The Learning Center was closed over Chinese New Year and I naturally took it as an opportunity to travel. On the way to Phnom Penh I sat next to a monk that had three different phones in his bag. One oft hem was an Iphone. I sometimes wonder what is happening to the traditional images of Eastern spirituality. Monks that are on facebook and order food from a street kitchen. I always think I am far more reluctant towards them than them towards me. I happens to me that a monk is smiling at me while I am trying to walk a respectful bow around him, trying to avoid eye contact by any means.
It is easier now to find my way around in Phnom Penh. When I waited for my bus that should bring me to the north-western town Battambang, I talked a little bit to some Tuc Tuc drivers that waited for work. When they heard I could speak Khmer they immediately changed their entire manner and asked me a whole bunch of questions. One of the men had an English grammar book with him and wanted me to practise with him. It was quite funny to have grown up students, instead of little children that listen to my explanations. When we came to the grammar topic of places, one of them helpfully changed his position and everyone was shouting “behind”, “next to”, “opposite of” as he hopped around a chair. Everyone who walked passed us gave us strange looks. They were all super excited and had so much fun, I honestly considered to offer free English courses for tuc tuc drivers. When the bus finally came I sat down next to a boy of about 14 years who wouldn’t stop ask me if I wanted to share my food with him. I wasn’t really hungry, but eventually I put the Leibniz cookies from my grandma out of my bag and lay them in front of us on the table. He happily took five cookies and gave me some strange looking fruits and some chilli sauce. After we had been driving for about an hour, the bus driver turned on a movie. It was about a small village where a dog suddenly went crazy and tried to eat all the inhabitants. It was so loud and the quality just as the story line so poor, I felt like I might as well be easier to jump out of the bus and walk to Battambang. To my infortune, the man behind me suddenly began to ask me what I was doing in Cambodia and when I said I worked as a teacher he asked me if I wanted to come and visit his university somewhere in the middle of nowhere to help. I told him, if I should ever find time I would try to come, but he insisted to get my e-mail. I don’t understand why foreigners, no matter how unprofessional they might look (an 18 year old girl with an old backpack and a strange mix of clothes), are always being invited to come to teach only because they have white skin. No matter that English teachers in Phnom Penh have a bad reputation, as really everyone can come and start to work there. When I had written down my e-mail address for the man, I tried to sleep, but of curse I was interrupted again. The man on the other side of the aisle pointed on himself and said he was part of the Muslim minority in Cambodia. Then he told me his whole life story and showed me pictures of his family. He wanted to know if there were many Muslims in Germany and if I had ever thought about changing my religion. I told him that I wasn’t religious at all, what just made him sigh in a “the youth of today”-way. The drive should take seven hours but to that point, we were already on the road for eight. Well, that is not exactly true, we spent a lot of time stopping, so we had time going to the toilet or buying something to eat. When we stopped this time though, we were really in the middle of nowhere. I looked out of the window to see if I could spot something, but I couldn’t. Around us were just fields. In that moment my phone began to ring. I looked at the display and saw that it were my grandparents. Perfect timing of course. I answered the phone and could barely understand anything because it was so loud. The guy next to me looked curious as if he wanted to take over the phone and the Muslim man looked as if he wanted to say that we really had other problems and I should be reasonable and turn of the phone. I stood up and went to the driver seat to get away from the noise, but it just got worse. I turned around them and faced the whole bus load full of people. “Som siem sniet!”, I said like I do it with my younger students (please be quiet) and immediately it was silent. What classroom words can do is really magic. I then asked the driver to open the door to explain my grandparents that we apparently just got a engine breakdown in the middle of nowhere and it was about to be pitch dark in about five minutes. I said it in a nice and reassuring way though, of course. Soon everyone else realized, that we wouldn’t move away from here for some time and got out of the bus. It took two hours until another bus arrived to pick us up.
The next morning I rented a bicycle to drive to the Bamboo Train outside of Battambang. No matter where I go in Cambodia, it looks the same. High palm trees and people that sell their fruits in front of little wooden houses, that are covered in advertisement for beer and blue plastic chairs. There is also an orange box with beverages and some candy that is hanging off the ceiling, waiting to be sold in front of nearly every house. There are motorbikes and lost cows on the way and crowds of children that say hello to you. And then there are men lying in hammocks and women feeding chicken. I asked some people for the way, but just seemed to move farther away from the place I actually wanted to go. Suddenly I saw something small and black coming towards me. I closed my eyes and felt a burning pain. Directly under my eye, a bee had stung me. I am allergic against bees and know so, since I once stepped on a bee when I was six years old and my foot got swollen three times the size. I wasn’t going to just stop looking for the bamboo train though and was in the middle of nowhere so it wouldn’t make much sense to just stop. The train rail seemed to be centuries old and the actual “train” was just a wooden table with little wheels under it. Two men moved the thing on the rail and off we went, much faster than I ever imagined it could be possible. The Cambodians had used the train to transport goods from one place to the other when the streets were destroyed and there was no infrastructure after the time of the Khmer Rouge. The whole landscape looked horrible, after the harvesting season there was no green anymore to be seen and instead everything was dark black And old Khmer saying goes like this: “If you want to learn, kill the master; if you want the fruits, burn the foot of the tree. This seemingly paradoxical assertion actually means that the student should outperform his master. One used to put ashes at the foot of the coconut tree in order to fertilize the soil. Furthermore, some make a fire at the foot of the tree because of the fact that under stress plants tend to increase their fruit production. That is why Cambodian farmers set fire to their rice fields, to improve the next harvest. I was nevertheless shocked to see the never-ending area of burned soil. I wish it would be possible to drive with a train through the whole country, but it might take years until this is possible again. In the mean time my eye got swollen worse and worse.
In the afternoon I met Stacy who was in Battambang for work and she was shocked when she saw my eye. She couldn’t believe that it was only a sting, as I could barely open the eye. We sat down in a little restaurant to eat something and were talking as suddenly a boy emerged and introduced himself to us. He said he was from Norway and in Cambodia for two weeks. We were a little bit confused that he came to talk to us out of the blue and then I realized that two of his friends were behind him. When I was mustering them, it occurred to me, that they were all looking at my eye. Then the first guy asked me, if he could pray for me. I looked very confused and Stacy seemed to be so shocked, she didn’t reply either. The guy might have thought we didn’t really understand him. He asked me again, if he could pray for my eye. I slowly shook my head and explained to him, that it was a bee sting and that I would try to get a cream for it or anti-allergics. I thought of the story in the bible when Jesus healed the blind man and the way that the other guys crowded behind him, made me think of the disciples. Scary. He looked deeply disappointed when I rejected his request, came to me and took my hands in his. Needless to say, that the whole restaurant was staring at us and Stacy still didn’t react. He looked at me as if he wanted to hypnotize me and said: “I am a Christian. I can heal people.” At this point I started to laugh. I was sure that somewhere had to be a hidden camera. But when I saw the disappointed look on his face, I kind of felt bad and told him I was sorry, but I was going to be fine without his prayers, too. Then they left one after the other, following the modern day Jesus from Norway who had come to Cambodia to heal people.
The next day my eye looked so horrible, I nearly regretted not having let Jesus pray for my eye. The whole staff in my hostel urged me to go to the hospital, so I said yes. It took ages until the doctor had time for me and I had to give what felt like a litre of blood. Then a doctor who could barely speak English asked me a whole bunch of questions about my eye and then he wrote down about twenty different kinds of remedies for me. I told the women in the pharmacy I only needed the anti-allergica and gave everything else back. Weird looks followed me wherever I went. I was not only taller, whiter and blonder than everyone else now, I also looked like the female version of Quasimodo.
In the afternoon I decided to go with a group of people from my hostel to a bat cave. It was on top of a mountain, about half an hour away from town by Tuc Tuc. On the mountain was also an incredibly beautiful pagoda, with towers carved with flowers, shining in gold. When we arrived on top of the mountain I saw a tree that grew just next to the stupas. It was the same tree that my host family has in their garden. The so called Moringa leaves are growing on the branches and it is one of the super foods that contain all kind of vitamins and minerals. Buying it in a shop is very expensive and eating the wild grown leaves is even better. I told everyone about it and a minute later all four people that came with me there started to eat the leaves of the tree as if they were starving. A girl from Australia asked me if a little package was really 20 Dollars and when I said yes, she put another hand full in her mouth. It was the funniest thing I had ever seen. What was very sad on the other hand was, that the place had been used by Khmer Rouge as “Killing Caves”. There are thousands of holes, tunnels and carvings in the mountain where bats live and where in former times prisoners had been tortured and thrown down the in the darkness to rot. There are still bones and skulls everywhere, it is truly terrifying to see. When it was about to get dark, we sat down on a rock and waited for the bats to come out. We had seen some little ones before, flying over our heads and hanging from the ceiling above us. They were really cute, but suddenly, there was a giant black cloud that came out of the mountain, so that you could barely see how many there were coming out at once, it was just a cloud of black wings. It didn’t stop for about an hour, until the last bat came stumbling out of the mountain, it was impressive, but creepy at the same time. There had to be so many holes, so much dark, undiscovered space that nobody ever saw before, the thought of it made me shiver. Matched with the horror stories of the Khmer Rouge, even the beautiful pagoda couldn’t convince me to stay any longer.
In the evening I went to the local circus school what was very impressive. It was all about the processing of the past and the crimes against humanity under which the society had to suffer. Today there are barely old people to be seen on the streets, so many died and the society is young but nevertheless influenced by their parents, which suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. I never realize it that much, but a girl told me that she had been so shocked to come to Cambodia for the first time as she had travelled in Vietnam and Thailand before and she couldn’t see old people anywhere. It seemed to her that something was wrong and odd about the country and only after some time she realized that this was the things that had bothered her. In the circus school there was singing, dancing, acting and acrobatic and I was highly impressed by the talent of the young children from the villages. When they continue to be trained in the circus, they can later work in the official, professional circus in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap. I was lucky to see the performance, as they only have one per week, but that was surely the reason why it was so good and the children seemed to have so much fun with everything they were doing.
The next day I left Battambang and went to Koh Kong. As I love hiking, I wanted to go and see the Jungle there. A man whose name is Alex Gonzalez-Davidson that comes originally from Spain has lived there for 20 years and founded an NGO with the name “Mother Nature”. He speaks fluent Khmer and has prevented the jungle from being destroyed by deforestation many times just as raised awareness with making many movies in Khmer to show the people the preciousness and rarity of the area. He was so popular within the Khmer people, because he really made an effort to learn their language and culture and became one of them. Today he is a celebrity, especially on facebook you can read only positive response towards the things he is doing. When the Cambodian government wanted to build a dam in Koh Kongs rain forest area, he organized a protest with so many people, that it was not possible for the send people to take the measurements and plans. After that, the government refused to extend Alexs visa and he had to leave the country, by military force. The response of the Khmer people was heart breaking: “I was there to protect him and went with him to the airport to protect him from the military. I wanted to protect him as he protected our nature.” Or “We should not kick Alex out of the country, we should give him a citizenship. He did more for the Khmer people than all of the politicians today together.” I was very interested in his case and what happened to him and the project then. That was also why I wanted to see the place with my own eyes. I hopped out of the bus on my way to the provincial capitol of Koh Kong. From there on I had to take a little boat that would drive me down a river and to another village from where on it was possible to walk in the jungle. With the fisher boat I was two hours on the water. It was the most amazing landscape and I could see, why people would risk their life to preserve it. Cambodia is so flat, that you could see mountains nowhere I have been before. Now they surrounded me. It was like floating in a giant valley down into a world where there is no sign of civilization. Now and then there were huts by the waterside, framed by the long branches of giant trees. The people there lived with the nature in a way I never saw it before. The boat driver explained to me, that the river was their source of life, where they found nearly all their nutrients. When I arrived in the small village and got off the boat, I was welcomed by a family that told me I could stay the night at their house. I always thought hat my family lived in humble conditions, but this was a whole new level. I was sleeping on the floor and all we had to eat was rice and potatoes. The next morning I went with a group of five, two locals and two other people that had come to the village the day before, in the jungle. The path first led through a valley and it was incredibly hot. Our guard told us we should watch out for snakes and five minutes later a giant yellow animal passed our way, about 20 centimetres from my foot. The locals showed us which plants we could eat, which were poisonous and which you could use as a remedy. We cut some branches that contained drinking water and found sweet berries that we ate all day long. After the valley we came in the jungle and it was just like one would imagine an authentic rain forest to be like. In the crowns of the trees you could see colourful birds flying, the trees were so thick that five people could not lay their arms around and giant stones in the shapes of animals kept lying in our way. Every time we passed a smaller stream, the guides just lay down in the water and drank with their bare hands. In the evening we arrived at our camp, a little hut where we hang up our hammocks. Nearby was a giant waterfall and we all went swimming there before the night fell. From one point that was about seven meters high you could jump in the water and it just felt amazing to get a jungle shower after the whole day walking. Then we brew tea with the things we collected and cooked some rice with vegetables. Before we all went to sleep, the guard told us that we should be prepared for tigers, bears and even elephants to interrupt us at night, but I was so tired, I fell asleep in two seconds. The next day we continued our way and had to cross a river over stones that were so slippery, I was sure I was going to fall. Then we climbed up a rock and suddenly had a great view around the whole area, as it was still early morning, the fog was hanging in the trees and the screams of monkeys filled the air. All you could see was a green landscape, but it was like the air was vibrating with all the hidden life underneath. I was so glad to having come there and seen the place that I heard so much about in the media with my own eyes. It is a world so innocent and untouched, it would be crime to destroy it for the sake of money. I felt like I had to do something, change something myself. But it sometimes feels like it is far easier to do bad than good. I imagined the elephants dying when the river had no water anymore and the tigers not being able to hunt anymore, because there were no trees to hide behind. All the beautiful flowers smashed under the weight of a steamroller. It was so hard to leave the jungle again to go back to reality. I knew I could never come back and see the place like I left it.
captivatingcambodia 