I’m not going to discuss the Khmer Rouge and the Genocide of 3 million Cambodians in this post. Mainly because it needs its own post but also I don’t want Cambodia to only be known for what was a particularly ugly piece of recent history.  Cambodia has thousands of years of other history and some incredibly lovely people and I believe that should be celebrated instead of being tainted by what was, in the grand old scheme of things, a short yet devastating period of time.

We reached the Vietnam Cambodia border and spent more than a few  hours just sort of floating about in no man’s land. We wondered if it was because the Cambodian border police had never seen a New Zealand covid vaccine pass. Just at the point when I started to wonder if perhaps they had changed their minds about letting us in, the engines kicked into gear and we were once again on our way.

Our first stop was Phnom Penh the biggest city in Cambodia. We walked to see the Royal Palace and then on to a Buddist pagoda, first main difference we noticed between Vietnam and Cambodia is the number of monks and also it’s way cleaner and not as chaotic as the cities in Vietnam.

There were Toucans in the trees and tuktuks in the streets. There were fruit bats and monkeys and food sellers everywhere. You can also buy genuine raybans for $7.

We learned about our new Cambodian guide’s life growing up in a small village surrounded by Khmer Rouge. He is currently 42 years old so this is not ancient history. How he would walk to school 3 miles everyday and would have to swim a river to get there. He would take off all his clothes and wrap them in a scarf to put on his head. On the other side he would get dressed again before continuing on to school. He spoke of his mother and how she wanted him to have an education and to have a better life. How he sold palm nut cakes in the afternoons after school to make extra money to support the family and how he spent 8 years at university studying Cambodian history and English to become a tour guide. Currently he is working for a construction company as the tourists stopped coming during covid so this was his first project in two years and so took time off from his other job to do it.

Again the people and especially the children were so happy to see us. The children would run outside when we came to wave and yell hello! As the boat passed they ran and laughed and waved hello. It was so special.  At one port a small group of cute kids high fived, fist bumped and hugged every one of us as we got off the boat At another stop a small boy put a tarantula on my hand without me knowing and learned his first English swear word.

We visited a school where we were able to go into the classroom of 9-13 year old kids. Our guide takes the opportunity to speak to them about the value of education and learning English and listening to their teacher. He asked a few of them to stand and speak some English. One by one the cutest little kids stood and said “hello my name is and I am X years old”. They laughed at each other and made jokes with our guide and stared at the weirdo foreigners. They all wore a white shirt and black pants or skirt and sat in the heat with only one ceiling fan working. One boy stood and in his best English told us his name and age and that he wants to be a doctor when he grows up. He was the best in the class at English. I later asked our guide what the chances are for that boy to become a doctor? He said “less than 0.5% It’s just not going to happen for a child in that village.” 

At the end we had the opportunity to donate some money to get the other fan working for them. They sang a song of national Cambodian pride to us with varying degrees of gusto and smiled when we thanked them in Cambodian. It was a really lovely afternoon. 

One of the evenings we had traditional dancers from one of the local orphanages come to our ship. They had beautiful costumes and the girls were so graceful and sweet. They can also bend their fingers backwards in a crescent shape which looks lovely but is completely impossible to do unless you’ve trained yourself from a young age. Their dances were all about myths and falling in love and all the usual things that dances are about.

Another evening they brought out a plate of fried crickets(yum), steamed silk worms (blurgh), tiny spicy frogs (yum) and some form of black beetle that you had to remove the wings and the spike inside from before eating  and so we didn’t bother. Some of the French were adventurous enough to try them but most weren’t having a bar of it. We’ve done it now don’t need to do it again.

One of the day trips was to a pagoda to be blessed by the monks. To get there and back we rode in Ox drawn carts. No suspension and thick mud, past rice paddy fields and lotus ponds. On the way there it teemed with rain so we were fairly soggy by the time we got there. But it was fine on the way back. I loved that trip so much.

We met a 70 year old man whose job is climbing palm trees to harvest palm sugar sap. He would scamper up a bamboo ladder about 15 metres and then use bamboo poles to walk between the palms. We asked if he’d ever fallen and he said once, when he was 16 and he fell the full 15 metres.  This, we were told by our guide, is a dying profession. No one wants to do it any more as it’s too scary. I guess palm sugar will be a thing of the past soon.

That’s one thing we learned about the future for Cambodia. So much of their current life is based on ancient principals of living. There is a one village one product initiative from the government to encourage villages to specialise in just one product i.e cooking stoves or pounded rice or gold jewellery. This means that the next generation are expected to take on those roles. But the kids don’t want that. They have access to the internet. They can see how others live and they don’t just accept what is given to them any more. “It’s a problem” our guide says.

And then in the blink of an eye we were in Siem Reap.  The bus pulled up outside our hotel and we said “au revoir et bon voyage” to our French speaking companions and we were on our own again. They were off for a full afternoon of temple walking and we were off to lie by the pool and drink beer. We both decided it was the quickest 10 days of our life. Loved it.