More Family Must Sees
The following day we all pack up into the bus and head to Phnom Kulane, a sacred site to the Khmer people. It is said that here, on this mountain the Khmer empire was first established, breaking away from Indonesian rule so many hundreds of years ago.
We start off with a traffic jam all of one block long all because no one wants to let anyone through and everyone wants to jam in as much as possible. After a half hour Samrith gets out and starts yelling at people and gets traffic flowing to my amazement.
After a rough ride on dirt roads for a couple of hours we head up into the mountain on a narrow dirt road. This road is private and we pay the native prices with me saying very little and hiding my English Lonely Planet book on the bus. At the top we cross a stream and find yet another gathering of huts selling goods and food of all kind. A few men and many women all hawking fried fish, roasted chickens, wood carvings, etc… We pick one vendor to retain two sitting huts near the creak and order food to be delivered there later.
We then walk up the mountain along cement steps, passing beggars every ten feet. At the top of these stairs we take off our shoes and let a women there watch them for a fee. We then climb more stairs to the top of a rocky peak where there is a concrete house, cast right onto the stone. Inside the stone has been carved into the shape of Buddha lying on one side. Many touch its surface and say prayers; I merely take a few photos having said a short prayer at a shrine just underneath.
Prang, my fourteen year old cousin, and I then wander off by ourselves to go higher into the trees, following a well used trail. Here we find vendors selling animal products such as tiger claws, an occasional gall bladder, short tusks, and packets and packets of wood chips. Finally getting to the end of the trail we head to the huts to eat and swim.
Again the food is subpar, nothing more than sustenance by my scale. The chicken is tiny, dry, and unsavory; the rice is dry; the fish is tasteless. But everyone gobbles it down and complains that I did not eat enough. We then head off to the creak to swim, which in Cambodia consists of sitting in the water as most people do not know how to swim or so it seems. There is a pretty waterfall here and pictures are taken, not by me as my camera is not waterproof. My seven year old cousin Linda, starts to drift away in the current and gets rescued by my future cousin La, whom will marry Samrith in January.
As we leave the huts five or six children move in and clean up the leftovers. We had mostly picked clean everything, so the little scraps they found they ate on the spot, except for the bowl of rice which one of them dumped into a plastic bag. They weren’t overfed by any means, but not apparently starving either. Throughout they eagerly talked amongst themselves as any school age children would. One of them appeared fairly dirty, but the rest did not appear out of the ordinary. This dirtier child ended up walking ahead of us as we made our way to the bus. She stopped at a hut selling bananas baked on a spit and dropped off her bag of plastic bottles with a woman who was likely her mother asking her some question that I don’t recall.
By this point I’m not all that thrilled with the place. It’s nicely historical, but the constant litter and bad food made for my bad mood. Litter in this culture is invisible. I imagine it’s like smokers and cigarette butts. Here everyone throws things out anywhere and everywhere. On the bus and finished with your bottle of water? Out the window it goes. Sacred mountain? No one will mind. I was on the second floor at uncle Chheang’s and was saving my fruit shell for the one trash bucket two or three units use when he picked it up and tossed onto the busy street below, telling me this is what we do with it here in sruk Khmer (Khmer country.)
I did come across vines hanging from the trees on the path to the huts and climbed one wondering if it would really support Tarzan. Well, I can tell you it would, but is pretty hard on bare hands. My aunt assured me it wouldn’t break and it didn’t budge under my weight. It was fun and I wanted to go higher, but the risk of breaking something here put a stop to that idea.
Another two hours on the bumpy road brought us back to Siem Reap, but we end up at Phum Wapathor, the Cambodian Cultural Center. It’s 5pm at this point and I’m fed up. I ask how long this was going to take as Sopheap had said it was an all day event earlier that day. I’m told we’re going to watch a show that will last five hours. I then put my foot down and say I’m not going, I’ll take a moto taxi to the guest house. They all think I’m sick at this point and let me go after feeling my forehead and belly. I’m sure I’m not sick physically, just drained with the senseless need to see without connecting. I am tired though, more so than I should be with the activities I’ve done.
Back at the guest house I shower and give Lyna a call, she is in town with her parents, some friends, and cousins. We meet up for dinner with her cousins near my guest house after some walking. Afterwards I go to the 7-20 store (yes the logo looks just like 7-11 at a glance) to find some aspirin for my slowly developing headache. No luck there I head to the pharmacy down the street. There I ask for headache medicine and am directed to the back where a gal gives me a box from behind the counter. I see that it is a medicine called paracetamol with codeine, but what the heck, do as the Romans right? No rx needed here, just cash. I wonder if they have medical marijuana, close cousin to the more commonly found recreational marijuana, back there somewhere.
