natural wonders noticed
Saturday, January 17th, 2009by a sunburnt Mama, who got caught by surprise with mid-30s temperatures and a blazing sun after a few weeks of (more pleasant to us 😉 ) high-20s and an accompanying gentle sun
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Some walks are full of historical features (and today’s was not lacking in those as we wandered past half a dozen wats, the Friendship Monument, the Independence Monument, the national museum, the Royal Palace and a variety of different-styled buildings)……
Some walks are a conversation with the people we walk by and linger to chat with (and there was a superficial amount of that too today – if you count “special price just for you” offers of water bottles to tuktuk drivers urging us to take pity on our small red child who was obviously suffering in the heat, and one tuktuk driver with whom we ended up making arrangements for an outing to an orphanage tomorrow)……
Some walks have a purpose (scouting out food or visiting embassies, for example, but this one had no purpose other than getting home after a cyclo ride, which finished across the opposite side of town)……
Some walks surprise us with delights from creation….like today’s….
We have seen bananas growing often enough now to have dispelled the thought that one of us clung to that they hang downwards….reinforcing this truth is the fact that bananas can be bought virtually straight from the palm, even in the city:
Also on a culinary note, in our previous experience, tamarind had come from a vacuum-packed plastic bag. Here we have seen the pods at the market, but we have still wondered how it grows. Today Mboy6 excitedly declared, “Look there’s a tamarind tree!” With a tall pine-like trunk, but a bit more gnarly, it’s an impressive-looking tree. In contrast, the leaves are tiny, giving it a delicate appearance through which the pods hang above head height, sometimes a single pod, sometimes in clumps.
Further along the tamarind street, it was Kboy11’s turn to call out.
“Look up there! It’s looks like dead leaves clinging to the tree, but they’re bats.” And there were – hundreds of them. Real live hanging-upside-down squeaking bats, a few of which were stretching out, others moving around and fighting. Nocturnal?
The rest of us were still marvelling at the bats when ER2 pointed ahead, “There’s a monkey, Mama!” A monkey was the last thing we expected to encounter on a stroll through the city (after bats and tamarind perhaps), but she was right. We stopped to watch him scavenging noodles from a plastic bag and picking through egg shells in the side-of-the-footpath rubbish pile, before he scampered up the wall and out of sight through a hole.
More predictably, we stepped over (or on top of in Jgirl14’s case!) squashed rats and a translucent half-squashed frog. We’ll spare you the pictures of them, and leave you with the cyclo ride instead…..
rayres