Dancing lessons from god

Saturday, August 23, 2008

1:59 AM ICT

Room 29, Golden Sun Guest House

Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia

It was such a simple plan, really. Me and Natalie both wanted to get from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh, and Dave (Natalie’s boyfriend, who recently joined us, and who has his own organization doing work in Cambodia) had a work-related meeting in Battambang. So we decided to take a boat to Battambang, then a bus to Phnom Penh later the same day. Get the scenic and the speedy, and see a bit of a new city.

Now the case of the Siem Reap – Battambang boat trip is an interesting one. Both myself and Natalie had heard good things, but Lonely Planet remained… cryptic. Despite seeming to recommend the trip, the guide spends a lot of time complaining about how expensive it is, and how you’ll simultaneously freeze and get sunburned. But whatever, we figured it would be an experience, at the very least. So Thursday morning, the shuttle bus that takes people to the boat to Battambang left our hotel at 6:15am, and we figured we’d be in Phnom Penh by 6pm the same day. But it’s now Friday, and we only got to the guest house (somewhere between a hostel and hotel, very popular for travelers in Cambodia) around 12:30pm. How did we go so wrong?

Now besides the other things it says about the trip, Lonely Planet also places the length of the trip, somewhat cryptically, at “three to eight hours long.” They explain that during the dry season, water levels are low and the boat has to waste a lot of time looking for deep enough water and slogging through mud. But the rainy season lasts May to October, so we figured it would be in the 3 hour range.

Since the boat left at 7:15am and only arrived at Battambang at 2:45pm, I believe that places the trip in the 7.5 hour range, and for those keeping track, 7.5 is closer to 8 than it is to 3.

And of course, after getting in, Dave had 2 hours of meetings, and the last bus from Battambang to Phnom Penh had already left at 2pm anyway, and we were sick and tired of sitting and travelling, so we spent the night in Battambang. Then this morning we took a taxi (a Toyota Camry with driver… every car here is a Toyota Camry) to Phnom Penh, and then Dave had another meeting that we tagged along to, and hence only got to the guest house arrived 12:30pm.

I suppose there were warning flags (which, I’m slowly realizing, are among the most popular types of flags in Cambodia) that the boat trip might be problematic. The first was the boat itself, which was probably 30 years old, if not more, and almost certainly had its original motor. It was long and thin, featuring two rows of hard wooden benches facing each other, and (thank merciful god) a roof. It was designed to hold maybe 15 people and some bags. We had 5 or 6 crew, a rotating roster of locals hitching rides, and 18 passengers, each with luggage enough to support a multi-week trip to Cambodia. The banister, which, from inside the boat, hit around your upper back, was maybe a foot out of the water, max. The boat also seemed dangerously close to tipping over anytime anyone moved. It is my growing contention that you cannot (or at the very least should not) travel within Cambodia without coming face-to-face with your own mortality at least once every… three days.

The official flag of Cambodia. Rank popularity among flags in Cambodia: 1st (tied).

Now without a doubt, the trip was incredible, in many ways. The sense of imminent doom was bad, the fact our boat broke down for 20 minutes in the middle of mosquito-infested nowhere was bad, the painful hardwood seats were bad, the fact we were squished together like sardines was bad, the fact the trip lasted 7.5 hours despite our relatively brisk pace was bad, but the rest of the trip was awesome, I swear!

First, the trip took me to areas of Cambodia I would have never seen otherwise. Rural Cambodia. Poverty even worse than in the city, but it’s not the same kind of poverty. It’s not poverty living in a capitalist city, it’s poverty living what is basically a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They’re fishers. Every day, they go out on the river in homemade canoes (some with motors, many without) and fish and gather fruits and vegetables that grow naturally. And to say they go out on the river is a bit silly, because they live on the river. Not in houses at the river, they live on the river. Floating villages. Houseboats, basically. Houses (again, homemade) on bamboo platforms, tied to empty oil barrels, then anchored to the sea floor. They do it because every year, during the rainy season, the river expands to several times its dry season size (and depth), and they would die otherwise. (This is as opposed to the strategy of the city dwellers who live near the river, who, in an effort to stay at road level, design for their houses a series of stilts made of unsupported, uneven, and generally not entirely straight, tree branches.) I hate to seem like I’m romanticizing such poverty, but for them it’s not a lack of wealth, it’s a removal from the wealth system. Does that make sense? (This makes sense in my head, but it might require a blog post of its own to fully explain.Man, even when I'm a tourist in Cambodia I wind up talking about poverty and social ills!)

Fisher, in high-tech fishing vehicle.

It’s kind of hard to see from the picture, but this is actually in the middle of a river, and all of these houses are floating (and all the trees have their roots underwater.)

Similar are the farmers who live further along the river. They have houses on land (though the houses are often made of little more than twigs, bamboo, and mud). And again, they live off the land, growing rice and other crops, generally using an ox to power their carts. I think much of it is sustenance farming, and the rest are family farms. This isn’t to say there aren’t corporate rice farms (there are, and a lot of them) but these are something entirely separate, something that completely doesn’t exist in Canada.

I swear to fucking god this picture was taken yesterday and not eight hundred years ago, and those are *seven* actual people living in that house (perhaps more).

Sustenance farmer kids! The kids seem to love the boat. Much time during the trip is spent waving to children on the shore. Much fun.

Second fun thing about the boat trip, and probably most dramatic, was an incredible section of the ride right in the middle. You see, most of the time, the boat is heading down a wide wide river. Most of the river is covered in floating vegetation and floating villages. But, there has been cleared a section in the middle probably 20 or 30 metres wide; like a highway down the middle of the river. But this particular boat has a route that passes through protected nature areas. And apparently in Cambodia, it’s fine for large motorboats to travel through protected nature areas at high speeds, as long as their route isn’t too wide. And too wide is any wider than the boat. The boat is literally brushing up against weeds on either side. And that’s fine (except when 2 boats need to pass, which happened once during our trip). What’s less fine are the trees. Because trees are essentially the shape of an inverted pyramid. So even if the tree won’t interfere with the boat at water level, there will be branches that interfere higher up… say, at the level of your neck. Moving at 30 or 40 km/hr. A sharp tree branch, protruding into the boat.

Seriously, boat width.

The solution, and it’s a rather genius one in how simple and effective it is, is a bright red curtain made of a light tarp that can be pulled down over the openings at the side of the boat. It creates an amazing effect in the boat, as you’re in a bright red cocoon, with branches and leaves and plants whipping and scratching along the outside of the tarp (what’s less fun is the part of the tarp that wasn’t secured at the bottom, and would flap in the wind, occasionally allowing a persistent and sharp branch in to attack the Spanish woman unfortunate enough to sit in front of it.) Still quite exciting, and a damn lot of fun.

View from inside the red cocoon. Also a view of Dave and Natalie, my partners-in-travel.

And finally, and I suppose this originates from the (in many ways) terribleness of the trip: the sense of community. I’ve felt this before, in overcrowded buses (or, once, a crashed bus), in classes with terrible profs, during huge storms. It’s a unique sense of group belonging that seems to only develop out of collectively surviving a horrible experience. You know, lots of joking, knowing looks, extra support for those not handling the situation well, getting excited if you see them out in the ‘real world’… But seriously, the trip wasn’t horrible… for the most part.

PS: Five points to the first person who can identify the source of the title of this post, sans google.