First fortnight in Cambodia

Sua s'dai (hello) from us both from Kratie in north east Cambodia. It's hard to believe we've already been in the country for two weeks. It's lovely, and distinctly different from Vietnam in several ways that we've noticed so far:

• Cambodia is much less crowded than Vietnam so although mopeds, dimwitted road behaviour and 'hello ambushes' are still omnipresent they're somewhat more bearable here.
• Once again most people live in reasonably sturdy looking homes, but here they're older, usually built on stilts and frankly more photogenic. Some are nicely painted and many have gardens. Unlike in Vietnam rural people do not have electricity (EVERYBODY in Vietnam has a tv!), and very few have running water. Instead they collect rain water from their roofs in butts and boil it to drink (we believe). Selves, small children and clothes are mostly washed in (brown) rivers. Towns seem to have very low voltage electricity which cuts out on a daily basis and is apparently bought at great expense from Vietnam.
  
• There is seemingly a greater level of foreign influence in Cambodia, with many foreigners involved in tourism, aid NGOs etc; by contrast, for better or worse Vietnam is confidently doing things very much its own way. Here the stark contrast between poor Cambodians and rich people (Cambodian or foreign) coupled with all the shite the country has gone through make for a certain hard-to-explain sadness. We'll try to put our finger on this better in a later post.
• The amount of English spoken in Vietnam by people not involved in tourism was virtually nil. We didn't see an English language school anywhere in the country. Here most teenagers running market stalls or coffee shops can quote a price in English, and some 12 year olds can attempt a conversation. The hello ambushes are also more varied: we've had hello Madame, hello Mrs, bye bye (instead of hello, very popular with tiny kids), ok, i love you, where do you go, where are you from, what is your name, how do you do, and our particular favourite happy new year!
• To our great surprise, the food is better! Random road-side stops in out of the way places fairly consistently reveal more varied and interesting flavours than their Vietnamese equivalents. We're particularly enjoying the coconut-based fish curries and dishes containing sprigs of fresh green peppercorns.
• In Vietnam every street food place has primary-school-sized plastic stools, whereas Cambodia has grown-up-sized plastic chairs.
  

Since arriving in Cambodia we've felt rather like we're on holiday, having had about six non-cycling days including one on the beach, one devoted to bike maintenance (more on the bikes in the previous post) and a couple spent worshipping at the often conveniently adjacent alters of Flickr and Happy Hour! Poor Zoe.. internet connections here are soo slow, and often just when she thinks she's managed to upload an image there's a powercut! Sometimes it's so frustrating only a mojito or a glass of beer over ice dulls the fury.

We've spent the last three days cycling north up the Mekong from Phnom Penh to a little place called Kratie, a typical slow riverside town with crumbling French colonial buildings and loads of squalor. Unpaved roads of variable ride-ability took us through (not past) an endless parade of rural life: stilt houses (see above), cows as tall as men, horses as short as children, pigs on motorbikes, dogs (mostly benign), barefoot and often naked children, some rather beautiful ladies (clothed), fishing, small-scale market gardening, jolly noisy temples, mosques, and lots and lots of floods.

Life expectancy is about 57 here, but older ladies have featured heavily these last few days:

Tomorrow is a major Buddhist festival and many villages have been fundraising for their temples by standing on either side of the road holding out baskets and yelling some sort of running commentary into a badly distorting microphone. As we approached one such ambush we were spotted and the Khmer commentary turned to 'hello' etc, giving the whole village advance notice of our arrival. As we pulled up the lady with the microphone (and a mouthful of metal teeth) opened with 'where are you from?' in English, so Hannah gave a short broadcast interview to the village whilst having her sweaty chin inexplicably tugged by her interviewer as Zoe had her nose tugged by another old lady.

In a place called Chlong we stayed in a more basic guesthouse than usual ($5) because it faced the Mekong and seemed atmospheric. At first the old lady who ran it seemed sweet and Hannah could communicate with her in schoolgirl French. It all started to get a bit weird when we retired (at 7 o'clock – a record!) and she wanted to know how many dollars we'd spent on our supper. From our flimsy-walled room we gathered that she'd set up her bed in the reception room immediately outside, from where she proceeded to cough, hock, spit and fart loudly til dawn. Her two manky guard dogs joined the rest of the town's dogs in occasional howling contests throughout the night. It was some consolation that – when the power went off and our tiny fan stopped working – we could hear the vast Mekong flowing past. In the morning Zoe looked out of the communal bathroom window to find a naked teenage boy wanking in the garden whilst looking up at the window. Shortly afterwards Hannah came out of the shower to find Madame sitting looking cross. 'Donnez-moi deux dollar mademoiselle' she kept saying to us; it seemed she thought we should pay a supplement for having washed. We refused and got the hell out.