The rains come, the tourists go

The onset of the rainy season is also the onset of slow season in Cambodia. The rains can make travelling about miserable, so it probably isn't the best time to visit. The rains ease up in October, usually, maybe November and the inrush begins again.

Rainy season doesn't just turn on one morning. We kind of ease into it. Today was a beautiful day, and I took the motorbike into town to get needed supplies (cabbage and Irish whiskey if you must know).

This is one of the normally busy streets at about 0830. The khmer start mornings early, and perhaps the backpackers are all still sleeping in, but I don't think so. Along this street you can buy welding gas, bread, cell phones, some packaged junk food, get your hair done, and a bit further down is the main bank, Acleda.

 Behind the stack of tires is one of the many motorcycle repair shops. This one is just around the corner from the Honda dealer. One lovely thing about riding a motorbike here is that if you have a problem in town, you are never far from someone who thinks he knows motorbikes better than you, and certainly knows them better than me, and has tools and parts.

 This is the Eastern end of our main market (psaa). It was more crowded earlier when I went by. I came back to get a shot of one of the pony carts, but they had finished loading and lumbered off to wherever they lumber to. This is at the intersection with the main road that goes to Phnom Penh and the market really starts down where the umbrellas are and is quite extensive. I bought two cabbages and four nam groaech, which are sweet deep-fried rice flour pancakes.  The shops closer are mostly where you can buy cell phones. My Nokia was less than $20 there.

The shop ('Hang' in khmer) on the right is across the street from where we live. This is where I buy 20 litre jugs of drinking water and Anchor (pronounced "an chore" so as not to confuse it with "Ankor" beer).

Even in Paradise

It is tempting to think that once you have moved to a tropical location, life becomes simple. All you need to do is sit back, drink wonderful drinks with umbrellas in them (don't eat the umbrellas, as they can reuse those), served by lovely serving girls and enjoy life. Unfortunately, life follows you. There are always domestic chores and the business of life. Some are more onerous than others.

A couple of days ago, my office was perfumed with a familiar and unwelcome odor. Shortly I was surrounded by the noise of work going on. When I investigated, I learned that the sediment filter from the septic tanks was backed up. Our landlord had the staff hard at work, and he joined in. This was important. After all the blockage was from his house. So for three days, the crew hauled out the gravel, cleaned and sorted and put it back together.

In case you were wondering, Mr. Ka, who is smiling on the left, wasn't thrilled by this particular job, or at having his photo taken standing in the tank.... he just smiles a lot. Very nice man. Our landlord is the one in clean clothes. (These guys are good workers!)

A visit to Phnom Penh

The name Phnom Penh literally means "Penh's hill", but the city is rather flat and quite walkable. Our neighbors in Kampot suggested we try a guest house owned by friends of theirs. The name was inauspicious. The Lone Star Saloon does not conjure up images of the pearl of the orient. Still a reference is a reference and these folks are usually pretty good, so we gave it a try. Our regular taxi driver, Mr Mao, took us right to the door in time for lunch.

Our trips to the city are infrequent and usually based around the need for things not available in the provinces. Our favorite way to shop is to hire a tuk tuk for the morning and take advantage of the local knowledge as well as transportation.

Here are some tuk tuks outside the wat that is just at the end of 23rd Street where the Lone Star is located.

They actually seem to do a brisk business ferrying monks back and forth from where ever monks go to when they aren't at the wat.

By the way, The Lone Star was great. Most of the folks working there are Khmer, although the lady who owns it admits to having been to Texas. Her husband is from Texas and the sentiments are his. The rooms were comfortable and quiet and good value. The location is perfect for prowling the city, regardless of what you are prowling for.

Another wedding and its music

The folks at the basket maker's house next to us started setting up the tents for a wedding on Saturday. I call it the basket maker's house, because when they aren't having weddings, they make huge baskets out of reeds--all day long. A very industrious group. So they deserved a party.

You can' see the house in this photo. It sits back from the way and the tent runs all the way from the road to the house. The second tent, to the right, is in an empty lot. I suppose it is for friends of friends of the family.

The daytime music, which is largely traditional music, which I was told was written specifically for weddings, is interesting. Khmer music uses five tones, but they aren't the same as the Western pentatonic scale (the "rock" scale). It is all whole tone steps, no sharps or flats. And the arrangements tend to be rhythmic. The music has no harmonies, and independent melodies are interwoven. At its best, it is really nice, kind of Asian Dixieland. At its worst (according to my ears) it is like a bad jam session.

The nighttime music was certain to be that terrible mixtape of Santana (long instrumentals by a Santana clone who is good but little imagination) and pop and awful Karaoke. So went to the city for the evening. Stayed at a nice wooden guest house on the river front. We had a khmer massage, which is a very soothing way to spend an hour, and ate frogs legs while watching family hour on the riverfront. We call it family hour because the vast majority of the traffic is motorbikes with Mom and Dad and a couple of kids on board. They stop at street vendors and buy boiled corn on the cob, or beer, or some of the other interesting foods available. But more on food another time.

The Twelfth Year

Moving into the twelfth year of something is important in Cambodia. A nearby house starts its twelfth year of existence soon, and the owner brought in monks and held a small ceremony to ensure it will be propitious. I find it interesting that the idea is to celebrate the year at its beginning, but it makes a lot more sense than the normal cry of relief that we give in the West to announce that we have survived another year.

Closer to home for us, a local couple invited us to the party for their wedding anniversary. Having been married for eleven years, they are moving into that auspicious twelfth year. Parties are important here, so we got fancy invitations telling us that Mr Sor Yuthka and Mrs Yuos Sophy, known to us as Ka and Sophy, were having a party and we were invited.

 An anniversary party here looks a lot like a wedding party. There is a huge tent or two, lots and lots of speakers for the LOUD sound system (that plays music really LOUD! And I mean REALLY LOUD!). As an honored guest you get to sit in front of the speakers. Fortunately, we were on foreigners and able to suggest that we sit slightly off the main target range and further back (stupid foreigners never know a good thing).

When enough guests arrive to fill a table, the food starts to arrive and people chat as well as the music permits, and toast each other. So you face the prospect of a well dressed housewife looking you in the eye, clinking glasses with you and saying "joul moaay", which means you have to drink your iced Cambodia beer down in one go or face incredible humiliation in the eyes of everyone around.

Early guests getting ready for the feast

We left not long after the food was done, but the party proper was just ramping up. The emergence of a generation of karaoke artists caused the volume of the music to increase, with a commensurate increase in distortion. We were going to hear it anyway, at least until midnight, but decided to put some distance between ourselves and ground zero.

We find it interesting that Cambodians almost universally love loud noise. The old and young alike have no use for a volume control set even a micron below maximum. It seems hard to relate this quality with their many virtues.

Happy New Year from SE Asia

Here in Southeast Asia, New Year is approaching. In a few days it will be 2556 BE (Buddhist Era) in Cambodia. Laos celebrates on the same days (April 13 through 15) as it is the end of the harvest season. The Thai New Year is a little off; maybe they like going to two parties. At any rate, throughout SE Asia, the monsoon should be coming soon, and with it the rains. It is hard to travel in the rainy season.

It's a big holiday for the Khmer people, and they are not content to settle for the three official days, as this is an opportunity to return to the provinces and see family and just have fun. The Khmer people have a great aptitude and appetite for partying.

Theoretically, each of the three days has a specific function that is tied closely to activities at the pagodas. The first is Maha SongKiran, when offerings are made; the second is Virak Wanabat, which is supposed to be about charitable work and helping the poor; the third day is Tngay Leang Saka, and if you do it right, you cleanse the statues of Buddha with perfumed water.

It is a little crazy all over the country this time of year. Khmers sort of warm up with celebrating the Chinese New Year in Feb, and brought in the year of the dragon with some great revelry. So we expect stores will be closed. We've been stocking up and getting ready to hunker down. Traffic gets wild, and there is more than the normal amount of drunkenness, as you might expect. After all, it will soon be 2556, so check your calendars.

Waiting for the rain

It is getting warm in Cambodia now. The nights still cool down, but the afternoons are often quite hot. I can't tell you exactly how hot it gets, because I have given up on getting information from weather reports. There is no weather station here, and the weather is quite different in the big city where there is one, but take it from a kid who loves the tropics--it does get hot. It won't get cooler until the rains come.

April is the cruelest month according to Thomas Stearns Eliot, the American poet who wanted to be a British poet, and did a fair job of that. In Cambodia, which tried being French for a while, April and May are the hottest months, tempered by, at some point, the advent of the mango rains, which produce the best mangoes in the known world. Good mangoes offset any perceived cruelty in my book. And the mangoes are tasty even now.

A mango tree in March, waiting for April showers

A Cambodian mango, but it tastes international

One of the many things I enjoy about Asia is the fresh food. The produce doesn't look like it was factory made. Oranges come in different sizes and some are mottled. They are flavorful, and that is what counts. Cambodians have an interesting way of talking about some fruit. The Romanized pronounciation for the word for orange is groach bpoasut, which doesn't do much justice to the way it sounds, really, and anyway all you need to say is groach to make your point. When I saw tangerines in the market, I asked my neighbor Nak what they were called. She said groach. When I pointed out that that was the word for oranges, she agreed. So I asked how the heck you could send someone to the market for tangerines and make sure they didn't come back with oranges. She said you say Battambang groach, which means oranges from the province of Battambang. Of course the word for mango is pretty close to the word for monkey, so I am learning to be careful what I ask for.

After the mangoes come the rains. The rains are often heavy to an extent those who haven't been to the tropics can't really imagine, but it is a good time of year. Roads are impassable, tourists go home, and the place is relatively cool and quiet. And wet.