One of my favourite days of my RTW trip so far! I woke up after hardly any sleep in my Siam Hut in Koh Chang, and decided to leave for Cambodia… This was in part due to wanting to get ahead in the SE Asia leg of the trip, but the fact my makeshift bed was swarming with ants spurred me on to leave!
On the minibus from the Trat deck to the bus terminal, I made friends with a Cambodian lady who also needed to get to the border crossing at Hat Lek/Koh Kong. She was so patient and helped me and another backpacker avoid getting ripped off by the many touts on the Cambodian side of the border, organising motorbikes to the Koh Kong town. I couldn’t get away with not paying the 1200baht visa fee, but I did manage to avoid paying a needless tip to some random tout who took over filling out my forms. I never asked the guy to help me, and it is hard in a foreign country to know who the official workers are and who the schemers are. There was literally about fifteen Cambodian chancers all trying to find ways to rip off the backpackers and tourists there.
Anyway, once we got to the main district of Koh Kong, this friendly Cambodian lady (about 27 years old, married to a Canadian and mother of two) offered me to stay at her house. Without really thinking I agreed, for I am all about taking random risks and finding ways to avoid paying for accommodation!
When I arrived, I was greeted by her parents, her children and about half the neighbourhood eager to know why a whitey was on their turf. Even though I lived in China which should have acclimatised me to being the subject of stares in public spaces, nothing prepared me for the reception of the locals. They were shouting “hello” and doing double takes, trying to work out why I was speeding around the town on a locals’ motorbike.
My new friend then took me to the local market, a place which I am kicking myself for not taking photos of… but I didn’t want to draw even more attention to myself considering the stall holders and customers were eyeing me as though I was a spy!
The Cambodian market
Obviously I didn’t take photos so I need to find the words to evoke this curious place. The vapours of dead (and barely alive) fish saturating the whole warehouse, made more potent by the lack of fans. There was a stunning array of fruits I had never seen before, not to mention certain hygienic techniques you would come across in my local market in Stortford!
In place of plastic packaging or a wipe-clean counter, traders presented slabs of meat on sheets of old cardboard boxes. If that wasn’t enough I witnessed a young girl surveying the meat with her mum, and decided her way of weighing up the choice was by running her hands up and down these slabs of meat and poking her fingernails into the flesh.
My friend chose fish as the main component of the meal, so we weaved further into the depths of this market (which for me conjured up how an English market might have been a century ago) and settled on a stall with tanks full of live fish, all unknowingly about to face certain death. My friend pointed at a poor fish, and the trader replied by slapping it onto the counter and bashing it with a large knife. Unfortunately her aim was, well, shit, so the fish fell on the floor, which became the new site of extermination! Once the life had been beaten out of it, she wrapped it into a plastic bag and I begrudgingly accepted it, trying not to shudder as all the blood began to drip on the inside.
I was about to tiptoe towards the entrance, when an elderly trader decided to empty the suspiciously coloured water of her large bowl onto the floor of the aisle. I couldn’t successfully identify the solid contents of the bowl, so God only knows what that water contained.
With a heavy basket of tonight’s dinner, we hopped onto the motorbike and made it back to the family abode. The children were adorable, and even though the mother didn’t speak a word of English (and likewise I could only say the Cambodian word for thank you) I felt myself truely accepted into the family like I was an old friend.
While food was being made I left and strolled around, just in time to meet more enthusiastic and friendly local children and also watch the sunset.
The dinner apparently cost just under 600baht and fed all her family, plus me and a few other guests from the neighbourhood. Without wanting to sound liking I’m trying to romanticize their way of life, there was something really satisfying in seeing a family that had so much spare time to while away their hours on the front porch, in the hammock and playing about on the wooden floor in their sparse living quarters. We even made food on the kitchen floor because they didn’t own a table, which made me feel like I had been transported back in time and was really experiencing a culture unlike my own.
I am writing this the night before I am due to get my bus to Sihanoukville, apparently a hair-raisingly picturesque seaside town. So far my short time in Cambodia has made for an unforgettable experience, and I can imagine it will only get better as I begin to work my way up to Phnom Penh, Siam Reap and Angkor Wat.
