by a couple of English expats with a local Khmer guy and his family assisting and running the kitchen. Its so peaceful there, all you can hear are the waves crashing, even the generators are tucked away in the bush and are almost impossible to hear. Each hut has its own septic system which works very well and is very island friendly, but no hot water. The owner said he wishes he had spent the money for solar up front back when they first set up but it was so expensive at the time and they didn’t actually know how long the government would let them run the place, so they have existed now for 10 years with always the possibility of government kicking them off the land at any time when a developer comes along and offers more money to build a big resort. Once that happens the whole place will be destroyed, it works because it’s so isolated. The pity for myself and the others staying whilst I was there, (think it was 3 or 4 other couples) was the poor weather which was generally overcast, windy and raining quite a lot of the time. Its low season and that is the usual weather this time of year. But it was still beautiful as the pictures show. 

I met a couple staying at the resort who were from Gympie and the women happened to have relatives living in Lawrence and on Woodford Island (near Brushgrove wreckers for those that know!). It was pretty amazing. We sat up at the bar each evening drinking cheap cocktails made by a couple of English people who had just started working at the resort a week or two ago after working in a dodgy backpackers in Sihanoukville for nearly nine months. The women is flying to Australia in a month to work on a farm for the required minimum to get a visa to stay in Australia for another year and travel. So we tried to teach her ‘Australian’, so she would feel right at home when she goes there. We told her you wear thongs on your feet, you say ‘howyagoin’ all as one word when you see your friends and never talk about distance in km’s or miles, its always how long it takes you to drive there….

There were two dogs and three cats living there, very well fed and looked after and they treated the whole place as if they owned it, especially the cats, wandering up on the bar, lounging around in the seats, all very regal.

 

The little hut I stayed in was pretty cool, all built out of timber, with a thatch roof and the least amount of steel possible as it rusts within 12 months. Even things like curtain rods, toilet roll holders, window locks, door handles, all made of rope and timber, designed for easy replacement and no rusting. It was  ingenious.  

My place

Window lock

Curtain rail, so simple and clever

There were large gaps in the wide floorboards, around 10mm, and large gaps up the top of the attached bathroom walls so large spotted geckos, mice and other interesting characters visited most people during their stay. There were two hammocks on each verandah and it was so nice swinging away in one staring out to sea as the sun set, spectacular really.

Chilling on the front verandah

The morning I left it started raining pretty consistently so I imagine it wouldn’t have been fun for those remaining. I was the only one leaving that day so they put me on another type of commercial, high speed ferry boat which looked like this, far more impressive than the large and cumbersome but more traditional boat we went over with that the resort owns and runs. The difference in time frame is two hours for the slow boat, 40 minutes for the fast boat.

It has some serious motors on the back, I could see the drivers dashboard and each of the three motors was sitting pretty consistently at 5400 rpm’s all the way (for those that care about these kinds of things). Sometimes due to the rougher weather the boat would lift up out of the wave before crashing back down and your stomach would rise and fall before the boat did, it was rather disconcerting! The European backpackers all thought it was great fun, the poor locals using the service not so much…

So, back to reality and work.