In the morning our breakfast was late; there was a little bit of a kerfuffle because we’d explained about how we were leaving at 7am; so somebody went and woke up somebody and our breakfast arrived pretty quickly thereafter, with a bit of banging and scuffling through the kitchen door and some rushing around, while everybody had a little look at their watches because we knew we had to be on the bus to the next town by about 7.30am. Again.
Luckily everybody who wanted something to eat got something to eat, and we walked down the dirt road out the front of the Tigre de Papier to meet the bus, which was going to come and meet us at our hotel but couldn’t make it all the way down the dirt road. On the bus we drove across town to the bus station, where women sold whatever was balancing in the baskets on the tops of their heads. Do they instruct people to buy from one side only, or if there are two people, do they have to buy from opposite sides of the head, so that the basket contraption may remain balanced? Who knows the answers to these important questions, when we are just more tourists on the way to Kampong Cham, where the locals are rumoured to cook and eat tarantulas?
The bus trip really describes itself. We sat, we watched, we made definite and concerted attempts to sleep with hats over our faces.
We stopped at a roadside stop for fresh pineapple and toilet breaks and that kind of thing. Several other very similar looking buses stopped with us. I went off to take pictures of the road and the motorcycles and the people in colourful clothes and the huts with ponds full of lilies in front of them that reflected nicely the palm trees growing behind. I took pictures of the colourful people on motorbikes reflected in the ponds which were in front of the huts that had palm trees growing behind them. I took pictures of the huts reflected in the ponds full of lilies that the people in colourful clothes rode past on motorbikes.
Or to put it another way I nearly missed the bus.
I wanted to buy something to eat but one lady didn’t have change for $10USD so I went around the fence to the shop next to the roadside stop. While people looked for me where I had been standing while taking pictures. Then I came around the front of the bus, well, A BUS, not THE BUS, while people looked for me around the fence. But then Alice found me and instructed me not to run off again. So I made a mental note of the number on the front of the bus, as they were all from the same company. 761, I think it was.
In Kampong Cham, at 1pm, just about everybody got off when the bus pulled up in front of the Mekong Hotel, because just about everybody was a tourist with a huge backpack to be got off the bus, and then just about everybody filed on into the Mekong Hotel. We had ‘phoned ahead’, so to speak, so Nak gave us our keys and we walked on up the spiral stair case to the rooms, which were separated by a corridor at least 10 metres wide and as long as the entire building, with nothing whatsoever in it except for the exit of the stairs poking up like a periscope. It was covered in white tiles. The walls were white, and also the colour of the ceiling was: white. Strong ‘This used to be a hospital’ vibe.
In the hotel we kicked around for a little while ahead of our luncheon engagement, at the biggest shiniest restaurant in town, which had it’s own ‘bubble boy’ section for those who wished to pay a small surcharge for air conditioning. The fact that the number of staff coming and going to these tables meant the door was almost always open led us to believe they would not dare apply the air conditioning surcharge to our bill. And they did not. What they did was bring us big portions for small prices, which was what we had in mind.
People (the aforementioned ‘group’) then split up for a little while, some going back to the hotel for lay-down, others going wandering around town looking for internet access, others simply amusing themselves. Meanwhile Ella had convincingly won the ‘spot he bakery’ competition.
In the afternoon we gathered at the front of the hotel and took our choice of bicycles, and as in Vietnam the least malfunctioning bike was the best choice. We rode these bicycles down the road, next to the wide wide Mekong River, in the dusty gutter, past the great concrete bridge paid for in total and as a gift by the Japanese, and past the main part of town, then down a small steep path to the river front, where we sat and waited for the ferry. The ferry was no jet cat; instead it was two boats strapped together, with a 5m x 5m wooden platform roped on top of it, and a piddly petrol motor, possibly surplus from the outgoing Rover or Victa range, attached somewhere. We sat while the bikes and people with baskets and things like that disgorged from the ferry, and then grabbed our bikes and shuffled ourselves toward the front of the queue to make sure we all got on.
Only, once we were on the ferry, we had to wait for some guys to get their horse and cart over the edge of the jetty and up on to the ferry. Did I mention the cart was full of spinach, and that the horse was having great difficulty hauling it up over the ledge on to the bits of plank strapped together? And did I mention, also, that with regard to Resolution 402 vis. ‘Should the Horse and Cart be allowed on the Ferry at all given that it’s extremely heavy?’, I voted in the negative.
I should say, though, that the ferry stood up pretty well to what looked like a strong current in the Mekong, and we motored across this current to Koh Paen island. In the dry season you can’t exactly walk across where the Mekong used to be, but you can put down a temporary bamboo bridge which is strong enough not to sink into the mud and can carry medium sized trucks. In the wet season you can pack these parts up and leave them on he edge of the island, ready to go again, ready to have their picture taken by tourists hauling their bicycles off of lawnmower ferries.
On the island we rode along the dirt paths past little children leaping in front of the bikes and putting their hands out for high fives, and shouting out hello, and we stopped out front of a school, next to a temple, where the guide from the hotel told us all about the two types of tobacco, and showed us little seedlings growing in plots, and then took us across the road to see large plantations of tobacco spread through the middle of the island, and in the sky hung the great lurching spectre of the British-American Tobacco corporation. Or was it a blue and purple afternoon storm? Hard to tell these days.
Near the school we sat around a table drinking cane sugar juice, which they make by torturing the juice out freshly cut lengths of sugar cane, with a contraption very much like a catherine wheel. Just squeezes it right out, is what it does. For a total of 50c I had a nice refreshing cane sugar juice, which actually as a bit of a tangy orange-like taste in it, while Alice had an extensive counting lesson from an enlarging group of small happy Cambodian children. Many small fingers waving ‘this many’ and then ‘this many’. An old decrepit bicycle coasted past with four little girls mounted on to it in various places, none of them big enough to actually ride the thing on their own. Presumably they had a system of command like a submarine, one setting a course, the other varying propulsion. Then the front one slipped off the pedals but was too small to get back up onto them.
Through the metre-wide backpaths of the island we took ourselves to a little shack among the streets of little dark wooden shacks, where our new hosts cut apart some of the large red and yellow grapefruits which grow in these parts. The red ones are riper, and a little bit more bitter, while the yellow ones are almost watery but sweeter; not quite watery but just sort of neutral flavoured, like eating shortbread in comparison to some other much sweeter sweets. It became known that the last ferry would be leaving a little bit before sunrise, and we pedalled off in that rough direction.
A long line of schoolgirls came the other way up from the ferry arriving, all white uniforms and smiles.
On the ferry I waited minutes to try and catch a lightning bolt on camera, but somehow missed the three or four that happened during the trip back, and as we got off the ferry the darkness was just coming along, and the huge purple clouds faded into that darkness, with no rain. Along the edge of the river we rode back to the hotel, and I stopped for a minute to take a photo of the Japanese Bridge at night. Dinner was had at a restaurant on a corner right near the bridge, open air and comfy chairs freely available, and on the way back we discovered ‘bars’ had sprung up on the footpath in front of the hotel, that is, women with eskies were selling all kinds of drinks at good prices. That’s what changed it from a good fun day to a great day, really; sitting outside, fresh air coming off the river, sinking a cold beverage.
Magnificent.
Greg
