Amazing Elephants

Sunday was elephant day.  Ra drove us to a Phnong village near to the nature lodge.  Phnong is one of the minority tribes in Cambodia.  There, we were introduced to Mr Hong, who was to look after us on our elephant trek. We were also to have dinner afterwards with him and his family in his traditional Phnong house.

Here is Mr Hong's house

And here he is in the white shirt supervising preparations

Mr Hong speaks good English and has a great sense of humour.  His claim to fame is teaching Gordon Ramsay to be a Mahout.  You can see a short clip of this after the bee bit in the link below. There might be more somewhere.

http://youtu.be/QniTN5gPAA8

Our elephant was a fine fellow called Ramkin.  Here he is being made ready.

Before we set off we fed him some bananas so that he'd be a happy elephant.  He was much more obedient than the other one carrying a Belgian couple which didn't get any bananas.  Here's Claire feeding Ramkin bananas.

Then you get on, via a useful tower.

We both sat in the basket on top with Mr Hong on the elephants neck.  He showed us how he uses his feet behind the elephant's ears to make it go left, right, straight on and backwards.  There were also calls they used and a stick and string implement.

We trekked for about two hours.  The elephants are extremely elegant in their movements and it is excellent being high up walking through the forest.  It was rather cramped in the basket with two people though and I think we were all grateful when we got to the lunch spot by a river.  Here we also met up with another party.

After a rest for lunch, the best bit.  We got to swim with the elephants and wash them.  This was fantastic.  The elephants really seem to like the water and letting you climb on them and jump off.  It was also lovely to cool down on a very hot day.  Here's Claire and me on one of the elephants.

And here's Claire falling off.

I managed to stay on and ride him out.

Then the other elephants arrived and we all dived back in.

After all this galavanting, we saddled back up and trekked back to the village.  For the last bit, I moved up to ride on the neck, which was a lot more comfortable although slightly more scary on the ups and downs.

After saying goodbye to the elephants, Claire, Ra and I had dinner with Mr Hong, his wife, six children and mother-in-law in the house in the first picture.  There are two platforms inside, down the length of the house with an earth floor channel in the middle.  One platform is used for sleeping and the other for sitting and eating.  There is a fire in the middle of the floor for cooking.  Having the fire inside stops the wind getting at it and keeps the insects out.  There was also a constant traffic of animals coming in and out: cats, chickens and the cutest piglets you've ever seen.  The food was delicious, there was a mixture of pork and aubergine cooked in a bamboo, barbecued pork, a stir fry of pork with vegetables, and of course rice.

All in all, a brilliant day and we drove back to our bungalow on the Nature Lodge very happy and in love with elephants.

Dolphins and Coffee

Leaving Le Bungalow in Kratie bright and early, we went a bit further upstream on the Mekong river and went out in a boat like these below to search for the Irrawaddy dolphins.

We searched for quite a while without any sight of the dolphins, the main theory being that it was too windy.  We did see some birds.

Then suddenly we saw something break the surface and that was it, we spotted and could follow group after group of dolphins as they swam and rose above the water.  We seemed to do much better than the other boats which then resorted to following us.

The dolphins were almost impossible to photograph as by the time you'd seen them break and reached for your camera, they'd gone under again.  But I did manage to get a couple of shots. Yes, they are dolphins.

Next stop was a Buddhist temple on top of an unusual hill in the middle of an otherwise flat plain, presumably volcanic.  This had lots of nice statues and murals, although the effect was ruined a bit by seeing monks on mobile phones.  We had to climb about 365 steps to get to the top, and on the flight you can see below, the girl is helpfully pointing out the snake half way up.  It's fine Ra said to her, thinking it ws a short fat green snake that is quite common and harmless.  When we got there it turned out to be a very angry, thin tree snake that had fallen out of its tree.  Ra managed to fling it into the woods with a stick.

Here's another set of statues without a snake.

For lunch we stopped at a coffee plantation in the mondulkiri hills. This place was fantastic with all sorts of fruit, vegetables, salads being grown.  We had lunch in the shelter you can se below.

We had delicious iced coffees from the local coffee and then a spicy beef and vegetable dish that is still the dish of the holiday, it was so fresh and flavoursome.  Following this were big rice pancakes filled with pork and bamboo shoots, accompanied by a plate of fresh salad leaves.  Absolutely delicious, and we've bought a half kilo of the coffee beans to bring home.

Finally, it was off to our home for the next two nights.  We had a chalet at The Nature Lodge.  This was a fairly basic wooden chalet in grounds where horses and cows roam. Probably other animals as well that I can't remember. It had natural air conditioning which worked really well as we were up in the hills and it was a bit cooler.  There was also a good breeze on the first night.  The central facility was a big tree house where you went in the evening for drinks, food and wifi and at breakfast for excellent muesli with fruit, actually more like fruit with muesli, with loads of mango, banana, pineapple, water melon and dragon fruit in the bowel.  We've eaten more fresh fruit on this holiday so far than we normally do in a year.  Many pit stop snacks involve a mango or pineapple.  Here are some pictures of our chalet.

The reason we are here, just outside Sen Monorom, is to see elephants, and I'll tell you about them in the next post.

Genocide

In the morning of our second day in Phnom Penh, we went to visit the genocide museum at Tsoul Slek (S-21) and the killing fields at Choung Ek.  A pretty harrowing experience, but something we felt it would be remiss not to do on a visit to Cambodia.

S-21 was the prison in Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge set up to incarcerate, and kill those they considered against them.  This was initially all the intellectuals, teachers, politicians, rich people etc that they thought might oppose them and on whom they wanted vengeance.  This is billed as poor peasants kicking out rich capitalists.  Later, as he became more and more paranoid, successive layers of the Khmer Rouge organisation itself were imprisioned or killed as Pol Pot thought they posed a threat to him.

The buildings were previously a school and you can see them below.

There are three of them.  The open side is overlooked by other buildings but the Khmer Rouge emptied the city when they took over, forcing everyone to go and work on communal farms in the country.

They put barbed wire up to stop people jumping off the buildings and committing suicide.

They divided up some of the floors internally to create 2m x 1m cells.

Other rooms were used as mass cells or torture rooms.

Overall, not just in this prison, 20% of the population was wiped out.

There were seven survivors found at this prison when the Vietnamese came in. Two of them are still alive today and were at the prison signing their books and promoting a victims organisation.

We were really lucky with our guide who was a key researcher into the background and had written most of the material in the museum.  He was very knowledgeable and good to talk to and answer questions.

After the S-21 museum, we went slightly out of town to the biggest of many killing fields sites in Cambodia.  It took ages to get there because construction had blocked the road and we had to manufacture a short-cut through various villages and dirt roads.

This was where they drove lorry loads of people to be executed, usually at night, and buried them in mass graves.  There was an excellent audio tour that took us round the site and had interviews with witnesses, guards and survivors.

The undulations in the picture below are mass graves.

Some have been given roofs as a mark of respect.

They've build a giant Stupa to hold remains to Buddhist standards which really brings it home.

It has 17 layers like this.

Phnom Penh

Phew! Phnom Penh.  I'm not sure I've got the words or pictures to describe it.  It's busy and bustling with ramshackle shops and markets cheek by jowl with colonial buildings and new glass and steel.  There are also fantastic temples and the royal palace in red and gold splendour.  The river front throngs at night with food stalls and the lights and music from the bars and restaurants.  But more than all this, what hits you is the traffic and the dust it causes.  The roads throng with mopeds, cycles, tuk-tuks and cars with rarely a gap between them.  It seems like chaos with nobody obeying any rules except maybe a general trend to drive on the right, but as you get used to it you realise that rather than everyone fighting each other for space, they're all making allowances for each other with use of indicators and hand signals to give guidance to others as well as say what they are going to do.  You soon learn that to cross the road you have to just walk calmly and firmly across and let the traffic adjust to you, scary though.  All this creates a tremendous amount of dust, with lots of people on mopeds wearing masks.  I'm sure the only reason a few wear helmets is to keep the dust out.

We made the mistake on our first day of thinking we'd have a walk around the area near the hotel to get our bearings.  It soon became clear that pavements are for parking on, not walking.  You're also offered a tuk-tuk every few minutes.  That, indeed is the way to travel, door to door for just a few dollars and with built-in natural air conditioning.   Did I mention that it is hot - 36-37 degrees in general. 

Our first excursion proper was a cyclo tour of the city.  Here's us being picked up outside the hotel.

We'd expected to just be taken round a set route seeing the main sites, so were a bit surprised when they asked where we wanted to go.  But we soon got the hang of it.  We could go to all the sites we wanted to see, get out and look round, then move on as we wanted.  It was great fun, although it must have been hard work for them.

Here's some street scenes.

First stop was the central market.

We also went to the phnom Wat temple on the original hill around which the city was founded and with a temple to the woman credited with starting the city.  It has a large clock on the ground.

Birds you can release to gain merit and a big drum.

The steps are guarded by seven headed snakes called Nagas.  By the way, we came across our first real snake in the wild today, but that's several posts ahead :-)

Finally, a couple more bits of architecture.  I was particularly please with the second photo.

We want to various other sites including the Royal Palace, but we went inside that the next day so I'll maybe do a separate post on that.  

The day ended with cocktails on the balcony at the Foreign Correspondents Club, shown below together with the view, and a great dinner at a Khmer restaurant whee we had Fish Amok and Chicken Curry Khmer style.  Probably my second favourite Cambodian meal so far.

To put you in time context again, as I'm getting behind with these again through travelling.  I'm writing this from a lovely treehouse bar at the end of our first real day in the country, can't wait to tell you about it, but must have dinner now.  Next post - genocide (probably).

Time and Food

I thought I'd do a quick post to align you with whee we are in the journey, as I write these when I can and post when I have internet. And at the moment I have both time and internet.

We're back in Singapore, having come back from Nikoi island yesterday (Monday).  Claire and I fly off to Cambodia at the crack of dawn tomorrow for a very different phase of the holiday.

Can't do one of these without pictures, so here's some of the local food court in Singapore where we go for a quick bite to eat and a beer.  My favourite so far is roast duck and pork with rice and chicken broth, augmented with chilies.

This is Alex and Tony watching a guy cutting up a Durian, the smell was awful.

Next posts once we've settled in Cambodia and seen some sights.