Cambodia

Lonely Planet guidebooks are great for providing suggetsed itineraries, essential in-country information about visas and ATMs and they can provide good dining recommendations.

They can also be full of guff. Take this description of Battambang…

‘A subtle charmer……Battambang works its magic on many visitors’.

‘It’s the perfect blend of relatively urban modernity and small-town friendliness’.

No it’s not.

It is a dirty, dusty, hotch potch of a town with a central market that smells worse than North Shields fish quay in 1976. The road surfaces are lethal, pot-holed obstacle courses and the few remaining French colonial properties have vegetation sprouting from their old balconies and rooftops. Half of the town looks like an old
movie set.

It was perhaps no surprise, therefore, that the tuk tuk tour mentioned in our previous footprint turned out to be pretty hopeless. This was partly as a result of there not being very much to see (the 7 hour tour could easily have been done in 3, max) but it was also because of the guide himself. Instead of just giving us an insightful tour he thought that he was auditioning for The Edinburgh Fringe!

So many guides take this route and this guy, ‘Just call me Spicy Sam’, was first class at making the day tedious, uninteresting and long. It didn’t help that we were squished in a tuk tuk with 2 quite rude American ladies and their 2 very sullen offspring in 36 degree heat.

Hey-ho, not every day’s a holiday.

The (very) brief highlights of the tour were a fun ride on The Bamboo Train - the video shows what this is - and the spectacle of a million bats leaving the aptly named Bat Cave at dusk. It was just a massive shame that even these 2 sights were characterised by so much roadside garbage and filth. This is not just a Cambodian problem and goodness knows what the solution is in this part of the world but very often litter just becomes part of the landscape and you don’t see it. When we do notice it, however, it is awful.

There were 2 redeeming features of Battambang. Our hotel brilliantly named, Oh Battamberg Boutique Hotel, which was a beautifully decorated, high ceilinged old property and a restaurant /yoga joint called The Fringe owned an American lady, Anna. The food was excellent and as we also bumped into our fellow boat passengers on 2 visits there, we had great company too.

Battambang was our jumping off point for some off the beaten track travel into Western Cambodia and The Cardamon Mountains. We had been planning an adventure through this sparesely populated area since we had come across the website of Mr Lim and the Osoam Community Centre. The Centre promised jungle trekking, opportunities for volunteering and a chance to live amongst the community of 4 villages and fewer than 400 people.

Once again, guff!

The website turned out to be well out of date which meant that there was no mention of the brand new 4 lane road that the Chinese had carved through the area over the last 3 years and which opened just 4 weeks ago! There had also been no mention of the opening of a brand new road bridge, now the highest in Cambodia, which brought every Tam, Duc and Hari out from Phnom Penn in their 4 x 4s to view it.

Our transport to get to Mr Lim’s was another hilarious (and slightly risky) experience. Having taken an early morning bus to Pursat, we then had to find a shared taxi to get to Osoam. We managed to find the taxi pretty swiftly but the sharing part was incredible…..8 other people in a very beaten up old Toyota saloon. Oh, and a dog. The sight of the driver sharing his seat with a passenger will live long beyond the 2 hour journey.

Once we arrived at the Community Centre, the accommodation was in line with expectations. A simple wooden hut with a vague water supply and no food provision. However, Mr Lim did come up trumps the next day by organising a most amazing trek into the jungle, followed by a 2 hour boat ride down the most remote river and then a night with his uncle in a lakeside homestay, with even more basic facilities.

The jungle trekking was just what we needed after spending time relaxing and being in cities but the unexpected bodily invasion of leeches was the opposite. An impressive thunder and lightning rain storm the previous day had brought the leeches out in great numbers.

Our trekking group included 4 youngsters, us and 2 guides and after the first couple of kilometres, the party was just a constant shriek of ‘leech’, ‘leech’ and the offending creature was then picked off, sworn at or more often than not, missed until later when we all disrobed for a very welcome and cooling swim in Mr Lim’s waterfall. This seemed to be in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

The removal of the leeches that we had missed from ankles, calves and one from Carole’s belly button was grim and the horrible anti coagulant that they produce meant that ‘wounds’ took ages to stop bleeding.

Following an amazing home cooked lunch on the rocks at the waterfall, the 2nd half of the trek was pretty much a speed march to get us away from leech land and the removal of leeches at the end point was even worse. The photos here show the gory detail.

We were then sent on our way to meet our boat transport. The voyage was another spectacular vista of uninhabited jungle and deep, wide waters. The homestay setting was idyllic and after a swim, dinner with the family that evening, using Google translate to converse, was special. The home cooked food was delicious.

As we fell asleep pretty much on the floor of a wooden shack with the lake directly beneath us, we both agreed that with the taxi ride, the jungle trek, the boat trip and the homestay we had achieved the objective of getting off the beaten track.

We just had to decide where to go next.Read more