Oct 31 ...a different way of life: the floating villages of Cambodia

At a lunch today, which cost $11.50 for two, in the Old Market of Siem Reap, we discussed  how differently  India and Vietnam/Cambodia  presented their respective country to outsiders. In India,, we saw every fort, every palace and lunched at 5 star hotels....glitz and glamour, a lot of red and gold were the order of the day. Waiting rooms and stations were cleared for us, our attendants carried our bags. In Vietnam/Cambodia we saw temples and pagodas with lots of rich ornamentation and gold as well. But we also saw, and were informed about, the lives of ordinary people. We visited people at work,, in factories, home industries and markets, and learned about vastly different ways of life. And although I have serious reservations about descending upon a village like a cloud of locusts to observe the lives of ordinary people like animals in a  zoo - it smacks of voyeurism -I am grateful for the opportunity of having seen it.

A very different way of life is that of the inhabitants of the floating villages of the Mekong.

These houses are moved every few months in accordance with the water level in the Mekong depending on the monsoon season. Children here are picked up and taken to school, groceries are delivered:

There is no electricity, everything is run by batteries...there are specialists whose job it is to recharge them.

There are floating shops, floating restaurants, floating churches:

even a floating basketball hall\:

The people who live here are fishermen...here is a fish farm being built.

The "basement" cage is under the house when finished...the fish are placed in as minnows, then fed, caught and sold live...most of the farmed fish eaten in restaurants all over the world start life here.

And of course children lean to paddle at an early age, like this babe in a dugout.

It's unbelievable how different life can be!

Oct 29 - Kampong Cham- Eco Village-orphanage

Kampong Cham is the second largest city after Phnom Penh...strangely quiet, it seemed to us, until we learned it was a holiday.

But these young people still worked and here are going home from work in the factory...

There were dozens of these trucks..

We meandered through rice fields...and having never seen a rice field I had no idea how green and lush they were, and much like any other grain field-

 ...to visit an Eco village supported by AMICA, a French organisation, then on to the 12th C temple of Wat Nokor - this one very in the style of Angkor Wat, so I'll save photos until then - to finish off the afternoon by visiting a Cambodian orphanage.

In every village we had come to, the children had followed us around and had asked, nicely, for treats or money.Some of us were uncomfortable with a repeat performance at the orphanage. So at lunchtime the passengers of La Marguerite decided on a gift-giving plan for the children of the orphanage to avoid favoritism and the individual giving of small gifts like pencils and notebooks. We collected money  from everyone before leaving for the afternoon excursion, stopped at the market on the way out and bought school uniforms. With the money collected, we bought 57 uniforms for boys and girls of various ages, and donated the balance to the orphanage to help defray daily expenses. It costs 40 cents a day to feed a child...the money we donated will feed 3 children for a year.

The orphanage has 92 children, there are 20 orphanages in Cambodia. And I am told, these are the lucky ones...many children live on the street. The director was grateful for our contribution and the children sang songs for us...

Oct 29 - Pagodas, monks and cheeky kids...

We’re getting quite used to being accompanied everywhere by hordes of children…they take your hand, and practice their English (“”Hello what is your name?) and sometimes run away before you have a chance to answer.

Wat Hanchey was no different…they descended on us like a horde of flies and stuck. 

A  policeman did his best to chase them away, but it all became a game to them, and to us, and they provided great photo ops.

Wat Hanchey is a very old temple, from the 8^th century thus predating Angkor Wat by several centuries. 

 

 Here some ruins from the oldest part, a temple built of brick.

The whole temple complex is still very much in use, occupied by a number of Buddhist monks who were happy to talk to us and  practice their English and show us where they live.

 

Inside the temple the light was beautiful....

...the Buddhas truly "awesome".

Oct 28 Chong Koh Village...silk, children and mud

Just in case you don't know where we are...we started in Ho Chi Minh City in the south, boarded the Marguerite in My Tho, have just passed Phnom Penh on our way to Tonle Lake and Siem Reap and Angkor Wat.

The smell of wood burning fires, rain and mud, milling children...Chong Koh is another Cambodian village on an island in the Mekong River. Like Evergreen Island in Vietnam, this place reminds me of rural Mexico in the 60's.

The people fascinate me...so here a sampling of the ones who trailed after us in the village where we watched people at work in the cottage industries of weaving cotton and silk scarves.

This boy who looks like nine, is actually 15 years old. Many of the children were not in school that day...one child told me it was a holiday, but in fact they skipped school to help sell silk and cotton scarves..
The village has just come through the rainy season, when the island is flooded...all the walkways were still quite muddy...

Oct 27- Phnom Penh - palaces, pagodos and Killing Fields

Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, is a bewildering contradiction of impressions. I awoke this morning with the image of Munch's The Scream imprinted on my retina. The souls of millions of people murdered during the genocide of Khmer Rouge are screaming. It was not a comfortable awakening.

No-one else seemed bothered though and we viewed both the Royal Palace with the Silver Pagoda,

 [...we saw Buddhist monks on the phone, on motorcycles, and on vacation...]

 [Bibi, caught...]

 [Acres of  these wall paintings, mercifully unrestored, had beautiful colours and interspersed text]

and the National Museum in the morning. The Silver Pagoda, where the floor is made of silver, each of 5000 tiles weighing 1 kg, houses an incredible Buddha made of gold, 90 kg of it, studded with 9,584 diamonds in the chakra spots. No photos allowed unfortunately. I ignored the 100's of other antiques and artifacts on display....there is simply too much to take in. Much the same happened in the National Museum. Guides are anxious to display their knowledge of history and English, so I wander off to stare at one of the 1000's of sculptures.

This one, outside in the garden, symbolizes the city of Phnom Penh for me, the destruction and the hope.

Phnom Penh, a city struggling to catch up to the rest of the world, has a charming downtown diplomatic and residential section, vestiges of the French regime, and great shopping in several markets geared to the monied.   It also has young men on every street corner, indication of the  65% unemployment, and unfinished apartment buildings inhabited  by squatters.

Traffic is chaotic...not only does everyone- carefully- drive wherever they want, they also drive in the (even for here) wrong direction.

We spent the afternoon in a tuktuk, Bibi and I, opting to go shopping for silk at the Russian Market instead of seeing the Killing Fields.

Observing Cambodian life from the back of a tuktuk is possibly the most efficient way of seeing the city, if you can deal with the erratic traffic. In all of Asia we have not seen a single traffic accident.
Everything is very inexpensive here according to what we have seen elsewhere. Massages are advertised at $4. US haircuts at 75 cents. ATM's are everywhere and spew US cash which is accepted widely. On the other hand, there are not a lot of people here spending money.

Here is our bus, captured in a helmet...

Oct 26 - Tan Chau and Evergreen Island

An amazing excursion into rural Vietnam... a trip into another era...








We moved through the villages by rickshaw....

Not many tourists come this way, we had a warm welcome...smiles everywhere, people at the side of the road, waving...for once I felt as much like a zoo animal as they must feel when we marsh through, cameras clicking everywhere.
We see all kinds of things from the back of the rickshaw...here a house under construction , note the scaffolding...

 ...dinner...there were about a dozen of these by the side of the road...

 ...lovely people, welcoming...

 We saw more people at work...great pride in the home industries, small factories producing (imitation) silk, mat-making:

 ...and a lady from the old regime...

 At the silk factory Bibi went local...

But for me the highlight was the sidetrip to Evergreen Island...no cars, only bicycles. 700 people live in an area 1 km wide and 7 km long...there is no electricity. In the monsoon season the island floods, that's why the houses are on stilts. when they cannot grow their crops, they catch fish, right under their houses.

For me this was a trip into the past. The similarities to the life style of (very) rural Mexicans from half a century ago with the lifestyle of rural Vietnamese in the 21st century took me back more than 40 years to Caracol where I did community development work with a group of seminarians.
The smell of wood fires, the construction of the homes (no windows necessary, you can see through the grass and twig construction), the laundry, the smiling people, the mud....