Cambodia’s kitchen is made of such an impressive variety of flavors, I never get tired of it. I remember when I was travelling in Thailand with my family, I adored the food so much, I would wish to be able to beam myself back there for every lunch break. I imagined how many wonderful things I could buy myself I could get in Germany maybe a disgusting potato salad for. Especially for vegetarians, the Southeast Asian countries are like heaven. Of course there is meat in every traditional meal, but when you make the effort and cook yourself, there are millions of spices, herbs, fruits and vegetables to buy at every market. I came to the conclusion that I actually like rice more than noodles. Not without reason do Cambodians say: “Nijam bay” (eat rice) when they say they are going to get a meal. One time when I was eating with Sopheak, Chanthou and Pereah lunch on a bask mat on the floor; I stood up to get some water when suddenly all of them began to scream. I looked around in panic, expecting to find a rat somewhere, but then I realized they were all starring at me. I was confused, what had happened in the two seconds since I stood up? I touched my head, because I thought that there might be a giant spider. But no, no spider there. “You can’t walk over the rice!”, Pereah finally exclaimed to reveal the secret. Walk over the rice? Oh sure, as we are eating on the floor, I had put my foot over my plate to get to the other side of the room. “The rice is holy!”, said Chanthou. “It’s like our mother!”, added Sopheak. I remembered when Sopheak told me the story of when she once let the rice get burned and her mother got really angry at her and said she would never find a husband when she couldn’t cook rice. Rice is serious business in Cambodia.
One of my favourite desserts in Cambodia is pumpkin in coconut milk. In Germany I didn’t like pumpkins at all. Especially pumpkin soup was one of the worst dishes I could possibly imagine. In Cambodia I suddenly love the vegetable. There are so many never thought of dishes that you can make with it, there’s no way to get tired of eating it. The pumpkin dessert is very easy to make, you chop the pumpkin and then boil it in water. Afterwards you add sweet milk and pour coconut milk over it all. It’s like heaven. I don’t know how I should ever survive coming back to Germany and not having the amazing food anymore. I will continue wishing to be able to beam myself back for having lunch, probably.
One thing that everyone who has spent some time with me knows is, that I really love quotes. I’m not sure if this is really of any value for my future life, but once I like them they are stuck in my head and I can’t get them out even if I wanted to. I decided that we needed some inspirational quotes in the Learning Center and began to draw posters in different colours to underline it. I started with Ghandis “Be the Change You Want to See in the World” and “Educating the mind Without Educating the Heart is No Education at all” by Aristotle and finished with “A Good Education Will Stay with you Forever”. I was quite pleased to see, that the children are actually stopping to read the quotes.
Once I wrote about the short movie that I made with two of my students, Nareth and Lisa, about the rules in the learning centres. Now Sokhan asked me to do one more, but this time in Khmer. We might be putting the movie on the tablets that we are getting donated next year. I still think that it is a very good idea and having the movie in Khmer, in that way you can make sure that everyone understands it.
I am learning the present continuous right now with my students from 3 to 4 and I gave them 20 new verbs to learn with it. They insisted that they would only learn them for the next day, if I learned them in Khmer. I thought it was a deal and sat down to learn them all. When I came in class the next day, I had to pronounce every single one of the words in five different words before an “aaaaah”-sound went through the class. It is so frustrating, really. Just to give one example of how hard it is to pronounce the words is the sentence “Can I help you?” – “Dta knyom juiy neak?”. When you pronounce it just a little bit different it ends up meaning “Can I f*ck you?” – Dta knyom joiy neak?”. I can’t understand how they can make two such words so similar, but whatever. Maybe they wanted to have something to laugh about.
For New Year I went to Sihanoukville, to meet Sam and Garlaine there, two girls that are volunteering for the same organization as Stacy and that I met at our Bookbridge workshop. I left at the 31st of December to not be missing in school longer than necessary. First I put my backpack on my shoulders (I don’t know how it survived the last year with me, I didn’t have much mercy with it) and biked all the way to the bus stop down national road number two. When the bus finally came (one and a half hours later of course), there were no seats anymore. I told the bus driver that I could sit on the floor, because it didn’t make much of a difference to me. The man looked at me completely shocked about the fact that a ‘barang’ would sit on the floor. I ended up in the alley between the seats on a tiny plastic chair. I didn’t turn out to be the only false passenger. Behind me were 10 other Cambodians on plastic chairs. The chairs were very low of course, so I kind of felt like a giant on a dwarf furniture. When we arrived in Kampot, I had to change to a taxi. The taxis in Cambodia are really incredible. They try to fit as many people inside as humanly possible, meaning that there is one person between the driver and the door, one person where the hand break is, two people on the second chair in the front and surely five people in the back. So it’s nine people in total in a tiny car and I was told that it’s not unusual for them to put eleven in it. Don’t ask me where the people are then, probably in the trunk.
During my time travelling I had desperately tried to call Garlaine. She left for Sihanoukville the day before, but every time I dialled the number, I got a message that it was not possible to build a connection. When I finally arrived in Sihanoukville at 4 pm on New Years day, I was pretty much in the worst mood imaginable. I had been for more than two hours in a car without air conditioning, squeezed between a pregnant women and a stinking man, not being able to move an inch just to find myself alone in a town I didn’t know without anyone I knew, on New Years day. Additionally I was hungry and thirsty and still sweating. I began walking down the road and went through some backyards to get closer to where I suspected the beach to be. I got a coconut from a women that seemed to sense that I was feeling miserable. I just sat down on the roadside, sipping my coconut, looking like seven days of rainy weather. I began to wish I had stayed at home. Now I imagining myself sleeping in a horrible cheap guest house, celebrating New Years all alone (part of that was to become true). I felt so miserable; I nearly started to cry and pour tears in my coconut. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Do you know if there is any place where we can sleep this night? We asked everywhere, but it seems like everyone on this planet is in Sihanoukville for New Years and it’s all booked.” I turned around and looked at a girl that had the same hairstyle like my little sister. Brown and cut under the ear, so that the top would look mischievously up from under the chin. She smiled at me and raised her eyebrows at the same time expectantly. Her friend next to her was smiling too. She had curly blonde hair and a lot of freckles. “I have no idea.”, I said honestly. “So where do you sleep then?”, asked the blonde girl with a French accent. “I don’t know… honestly”. I told them the story of how I couldn’t call Garlaine and didn’t know what to do. The girl with the brown hair smiled and shrugged her shoulders: “So you are going to sleep at the beach with us?” I considered what other choices I really had and stood up. “my name is Malin, nice to meet you.” Their names were Loelia and Emma and they were both French. Sometimes I feel like travelling is not about arriving somewhere and taking pictures of the things that millions of people saw before you, but about meeting people along the way. That’s what really makes a journey unique and unforgettable. We headed off in direction beach when we walked past a cheap looking guesthouse. In fact, the most abandoned looking guesthouse I ever saw in my life. The guy that was standing in front of it, with barely any clothes on and a yellow sign in his hands to advertise a New Years Party, screamed at us when we were barely standing two meters away from him: “Rooms for only one dollar!! Don’t miss this chance and don’t miss our party!!!”. “You still have rooms?”, asked Emma astonished. It turned out that the room he had talked about was a tiny chamber with a story bed in which an infinite number of people could fit, as the matrasses were not divided. In the door was a guy that was just shaving his head and the drawer that we could use to put our important things inside was half-broken. Well then. I kind of didn’t care because we wouldn’t actually sleep there as it was New Year and we could find something else the next day. We tried to get away from the bald guy and get to the beach as fast as possible. We could already see, that it was completely full with people. I don’t know how many, but it was gigantic. We decided to go swimming with the last rays of sunlight that shone down on us. We climbed some rocks to get away from the crowd and jumped in the water. I always loved swimming, no matter where I am and no matter how cold the water is, I always have the urge to jump in. That’s probably how I ended up swimming in the Tonle Sap. It was just wonderful, I somehow didn’t feel so miserable anymore and I seemed to just click with Lia and Emma right from the start. Afterwards they explained me that they didn’t have a lot of money and were therefor mainly eating coconuts what was absolutely fine with me. Coconuts are just amazing. (I might have mentioned that before). We were talking about all kinds of things, realizing that we had a lot in common, beginning with our love for spontaneous decisions. When we walked to the part of the beach that was filled with people, it was already dark. Once again I was overwhelmed by the number of people. There seemed to be no empty spot left on the beach. They had already begun with the firework. Of course you normally start to send off the firework at midnight, but here the whole sky was filled with more lights than I ever saw before in my life at seven o’clock. They also had lanterns that were floating in the sky, mingling with the real stars. They looked just like the ones from Tangled and seemed to be the last thing missing to create this special atmosphere. I was astonished to see them all. Lia, Emma and I got a heart shaped lantern and lit it in the water. The whole sky was spectacular and it should go on like this till midnight. We tried to find our way through the crowd, passing by hundreds of people. At one place we got free drinks, at another we could paint pictures on ourselves with glowing colour and at another we were invited to build a sandcastles, decorated with hundreds of candles. Then we went dancing to WESTERN music and basically laughed the whole time, imitating all kind of dance styles from different parts of the world. Suddenly I saw Garlaine and Sam and the world was okay again. We greeted each other and Garlaine told me that she went swimming in the morning and when she came out of the water, her whole bag was gone, with mobile phone, key, cards, money etc. She didn’t seem to be bothered about it. I don’t think anyone could be sad at this place at this time. Half an hour later it was midnight and when it wasn’t all crazy before, it was definitely out of it’s mind by then. There were colours everywhere, people dancing shouting, screaming and in front of the shore was a giant construction that was carrying the words “Happy New Year 2015”. I don’t have to explain what happened when they set them on fire.
All in all I managed to get one hour of sleep in the prison chamber and then I escaped with Lia and Emma. We decided to take the morning ferry to Koh Rong, the island in front of Sihanoukville. We were basically the only people on the boat, behind us was a hung-over guy who was splashed with water every time we hit a wave and didn’t care about it at all. When we arrived at the island, we were greatly disappointed. The whole beach was plastered with guesthouses that had signs outside, advertising daily parties and cheap flat rate drinking offerings. We went to one of the bars and sat down. The guy at the table next to ours had a long beard and was reading a newspaper. Lia tapped on his shoulder: “Sorry, you wouldn’t know if there is a calmer place on the island, would you?” “Calmer place?”, he asked. Then he looked at us judgemental as if to make up his mind about something. “How good are you on feet?” “Amazing!”, said Lia immediately. The guy brought a map and showed us a way that seemed to lead straight across the whole island and to the other side. “This beach is called long beach. That has two reasons. First: it is a very long beach. And Second: It been a long time since anyone went there and actually came back”. He started to laugh and winked at us. “How long to get there?”, asked Lia. “Depends on how fast you are. Maybe two hours?” “Let’s go!”, I said. “The sooner we get going, the sooner we are going to arrive.” After some time we found the right track and left the tourist hell behind us. The path was really steep and we passed two water buffalos that were having a nap right in our way. We kept on going and soon the sweat was pouring down from everywhere. That was nothing like going hiking in the Alps. My backpack seemed to be 10 times heavier and the air felt like it was actually so hot, it could burn my skin. When we were enclosed by the jungle it was a little bit better. Not so hot anymore and it was possible to breath. Several times the way parted in front of us and we had to choose which way we should take. It was like in a labyrinth, so we decided to always walk on the right site. We had to climb over fallen trees that blocked our way or push branches to the side that were scraping our faces. Soon we were so high up, we could see the sea again. It was a beautiful day, the first of the New Year. We kept walking when we suddenly saw a sign in front of us. It said, “This is the windy rock. When you feel like you are son going to die, just sit down for a while and enjoy the view!” I walked closer to inspect the rock. Under the rock it just went steep on into nothingness. Maybe this was the highest point of the island. The rock was very long and the surface cool. I climbed up and let my legs hang over the free space. Lia and Emma also came up behind me. From here on we could see the turquoise water of the shore of the long beach. This was just too good, the breeze tussled my hair and I drank a big sip of water. Emma learned German in school and we started to talk in a mixture of French, German and English. They started to teach me “Aux Champs Elysees” and I taught them “Über den Wolken”. When we were able to keep walking, we were singing as loud as possible, certain that nobody could hear us. Fortunately we only had to walk downhill from now on and soon arrived at the beach. All of us were stunned. I didn’t believe that beaches like these existed any longer. The sand was really purely white, no rubbish, no waste was there, the water was crystal clear and the palm trees were full of coconuts. We started to walk down the beach. After an hour we saw two people that had hung hammocks up in the trees and were cooking lunch. They greeted us friendly and when we had gone out of ear sight Emma exclaimed: “Let us do the same! We can build a house here!” Lia and I immediately enthusiastically agreed on the idea. From now on we kept watch if we could find a good place to stay. After another hour we found one. Two trees had grown bended to the beach with their branches intertwined. We ate the rice with vegetable that we had bought in Sihanoukville and began searching for wood. There were unexpectedly, a lot of things that we could use to build our hut. Wood, strings, palm leaves, coconut shells… We worked hard, especially Emma who came several times with monstrous trunks out of the jungle, and soon we had a true Robinson-Crusoe house. I was in love and when Lia put out her mosquito net and we installed it on the point where all our poles came together in the middle of the house looked like we had just made a new invention of a traditional Indian tippi. When the sun began to set, we lay down and watched the colours in the sky. “Isn’t it incredible that the sun is doing this beautiful show every morning and every evening and people are to busy to watch?”, Lia asked. “Yes, incredible. I feel like this is a present that is just for us, that the sun is doing this because she knows she has an audience that is truly watching now.”, I added. I can’t really describe it and even pictures can’t tell what we experienced that evening. It was the most spectacular sunset I had ever seen. It was really as if the sun wanted to say: “Hey! My New Years resolution was to start the month with everything I have.” We didn’t talk any more, everyone of us just stared at the sky, that was changing every moment, to let us see even more spectacular formations. The firework the day before was nothing compared to this. We just laid there for what seemed like an eternity. Emma was the first of us to talk again. She pointed down the beach and there we saw a fire. We realized that we would get really cold without a fire and decided to check out who was there. When we arrived we saw three people sitting around a fire. Their hut looked even nicer than ours. They had made a kind of hut that the Vikings would have appreciated and hung little flowers in empty coconut shells, fruit and vegetable from the ceiling. The two girls, Eleonora and Georgia, that were sitting around the fire were Italian and the guy, Jake, came from Canada. He was dressed like a real hippie, with long colourful clothes and a long grown beard. In his hand he had an ukulele. Eleonora and Georgia, told us that they were camping here for one week already, besides the fact that they had only intended to stay for two days. Now they were planning to stay for one more week and skip Siem Reap on their route, as this place was truly magical and not worth leaving for anything else. We sat down and the guy asked us for our favourite songs by the Beatles. We ordered “Penny Lane”, “Hey Jude”, “Can’t buy me love”, “Eight Days a Week”, “Yellow Submarine” and finally “Let it be”. He could play them all. He asked us for a song that all of us were able to sing. We couldn’t think of any. I suggested that we should try a Disney song. “What about ‘Bare Necessities’?”, Jake asked. Every one of us could sing the lyrics to the song, but only in their own language. First Jake started in English, then Lia and Emma continued in French, then in sung it in German and then Elli and Georgia ended in Italian. It was incredible. We had so much fun, we didn’t even want to walk all the way back to our hut. We decided to meet up with them the next day to explore the island.
In the morning we did yoga at the beach and then meditation to let the soul calm down. I felt like I was buzzing with energy afterwards. After our traditional coconut, we began trekking. There was a way that should apparently lead to a very small fisher village on the island. We found a path and took the chance. Jack had his Ukulele in his hand and invented a new song that went somehow like this: “We don’t know where we are, we don’t know where we go, but we will find our way. We don’t live in the past, we don’t live in the future, we live in this moment as if it was our last.” Jack can play 100 instruments. Whenever he is travelling somewhere he tries to learn the instruments of the country. He already released an album called “Wanderlove” in which he plays songs with a combination of unusual instruments. Completely unexpectedly we stepped all of sudden on an actual road. Half an hour later a truck drove past us. It stopped and the driver gestured for us to climb on top. When well al sat on the loading space the truck continued driving and Jack was playing “Somewhere over the Rainbow”. I looked over the landscape of the island. We drove passed lakes and endless areas of trees. When we finally stopped, we were at the end of the road. In front of us was jungle again. The driver gestured us to walk through the branches. There was a tiny path that we followed down the hill. The beach that we finally arrived at was not very big and the waves were really high. We went swimming of a big flower in the sand and when we came out of the water we began to make a mandala. I drew the outlines in the beach and then we searched shells and flotsam and jetsam that got spilled on the beach to decorate the lines. We put leaves together, searched wood and see tang. It looked stunning in the end. We kept on walking in search of the fishing village and I found about five giant seashells on the way. They were all beautiful and looked like the ones you can buy in stores. The fishing village was just like the one in Takeo that I’ve bin to with Sopheak, Sokna, Pereah and Chanthou. Little huts of wood were built in the water and coloured boats were secured to them with strings. The children came running to greet us and outside of the huts were rows of dry fish. The water seemed to be nor very deep, for meters on no end it seemed to reach in the distance on ankle height. We drank coconuts and played with the children while listening to an old man who was playing the flute.
This night we decided to move to Eleonora and Georgia, simply because we didn’t want to walk all the way back again and because they had a campfire. We went for a night swim and grilled marshmallows with sweet potato and eggplant over the fire. When the moon was high above us, making the stars look pale, I had the idea of making a wish coconut. We all wrote down a wish on a paper and put it in an old coconut shell. Then we put flowers in the opening to close the nut. Everyone of us wrote down the wish. It was then when we realized it was actually full moon. At about three o’clock in the morning Lia shook me awake. “Malin, Malin! Look at the sky!”, I looked up and saw that around the full moon was a kind of white ring, similar to the ones you can make with smoke but it had to be giant. I stopped breathing. It was a kind of natural phenomenon that I never heard of before. “Do you see the green lights down there?”, Lia pointed in the distance, the open sea. “This are the aliens that are coming for us.”, she whispered. We both started to laugh. But then it really seemed like aliens had just arrived from another planet and were about to visit us. I don’t know when we fell back asleep, to continue dreaming about aliens. The next morning we started with our yoga lesson at six o’clock and ate bunch of fruits. Mango, banana, dragon fruit, papaya. I figured that I would get so healthy when I stayed there longer, only walking around all day and eating fruit and rice (and marshmallows). On this day we went snorcheling at the riffs. We couldn’t really see much besides three o four fishes, but the water was so clear, that we could see each other even in 20 meters distance and tried to make handstands and somersault. When we came back to our hut we put our bikini tops on a line to let them try in the sun. We then went to search some coconuts. When we came back the bikini tops were gone. Basically all of them. I couldn’t believe it. We decided not to worry about it, there are worse things to loose than bikini tops I thought, thinking about Garlaine. Lia brought her colours and we began to draw. Emma and Lia are both at an Art Academy in Nancy and very good at drawing. We tried to draw our sunset from memory and then we tried to draw each other. When it was about to get dark again I rushed to the jungle to collect some firewood. I just dived up from under a low branch when I suddenly saw something colourful. In the trees were our bikinitops. All of them hanging from the branches. I called Georgia and she took a photo of it. We couldn’t believe it! We spend the evening decorating our house further. We wrote “Ukulele Bungalow” on the main branch and I added “Million star accommodation, no money wanted.” When we sat around the fire this evening, we played the game when one person has to start telling a story and the other has to continue it. We made up 10 different ones, each crazier than the other. Emma then pointed at the beach and we all fell silent. This evening I saw plankton for the first time. The whole beach was glowing like someone scattered neon colours along the water.
The next morning I took a photo with the ukulele in front of the bungalow. Then I said goodbye to everyone. I had to be back in school Monday. It was really hard to leave, I had the feeling like everything I really needed had been there the last days. When I think about how many wonderful and unusual things happened to me over the passed days, I would never have treated them for a luxury accommodation on the other side of the island. I walked the whole way back, down the beach, to the path we took on the first day and up the mountain. It was even harder than the first time. I told myself I couldn’t stop if I wanted to get the ferry by 9 am. I felt like I was positively about to faint and be surrounded by hallucinations in the middle of the jungle. I was breathing like a locomotive. When I finally arrived at the other side, I felt like I just woke up from a dream. Around me were tourists again, drinking sweet smoothies in the beach bars. And my ship, the backpacker ferry, was just sailing away. Then I saw the fancy speed fairy was at the peer and people were getting in. I rushed to the queue and waited in the line with the suit-case-tourists. The guy at the boarding looked at my ticket for about a nanosecond and I hopped on board. I put my backpack in a corner and took the coconut with our wishes out. I just stood at the reiling, watching the island becoming smaller and smaller. I knew deep in my heart that I would never come back there. In one year they would build a hotel chain on the long beach, the guy with the long hair that had told us about the place had added before we said goodbye to him. I imagined how umbrellas and sunloungers would fill the beach and the jungle where we found our bikinitops would be cut down. I imagined that they would find our little huts and laugh about them, before putting the cement foundation at the very same place. When we were in the middle of the sea I whispered “Let our dreams come true.” and threw the coconut in the foaming waves. I watched the coconut till it was only a tiny dot in the middle of the sea. When I arrived in Shanoukville I was the first to go off board as I never really occupied a seat and headed off with the first motodub driver. I explained him that he should bring me to a Khmer restaurant with traditional food. The best thing about the local places, besides from the good prices, is the free cold drinks that you get there. After I ate I went to the sharing taxi. When I arrived in Kampot, I asked my driver where the bus was. He pointed to a minivan and said that it would drive past Angtasom. The vans are about as big as our VW bus and there are never any tourists in it. I figured I could as well go for it instead of taking the official bus line. I asked the bus driver how much it would be from here to Angtasom. He looked at me and then said it was 10 dollars because of New Year. I told him that New Year had been last Wednesday and today was Sunday. He said it didn’t matter; people like me were still travelling from one place to the other because of it. I shook my head and told him, that this price was crazy and even on New Year itself I wouldn’t have paid that. He didn’t listen at all. I looked him in the eye and said that I didn’t understand why I had to pay more than a Khmer person, as there was no difference between me and them and that I worked as an English teacher and didn’t get paid. This whole conversation we had in Khmer. To that point all the tuc tuc drivers and other hammockers around us were laughing. The driver was raising his eyebrows. “You are the same as a Khmer person?”, he asked me. “I told him that he understood that right. He took my hand and shook it enthusiastically. “You Khmer, I am Khmer! Nice to meet you.” “Nice to meet you too.”, I said. “Two dollars.”, he said and gestured for me to get inside. I breathed out, relieved that this conversation was over. I could live with that. The bus that would have maximally provided space for 6 people in Germany was already stuffed with 15. With horror I watched more and more people get inside. To the time we arrived in Angtasom we were 21 passengers as we stopped for everyone waiting by the wayside. When I got out of the bus I saw that there were 4 people and 10 coconuts sitting on the roof.
When I got home I put my seashells as decoration in front of the door. And then I fell asleep. I had woken up at six in the morning, made yoga, went for swim and a hike before even having had breakfast. This night I dreamed of a pandemonium of impressions that I had collected over the last days.
I felt like I had been kissed by the moon and the stars and would and could never again forget my Robinson Crusoe Days.
captivatingcambodia 