Cambodia River Days

I'm starting this late on Wednesday, March 26, (and finishing it Friday morning, Phnom Penh time). It's my second day on the Tonlé Sap River, and probably going to be my most memorable. This was the second time I almost lost my passport, only this time, instead of being in my pants, it ended up in the river. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Somehow they don't fall off the took. this one has a deck.

We went up river again today to visit three communities, using a fast motorized took.  A took is similar to canoes, and just about as stable when you're stepping into one. My companions would carry my laptop and backpack as I struggled to walk the centerline and maintain my balance, with considerable trepidation. The Tonlé Sap doesn't have landings; it has riverbanks, and they can be abrupt.  Getting into a took is difficult enough. But in addition, the ride is a pain. I had to sit tailor fashion on life preservers to cush my tush. It doesn't take long to get saddle sore. It causes my knees to lose their flexibility and my hips to hurt.

Vuthy

The took is low to the water. You don't get much spray, but you do get a close look at the murkiness of the Tonlé Sap, whose color palette is  a marvelos shade of mauve. The silt that creates this color is what makes this land so rich for agriculture. This endless purple-gray flow brims with earth that is nutritious for farm crops. It's hot on the river, and our translator, Vuthy, a fisheries department employee, wore a head scarf to stay cool.

Our first meeting of the day was amid pilings in the underside of a home that was still under construction. As Jay asked questions about how the loan program was working and Vuthy translated, men were mixing cement which was hoisted up to the next story to extend the house. Outside children ran in the sun, oblivious to the heat, which was fairly tolerable. Two days later it would reach more than 98 degrees and 47 percent humidity. Jay had a surprise at this community -- they fished in a nearby lake, but not the river,which wasn't part of their alloted fishing area. As he learned this, poachers were working the river in plain sight.

Above the meeting, workmen extended cement beams on the stilted house.

Stick in hand, she shows bossy who's boss.

At our next community, there were a lot of youngsters around. One little girl made it clear to a bovine that she was in charge. Others sang a song in unison to practice their multiplication tables in what appeared to be a classroom in a stilted building. And some just stood off to the side and watched as Jay, Vuthy and their adults discussed the loan program.

The meeting was facilitated by the shade of a kind old tree.

Vuthy climbs the palm.

 When it was time to leave, our multi-talented translator, Vuthy, demonstrates another skill: climbing a palm tree, using a ladder made of a bamboo stalk with its limbs cut short. The stubs are just long enough to be used like rungs in a ladder.
During Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge revolution, Vuthy's family was always hungry. But after the Vietnamese drove out the Khmer Rouge, life got better, and Vuthy learned to climb palm trees to collect liquid, which he said was turned to sugar and traded for gold. That's hard to imagine, but there are a lot of things that are hard to imagine in the recent sad history of this old country.

Picnic at the Banyan Tree Restaurant

Following the meeting, we headed to the "Banyan" restaurant, climbing a steep bank to sit on the eroded roots of a large banyan tree for a picnic lunch. Then we descended the steep bank, with my friends holding my laptop and backpack while I rested on one hand or grabbed roots. Then they helped me step into that tippy took, and off we went to the next meeting

When we arrived, it was the same routine: hand my laptop to one of my friends and my backpack to another, so that I could focus on maintaining balance walking on that rocking took. The end of the took rises, and  I stepped boldly forwared and then inclined slightly left when I noticed my body heading in an unintended direction...

The Tonlé Sap and the Nile

Back at Frances Willard Grade School in Spokane, WA, Jay and I were in Miss McDermott's  6th grade social studies class. She was a cranky old battleaxe who insisted on arm movement, not finger movement, when we wrote with our fountain pens. Some lessons from childhood are unforgettable -- like the film she showed about Egypt and the flooding of the Nile every year. I still faintly remember a hand pulling up a fistful of mud and squeezing--it oozed out between the fingers; The Tonlé Sap has mud like that. And very shortly after I tried to leave the took, so did I. I had it on my new Nikes, on my pantleg, on my shirt and sleeve. I even managed to smear some onto my pants. As my butt parted the waters and dove to a  gooshing arrest on the bottom of the shallow bank of the river, I also managed to scoop some into my trousers.

 At that moment, I was particularly grateful that I was in a country where certain English words and phrases were unknown, because I'm certain I may have shared them with anyone in earshot. Fifteen minutes later, after a walk up the bank in a fruitless effort to find a place to scrape and wash off the very adhesive river mud, I was back at the bank of the Tonlé Sap, shoes firmly planted in the muck to obtain purchase, and rinsing and/or scraping almost every stitch I had on. Well, OK, so I didn't have them on any more.

It was at this point that I realized I had soiled myself -- literally -- with some of the most nutritious earth on earth. The scooping had deposited an ample amount inside my Ex Officios and on my backside, giving any onlooker reason to speculate on whether that was me or the river that placed that sludge there. The only way to properly remove it was to slightly lower the last thing I was wearing -- my Ex Officios, and hope the children in the classroom up the hill wouldn't be scandalized. I will forever remember this moment as the laundromat at Half Moon Beach.

Vuthy helped me clean up, then noticed my passport pouch floating in the water. I had taken off my belt, forgetting my Rich Steves money pouch was hanging from it. The pouch fell in the river next to the took as I stripped. The money and passport were only slightly damp in that water-resistant pouch. Thank you, Rick Steves!

Jay held his final meeting of the day up the bank while I worked to dry my cell phone, a voice recorder and my lucky traveling harmonica, as well as squeezing water out of my new Nikes. Then I put my partially dry socks back on and squished my way down the bank to the took for the ride home.

There is an  the adage that if you eat a frog in the morning, nothing worse will happen to you all day. Not only did that turn out to be true, but we had a bright moment on the ride back: we passed some poachers who were having a conversation with an enforcement officer.

When we returned to our embarkation point, we passed a floating village and pulled up at a beach so cluttered with trash that it beggars description. In Cambodia, Jay explained, there is no infrastructure to clean up the mess. And floating villages don't have any place to recycle styrofoam, plastic bags, food containers, or anything else, except in the river. (they also don't have holding tanks--that stuff goes in the river, too.)

A floating community

A small sampling of trash near the floating community. There is no infrastructure to protect the environment.

It seemed that, no matter how many times I rinsed my clothes in the room that night at the Raksmey Sokha New York Hotel, the water never ran clear.

Love,

Robert

Author’s note: This blog is produced independently of Sustainable Communities International. Observations, opinions, errors and omissions are solely the responsibility of the writer.