Seemingly months ago, Mum & Dad booked flights to come to Cambodia for three weeks and they are finally here!! It’s been great fun showing them around, and discovering new parts of the country together, so today’s post is a summary of the first part of their trip – we’ve been busy…
The original plan was for Mum & Dad to arrive and spend the first week on their own, exploring Phnom Penh and then head to a remote island off the south coast to chill out completely. I decided that I couldn’t wait another whole week for a ‘Mum hug’ though (Dad hugs are pretty good too, BTW), so I travelled to Phnom Penh and surprised them at the airport – I think it was a good surprise!! I then spent 24 hours giving them the lowdown on how to negotiate with tuk-tuk drivers (& not to call them tuck-tucks…), what the local currency is worth, how to say a few basic phrases & gave them a quick orientation tour of Phnom Penh, before leaving them to their own devices for a week. Would they survive??!!
One week later I went back to Phnom Penh to discover that they had survived, and looked a lot healthier after three days on a sunny island in the Gulf of Thailand. Hooray! I had taken a week off work and the next morning we were heading on our first minibus trip of the holiday to destination number one: Sen Monorom in Mondulkiri province in Eastern Cambodia near the Vietnamese border.
Sen Monorom is 800m above sea level which is pretty high for this country and I’d been told it was cooler there. And I did have to reach for an extra layer once or twice after dark – wonders will never cease! However, I digress. After an early start (yep, they feature a lot but so do early nights), we arrived just before midday & looked around for transport to our hotel (there is usually a crowd of tuk-tuk drivers competing for your business before the bus doors even open). It quickly became clear that we were now in the sticks and that the only option was to hop on the back of a moto. Me: “Erm, Mum, are you ok going on a moto??”, Mum: “Well, I guess I’ll have to be!” And on she jumped. Good on ya’ mum!! (I should say here that Dad claims to have driven a moto when he was still at school but that story has only emerged since he’s been in Cambodia & has not been corroborated!!!!)
We stayed at the Tree Lodge which had a series of small, basic wooden bungalows lining a slope down towards a river. A boardwalk connected them all and we were at the end of the row really close to the river. The room literally only had two beds with blankets and a mosquito net each, and a basic bathroom with all sorts of places that creepy crawlies could go in and out at their leisure. But it was comfortable and quiet.
The reason we were in Sen Monorom was to visit the Mondulkiri Project the next day. They have four elephants that they protect and look after in the jungle, who are able to roam freely over 250 hectares. We were off to see the elephants! That meant piling in the back of a pick-up truck and driving on bumpy roads for 20 minutes to get to ‘base camp’ which they call the Jungle Lodge. We met three of the elephants – Princess, Sophie and Sitgen – but Lucky had roamed too far away that day for us to meet her. We got so close, it was amazing! The team gave us loads of bananas and the elephants took them straight out of our hands with their trunks. One even liked having the banana put straight into her mouth (no teeth, so we weren’t too worried!). After lunch which we ate sitting cross-legged on the floor of the jungle lodge, we went back to find Princess and helped to give her a wash in the river. It was a bit of a ‘pinch me’ moment – were we really standing in a river in a remote part of Cambodia next to an elephant that we were washing with brooms and splashes??!
I had opted for the two-day tour so waved goodbye to mum and dad around 4pm, and stayed in the jungle lodge with six others who were also going to sleep in a hammock under the stars before trekking 18km with a local guide the next day. The six others were all French, so I opened a very dusty wardrobe at the back of my brain and dragged out my French from 15 years ago, and spent 24 hours communicating fairly successfully. I was pleased with how quickly it all came flooding back, although I still need to work on the accent, so obviously university taught me something other than how to have a good time 😉 Our local guide cooked up a delicious eggplant dish in bamboo over a fire and made us try the local rice wine which is pretty potent.
The next day we trekked through the jungle, but this was an entirely different experience to Tatai trekking a few weeks ago. Not one leech, well worn paths, a cool breeze, fields of crops where deforestation had taken place and quite a few areas that were like rolling meadows.
We saw a couple of monkeys swinging high up in the trees, swam under a waterfall, clambered over rocks behind another waterfall, spotted bear claw marks in the trunk of one of the huge trees and came across another few elephants that were being used to give tourists rides. Our guide told us the elephants are not happy and gave them a wide-berth. He was a local guy who had learnt his English in the last 8 months after getting the job as a guide (we were mainly communicating in Khmer and then I was translating to French for the others!). He has lived in his small rural village since he was born and has been to Sen Monorom a few times, but otherwise he has not been anywhere else. He told me that he doesn’t want to go to Siem Reap or Phnom Penh or any other big towns in Cambodia because he has everything he needs in his village, and they are expensive and very busy. It is a foreign concept to me, and most people reading this blog, to operate exclusively within the same 5-mile radius but I’m sure many thousands of people in South-East Asia could tell a similar story.
The next morning we got in a local minivan to Kratie, a small town on the Mekong river, but that’s a story for next time!
chroniclesfromcambodia 
I really loved that posting! And I have been getting Marilyn’s posts too – what a fabulous time they are having. Your guide who didn’t want to go anywhere is a bit like people in Rute, it is only the generation who are now at university who are looking round the world – before that most came back to their home town. And as for Ely, Cambs. where I once lived, old ladies went once to Cambridge perhaps in service to a big house, but then returned to the village and that was it – most had never been to London – this was in the 1980’s! Keep enjoying your great and diverse life! Sheelagh
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