Bamboo of Battambang

My last night in Phnom Pehn I did what I always do in a city; I walked and walked, both puzzling and disappointing the moto and tuk tuk drivers. I don’t like using them. While it can be fun, and it is very Southeast Asian, they can be shady and dishonest, and I oft prefer to walk a city in order to discover it. I visited several other areas in Cambodia, two of which I’ll write briefly about now. I took a long bus up to the far northeast to Ratanakari Province, considered some of the prettiest landscape in the country. It was definitely countryside and rural and not on the main tourist trail. I was the only non-Cambodian on the bus and one of the few foreigners I saw at all in the entire province.

My time there I spent swimming and lazing around in a crater lake, hunting for hidden waterfalls, and motorcycling country roads, gazing out at small villages. The lake was wonderful, a large crater lake hidden in a thick forest of trees, far in the countryside out past several villages that rose with the hills in a stretching horizon. The water was peacefully calm and amazingly cool. I dove and dove off the dock down into the deep water which I could never reach the bottom of. I lay on the benches in the sun as water coolly evaporated off my body. It was beautiful there, and relaxing, and the kind of vacation you sometimes really want, a day spent doing nothing, having to do nothing, and knowing you could stay as long as you wished, and so I stayed. I stayed for the nothingness of it all, the lake, the waterfalls, the beautiful countryside, the walks through the small town, the motorcycling out on endless roads that I drove and drove for hours through a country thousands of miles from what I knew. On hat days since leaving the province, I oft wished to be back in the lake, the cool deep waters carved from an ancient crater. It was hot there, in all of Southeast Asia, with temperatures over 100 degrees and high humidity. Sometimes I just wanted to hide in my room, but without AC, the rooms were also hot and sticky.

Cambodia is a poor country. Most homes were built on stilts to keep rain and critters out. Garbage was strewn everywhere, thrown about without care by the locals. Even the aisles of busses became carpeted in bottles, wrappers, bags, discarded egg shells, and more. It is sad to see the lack of care and pride for their land that is so prevalent throughout the whole of the continent. The province was nice though, with little to do, dusty from bumpy dirt roads and built around deep, red clay that sunk deep into skin and clothes and buildings and everything. My private room was $3 a night and I ate for about $2 a day from street vendors with frequent meals of sticky rice stuffed with beans or sweet jams, or layered inside a thin coating of fried banana batter. There were lots of goodies to try and I could make meals for 50 cents. The downside of living cheap was the occasional stomach cramps and bed bugs feasting on my skin. The itchy, red bumps pocking my body attested to that, but really, I’d have it no other way. I have to say, I loved it all, and I still try and travel that way when I can.

In addition the Ratanakari province, I also visited Batambang. I went with a German gal I met in Siem Reap. Oh, Batambang was hot, and we did our best to hide from the heat. We walked the city, finding spots to escape to the shade before making our retreat back to our room. One day we did brave the heat and hired a tuk tuk driver to take us to some of the sites outside the city. We went to the Bamboo Railway, an old railway looking overgrown and dodgy. The locals put small bed carts made of bamboo on to two separate axle wheels. A driver operated a small six horse power engine to move it all forward. When a cart came in the opposite direction, the passengers from one got off, and both drivers moved the cart, axles, and engine off the track to allow one “train” to pass and then reassembled the other back on the tracks. We stopped many times to help drivers reassemble their carts. It was a fun way to travel, a way the locals still travel to take goods to and from the market. We sped along at a slow, but decent speed through countryside and dry farms, the train was loud and at times felt like a roller coaster, creaking and cracking on bumpy, noisy tracks. I loved it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go, but my German friend talked me in to it, and I am glad she did. I really have met a lot of awesome people traveling, and she was one of them. The bamboo railway was a definite must of Cambodia, especially for a man much in love with train tracks, the tracks themselves. Oh, how I often walked along train tracks growing up back home, or picnicked on top of empty box cars and watched speeding trains bullet past on the opposite tracks. I will always love the reminder, and now I have new memories of trains and tracks, memories of a foreign land, a pleasant “conductor” and me and a German gal sitting on sticks of bamboo strapped together that trolleyed us forward through rural countryside, dirt brown and red, trees and fields.

We also went to a very old temple there, predating Angkor Wat. The temple sits atop a hill of over 358 steps, which in heat and humidity was a drenching walk up to a small temple with plots of flowers around stones thousands of years old mounted together for prayer. It was a miniature Angkor, the three cone spires atop the mighty stones.

We also visited the killing caves, which are just as they sound, caves where victims of the Khmer Rouge were brought and murdered, their bodies discarded in the caves. It was similar to the Killing Fields, though not nearly of the same magnitude, but still with small shrines in memory, and the skulls of victims, their stains, still in the caves. The caves were also a hot and sweaty hike up a large hill, and a longer walk down the backside and through tiny villages out on clay roads where people stared at the wonder of two foreigners passing through their village. It seemed we took the wrong way and long way down and nearly got lost, but made our way back to where our driver was waiting. He was refreshingly honest for a tuk tuk driver, and spent many years as a Buddhist Monk, which is very common in Laos and Cambodia, even mandatory for all boys to spend at least one week taking the vows of a novice monk.

We left Batambang with a few small gifts from the guesthouse owner, and the owner of the restaurant next door we ate at several days, amazing and generous people, and my farewell to Cambodia was pleasant and delicious, with fresh homemade rolls and chocolate chip cookies. My last night, I went to “Seeing Hands Massage.” It is a massage business in several Asian cities where all the masseurs are blind. My Masseuse was very strong. He gave me an hour long, full body massage. I could feel the trembling in his fingers from pushing down so hard with pressure on my body. It was interesting how he felt around the bed and my body with his hands because he could not see. It did hurt a little at times, as a good massage should, and afterward I felt limp and drained and wanted to fall in to bed and float away to sleep and dreams. It was $6 well spent. That is one thing I miss about Southeast Asia, the extremely cheap and extremely wonderful massages I got all around. For as low as $4, I would get a full-hour massage. Oh goodness, I could use one now.

Singing through the forests, Rattling over ridges; Shooting under arches, Rumbling over bridges; Whizzing through the mountains, Buzzing o'er the vale,- Bless me! this is pleasant, Riding on the rail! "Rhyme of the Rail" - John Godfrey Saxe.