Cambodia

Cambodia is a land of contrast. There is village life, where things have not changed in hundreds of years. And there is city life, where the economy and the way of life are changing everything.

Cambodian Village Life

The houses out in the countryside are simple bamboo boxes on sticks. They have no doors, which allows for a nice breeze to flow through, keeping everyone cool during the night. During the day though, the whole family, along with the cows and the pigs, sit in the shade under the house. Strangely enough though, the "hotels" always seem to be concrete boxes with tin roofs. And in places without electricity for a fan, that really makes for hot, sweaty nights!

As we would ride past these houses, about 40% of the village (40% of Cambodia is under the age of 15) would come flying out of the shade, gleefully shouting,"helllloooo, helllloooo!" The kids made us smile and feel welcome as we biked through the countryside, and we appreciated their enthusiasm as the adults were often very stoic and reserved towards us.

It surprised us to see how the people in the countryside live. Had we been passing through 200 years ago, I doubt that it would have been any different. People would often be pulling heavy carts that should have been pulled by strong animals, small children were doing heavy labor, schools and hospitals were non-existent, and most of the people were just sitting around without any opportunity to find a job. Restaurants (if there were any) consisted of a table on the side of the street with one pot of noodle soup.

Each village that we went through had a single specialty. If you are in a stone carving village, all you see is stone carvers, and you can bet that there is no one selling sugar cane juice. But if you are in sugar cane village, you will find a lady selling sugar cane every 5 meters at the same price. But imagine that you are hungry, you have to wait for noodle soup village if you want anything to eat. For two unlucky days, we went through one sugar cane village after the other. There was no noodle soup village in sight. We had to bike on sugar cane power alone, which gave us a very liquidy feeling throughout the day.

However hungry that we were while riding through the country side, we always hesitated a bit to enter a restaurant. It was always a problem. As we would enter a restaurant, everyone would quickly rush to the back of the restaurant to avoid contact with the scary foreigners. As I approached them, they would either stare like a dear in the headlights, or they would start vigorously cleaning things, hoping that I would just leave. Sometimes we were doing dramatic gestures and attempts at communicating using our Cambodian phrasebook. Instead of helping the situation, it usually just caused widespread panic and confusion. We went through this over and over again, every time that we wanted to eat something.

When we finally met someone who was calm enough to look at us and listen, we would order a noodle soup (that's all there is to eat). Unfortunately for us, the deeper we got into the countryside the more strange the meat floating in our soup became. Sometimes we had so many vital organs floating around in our soup, that we could have probably created a new life form if we had stirred hard enough. So, after the long struggle for a meal, our meals were more for survival than for relishment.

City Life

Of the few cities that there are in Cambodia, they are crowded and chaotic. But, you can also find a clean bed and electricity, which meant the world to us after days and days of riding through little villages. Unlike in Thailand, we were relieved to find a tourist place. It meant that people wouldn't run away from us (one school teacher even dragged us to his school and made Amy sing Jingle Bells), we didn't have to eat organ soup, and we could cool down at night with a fan. It was like heaven!

Although traveling through this country was really dusty and not always fun, it was incredibly interesting and we wouldn't have had things any other way.

Dirt. Lots of dirt. Dirt up our nostrils, in our undies, and crunching between our teeth. The minute we crossed the border and entered Cambodia, our brand-new, four-lane highway vanished, and 150km of this lay before us:

We had to wear surgical masks inorder to breathe.

The last three days we spent making our way through the dirt cloud to Siam Riep to visit the Temples of Ankor. Despite the bad road, we were glad that we didn't have to take public transportation.

Actually, we have to say that we liked the route a lot. Along the way we saw lots of rural villages with folk music blasting from public speakers. We also saw people praying in the temples, happy naked children playing in drianage ditches, farmers hearding cows down the middle of the highway, and we got to taste some really strange tasting meats.

Now we are in Siam Riep and this morning we biked around the temples.

The coolest temples are the ones that are squashed by trees.

However, we had to go back to our hotel in the afternoon because the sun was starting show it's negative effects on Amy.