Holiday season

Early April was party season in Cambodia in the run-up to Khmer New Year, which was on the 14-16th April. It was the third of the new years that are celebrated here (Chinese and international being the other festivals borrowed as an excuse for a public holiday), and is the biggest, with most people taking a week or two off and going back to their home villages.

In the weeks before, work starting to wind down as most of the schools closed, and there was a string of parties and weddings – the rainy season is on its way so couples are under pressure to get married soon or have to wait until November. Jen is staying in Mondulkiri for a few weeks so she also went to some of them, including a New Year’s party at the bank and the wedding of one of the teachers we work with.

If you look closely, you can make out the empty tables around us - this month we perfected the arrive first, drink lots, leave last technique. It's all about value for money. 

We also visited a few waterfalls, including Kball Preah which is probably my favourite – quite dramatic, but not as impressive as Bousra and therefore attracting fewer crowds. It also requires a half-hour walk which helps, too, to put people off – I forgot to mention this when I suggested Kball Preah and I think when this photo was taken everybody was a bit pissed off with me.

It was worth it though.

For the holiday itself, we went to Kampong Som on the south-west coast. There were five of us: Tak, Eng, me, Jen and Rachel, who was travelling in Thailand and met us for a week or so in Cambodia. It was a really nice few days of swimming, eating fresh crab and squid, and drinking. (Gone are the days when I assumed holidays were about doing things; now it’s all about sitting around and drinking.)

Eating fresh crab on the beach.

Evening at the beach.

I was hoping that by the end of the weekend I would have cafe au lait coloured skin (admittedly with extra lait) to complete my Cambodian conversion, but Jen said Strawberry Nesquik was the best I could hope for. The following photo is of the two pinkest men on the beach.

On Saturday Ingran and some of his friends from London arrived, and the following morning Dave and Helen turned up too, so it was nice to see them although we had to leave a few hours later. We had a night in Phnom Penh on the way back, taking Jen and Rachel to DJ Club which was good fun as always.

Coming soon on DVD...

Since my last blog entry, I’ve become something of a TV star. The DVD of Tak and Eng’s wedding has been released and, having confused the camera with the video camera during most of the official photos, I think I stole the show. Furthermore, I recently starred in Come Dine With Me Cambodia, filmed on location in the VSO Programme Office, Phnom Penh. As you can see, I’m becoming something of a cult figure among the Cambodian youth:

A young boy meets his hero

Please overlook the terror in the boy’s eyes, and Tak’s firm grip preventing attempts at escape; I think he was just overwhelmed by the experience.

Come Dine With Me was Ingran’s idea as the group we had arrived with in September were back in Phnom Penh for a week of language training. We cooked in pairs over four nights, although Ingran made the mistake of putting myself and him first – on the Monday we set the bar fairly high and were subsequently overtaken by everybody else. It was devastating to feel the prize money of 1000 riel (approximately 15p) slipping away, but at least we got good food. The filming was lots of fun and everybody was extremely rude and offensive, so I’m looking forward to the DVD.

It was a busy week in the end as Sam and I were also editing the volunteer magazine. It’s basically modelled on the Weekend section from Saturday’s Guardian, and so the three spelling mistakes I’ve noticed since it was printed were obviously deliberate, included to add authenticity. I was particularly galled by the typo in the recipe section – where Hannah’s Spanish meatballs recipe for albóndigas was misspelled as albóndingas – as Spanish is a language I have a degree in! Overall, though, I think we’re happy with how it turned out.

Since then Tim and Jen have visited which was great. They were the first visitors I’ve had and it made me feel very Cambodian to be thinking things like, ‘I must buy toilet paper – the foreigners are coming!’ (Cambodians use a water hose.) It also made me realise that many aspects of my daily routine, which now feel perfectly normal, are very different from my life before. Breakfast, for example, is a bowl of super noodles and a cup of Yorkshire tea; lunch is at 11am; drinking – sorry, I mean dinner – starts any time after 5pm, which it hasn’t done since we were children and our family mealtimes were scheduled to avoid clashing with Neighbours.

Anyway, they came to Mondulkiri for a few days and had a barbecue, a bit of waterfall visiting and general hanging out, before the three of us went to Siem Reap for the weekend. This is the home of Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious building and Cambodia’s national symbol, and it was very impressive, in its scale as much as anything else. We arrived at 5.30am to watch the sunrise, and then visited Angkor Wat and some of the other temples. 

I was a bit worried about food as Siem Reap is a tourist hotspot and I thought we were going to get ripped off, but it really helps to be able to speak Khmer – people immediately realise you’ve spent some time in Cambodia and know the price of everything. We also found a great all you can eat barbecue on the first night, so we ate until we felt sick, then had a break and carried on. 

They went to the beach after that and I began the long two-day journey back to Mondulkiri, where work has been very quiet as all of the schools are closed. Khmer New Year is next week and schools are likely to stay closed for about three weeks. Our plan for the new year is to go to the beach where we should hopefully meet up with Rachel, who I think is in Thailand, so that will be good.

 

It is also the last month or so of the dry season, and so there’s been a flurry of weddings and other parties. Last night we went to a house warming party in Bousra, about an hour from Sen Monorom, which was as grand as a wedding. We didn’t see the person who had invited us, and barely knew anybody else: when we noticed that other guests had red invitations while ours were white, we wondered whether we’d stumbled across the wrong party. We never really cleared that up, but as long as you pay your $10 I don’t think it really matters. The party was lots of fun, whatever it was.