And so on and on …….

Now early December and we hear of chills and snow back home, shame!
We have ventured from out temperate paradise to engage in ventures far a field.
Due to circumstances beyond our control we have no VA’s, or volunteer assistants, who act as our translators at workshops, meetings etc, etc, etc. They are extremely competent and very skilled and get paid very little. Anyway, I was invited to a CESSP (I won’t bore you with the acronym details, VSO is full of them, oops there’s another one!) in a place called Battambang (or BTB). As Jan was left without any translators i.e. hands, eyes and ears now removed from the Khmer world, we fixed it to do an informal ‘study tour’ of the same area (coincidence or what!). This is not an easy task. Firstly we have to escape the Sen Monorom / Mondulkiri (MDK) gravitational pull. This was achieved by leaving at 0730hrs (Khmer time meant this was actually 0845hrs – which still really p_ _ _ es me off as I now realise that I’m ‘anal’ about UK time i.e. 0730hrs means exactly that. So the taxi, a Toyota Camry, arrives with a smile (hope he knows a good dentist!) luggage aboard and off we go to Phnom Penh (a mere 7hrs away). Never again will I baulk at the thought of three hours to Exeter to visit Jan’s M&D (I’m also sure that Jan will be relieved to hear this also as I know I’m a nightmare in traffic, so much so that she prepares a travel pack of colouring books, SOD UK’s (as I call ’em) and any other assorted goodies to distract me from the traffic build up before, during and after BLOODY BRISTOL on the M5!)

The seven+ hour journey went fairly quickly considering we had two punctures en route. Needless to say, the first one wasn’t repaired as soon as poss. - that’s far too sensible and easy and so it came to pass that the second meant no spare – no problem. Left at a roadside café / shed whilst the tyre was re-inflated, taxi zooms back up road and reappears some ten mins later, tyre repaired (or a lump of rubber sticking out of the side and inflated). I hadn’t the heart to ask if he had the spare repaired at the same time and I’ll leave you to guess, was it or wasn’t it???

We arrived in Phnom Penh, dropped off at the VSO office / accommodation relieved and somewhat tired!

Our subsequent coach ride to BTB left on time, was relatively straight forward $6 each for a ‘comfortable’ 5-6hr journey and ‘on tarmac’ roads. Although we did see one over confident dog go to the great bone yard in the sky via the front end of a pick up truck – to be honest I’m amazed that the roads aren’t littered with canine corpses (maybe there are but as Khmers are protein deficient…….)

Both meetings / conferences were OK-ish and leave it at that. BTB we thought was a nice place with interesting French colonial buildings still intact, pleasant river promenade and a range of restaurants. Two eateries to note were a lunchtime treat called KKK which we were led to by some resident volunteers up the side of an alley way, back of some buildings to an ‘enclosure’. Menu on wall, we order, man gets on moto goes to market, returns, food cooked. This is a new concept to me – I’ve heard of ‘cooked to order’ but never shopped for and then ….. (very good it was too!). The second was interestingly called ‘Smokin Pot’. I’m sure this may well confuse many of our YFD’s (Youth For Development – basically under 25yr olds) and Dutch volunteers who could be misled only to find somewhere to eat rather than…..

On our final day at BTB we had an afternoon free (it wasn’t meant to be but…..). So, we decided to experience what is called the Norry or more descriptively the ‘Bamboo Train’. This conjured up romantic images of a slow steam train trundling its way through the jungle loaded with goods and particularly bamboo. We hire a Tuk-Tuk – a four to eleven seater motor bike taxi and after eventually working out (derr…) that we were being given the compulsory tour of the local environs (driver stopping, saying he’d wait for us and leaving us to work out this wasn’t actually where we caught the train!), we did arrive at the ‘station’. Not quite the Khmer equivalent of the Simplon Orient Express but a carefully adapted contraption which had bamboo strips as the seating area (see photo insert above). This consisted of an interesting small wheeled bogey system supporting a bamboo slatted ‘platform’ all on a single track. The drive system was a petrol generator with a rubber drive band which wrapped around the rear train wheel axel. The ‘driver’ increased or decreased the speed by using a ‘dead man’s handle’ otherwise called a stick. This hurtled along the very uneven, hard rails with expansion gaps of two to three inches at times, until meeting traffic approaching from the opposite direction – problem; NO. We just get off, after stopping, the bamboo bed’ is lifted from the wheels, wheels then removed from track, other ‘train’ proceeds and then all is reassembled in a matter of seconds, brilliant. In all we experienced this ‘tourist’ attraction and had what we have called the BTB vibro massage – and still have bruises to prove it.
We returned to PHN then back to full occupation of our ‘new’ home in Sen Monorom, MDK province (a mere 6.75Hrs, a record).