January 6, 2013
Enterprising ... vendors selling from a boat in a floating village near Siem Reap, Cambodia. Photo: Alamy
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.
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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.
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