Banlung Hiking and wrap-up

To get from Siem Reap in the north west to Banlung in the north east we caught a bus. 12 hours later we were deposited at a busy bus depot on what seemed like the outskirts of town. The bus driver opened up the luggage area underneath the bus and removed one dust-covered piece of luggage after another. The roads on the way to Banlung aren't always in great condition and it seems like the wheels had been picking up plenty of stray dirt and flicking it right into the luggage compartment.

We were met at the bus depot by Jammy. He's the guy who runs the tour company we were using for our 3 day trek that was to begin the next day. Only 24 years old, a born salesman and seeming to buzz with energy. He tried to get us a tuk-tuk to take us to his office but someone just beat us to the last one so he asked us if we were ok if we went by motorbike. We said yeah although I definitely had one of those moments when I thought "this is quite possibly one of those bad travel decisions but hey, go with it". So both the K-Man and I handed our backpacks to blokes on very low-powered motorbikes (the backpacks somehow went in front of them) and we jumped on the back, helmetless (this is the bit where I could pretty much hear Mum's voice telling me to put a helmet on). Now I've never been on a motorbike before so grabbed hold of the handles right behind me and hung on for dear life. Fortunately Banlung is a pretty quiet town. We puttered away at about 40km/h max (probably less) and after only about 3km we reached Jammy's office (with our brains still unscrambled and in our heads).
At Jammy's office we got told what we were in for over the next 3 days. He explained there would be leeches but the way to combat this was to tuck the pantleg into the socks (shorts would be a bad idea for all sorts of reasons). We got told we could buy long sleeve shirts at the second hand clothing store over the road (again, the more coverage of the skin the better). He showed us old faded photos as if he was selling us the trip even though we were already committed to it. After forking out the money for the trip it was off to buy a long sleeve shirt, get a local meal and head back to our hotel for a good nights sleep.

Day 1 of the trip began with a tuk-tuk ride that took almost 2 hours, driving north of Banlung along a dusty dirt road lined with trees, crops (dusty tobacco plants, dusty bananas plants, other unrecognisable plants with dust on them) and occasional small houses on stilts. We arrived at a village along the banks of a large river. Our guide for the tour was one of Jammy's brothers whose name now escapes me. He disappeared for a while in the town, buying up food for the trip. We wandered into the market where I bought a massive big hat that would keep the sun off my face and probably not look out of place on a cricketers head. We then climbed into a small boat with a little motor attached at the back and cruised along the river for about 20 minutes. Getting out at the other end, we were met by a guy who spoke pretty much no English at all. I don't think we actually caught his name to begin with but he was to be our "Ranger" and spoke no English. My understanding of having a ranger is that if you're going to be hiking through these areas, you need a local guide to help you make your way along. He spoke all of the local dialects and while his grasp of Khmer (the main Cambodian language) wasn't great, he could communicate well enough with our main guide to get a point across. So at this point there we had two guides plus the K-Man and myself and we were ready to start walking. I had a large bottle of water in one hand, a bag with my sleeping hammock in the other and off we started.
In all that day we walked about 5 hours, with occasional stops for lunch and snacks. The ranger set a fairly good pace which surprised me. I was expecting more of a leisurely stroll but the ranger was all about getting from point A to B. Probably the first half of that walk was just walking along tracks between villagers properties, past banana trees and various other crops. We were mostly exposed to the strong overhead sun and it was damn hot. By mid-afternoon we entered into the jungle. Slowly the trees began to move closer to the path, to crowd in on us, protecting us from the sun and forcing us to walk single file. We were shown holes in the ground with a diameter of maybe 10cms and told this was a tarantula hole. Then our guide and ranger set to work luring a tarantula out of the hole. It took them a long time plus much taunting (and disturbingly some excavating of the hole) before the tarantula emerged, all fire and brimstone at the intrusion. Honestly, while it was interesting to see the tarantula and yes, it was a damn impressive size, it wasn't worth the massive effort they put into getting him out. Fortunately they dumped him back in a new hole and apparently chances are he'd just start up living in there. At least, I hope that's true!
At one point we had to cross a river. It was maybe 20 metres across, not flowing too fast and somewhere around waist deep. So off go the hiking pants and shoes and on go the awful thongs I had bought in town that were really shiny and slippery and totally inappropriate for walking along a riverbed. We had to carry our day packs above our heads to stop them getting wet and then make our way carefully across the river. All I could think about while trying to establish my next footing was that I had my camera and passport in the bag I was holding above my head and would really hate for either of them to get damaged. Fortunately we all made it across the river to the other side without incident where we stood there in our undies and pondered our achievement.
We made it to camp at about 4.30pm. By this time the forest was very dense and the path we were on sometimes was disappearing altogether as we brushed past plants and bushes and trees. We crossed another river, this time by jumping from large rock to large rock. We were in a small cleared area in the middle of the forest, next to the river and at the base of a waterfall.  An awesome place to relax for the night.
Actually that wasn't immediately true. We put all of our bags down next to a large boulder, and K-Man and I removed our hiking boots from our aching feet. That's when we discovered the leeches. I wish I had a photo of the leeches but I was too busy freaking out and trying to get the little blood sucking bastards off my ankles that there was no chance of me thinking to get a shot of them. I had two of them attached to my left ankle and another one attached to my right ankle. I have a feeling one is supposed to carefully remove a leech so they don't leave any of themselves inside you. Well I pretty much just brushed the little buggers off with my hand. Then watched as my ankle proceeded to bleed for a while due to the anti-coagulant in the bite. While both Ken and I were freaking out about leeches, our guide and our ranger just watched with slightly bemused expressions on their faces. Those two guys had been wearing thongs the whole time and I think were just brushing off leeches when they saw them attach. Not at all fussed! We must have looked like over-sensitive westerners. Still, it was gross and I'm no fan of them!
After recovering from the shock of the leeches we had a dip in the water near the base of the waterfall, relaxed for a while and then ate dinner which was a stir-fry with rice. Then our guide brought out some rice wine in an old water bottle. This stuff was homebrew and tasted nasty! In fact it didn't taste like much more than just alcohol.  I think our guide was hoping we'd have a bit of a big night on the homebrew or something but neither of us were keen on the idea.
After dinner we hung up our army-issue mosquito-proof hammocks from a small wooden structure someone had previously put together and it was off to sleep. It was probably not even 8pm at that point but it was dark and there was little else to do. I don't find hammocks at all comfortable so didn't sleep so well.

Waking on Day 2 we had a quick breakfast, packed up all of our gear and got moving - straight up a steep hill on a track that wasn't a track. Within about 10mins of embarking I was soaked in sweat from climbing upwards while pushing past trees, branches, vines etc. Our ranger led the way, swinging his machete here there and everywhere in order to make a path towards our destination. A couple of times that morning he would stop in front of a dense wall of trees and you could see him thinking "Hmm, which way now...?". Then we'd double back slightly, the ranger would pick a new path and the machete would start swinging again. I remember one point we stopped for a break after a fair bit of climbing and while we were just trying to gather our breath and drink some water, our ranger was trying to find the highest peak he could in order to get some phone reception. It takes a little something away from what has become a jungle trek when you see a ranger whip out his phone. Shortly afterward he brought us right back to the jungle when he pointed out a very scratched up hole in a tree. The scratching had been caused by a bear trying to break into a bee hive. Yeah! Bears! These are small bears and "much more scared of you than you are of them" but still, that's pretty cool. I think they are sun bears. Sadly the main thing I know about sun bears is they are the ones you see on those horrible ads where they are crammed into small cages and being milked for their bile.
Getting closer towards lunchtime we headed back downhill again and came upon the shore of a river. We spent a good few hours at the river. Our ranger disappeared for a while as he cut down a bunch of bamboo trunks. We then had to walk back up the river and haul them down to the river. They were heavy, really long and cumbersome. Eventually we had 12 or so bamboo trunks lying on the shore of the river. After lunch, our ranger used all of this bamboo to build a traditional raft. It was pretty cool. He'd obviously done it many times before but still it took quite a while. I did find it funny that in the "brochure" it said we'd help build a raft. I had wondered how that would work because neither K-Man or myself have had any raft building experience. Anyway, hauling the bamboo down to the river was the full extent of our helping. I guess if we'd been involved in much more than that it could well have sunk!
In the middle of the afternoon we loaded up all of our gear and ourselves onto the raft and set off along the river. I think we only travelled maybe half an hour to an hour before we arrived at our destination for the night.
We were staying with a local family in their home. Their home was very simple. It was basically a very long A frame wooden hut. It housed the man of the house, an old very smiley man, his wife, and their two young daughters. It also housed some pigs and chickens.  Plus ourselves and another tour group who rocked up a bit later.
We ate some dinner of rice, tofu and veg and then it was homebrew time again. This time the homebrew was from the source. A large earthenware pot that required us to stick a straw down into the depths of the pot, through sand and I don't know what else, to get to the booze at the bottom. It tasted better than the alcohol we'd had the night before but it was still virtually impossible not to take a big sip without letting rip some sort of sound effect like "errrggghh yeaaaahhh" once you'd swallowed a mouthful. The K-Man and I got sick of this game pretty quickly due to the sheer grossness of it plus also due to the other tour group being kind of annoying so we both called it a night.
Day 3 - I woke up sore and tired. Bed that night was just sleeping bags on a wooden floor. My hip hurt because my delicate hip bones aren't made for resting on hard floors all night! No, my hip bones like a nice mattress! Anyway, we got up, had some brekky, brushed our teeth in the river and suggested to our guide that we get moving.

Siem Reap - Home of Angkor Wat

After a 6 hour bus ride, we arrived in Siem Reap which is in the north west of the country. The hotel we checked into (Golden Temple Villa) was very flash for what amounted to about $10 per night per person. For this we got free breakfast, a very nice looking room, free bananas (!!), and a free half hour massage from the massage parlour (hmm, writing "parlour" makes it sound dodgy - or is that just me!?). A great deal! I think the only drawback was that the shower head in the bathroom was attached at about waist height. Cambodians tend to be on the short side but still, this was way low. On the plus side, my knees have never been cleaner.

Our main purpose for being in Siem Reap was to check out Angkor Wat and various other temples in the area. For this we had a tuk-tuk driver who kept us supplied with cold water and constant smiles, and a knowledgeable tour guide (a different one for each of the two days we spent checking it all out). Our tour guide for the first day was excellent. The guy on the second day was only ok but he did teach us the term "OMB". It stands for "Oh My Buddha". :) More appropriate than OMG when you're in a Buddhist country I guess.

The various temples in Angkor were created in around the 12th century AD and there are lots of them. In two days, you can only see a selection of the best. We started our tour with a stop at Angkor Thom (the name of the old city) and the main temple there, The Bayon. Our guide explained that this temple had been created by a Buddhist king with the aim of making one that was better than Angkor Wat. Gotta love a little one-upmanship in your Buddhist kings!

In our two days of temple touring, here are the main bits I found interesting:

• Early on the first day I tried to take a photo of a statue of some kind of deity. Now I’m not saying anything supernatural was going on here but when I did this with my new point and shoot camera, a little message popped up on the camera screen saying “Blinked Eye Detected”. Would technology lie to me or I did get winked at by a Buddha!?

  

  At the entrance to Angkor Thom

  
• Angkor Wat is impressive because it’s bloody big and also in pretty good shape. While smaller temples have been taken over by trees in parts, the size of Angkor Wat meant that didn’t happen. That said, for a non-archaeologist like myself, I found that the more a temple was ruined, the more interesting it was. I like that idea of nature reclaiming what humans made. A temple where the entrance is almost completely blocked by the roots of a gigantic tree that has worked it’s way into the architecture of the building looks awesome.




We had to queue for this photo so it's gotta go in the blog.








Awesome tree plus if you look carefully you'll see a  random Chinese lady doing the obligatory peace sign for a photo. 

• The detail on some of the carvings on the walls was amazing. Sometimes it was like a Where's Wally cartoon in the amount of "things" that were going on in a simple picture. You really had to take the time to look in order to see the hidden gems.

• Particularly on the first day, the guide we had was fantastic. He was a bit of an amateur photographer so he was regularly telling us exactly where to stand in order to get a great photo. I like this one of "Da Wat" from a distance...

• The sun in the middle of the day is fierce. Our guide went on the theory that if you are moving around while everyone else is having lunch, you can cut down on the some of the crowds, thus making it easier to get great photos. A wise idea but the drawback was we were two sweaty and sunscreen drenched tourists by the end of the day.
• On the second day, we got up way freakin' early to see the sun rise over Angkor Wat. We were easily in place, standing in front of the lake that fronts the temple by about 5.30am. The sun didn’t actually rise up from behind the temple until about 6.30am. This meant an hour of standing around, taking the same photo over and over again of the silhouette of Angkor Wat, while hordes of people of every race and language jostled for position lining the lake. It was as much a people-watching exercise as anything else. I watched one woman take a photo of a lotus flower growing on the edge of the lake. Rejecting the natural beauty of the setting, she decided to remove a couple of distracting lilypads from the scene and then dipped her hands in the water and splashed the lotus flower so that a few beads of water would land artfully on it’s petals. Then I watched another woman who decided she wanted to get to the front of a big crowd of people and her way of doing this was to put her head down (she was pretty short) and just kind of push on people until they moved. It was bizarre. The people in front of her just held their ground because it was so silly but she would just go around and try the next person to see if their arm was more likely to give way to the weight of her head. Eventually there were a few people in the crowd having a chuckle at this human battering ram lady and she turned around and gave up. Anyway, my shots of the sun rising over Angkor Wat looked average at best but the antics of the crowd made up for some of that early start.

I think this is the lotus the lady was prepping.


If the temples in Angkor are the number 1 attraction of Siem Reap, then without doubt the number 2 attraction is Angkor Wat Putt - a 14 hole mini-golf course a little way from the centre of town. Here's their branded car...

We’d heard about it on TripAdvisor as it was receiving high praise so we thought we’d check it out. We called up the owner and he drove out to our hotel to pick us up. His name is Mr Tee and he’s a bit of a legend. Something of an entrepreneur actually. Someone had suggested once that he make a mini-golf course back while he was a tour guide and instead of just laughing it off as a crazy idea, he did the research, loaned the money and has created a 14 hole mini-golf course, complete with miniature replicas of some of the sights at Angkor.

When Mr Tee gave us the scorecard, he apologised that the par for each hole isn’t marked. Apparently this is because he didn’t know what “par” is when he made the cards up! For someone who didn’t really know what mini-golf is, he’s done a great job! The holes were tough but still quite possible and if you hit a hole-in-one you win a free beer. Neither of us could manage that but I got a free beer anyway because I won and so the K-Man owed me. It was while drinking our after-game beer that we had a good chat to Mr Tee about his business. He’s really quite open about the various challenges he’s faced. It’s only been open a few months and is far from raking in the money just yet but it’s building steadily. I really hope he can make it. He still plans on adding four more holes when he can afford it in order to get up to 18 holes so we were brain storming ideas for what they could look like. The difficulty however, is that he needs to remain respectful in what he does otherwise he could get shut down by the police. For instance, I love the idea of having the golf ball roll out of Buddha’s mouth and into the hole but that could be deemed insensitive to the Buddhist faith. Having replicas of the temples is fine but I think he’s limited a bit in just how wacky he might want to make it. I actually get the feeling he’s fine with that too. On the drive back to our hotel, Mr Tee’s phone went off. The ringtone was “Gangnam Style”. There is seriously no place you can go that is untouched by Gangnam Style.

After two busy days spent in Siem Reap, it was time to catch a 12 hour bus to Banlung in the Ratanakiri province (in the north-east of the country) for our jungle trekking experience...

First Stop: Phnom Penh

The first part of our trip was spent in Phnom Penh, a city of about 2 million people - all of whom seem to be born with an innate ability to dodge each other as they hurtle along the streets on motorbikes, tuk-tuks, trucks, cars and bicycles while carrying something thats hard to balance. At one point we saw a bunch of motorbikes each carrying three large mattresses on the back. Bizarre.

We started our first morning with a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum followed by a visit to the Killing Fields. While far from cheery places to go, they are considered "must-see" options for tourists so along we went to find out about the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge in the late 70's. The genocide museum used to be a school before the Khmer Rouge turned it into an interrogation/torture prison. We saw one horrible sight after another as we were led through the buildings. We stood in the stark white rooms where it all took place and saw photos of torture, heard stories of the horrific treatment dealt out to innocent people and kept experiencing those moments where you wonder how one person can do such a thing to another. It was pretty tough going. Over at the Killing Fields where thousands of people met a horrible end we saw endless rows of bones and skulls and heard more stories of the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge and their 3 and a bit years in power. I could write heaps more about all this but think its sad enough without rehashing it all in a travel blog.

The rest of the day was more fun. We wandered the local streets looking for a store that had fish that would eat the dead skin off our feet while we drank a free beer (all for $3) but we couldn't find it. We also strolled along the riverside where locals like to walk in the evening, fish and kick soccer balls. We knocked back countless offers of a tuk-tuk ride (a motorcycle pulling along a chariot basically - a great way to cool off as they are quite open to the wind but we weren't going far enough to justify it). We also found some quality Cambodian food. I'm pretty sure I worked in a short nap during the heat of the arvo too. It's been about 30 degrees or so but humid too so mid-afternoon is a bit tough going.

The following day we checked out the National Museum. So many Buddhas. Just when you thought that there couldn't be another statue of a serene looking Buddha, you'd round a corner and there was another one, smiling happily as if to say "Gotcha!". We also saw plenty of the Indian gods as they too have had a big influence on Cambodia.  There were a few spots where someone gives you an incense stick to place in front of a Buddha and we did that the first time but then found they expect a donation so I got good at respectfully saying no thanks after that.

After the museum it was pretty chilled. We managed to track down that place where the fish eat the dead skin off your feet but it had obviously been closed and was completely gutted. Very disappointing. My feet had so much to give! :)

After two days in Phnom Penh, we boarded a bus for the 6 hour ride to Siem Reap, the home of Angkor Wat. I'll write about that in another blog post.

The First Post

On the 14th December, accompanied by indoor soccer star and buddy The K-Man, I'm off to Cambodia for a quick holiday. If time and internet access allows, I'll be writing the occasional blog update.

Three destinations are planned. Start in Phnomh Penh (the capital), then over to Siem Reap (the home of Angkor Wat) and on to Banlung (3 day trek in the jungle). Then back home in Melbourne on Xmas Morning at 6am.