Weekend, Insanity (part 1)

Another multi-part update. Sorry. I've gotten lazy with this. As have you with the comments!!

So, my weekend update is long overdue. Here’s what I did.

Friday I went out with work to hold some meetings in the communes (a commune is the smallest administrative area recognized in Cambodia; they’re small villages and are in no way communist). We were commissioning Citizen Advisors, who, with our training, would teach the locals – who have no education and concept of law, human rights or democracy – about, well, law, human rights and democracy.

The communes are a trip. Often, the roads aren’t really roads -- they’re just piles of dirt that have been flattened by lots of use. Or, they're somewhat roads, just with unending amounts of potholes. So, we’d bump and jostle across the “road” for an hour or two, reach the meeting (which I’d suffer through since it was all in Khmer... sigh), and then repeat it. At one point in the afternoon we had to wait on the side of the road as a tractor “built” the road for us; the road was literally a huge series of dirt piles, and the tractor flattened them into a sort of plateau that we very slowly drove over. Probably took hours to go a matter of 10 km. And I almost barfed a couple times. We ate this totally sketchy lunch in Kampong Speu province that I was convinced was going to make me hurl instantly; it didn’t, but I was hungry all afternoon.

It’s insane to see this level of poverty and under-development. The houses were often literally shacks amongst rice fields. The schools were old and rotting. People stared at our truck and white skin like we were aliens that just landed in the mother ship. It was humbling, to say the least. At one place I was given an authentic scarf made in the design worn by all citizens in the area. The people were very gracious.

When we got back to PP I headed to Steve’s Steak House as it has the biggest burgers I knew of in town and I was starving. I order the big burger, and doused it in ketchup... or so I thought. I had actually grabbed the chili sauce bottle, which looked just like – and was sitting right next to – the ketchup bottle. Hottest burger I’ve ever eaten, but I was starving so I just got through it. I got home so late that all my housemates had already left to go out so I just chilled at home and fell asleep really early.

Saturday

Woke up way too early again to catch the bus to Kep. Kep is a beach town on the south coast of Cambodia that just got ravaged during the war in the 1970’s and really hasn’t been rebuilt much. Really, it was pretty much a ghost town and we were one of the few hundred people there. But it is beautiful, and it is the ocean, so it was alright in my book.

The bus ride was another four hours of dust and constant jostling, despite the fact that it was only a 120 km trip. Lovely. I do around 130-140 km/hr in Ontario. They didn’t want to run A/C so they just kept all the doors to the bus open the whole time. The smells were nice. The bus itself was falling apart as we drove. I sat in the back listening to Wilco and dreaming about moving to Chicago and had a sort of zen-like peace for an hour or two.

So we get to Kep and decide to take a boat across to Rabbit Island, which lays off the shore of Kep in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand. It’s about a few km across the open sea to get there. In true Cambodian fashion, our moto driver “had a friend with a boat” who magically appeared after a twenty second phone call and the mention of $20 in payment. Soon, we’re on some complete stranger’s rickety old, tiny rowboat – which had thankfully been juiced up with an absolutely pitiful offboard motor – a few miles off the coast of Cambodia and I’m just freaking out. I hate water. I’m watching him pump water out of the bottom of the boat. Fish are flying in the air and hit Erin in the face. Really, it was fun, but I hate deep water, as I said. We could see into Vietnam from the boat, and in the gulf there were all these small islands all around... it really was beautiful.

We get to Rabit Island, it’s a secluded beach, really beautiful. Too bad it is raining. We swim in the ocean any way, and it was totally warm, which was awesome. We quickly forgot about the rain. I’m glad to say I’ve now swam in three of the four oceans (and I hope I never swim in the Arctic, honestly).

The trip back across the Gulf was even scarier than the way there because now there was a storm passing in the distance and we were hitting some waves pretty hard. Thought we might have bit it a few times but we didn’t. Everyone made fun of my fear.

Back on stable ground, we had an amazing seafood dinner – grilled crab, deep fried battered squid, and prawns in pepper sauce – and then we all sorta gave up on the night early. There’s zero night life in Kep so I ended up in our little bungalow in the hills (which, I should add, only had electricity from 6PM to 6AM... just like the rest of Kep, which runs on generator). I finished White Noise and Bobby and I went to the guest house patio for a beer a bit later, but that was about it.