Skuon

For the holidays we have agreed to join the throngs who leave the city and return to their home towns and villages. Dara will head to Kompong Cham, a city of about 50,000 further up the Mekong River. We will 

accompany her, happy to have her be our guide and booking agent. In the days leading to our Saturday departure we are unsure when we will leave or where we will be going. We decide that, as the trip is being organized by teenagers, to just relax and let them organize things in their own way – that way, when we ask about details, the answer “Its going to be fun!” is, really, all the information we need. It the end, seven of us are loaded into a special tuk tuk—a one piece unit (no motorcycle) with two additional seats beside the driver. Carl dubs it a truck tuk, and the driver Sang and his truck tuk will log many miles with us over the coming weeks. Pooah (pronounced Pwa—one of our security guards) and Carl take the two rumble seats up front. Pooah’s mother, Anna-Marie, Dara, Channey and Shrey Neth (all Nataraj staff) fit themselves into the back with a small mountain of knapsacks, suitcases, flats of eggs and grocery bags filled with city-style treats. Tight as the space is, this will not be our most cramped transport.

We will all spend Saturday night at Pooah’s family home in the countryside near Skuon, about an hour and a half northeast of Phnom Penh. There are three legs to our trip. First is the seven of us in our truck tuk. This takes us to the traffic circle near the Japanese bridge. Here we slow down and Sang begins yelling our destination and number as we ease past a scattered fleet of Japanese and Korean passenger vans. We get a positive response and the switch begins. After negotiations about price, Anna-Marie and I get somewhat preferred treatment; along with Dara and a stranger, we get the very back seat of the van to ourselves. While each bench will have four across, this is the widest one and offers the additional comfort of having a backrest across all four seats. Plus, we get a window that opens. The final count is twenty-one in the van (though one is an infant on its mother’s lap) and three on the roof, including Pooah. The roof costs a little bit less, though when it gets dark and starts to pour, we think it may not be enough less. A brief stop coincides with the start of the rain and I am able to toss my fifty-cent plastic rain coat to Pooah. Inside, the teen girls become dramatic as only teen girls can—hands waving like fans, noses scrunched and pinched, plaintive sighs from deep in the belly—when the diaperless baby does what one hopes a diaperless baby will not do. Once the deed has been done, with perversion appropriate only to the innocent, the toddler delivers pleased-with-herself smiles to us all.

Its been reported that 85% of Cambodians live in the countryside. Both this trip and our previous visit to Kep demonstrate what this means. The roads are lined, virtually without break, with houses. Most are classic Cambodian one or two room cubes on stilts. Families cook and dine on low platforms that look like oversized tables set under the house, so the floor of the house becomes a roof. None, we suspect, have bathrooms. Pooah’s family home is along a dirt trail tightly packed with other homes, but his is set back from the road far enough that their thin strip of Cambodia has crops planted: pineapple, cashews, squash, and other unnamed crops, as well as free range chickens.

Periodically, the continuous row of houses changes into a cluster of concrete two story buildings and market stalls—sort of a strip mall. The third leg of the trip begins at one of these. We are let off, and swarmed by local help, until it is made clear the foreigners are already attended to. Now the ride is by moto, and thankfully it has stopped raining. A small fleet of motos awaits us, organized by Pooah’s brother-in-law, Thy (Tea). We depart three to a moto for the 5 km ride along the dirt road, again close packed with houses. I’m not sure if where we switched from the van is the centre of Pooah’s village, or another one: despite asking we never did learn what it’s called.

Thirteen people (I think four generations) live in Pooah’s house, which has two rooms, though is divided into three. Anna-Marie and I will get a whole bed to ourselves, with the best bed (and it really was a good one) and a mosquito net. The girls slept on the floor in the living room. The next day they complain of a night spent slapping mosquitoes. We pass the evening looking at baby pictures of Pooah, and chatting about Canada and Cambodia life. We eat the freshest eggs we have ever had, served fried with rice, some fresh fruit, and sticky rice and sweet bean paste steamed in banana leaves. Everyone else discretely and in small groups goes down stairs, where they eat a traditional holiday meal of year-old fermented fish. They didn’t even show it to us.

We also shower. Below us, catching run-off from the roof are four clay urns, each about a metre tall. To bathe we are each give two kramas, Cambodia’s ubiquitous checkered scarf. You wrap one around your body, under which you disrobe. Then ladles of cold water are poured over you, by yourself or your evil partner, after which you wrap the second kramas over first, removing the wet one. An efficient system that with practice protects your modesty.

We agree that we should go to temple at five (there are multiple “services”) so, as is usual in the countryside, it is early to bed. Before bed, and after my brisk shower, I need to pee. I am aware that there is no bathroom, but don’t presume to know which bush to use. Pooah grabs a flashlight and we head out, along the way Pooah repeatedly announcing, “there is no toilet”.

Around 4:30 the next morning, with the increasing clatter of the kitchen and the chatter of chickens and dogs, we arise. Anna-Marie gets a short lesson in making the banana leaf packages with rice—these with soy grits and scraps of pork (she has help putting the pork on the rice). We eat more eggs—I’m sure a half dozen each along with a cup or two of rice. I had thought the whole family was to head off to temple, but just Thy, Dara, Pooah, Anna-Marie and I set out down another country road. In the pre-dawn gloom we pass by a magical landscape of palms, rice fields, houses, and a small lake.

At temple I mistakenly sit in the women’s section (just by staying close to my translator, Dara), but this goes largely unnoticed or uncommented upon. Of greater interest is Anna-Marie. We join a group of elderly women on their mat. They all have their hair cropped short (a couple of centimetres). This seems a typical option for elderly women, and is a demonstration of a rejection of vanity and outward appearances. The women are intrigued by Anna-Marie’s hair (all Cambodians are, but theirs is a special interest because of its short length). Anna-Marie reported later that one women, getting an affirmative response to asking if Anna-Marie was a women, poked her in the breast to make sure.

The return home is post-dawn and the countryside has transformed again. We pass by many houses but also lush fields of rice and the mysterious lake, which is now an inviting pool of water with a single mountain rising up beyond it. We stop here and talk about irrigation and rice and where our lake-front cottage would go. At home Tey tours us around the property. He speaks some English, having spend 4 months at school in England (though his English isn’t good enough to explain what). He continues our education of Cambodian farm practices and complains this has been a dry wet season (we had not noticed!) so many plants are not as far along as they should be. Because we love cashews and have never seen a tree, I photograph him beside one.

Our final act, before another moto ride to another town where a van will take us into Kompong Cham. We organize the entire family in front of the house for a photo session. I take a group shot of the family and one of family plus visitors (minus photographer).