Saturday afternoon, the first day of a long weekend holiday. Monday is “International Human Rights Day”. It’s a public holiday here and I think it should be so in other countries; human rights are a huge issue in so many places.
I was invited by Vuth and family to join them and their staff for a weekend trip to Kampot and Kep - Kampot is on a river which flows to the sea near Kep. There were about 15 of us and I ended up at the back of the bus with the young folk. Sitting next to me was 9 year old Ponleu who is quite a character. It’s amazing how I can allow a little boy to get under my skin in a friendly fashion. At one point I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that he had started to mimic my every movement and then he started to repeat everything I said. He thought it was hysterical, and I did - for a while. It went on for over an hour and then I had the bright idea to tell him he couldn’t come over to my place to stay, and that shut him up for a while.
When I travel with friends anywhere else, we pack the car with our belongings and maybe a picnic. In Cambodia we packed the bus with food, and lots of it. Cambodians start eating on a trip as soon as they leave home. Within minutes of pulling away from the office we were eating ‘shoe laces’ of dried shrimp, beef jerky, various fruits, drinks, packages of seaweed, nuts and other nibbles. Whenever we stopped for a toilet break someone would bring back food. The two 3 year olds on the bus performed karaoke with music on a large tv screen.
It took us ages to get through the city traffic and eventually our driver got fed up and took another route. Three times he realised he’d missed a turning so we did a U-turn in the middle of the road. There’s no such thing as road rage here; other vehicles waited patiently while we did 3 point turns in the middle of a busy road. We arrived at 6pm - 5 hours of travelling and two hours late. All major roads in Cambodia are either in a terrible mess, waiting to be widened from 2 lane to either 4 or 6 lane, or in a terrible mess because the construction is going on. Oudom was sitting on the back seat, wearing my old Fitbit. When we finally reached Kampot he showed me that he had 21,000 steps on the gadget and most of that was because of the serious bouncing up and down done by the bus. Because I was in the middle of the bus I didn’t get any extra steps.
We had dinner on a pier, jutting out into the river. Kampot has many bridges and they and the promenades on both sides of the river were decked out with coloured lights. Cina pointed out that we had free musical entertainment coming from a place across the river and we both noticed there was also a free smell. I’ve no idea what it was, but it did smell like a pig farm. Because of its nearness to the sea, Kampot food is very ‘fishy’; we also had shrimp in various forms, squid cooked in a dish that included ribbons of immature green peppercorns, fried rice with more shrimp.
Cina always books the hotels using the Agoda app so we were shocked when the hotel said we didn’t have a booking. I’m getting quite laid back about these things so I just sat down on a comfy sofa and waited for things to be sorted out. Luckily there were rooms available and I ended up with the lads. Most of the group headed to the pool and had a great time. It’s always interesting to see Cambodians swimming as they do it fully dressed. Even the men kept their shirts on - “there are ladies here”, was the comment. Afterwards I joined friends from Phnom Penh who’d come with a couple who’d just got married. They’d brought a cooler full of wine, food, wine glasses and even candles. The candles came in handy when the area had a power cut. I’d have loved to have gone to bed but our hosts insisted on ordering more food - chips with fried egg! It made a lovely change to all the exotic sauces and dishes we’d had earlier.
