10th January 2012
www.stuff.co.nz
prweb, A floating market stall offers fresh fruit that distracts
from the fetid aroma of shrimp paste that "smells like hell but tastes
like heaven".
There's something rotten in the state of Cambodia. We're drifting
past houseboats neatly arranged in rows to form the floating villages of
Kampong Chhnang on the Tonle Sap River when my nostrils detect enemy
fire.
Brightly coloured bed sheets are fluttering in the breeze as
children swing in hammocks or watch TV powered by car batteries. Their
fathers are engrossed in games of backgammon while their mothers do
laundry uncomfortably close to their floating toilet.
But a nasty stench has me hanging over the side of the boat staring
into the brown waters of the river, praying I do not add to its murky
colour. I'd also rather not spoil the water locals use to drink, cook
and bathe in.
My fellow travellers from the RV AmaLotus, which cruises between the
magnificent ruins of Cambodia's Angkor Wat and the Mekong Delta in
Vietnam, are mainly retired couples from Australia and New Zealand.
A few join me over the side of the small local boat, which takes us
from the RV AmaLotus through flooded farmland and marooned palm trees to
the floating villages that are home to mainly Vietnamese fishermen and
their families.
Our journey had started the day before in the tactlessly named Siem
Reap, which means "Thailand defeated" in Khmer and no doubt explains the
narky relations between the two countries, but already we are fast
friends exchanging travel yarns.
Liz tells me how a small girl selling postcards asked for her credit
card after learning she had no money. Janette jokes that the cruise is
for grey nomads, while Stephen tells me he once saved a man from
drowning in a brothel in Prague. You really do learn a lot from your
elders.
The fetid stench assailing me comes from the direction of the women
squatting on the front deck of a houseboat, who turn to wave and smile
at our boatload of lifejacketed tourists stickybeaking into their daily
lives. Our guide Phaly sniggers and asks why I do not like the fish
paste.
"I told you it smells like hell, but tastes like heaven," she says. She's not wrong.
Once we dock in dusty Kampong Chhnang, Phaly takes us to the
open-air market to sample the pungent fish paste that is a staple part
of the diet. It's not exactly heavenly to taste but it is less hellish
than the sea slugs in Siem Reap or the deep-fried cockroaches and
tarantulas dished up in Phnom Penh.
The Cambodian dinner table is not for the faint-hearted and neither is the barber's chair.
There are several scattered alfresco around the village, offering
haircuts hacked with a rusty blade for 75¢. Full of facts, Phaly tells
us Cambodians are great fans of even numbers, but believe odd-numbered
amounts, such as photographing three people or paying 75¢ for a haircut,
will bring bad luck.
Elsewhere, baguette sellers sit alongside purveyors of traditional
medicine and stalls selling rambutan, watermelon, dragon fruit, durian
and mangosteen - all fruit that can be grown in flooded areas.
There's even what appears to be a floating mosque shimmering in the
distance although Phaly later tells us it is actually built on stilts.
A massive monsoon turned frying-pan-shaped Cambodia into the set of
Waterworld, Kevin Costner's awful, but strangely prophetic, 1995
disaster movie about a drowned Earth.
Maybe it's my similarity to Costner that prompts one wild-eyed girl to clip me over the head in front of a pile of durian.
Either that or she's seen me grimacing at the smell of her fish paste.
- Sydney Morning Herald
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